Revival Season - Monica West (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📗

Lord, make Hannah walk so they can witness Your power. Please. It was more of a plea than a prayer, but I didn’t care. The voice inside my head was fearful, even though I knew that fear was the enemy of faith. The miracle definitely wouldn’t work if I was afraid of failing.

“Hannah Faith Horton, rise up and walk.” I always thought that Papa repeated things to hear his voice echo through the tent—to remind himself of his power. Maybe he repeated things when he started to doubt himself.

Hannah crawled along on the turf with limp legs behind her. She lifted her weight on her forearms and collapsed on her face. With one cheek pressed to the turf, she turned her neck and looked up at me with weary confusion. Her arched eyebrows pleaded with me to make it all stop. It had been too long.

She wasn’t going to walk. She was never going to walk. I lowered my hands slowly, and the room came back into focus—first colors, then shapes, then details—angry eyes, the glint of glasses, open mouths. Sounds trickled up from the ground—whispers that erupted into yells, words that weren’t discernable over the loud jeers.

Papa towered over us onstage—then he crouched to my level. His hands were close to my face, and it looked like he was wringing water out of them. I searched his expression for a kernel of tenderness or love or mercy, but there was none. The full force of his open palm struck my right cheek, his wedding band landing square on my cheekbone.

I fell to my knees on the thin layer of turf that covered the stage. I crawled away, blind, feeling my way toward the steps. My hands felt the lip of the stairs, and I slid down the three steps that brought me back to the level of the congregation. I opened my eyes when I got back in the aisle and stumbled down the narrow path that I had come down, stopping briefly by the fourth row, next to the two empty chairs where Hannah and I had been sitting. Ma wouldn’t turn to look at me, even as the eyes of the rest of the congregation seared my flesh. Her jaw was clenched as she looked up at Papa and Hannah. When I peered into the shocked faces of the crowd, I expected them to be pointing at Papa, yelling in his direction for the violence he’d just inflicted against me. But their fingers were pointing at me—their round mouths were yelling at me. My feet took me all the way outside as the tent released me into the darkness.

Overhead, the thin crescent moon was barely visible in a sky that hid it like a secret. I ran out of the parking lot, away from the noise of the tent. Away from everything. Darkness obscured the road. My feet struck the uneven gravel, sinking in divots and moving up inclines. The throaty croak of frogs and the hiss of crickets drowned out the ragged, panting breaths that couldn’t get into my lungs quickly enough, escaping just as fast as they came.

It was too dark to tell if these were roads we’d driven down earlier. All the landmarks that I had memorized—the swooping power lines that threaded between leaning wooden poles, the fork in the road—had vanished in a disorienting night sky so black and thick that I had no idea where I was going. I just knew I had to keep moving.

A crack of branches. I spun around, but there was nothing to see behind me. I twirled all the way in a circle, dizzy as I looked up at what I imagined was a dense overhang of trees knit together. Maybe a bird had landed on a branch. Or some kids had even wandered out here to play a prank. But there was no flutter of wings, no birdsong, no laughter. My heart quickened.

Another crack—louder than the first one, louder even than my thumping heart.

“Hello?” I called out, my voice barely audible among the chirps and susurrus. Nothing. I took one step back and then another, my heel striking the ground before I was ready, buckling my knees until I had fallen backward. Before I could stand back up, I heard a rustle in the leaves.

“Who is it?” My voice was wavering and thready. I dug my palms into the gravel and scampered backward as my eyes adjusted. My right hand struck a tree root, and I gripped its shriveled heft to push myself to my feet. In the distance I heard a quickening of footsteps. It sounded like someone was speaking to me, calling my name, but only my relentless heartbeat and my arrhythmic breathing echoed in my ears. Fear surged through my body as I flew into thicker, denser patches of inky dark woods. My body seemed to separate from itself. Part of me hovered above the woods while the rest of me ducked the few tree branches that I could see while getting swatted in the face by others. I jerked to the left, into a copse farther away from the road. I kept running, and soon I heard nothing at all—no footsteps quickening to catch up with me. When I slumped against a tree to catch my breath, the distant sound of footsteps came back—running this time—even though I couldn’t tell where they were.

I knew I had to keep moving. Gathering up the little remaining energy I had, I stood up and took off again. But, as soon as I did, my toe struck something hard, and I soared through blackness, my arms swirling out of time with my legs until I landed on a steep incline. The ground slid away as I tumbled down a hill, gaining speed as my head struck tree roots, and my face sliced through dense webs of branches. A hard fragment came loose and floated in my closed mouth; blood filled the spaces between my teeth.

I finally