I was bewildered. For a moment I didn’t know who or where I was. Then I became Maggie Caine, and in terror I ran around the altar, down the aisle and out of the room, evading those in the congregation who reached out for me. I went out the back door into the yard and then down the path to the woods.

I expected to be pursued immediately, but I wasn’t. Once inside the woods I stopped and looked back, but there was no sign of anyone coming after me. I set off again as fast as I could, but I wasn’t as sure of foot now, as I had been as Margaret Dorn. I kept straying from the path and bumping into trees and bushes, until finally I had to slow down and grope my way.

Then I saw lights, first on one side of me and then the other. They were faint and flickering at first, but they became stronger as those carrying them moved closer. Now I saw two lines of people carrying lanterns and torches and walking parallel to me.

They were dead, I knew, most of them dead a long time. There were men and women dressed in tattered ancient clothing. Men in buckskin, soldiers in uniforms of long-­ago wars, Indians in ragged, beaded garments. Women in dresses like Margaret Dorn’s, others in dresses of an older time, still others in dresses made of rough handwoven cloth. Even though they never turned toward me, the lines kept coming closer.

I was frantic but I kept moving, ignoring branches and brambles. For some reason I felt if I could only reach the Caine yard, I would be safe. I felt that the things wouldn’t pursue me where others could see them. I was also sure that if the lines ever came together, or if I was ever touched by one of them, I would be dead—and, dying in their company, I would be damned like them.

The lines weren’t ten feet apart now, less than four feet away on either side of me. Some of the heads were only skulls. The flesh on the others was dried and shriveled or else hanging in blackish green decay. Many of the hands that held the lanterns and torches were nothing but bones.

Several of those closest to me could have reached out now and touched me, but they seemed to ignore me. They didn’t seem to be trying to keep pace with me either, although they never all fell behind me. At one moment something dressed in the remnants of a Revolutionary War uniform would be on my right, and something in a frock coat and gaiters on my left. Then the next time a turning in the path caused me to look, the soldier might have been replaced by the bones of a woman in homespun, and the other by something in rotted silk or brocade.