When the floating powder reached Mother, it formed suddenly into a misty smoke. The smoke rose in a column around Mother, rising as high as the balcony above. Mother’s form remained essentially the same, but like a fine filter the smoke revealed an alter-figure, a manifestation that was purely spiritual, at least three times larger—taller and broader—than Mother.

She wore a flowing nightgown of diaphanous mist. The spirit inhabiting Mother—or so Solomon intuited, staring raptly at this enormous feminine figure dwarfing Blackwood and himself—waved her arms as though floating in a viscous fluid, her raven-black hair rippling behind her head like a dark aura. Her facial features twitched as though she were in distress or pain.

Hugo…

Her voice originated not from the giant apparition but from the air around Solomon’s head. Mother was black-skinned, a woman in her forties. The haunting projection was white-skinned, a woman in her thirties or perhaps even younger: Torment obscured her face.

Blackwood paused when he heard his name. He looked up into the vast face of anguish-plagued beauty, and for moments appeared grief-stricken, stuck.

Solomon, entranced by the sight of this behemoth phantasm, reacted almost too late. Pastor Eppert—compelled by the thing that entranced him—had risen from the floor, lunging at Blackwood’s back. Solomon grasped the larger man around the chest, tackling him into the pews across the aisle.

Blackwood resumed his ministrations, the incantations and more powdery smoke. Solomon, his knee on the back of the pastor, saw the swirling ashes briefly assume a form like that of a large crow before the widening eyes of the suffering spirit.

The crow of ashes sailed into the smoke-consumed apparition…and through it, blasting into a million glowing cinders, the giant spirit collapsing and dissipating like a vanishing curtain.

Mother fainted, released, falling to the floor.

Blackwood lowered his outstretched arms like the conductor at the conclusion of a mad symphony.

Solomon felt the pastor move beneath him. He let the man up cautiously, eager to look into his eyes.

Pastor Eppert looked bewildered, exactly as a man waking from a dark trance should.

“What is happening?” he said. “Who are you?”

Blackwood gathered the elements of his kit and walked to the woman in the choir robe, now stirring on the floor. He helped her to roll over and sit up.

She retched, dazed, shivering as though from a fever. Her pupils had returned, eyes reddened around the rims, lids lowered as though in pain. Black ash fell from her silver hair.

Solomon pulled the pastor out into the aisle. He saw his wife sitting at the back and staggered over to her. “Mother!” But as he reached her, an angry roar exploded behind them. Solomon ducked and turned, expecting a monster or some other hideous entity.