The blue door opened with a groan of rusty hinges, and the smell of decay congealed into a solid mass-hundreds of glass jars lined the wall, formalin soaking the baby's left hand, a silver ring with an engraved falcon on each ring finger. The heels of Alison's boots clung to the brown stains seeping from the cracks in the floor tiles, and a flashlight beam swept across the inlays behind the confessional: the Virgin was not carrying a baby, but a mining hammer on a mayor's gold chain.
The tape recorder hisses under the cobwebs, and a 1978 confession seeps into the marrow of the bones: "When the seventh whore was pregnant, Father said he wanted the bloodline to be pure." Jackson's grandfather's voice mixes baby cries with the sound of shovels digging, "The temperature of the lime kiln was just right to turn the little bones into blue smoke."
A roll of film in a dark compartment is projected onto the mottled tiles: Ethan's father staggers back with the camera in his hand, and in the shot the young Jackson's father is pouring kerosene on a crying pregnant woman. As the flames engulf the frame, Alison sees Sarah's handwriting on the last page of the confession book-** "They showed me my sister's wedding ring, saying it was an engagement from a lost miner." **
A sudden knocking code came from the ventilation ducts, three long and two short. A miner's distress signal that Ethan had taught her. When she pried open the movable brick wall, the man huddled at the other end of the pipe raised his mutilated right hand, the silver ring pattern on the stump of his ring finger matching the ring of the baby corpse in the glass jar. "They never waste any of their sacrifices," Ethan gasped, pulling back the collar of his shirt, the mark 0472 branded just below his collarbone, "the chosen child becomes the family's eyes and ears until the next generation of sacrifices is ripe for the picking."
There was a thud of cracking concrete from the ground, and Jackson's laughter echoed along the brass penitentiary pipes, "Dear Allison, do you know why Sarah sneaked into the manor in the middle of the night?" The rusty organ suddenly plays of its own accord, and a dark red liquid oozes from the cracks in the walls, pooling on the tiles to form a map of Greystones - the church, the mine, and the mayor's mansion forming the three talons of the falcon totem.
Ethan pressed the hidden mechanism of the altar with his severed limb, and kerosene began to drip from the Madonna's eye sockets. "This is between the first purification rituals," he said, shoving a matchbook into Allison's trembling palm, "Burn this and the secrets of Greystone will rise with the smoke."
As the flames gnawed at the first row of glass jars, the transparent silhouettes of countless babies emerged from the formalin vapor. Jackson's roar resonates with the centuries-old wails of the sacrifices at either end of the wall of fire, and as Ethan pushes Allison up the iron staircase to the well, the burning Madonna topples over and the inlaid hammers of the mines pierce his tattered body.
Alison took one last look back at the shaft and saw that Ethan's position at the stake overlapped with that of the crucified saint in the tessellation. His bloodstained lips opened and closed silently, a cursed proverb passed down from generation to generation by the miners - "Every grain of wheat pecked at by the falcon carries the farmer's fingerprints." **
As the morning fog turned raven-blue with black smoke, Allison stood in front of the township's boundary marker, Ethan's silver ring and Sarah's diary in her palm. Behind her came the sirens of the highway, and in front of her hung the soot-stained moon over the moor. She slipped the ring onto her ring finger, and the cold teeth of the falcon pierced her flesh, becoming a new shackle and a key.