A dark Southern tale of desperate souls who've wound up on the road of poor choices, a messianic child with untold powers, and those out hunting her for their own reward, all drawn together by Michael Farris Smith's trademark mournful, spirit-gnawing prose.

An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night.

A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, one young and one old, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose.

The two men have a job to do. They've been told to find the abandoned church in this burned-out countryside and go into the cellar. For what? You'll know it when you see it, they were told. When you have it call back and I will tell you what to do.

When the two men approach the place, they find bodies littering the churchyard. Inside, at the end of a long hallway, they find a door with light leaking underneath. There, they find the old woman, cut and scratched from trapsing through the woods. Standing next to her is the answer they never could have predicted.

So the journey begins and from here nothing can be undone, no step can be taken back.