That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them.
Michel de Montaigne

March 23, 1888 Christ Church, Hellebrea, England.

    Nothing looks familiar, Edwin Blutleer thought and walked from the secluded alcove where the opened mausoleum sat at the rear of the nave.
    He stopped at the raised altar platform and smelled the air. Above the rectangular altar hewn from a single slab of granite and smoothed by the labors of men decades in their graves, wilting lilies stood like sentries of forlorn memories in gold vases. The pair stood at opposite sides of an ancient carved wooden crucifix that bore the dark stain of a palm print.
    White linen cloth draped the altar. Small tassels decorated its borders, the tip of each a delicate weave of purple and gold.
    His eyes widened when he inhaled a faint odor of charred wood that he realized came from the old rafters twenty feet overhead.
    The horror of a day more than a century in the past dragged Blutleer into his memories. Hands on the altar, he closed his eyes, and pictured Lilith's ethereal beauty as she knelt at the altar rail. Her hands clasped, knuckles whitened, tightly to her breast. He watched her lips tremble, heard her words, "Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum, eaque detestor, quia peccando ..."  She displayed no other sign of fear. Her striking blue eyes stared from beneath curtains of damp pale lashes.
    Behind her fire roared, gnawed into the rail of the pew ahead of itself, billowed larger and thrust forward like a living entity.
    An enraged mob of men blocked the church's exit. The same people who had soaked the wooden floor inside the nave with lamp oil and pitch, then set the building ablaze.
    Blutleer had known that when he entered the chapel they would trap him. However, his desire to save Lilith outweighed concern for himself.
    The oak pews had seemed to crave the fire. Orange offshoots of flames ran the length of one like fingers raking a spine, and then rejoined the enlarged inferno that spawned them.
    Blutleer had heard the raucous shouts of victorious joy from the mob that had cornered him after herding Lilith to her sacrificial death. They seemed intoxicated by their triumph.