The Town (14 page)

He walked slowly through the open room, his footsteps echoing on the dusty wooden floor. The windows were shut, the doors securely locked, nothing appeared to have been touched, but he could tell that he was not alone. He could
feel
it. The church looked empty, but it wasn’t, and it was with trepidation that he approached the darkened doorway of the kitchen.

“Zdravicha!” he called.
Hello.

There was no answer.

He tried to tell himself that kids had broken in or that he was worried about robbers and vandals, but there was no sign of a break-in, there was nothing to steal, and nothing had been vandalized.

And the truth was, it was not human intruders that concerned him.

It was
neh chizni doohc.

He flipped on the kitchen light, looked quickly around. Nothing.

There were only the stove, the sink, an empty counter, and the metal rack holding pots, pans, and various cooking utensils. At the opposite end of the room was the closed door of the storage closet, and Jim said a quick protective prayer as he walked across the kitchen and yanked the door open.

Again . . . nothing. Only brooms and tools and buckets and cleaning solvents.

He closed the closet door. That was it. There were no other rooms or spaces inside the church. He had looked everywhere and found nothing. He sighed heavily. He should have been able to relax, his fears allayed, but the feeling was still there, as strong as ever, that he was not alone, that someone—
something.

—was in the building with him.

He thought for a moment, then decided to get out his Bible and walk through each square inch of the church in order to drive out any demons or evil spirits that might be lurking. He did not understand how
neh chizni doohc
could even enter the blessed house of God, but he thought of his experience at Agafia’s and reminded himself that just because he did not understand something did not mean that it could not occur.

He walked back through the kitchen, out the doorway, and across the dusty open floor to the wall against which the benches were stacked. Next to the piled-up benches was the small chest of drawers where he stored his Bible. He pulled open the top drawer—

And his Bible screamed at him.

He leaped back, startled, practically tripping over his feet in his instinctive haste to get away from that horrible noise.

There was another scream—high-pitched, loud, short, strong—and the Bible shot up, out of the drawer and into the air, as if it had been thrown. Jim continued to stagger backward, praying out loud, as the Bible turned in midair and flew toward him, its pages flapping. It looked like some sort of hideously deformed bird, not like a book at all, and he ducked, losing his balance and falling to the floor, as it dove at his head.

He was shouting now, Molokan prayers against the devil and his minions, as the Bible flew up to the top of the ceiling, then dove at him again. This time it smacked hard against the top of his head before he could move out of the way. He grunted with pain at the force of the blow and tried to grab the Bible as it bounced off his head and hit the floor, but it shot up between his grasping hands, closed hard on the tip of his beard and pulled away, yanking out hair.

There was laughter accompanying the attack, a close relative of the screams, a hideous high-pitched cackle that sounded like nothing he had ever heard.

He had never been so terrified in his life. None of this made any sense. He did not know why this was happening or even what was happening. He knew only that his church had been invaded, that he was being attacked, and that his prayers seemed to be having no effect.

Was this some sort of plague afflicting Russian Bibles, some type of evil that could only manifest itself in this manner? Or had this originated with Agafia? He did not know. All he knew was that he loved her, loved her with all his heart and soul, loved her almost as much as he loved God, and the thought at the forefront of his mind was that he needed to get out of here, needed to get to her, needed to protect her.

The Bible was circling in the air above the benches, and Jim clumsily scrambled to his feet and started across the church toward the front door.

He was not fast enough, however, and before he had gone even one-fourth of the distance, the Bible swooped down and slammed into his back, knocking him over. He tried to get up, but this time it did not fly back into the air. Instead, it remained on top of him, its weight unnaturally heavy, pulling itself up his body toward his head with a series of thumping pulses. He rolled over, trying to throw it off, but he only managed to get himself turned onto his back. The Bible was not knocked off his body but was still on top of him, now open on his chest and slowly, steadily creeping upward toward his face.

He grabbed the book with both hands, but it was stronger than he was, and with a suddenness he could not hope to match, the heavy volume jerked hard to the left, hard to the right, and forced his hands off. There was the sound of cracking bone as the weight of the Bible broke his right wrist.

Jim screamed.

And the open Bible plopped onto his face.

He was fighting for his life. He knew it, and he was doing the best he could, but he was old and not in the greatest health, and he was battling something that had the strength of hell behind it.

With his one good hand, he grabbed the leather spine and tried to pull the Bible off him, but it would not budge. Beneath the binding, each page seemed sentient, thin individual sheets of bound printed paper suddenly strong and sinewy, competing with each other for supremacy as they tried to force their way into his mouth.

He tried to fight off the book, biting with his teeth, clamping shut his jaws, but the pages turned, shifted to the side, pulled down, paper cuts slicing into his lips until he opened his mouth to cry out.

The pages shoved themselves into his mouth, sliding into the narrow spaces between his teeth and cutting into his gums, slitting the soft delicate flesh of his tongue. The flapping page in front of his eyes whipped back and forth, back and forth, and the movement of the words made it look like an animated cartoon, several lines printed in corresponding locations on double-sided paper forming one blasphemous, incongruous message before him:
God is dead. Thou art evil. The Lord thy God is a glutton and must be stoned.

His good hand grabbed the book’s front cover, tried to rip it off, but the Bible lurched again, hard to the left, and there was another crack of bone as his left arm went dead.

He was not going to win, he realized. He was not going to make it. He did manage to get his mouth shut again, but then a page of the New Testament sliced across his right eye, cutting into the cornea, and as he screamed in agony, the Book of Ruth shoved its way down his throat.

It had been a long time since either of them had gone to a Molokan funeral—and if they had been in Southern California they probably would have skipped this one, too—but they were here and they felt obligated, so Gregory and Julia dutifully put on their traditional garb and, leaving Sasha in charge of Adam and Teo, took his mother from the church, where she’d been staying with the body, to the Molokan cemetery on the ridge above the mine.

Gregory glanced in the rearview mirror as he drove. In the backseat, his mother stared straight ahead, looking at nothing, her gaze focused not on Julia or himself, not on the scenery outside, but somewhere in the middle distance. She looked old. She’d aged several years in the last two days, and the lines on her face seemed suddenly more prominent, the vicissitudes of life more pronounced in the defeated cast of her features.

She was taking Jim’s death much harder than he would have expected.

He didn’t know, but he resented her feelings, found himself angry with her for caring so much. She hadn’t seen the guy in thirty years, had gotten reacquainted only a few weeks ago, and now she was acting as though she’d lost the love of her life.

He didn’t want to think about that.

He knew he was being petty and childish. After all, she had a right to be sad and shocked, depressed and upset. One of her old friends had died—been killed—and it was selfish and inconsiderate of him to ascribe motives to her feelings, to feel betrayed because she was experiencing an understandable human reaction to an incomprehensibly horrific event.

Was she supposed to be cheerful and happy, to feel nothing at all and act as if murder were an ordinary everyday occurrence?

Of course not, and Gregory chided himself for his suspicious self-centered thoughtlessness.

But he still felt it.

Jim Petrovin’s death was the talk the town. Everyone in McGuane was stunned by what had happened, and there were rumors flying every which way. It was truly bizarre, like something out of one of those Vincent Price movies where the villains were dispatched in ironically appropriate ways. A minister killed with his own Bible? It was an unlikely murder weapon, to say the least, and Zeb Reynolds, the lead detective, was in the process of interviewing all church members, trying to find out if anyone had had a grudge against the old man. He had already spoken to Gregory’s mother, and she had answered all of his questions and pretended to be cooperative, but her English became a little worse when she talked to him, her already thick accent a little more pronounced, and Gregory could tell that she didn’t want to involve herself with the police.

She did not think they could solve Jim’s murder.

And that was why the minister had not been left alone since his death, why someone had always been with him. His mother and a bunch of the other men and women from the church had taken turns and remained with the body around the clock, saying special prayers of protection even as they said traditional prayers for Jim’s soul. The assumption was that his death was not caused by the hand of man but was the work of demons or spirits, and there were hints that the minister had battled with a devil and lost, that he had died a martyr trying to protect the church. While Gregory didn’t believe that, the idea of it still gave him chills. He was not as divorced from the religion as he liked to pretend, and being back here in McGuane, being once again among his people, brought it all back and made him feel like a boy again, afraid of things that in California would have seemed to him like silly superstitions.

The dirt road wound up to the crest of the ridge, disappearing at the top, and Gregory drove across the rocky, ungraded ground to the spot where other vehicles were parked, outside the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the cemetery. He slowed the van as he approached, feeling odd as he looked at the open gates of the graveyard. It was where his father was buried, and it had not changed one whit. The land, the sky, the fence, the headstones were exactly as he remembered them. It was as if time had stood still, and he licked his suddenly dry lips as he pulled to a stop behind a Ford pickup.

He had not been here since the day of the funeral, all those years ago, and he felt guilty and ashamed, acutely conscious of his filial neglect. His father had often been in his thoughts—not a day had gone by, in fact, when Gregory had
not
thought of him—but he had never made the effort to visit the gravesite. Until now he had been able to rationalize his actions and not face the fact that his avoidance was the result of a childish and selfish inability to confront his father’s passing. He’d always told himself that there was no reason to visit the grave, that his father was gone, that what was lying buried in the coffin was a husk, an empty shell. And he believed it. But the truth was that he also didn’t want to have to think about it. He had chosen the emotionally easy way out, preferring not to experience emotions that would make him uneasy or uncomfortable.

Now they were flooding over him.

He glanced at his mother in the rearview mirror and realized for the first time that she had never returned to McGuane either.

And she had not asked to visit the gravesite since they’d moved back.

She was unaware that he was watching her, and her face was set in what looked like a grimace. Her back had been hurting for the past few days, and he would have attributed the look on her face to the physical pain but for the fact that he recognized her expression: it was exactly the same one she had worn at his father’s funeral.

He remembered the way she’d broken down, sobbing, wailing, falling to her knees in the dirt next to the open grave; remembered that he’d been embarrassed and had looked away, looked over the side of the ridge, down at the ugly open pit of the mine; remembered that when he turned back to look at the group of mourners his mother was no longer crying but was grimacing as if in pain.

Precisely as she was now.

He couldn’t help wondering: was this face for his father or the minister? It was wrong of him to be so judgmental, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t like the fact that his father and Jim Petrovin would be buried in the same cemetery, and he hoped their graves were far apart.

Where would his mother be buried? he wondered. Between them?

Of course not. She had already purchased a plot right next to his father’s, had already planned out her funeral to such an extent that he knew where her burial clothes were and what style of casket she wanted. She was sad because an old friend of hers had died, and he was just being an insensitive asshole.

He and Julia got out of the van, Julia unfolding a sunscreen over the windshield so the inside of the vehicle wouldn’t be an oven when they returned. He opened the sliding side door, and his mother stepped out slowly, pressing one hand against her aching back. “Oy,” she groaned.

He took her arm as she straightened. “Come on,” he said kindly in Russian.