The Town (25 page)

It was Nikolai who had chosen the ritual to be performed, and it was he who had chosen the ten to participate. The entire congregation had met yesterday morning in the park for an abbreviated service, and Nikolai had finally preached his first sermon. He was not a great speaker, but he led them in the hymns, led them in the prayers, and there was even some jumping as a couple of the devout were overtaken by the Holy Spirit. A crowd had gathered, and there’d been laughter from some of the people in the audience. She was reminded of the old days, but she forced herself to ignore the onlookers, like the rest of them, and they conducted their service as if they were alone and in church. Afterward, at the time they should really have been eating, Nikolai called out the names of the chosen ten and had them all gather around the bench table on which he stood.

He had picked them, he said, to help him perform
Vi Ha Nyuch Neh Chizni Doohc
.

The Cleansing.

They had all been selected for logical reasons, and the reasons sounded good, but she was not sure that logic had anything to do with this. She glanced over at Vera Afonin, but Vera didn’t seem to have any problems with the selection, and that made her feel a little better.

The minister had decided upon the Cleansing ritual used to dispatch and exorcise murderous spirits, and they all felt that that was appropriate.

They’d met at Nikolai’s house this morning in order to practice and prepare. The ceremony was unfamiliar to all of them, but none had any trouble memorizing what they were to say. It was as though the words the minister had written out merely served to remind them of something they already knew, and she took that as a good sign. Nikolai had chosen correctly, and God was with them.

They reached the front of the church, stopping before the chest of drawers Jim had used to store his Bible and his papers.

There was a rumble beneath the floorboards. In the kitchen, a pot fell to the ground, clattering loudly.

How could the police not have felt this presence? No Molokan had been inside the church since Jim’s burial, but the police had been all over it, searching in vain for clues that they might have overlooked, and she marveled that they could be so dense. Hadn’t they sensed in the unnatural air the existence of the entity within the building? The aura of evil was so strong that even a nonreligious man could not have helped noticing that it was here.

They began reciting the final prayer, the entreaty to God to banish the spirit from this site——and spiders fell from the ceiling.

Not just a few, jarred from their perch by the rumbling, but a tremendous number of them, an intentional concentration of hundreds of the creatures that dropped from the rafters and onto their heads, onto their shoulders, onto the ground. She could see them, feel them, running over her skin, scrambling into her hair, darting under her clothes, the terrifying tickle of their horrid little legs moving over intimate areas of her body, and she wanted to scream, wanted to run away and rip off her clothes and beat the spiders off her, but she knew this was the devil’s doing, and though it was all she could do to maintain her concentration, she continued repeating the words of the Cleansing.

She closed her eyes, clasped her hands tightly together as she finished the prayer.
“Svetomou, Amien.”

A wave of cold air passed over them, the spiders were gone, and Agafia thought she saw a black, shapeless shadow pass over the room when she opened her eyes.

They immediately started singing. A hymn. A song of praise and thanks to the Lord, an addendum to the Cleansing that Vera had suggested.

There was wind. Not the sort of wind that blew, but more of a vacuum, as though the air in the church was being drawn rather than pushed.

The breath was practically sucked out of her body.

And, as quickly as that, whatever had been here was gone.

She breathed deeply, trying to keep on singing. Next to her, Semyon and Peter were coughing, Semyon practically doubled over.

They finished the hymn as best they could and began the physical cleaning of the building, the five men breaking out mops and brooms, the five women each using individual washrags but sharing a bucket of Lysol water. When they were through, the church looked the way it always had when Jim was finished with it, and although she didn’t want to, Agafia started to cry. She felt drained, both physically and emotionally, and the brief sense of purpose that the Cleansing had given her had fled, leaving her feeling alone and adrift. There was an emptiness within her, and she did not think it was an emptiness that could ever be filled or alleviated.

Nikolai put an arm around her, patted her shoulder. “It’s over,” he told her.

He had no idea why she was crying, but she did not want to tell him, and she grasped his wrinkled hand, squeezing. “I know,” she said.

But . . .

Something was wrong.

She looked around, met Vera’s eyes, the eyes of the others. The church was clean, free of spirits, but nothing had really been accomplished and they all felt it.

All of them except Nikolai.

Whatever had killed Jim was still here—not in the church, perhaps, but in McGuane. It had been forced out of this building, but had taken up residence somewhere else. Rather than killing it or banishing it, they had merely driven it out, forcing it to find a new home.

Now they didn’t know where it was.

The knowledge seemed to come to them all at once, and Vera gently explained it to the minister.

Outside, in the yard where they’d had her welcome-home party, in what seemed a lifetime ago, they stood next to the fence and talked in low tones. Cars and pickups passed by on the street outside, but it was as if those things belonged in another world and they were separated from that world by an invisible barrier.

There was no consensus on what they should do or how they should do it. Finally it was Nikolai who said, “We must visit Vasili.”

Agafia’s breath caught in her throat. “Vasili?”

The minister nodded.

The others were silent.

The
pra roak
. The prophet.

“Is he . . . still alive?”

This time, it was Vera who answered. “Still alive,” she said.

Agafia shivered. If that were so, the
pra roak
would be nearly two hundred years old now. He had been well over a hundred when she was a child, supposedly over eighty when he first left Russia. He’d had a life-changing vision when he’d arrived in Mexico, and though he had spent all of his previous life as a farmer, he never picked up a plow again. He became a prophet, devoting his life completely to God, eschewing physical labor and the work of the soil for solitary contemplation of the words the Lord revealed to him. It was a hellish existence by every account, and there were many who said that he had been driven mad by having God’s glory revealed to him, but the common wisdom was that this was what God
wanted
him to do, that it was for this mission that he had been born, and for generations Molokans had gone to him when there were problems in the community and questions that no one could answer.

And he had always answered.

And he had always been right.

She had met him only once, as a child, and he had terrified her so much that she had had nightmares about him for weeks afterward. It was not an experience she would ever forget.

It was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

There’d been a severe drought, and all of the crops had died. Money was low, and the Mexican government was once again threatening to take their land back. So they’d all marched out into the desert outside Guadalupe to consult the
pra roak
. They’d entered the prophet’s cave, and when the old man smiled at her, wiggling his fingers, she’d screamed in terror and burst into tears.

She’d spent the rest of the time hiding behind her mother’s skirt, praying for God to deliver her from this devil, and after what seemed like an eternity, they’d finally left.

The next day, the rains started.

Agafia took a deep breath, looked over at Nikolai. “Do we all have to go?” she asked.

“I think it would be best.”

“I don’t want to see him,” she said.

The minister was understanding. “I know.”

“I don’t either,” Vera admitted, and there was something in her voice that made Agafia’s blood run cold. “None of us do.” She paused. “But we have to.”

 

They left early the next morning, Peter driving, all ten of them crammed uncomfortably into David Dalmatoff’s passenger van. Peter was the youngest of them, and the best driver, but even so, his glory days were far behind him, and though she had her seat belt on, Agafia gripped the armrest tightly as the vehicle chugged up the narrow dirt road that wound up the cliff to the top of the plateau. She could see McGuane stretched out below them, through the twin arms of the canyons, sloping toward the giant, gaping pit of the mine, and the sight made her nervous. She looked away, focused for a moment on Nadya in the seat in front of her, but she could still see the passing scenery in her peripheral vision and she closed her eyes.

Once they reached the top of the plateau and were on flat ground it was better, but she still silently prayed for their safety. Peter kept wandering from side to side on the narrow lane as it wound through a series of hills, apparently oblivious to the rules of the road, and she could only hope that they did not meet up with any others on their way out to the prophet’s.

The prospect of seeing him again filled her with a strange, heavy dread. He was a good man, she knew, a holy man, but he scared her. He was part of the same world of the supernatural that they were fighting against, and though he was on their side, on God’s side, he was still different from everyone else, still not
of
them, and he frightened her.

He was also, quite possibly, the oldest person on earth.

That scared her too.

She had no idea where Vasili was living now, but she’d assumed that it would be closer to town than it was. They drove for another full hour through barren, uninhabited desert before finally reaching the small series of rocky hills that housed the cave where he made his home.

They hadn’t seen a single other vehicle since leaving McGuane, and Peter parked the van in the center of the dirt road, confident that no one else would be coming by.

There was a walk from the road to the cave, but luckily it was short. The sun was hot and they were old, and even under the best of circumstances most of them could not climb. Thankfully, the path wound along flat ground, between saguaros and ocotillos, before sloping gently between two boulders and disappearing into a crevice in the hillside.

They walked slowly into the cave.

It opened up beyond the entrance, but though the chamber was wide, the pathway was narrow. It was a strip of sand running through piles of bones and skulls and discarded animal carcasses, and they were forced to walk single file between the piled remains, toward what looked like a campfire at the far end. None of them had thought to bring a flashlight, and they moved slowly through the middle of the chamber, each of them holding into the shoulders of the person in front as they passed through the dark area that lay between the entrance, lit by outside sunlight, and their destination, lit by the
pra roak
’s fire.

The path widened, and they could finally walk two abreast, the bones and carcasses disappearing as they approached Vasili’s sleeping quarters.

Agafia’s heart was pounding.

She didn’t want to be here.

They did not see the prophet until they were almost upon him. He sat crouched by the fire, naked, his beard so long it covered his genitals. He was mumbling to himself, and when they drew closer, she could hear that it was scripture from the Bible.

There were all sorts of Molokan prophets. Most, over the years, had lived among them, had been normal, productive members of the community. But God had told Vasili to live alone in a cave and be naked, and so that’s what he did. The ways of God were mysterious, unknowable to man, and who were any of them to judge?

The prophet kept mumbling. There were ten people standing before him, but he did not seem to notice them, or at least was not willing to acknowledge their presence, and they looked at each other uncertainly, no one quite sure how to approach the
pra roak
.

Finally, Semyon cleared his throat. “We need your help,” he said loudly.

Vasili grew silent. He remained crouched, did not stand, but he looked up at them, his gaze flicking over the face of each. Agafia shivered as his eyes met hers, and he smiled at her. He still had all of his teeth, she saw, and seeing strong teeth in his wrinkled head was disturbing somehow.

On the sand next to the
pra roak
was what looked like a small village made out of sticks and stones and bits of dried cactus. Looking closer, she saw that it was McGuane. Not McGuane as it was, but McGuane as it used to be, when they’d first come here. There was a hole at one end, representing the mine, and from it stretched the other buildings, leading all the way up to Russiantown.

Nikolai took over. “We’re here—” he began.

“I know.”

And Vasili began to recount the story of Jim’s death. It was a detailed description, filled with specific incidents none of them could have known. It had happened much the same way they’d assumed, but hearing it spelled out like this was sobering in its horror.

The prophet’s Russian was hard for her to understand. Despite his appearance and reputed origins, the old man spoke in a higher-class dialect than that of the other Molokans. It was closer to Brezhnev’s educated speech than Krushchev’s peasant dialect, and she had to listen carefully and reorder the accented syllables in her mind before she could tell what he was talking about.