The Town (45 page)

Someone somewhere screamed in the darkness, and a moment later the police car finally pulled up. Two officers got out, clutching flashlights, and Roland ushered them quickly inside the building. “About time,” was all he said.

The emergency generator was on, but that meant that only the backup lights were lit, and the office was still dark and gloomy.

All of the phones were ringing, but there were only two receptionists, and they were answering the calls as fast as they could.

He led the policemen into his office, closing the door behind them.

“No, Mrs. Kennedy,” Alice was saying as the door closed. “There’s been no reports of any spacecraft landing anywhere in Arizona. . . . No, I don’t know anything about little alien men.”

 

Semyon Konyov sat at the picnic table in the yard next to the church while he waited for the others. Peter and Nikolai had driven out into the desert to get the prophet, and the others had gone in search of Russian Bibles, since theirs were still inside the church and could not be retrieved.

Agafia was waiting at his house. The rest of them had not wanted to hear from her, still blamed her for this, still thought she was tainted and corrupt, her information lies, but he had lied himself and pulled a Vera, saying that he’d seen the answer in a dream. He told them everything Agafia had said to him, pretending the words were his own.

And Peter and Nikolai had gone to get the prophet.

Semyon looked toward the street. Where were the others? His candle was burning low, and his flashlight batteries were almost dead; he’d turned the light off some time ago in order to conserve them.

It occurred to him that they had been killed, that something had gotten them, but he pushed that thought out of his mind. He turned around, looked back toward the church, saw the dark hair waving slightly in the almost nonexistent breeze. Quickly, he looked away.

The night had been noisy, the town alive with fights and screaming, gunshots and sirens, but most of it seemed to have been coming from elsewhere in the canyons.

Until now.

There was the sound of an engine drawing closer, bringing with it angry voices, and he was embarrassed to discover that he was afraid. He closed his eyes and offered up a quick prayer, asking the Lord for strength.

He opened his eyes and saw headlights. A pickup was pulling up, coming to a stop in the church’s small parking lot. The truck’s bed was filled with cowboy-hatted, overalled men carrying shotguns.

He had a quick flashback to a similar scene, in another time, a time he had not thought of for decades.

Flashlights played across the hairy front of the church. Several of the men leaped out of the truck onto the ground, and one of them screamed at him. “This is the last straw, man. The last fuckin’ straw. You milk drinkers think you can just come to our town and do whatever the hell you want? Well, we’re not going to put up with that shit no more!”

Semyon stood, scared, flustered. He walked toward the men. “No—” he began.

A shot rang out.

He stopped in his tracks, and one of the men laughed. Had they shot at him? He didn’t know and he was afraid to find out. His first instinct was to run, try to find help, but he knew there would be no help this night, and though he was trembling with fear, he remained in place. “Go!” he said. “Go home now!”

“Go home now!” Someone made fun of his accent, and the others started laughing.

They started shooting up the church, aiming their guns at the front of the building, taking turns, some focusing flashlights while their companions shot. The bullets sank into the hair at first, but after several minutes and several rounds, chunks of hair-covered wall began to be blasted away, pieces falling, flying off. Semyon turned on his own flashlight, and he saw something completely unexpected, something he never would have believed.

The building was bleeding.

What was under that hair now? he wondered. He could not imagine. It was obviously not a building. The voices of the shooters became at once angrier and more frightened as they, too, saw the dark liquid spreading out across the dirt.

Semyon gathered up his courage once again. “This our church!” he said. “Leave us!”

“Shut up, old man!”

He felt the bullet pierce his chest, felt it rip through his body, shattering bone and organ, stopping somewhere deep inside him. He staggered to the right, clutching the burning, bleeding section of his torso where the bullet had ripped into him. He fell against the wall of the church and was immediately engulfed in a forest of hair that clutched at him and pulled him into itself.

It felt soothing,
was the last thing he thought.
It felt good.

 

The lights led Wynona down into the mine, her feet slipping on the gravel of the extant road that wound down to the bottom of the pit. The lights were beautiful, appearing and then disappearing, forming patterns, and she thought that she had never seen anything like them.

They’d come to her bedroom window, tapping musically on the glass, and they’d drawn her outside, leading her down Ore Road all the way to the realty office before flying into the air above the pit and dispersing with a whirling flourish that no fireworks could ever hope to match.

The lights had floated down, settled and winked up at her from their various locations throughout the massive pit, beckoning to her. She’d found a hole in the chain-link fence, climbed through, and started down the old truck trail to meet them.

The gravel was slippery, and several times she nearly fell, but she always managed to keep her footing.

She finally did fall twenty minutes later, when she was halfway down, her right foot flying out, throwing her off balance, and she landed on her back on the road, the hard ground knocking the wind out of her.

She tried to get up, but she could not, her left arm wouldn’t work right, and she prayed that it was only sprained and not broken.

Throughout the pit, the lights flew up again, coming together, swirling, dancing, then flitting over to where she lay. If she could not come to them, they would come to her, and for a brief second Wynona was delighted, filled with an exuberant sense of joy.

But something changed before they even reached her, and as suddenly as it had come, her exultation disappeared, and she was left with a strange sense of dread that caused her to once again try to sit up and get back on her feet.

She rolled onto her right side and was up on her elbow, when the gravel beneath her shifted again, and she fell back down.

The lights danced above her head and landed on her body. Up close they no longer looked so beautiful.

They looked like they felt.

Terrible.

 

And the night continued on.

T
he voice talked to him.

It was a real voice, not an imaginary voice, not something he heard in his head. It was out there and it spoke to him, talking calmly and rationally about things that were not calm, not rational at all.

Gregory sat up on the bed, squinting at the brightness of dawn. He had not shut the drapes last night, and morning light streamed through the window—or came as close to streaming as was possible in this house.

Where was his mother? Had she ever come home last night? And where were Julia and the kids? Were they still in the house asleep, or had the treacherous little shits sneaked out on him? He felt for the van keys, was gratified to find that they were still in his pocket.

The voice continued to talk. He’d been hearing it all night, he realized. It had been speaking to him even as he slept, and he had incorporated its monologue into his dreams. He was awake now, though, and while he could not see the source of the voice, he knew it was in the room with him, and for the first time he listened specifically to what it had to say, to what it was trying to tell him.

“Remember when you caught Julia and Paul?” the voice whispered. “His hands were down her pants. How many fingers do you think were up her snatch? One? Two? Three? How many can she take up there? You think she was wet? You think he went sluicing through her juices?”

Gregory’s jaw muscles clenched. He didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to think about it.

But he could not stop listening.

“It’s not the first time she did it,” the voice said insinuatingly, and there seemed to him something familiar about it. “She’s fucked half the town. She blew Chilton Bodean before he bit the big one, sucked him dry, swallowed it down and begged for more. Your old pal the bartender? She licked his balls for over an hour while he worked behind the counter, crouching down and following him on her knees, servicing him as he served the customers.”

He recognized the voice now.

It was his father’s.

It switched to Russian. “Your mother was the same way, that whore. She’d spread her legs for Jim Ivanovitch, let him have her in whatever way he wanted, then come back and deny me my husbandly right. Bitch.”

He heard hatred in that voice, the threat of violence.

“I waited, though. I bided my time.”

“Did you kill Jim?” Gregory asked.

The voice was smooth. “Of course I did.” It was back to English. “Think I could let him bang my woman? Think I could let him fuck your mother? That little hypocrite. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ It’s one of the ten, and that lying little prick was giving your mother a sperm bath when he was supposed to be praying and reading the Good Book. Could I stand by while he fed my wife his tubesteak?”

It occurred to Gregory that his father’s English had never been this fluent, his command of slang and colloquialism never this well developed, but though he had the thought, it did not affect his belief in its authenticity, did not dissuade him from accepting his father as the true and ultimate source of the voice.

“I did what I had to do,” his father said. “As a man.”

Gregory nodded. His father was right. What he said made sense. Gregory stood, smoothing the wrinkles of the clothes in which he’d slept.

“Are you going to let Julia get away with this? Are you going to let her spread her legs for every swinging dick that comes along?”

“No,” Gregory whispered.

“Get the gun,” his father said softly. “You know you want to. Get the gun and stuff it up her pussy where all those other men have stuffed their cocks, and blow their leftover sperm out with a bullet. That’ll teach her. That’ll teach all of them.”

Gregory nodded.

“That’s what you bought the gun for, anyway. Use it. Do it tonight. Surprise her when she’s asleep, when she’s thinking about the taste of his hot sperm, when she’s dreaming about riding his cock. Do it then. Do it then.”

The voice continued to talk, but Gregory no longer heard it. It was like a radio that was on in the background, white noise, he could tune it in or out at will, and right now he had heard enough. He didn’t want to hear any more.

But he knew his father was right, and he was filled with a righteous anger, a molten core of fury that he knew he would have no trouble sustaining until tonight.

Part of him wondered why he had to wait, why he couldn’t just do it now, but that was like the thought concerning his father’s English. It was irrelevant, and he pushed it aside, ignored it.

He walked out of the bedroom, went immediately up to the attic, and pulled the ladder up, closing the door behind him as he headed to his gun shelf.

Teo was scared.

There was something wrong with her dad.

And something bad had happened to Sasha.

Her mom and Adam were scared, too, and that made it even more frightening. No one had talked to her about any of it—her mom had simply told her to stay in her room and not come out—but she had the feeling that it was the
banya
’s fault. She could not help thinking that if she had not stopped going there, not stopped seeing it, that none of this would be happening. She was being punished by the
banya
for her ingratitude, for the way she had treated it.

And it was taking out its anger on her family.

Teo felt like crying, but she forced herself not to, forced herself to be brave. She wanted to go back out to the
banya
and confront it, but her mom had ordered her not to leave her room—and she was afraid to do so anyway.

Her dad had been acting weird for the past few days, and she and Adam had talked about it, but neither of them had known how to bring it up with their mom. Besides, she wasn’t in the best shape herself. Whatever flue or illness she’d had, it had left her weak, and neither of them wanted to make things any more difficult.

But Dad was being weird.

Scary.

He
was
scary, and she wasn’t quite sure why. He wasn’t acting mean or angry or anything. He was either really, really cheerful or just sort of quiet and distant. But . . .

But neither of those was her father.

That was it exactly. He wasn’t himself. He didn’t seem like her dad. He seemed like a fake father, like someone who looked exactly the same and was trying really hard to be him but just couldn’t quite pull it off.

And that, she supposed, was what made her think of the
banya
.

That and the sense of danger.

For there seemed something dangerous about her dad right now. Beneath the cheerfulness, beneath the bland niceness, was something else, something deeper, something that reminded her of the swirling blackness of the
banya
shadows. She knew that Adam sensed it too. Their mom probably did as well, but she was staying away from all of them, keeping to herself.

She wished Babunya was here. Babunya would know what to do, and even Adam admitted that he’d feel safer if their grandmother was around. But Babunya hadn’t come home yesterday, still wasn’t back this morning, and no one seemed to know where she was.