The Town (49 page)

Paul looked up groggily, squinting into the darkness. “Who’s there?”

“Hello, Paul.”

“Gregory?”

“Who else?” He remembered what it had been like to see his friend’s hand shoved all the way down his wife’s open pants, fingers working on her, and he was filled afresh with rage and hate. “Didn’t expect to see me here again, did you?”

“N-no.” Paul could obviously tell that something was not right, and Gregory smiled at the wary expression on his face, enjoying the slight hesitation in his voice.

He thought of the last time they’d fought, the words that had been said. He advanced slowly. “ ‘Milk drinker’?” he said softly. “ ‘Faggot’?”

His head hurt like a motherfucker, but the pain cleared his brain, sharpened his thoughts, and he was able to remember in vivid detail the particulars of the fight, the unfair way he had been kept from complete and total victory. Paul was going to get what was coming to him this time. There was no Wynona to save his ass now, no teenage bim who was going to arrive at the last minute and rescue him.

Paul could still not see him, but the café owner stood, facing the direction of his voice. He walked out from behind the desk, and it was obvious that not only had he been sleeping—he was drunk.

Good.

“You called me a homo,” he told Paul.

“Did I?”

“
You’re
the homo.”

Paul grinned into the darkness. “Then why’d your wife want to fuck me?”

Gregory shot him in the knee.

Paul went down screaming, a bloody spray of bone and cartilage flying out every which way, splattering against the wall and the desk, soaking the carpet. Gregory was surprised the shot had been so true. He could see perfectly in the pitch-black room, but it was out of only one eye and his depth perception was completely gone.

God must be looking out for him.

No, he thought soberly, not God.

Paul was screaming nonstop, a piercing, agonizing cry that sounded more animal than human. It was an irritating sound, an excruciatingly grating sound, and he stared at the writhing figure on the floor, willing it to stop.

He realized dimly that he and Paul had once been friends, but that seemed so long ago and so far back that it was almost as though it had been in another life, in another world, in an alternate universe.

The screaming did not abate—got worse, if anything—and Gregory took a step forward, reached down, placed the barrel of the gun next to Paul’s Adam’s apple and blew a hole in his throat.

Blood was gushing, spurting everywhere now, and he knew instantly that he’d made a mistake. Paul was thrashing around and was no longer screaming—he no longer had a voice box, no longer had a throat—but he was dying, and Gregory had wanted him to suffer longer, had planned to draw out his death and torture him before finally allowing him to give up the ghost.

He stared down at his dying ex-friend. In a suddenly lucid moment, it occurred to Gregory that something was wrong. He was not the person he used to be, not the person he should be. He knew it, and he wanted it to be different, but his thought processes seemed to be overridden by an outside imperative, a will greater than his own, and the insight vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

Paul died.

And that made him feel good.

He walked back through the café and out onto the street, bracing himself against the coldness of the air and the strength of the sand. He thought for a moment, then started down the cracked sidewalk toward the bar, the bar where his father had been humiliated and where for the past few months that smug prick of a bartender had made it clear that he was doing him a big favor just by allowing him to drink here.

MOLOKAN MURDERERS

Whoever had spray-painted that graffiti gem had been more right than he’d known.

And the bartender was about to find that out for himself.

Gregory clutched the revolver tightly, holding it out in front of him. He didn’t know what time it was, but it couldn’t have been that late because through the sand and darkness he could see the glowing neon of a battery-powered beer sign, colors that he knew to be red and blue but that appeared to him as shades of gray.

The Miner’s Tavern was still open.

He walked inside. Candles were lit on the tables and on the bar, providing the only illumination save for the beer sign. The place was empty except for the bartender, and perhaps that was just as well. He thought of his father, humiliated here, degraded, cowed into being less than a man, and without stopping to confront the bartender or explain what he was doing, Gregory started shooting.

He stopped only when the hammer clicked on an empty magazine, but the bartender was already long dead.

He popped out the empty round, popped in another, then walked out of the bar.

Playtime was over.

It was time to get back to business.

It was time to kill his family.

The Molokans’ cars had been parked on the road that ran by the burned house on the other side of the
banya
. It was closer and quicker this way, and they didn’t have to go anywhere near their own home and risk seeing his father again. Adam was thankful for that.

He rode in a big car with his mom, Teo, and two Molokan men he didn’t know, moving slowly through the sandstorm. Babunya was traveling in one of the other two cars, and all three vehicles pulled up in front of the church together.

The wind was still blowing crazily, but the downtown buildings kept the worst of the dust out, and at least they could see here. The cars pulled into the small parking lot, and they all got out at once.

At the front of the church were the rest of the Molokans, twenty or thirty of them, old men and old women in white Russian clothes.

But it was the people with them who were the surprise.

Indians.

Standing next to the Molokans were several men from the reservation, dressed in what looked like the traditional clothing of their tribe. Dan and his father, the chief, were in the front, and Dan smiled at him, waved. Adam felt hope flare within him. Despite the reassurance he’d gotten from Babunya and her friends, despite the fact that they seemed to know what was happening and what to do about it, the Molokans seemed to him too old to be effective in any kind of fight. He did not think they would be able to stand up against the sort of power and force that could summon ghosts and kill people and haunt houses and possess his father.

But the stoic men of the Indian tribe seemed healthy and fit and reliably steady. He believed in them, he trusted them, and he knew from the clear, hard expressions on their faces that they could handle whatever trouble was thrown their way. They were clutching long spears painted with bands of alternating red and black and blue, fringed at the top with loops of leather cord and white feathers, and the fact that they carried weapons rather than Bibles made him feel a little more confident as well.

Although . . .

He squinted, looking closer.

They were not spears after all, he saw. They might not even be weapons. They were . . . painted sticks.

Dan said something to his father, started toward Adam. Adam looked up at his mom, wondering if it was all right for him to talk to his friend again, but he could tell by the expression on her face that their little rock-throwing incident and subsequent arrest was the last thing on her mind, and he hurried across the dirt to meet his pal.

Dan was the only Indian dressed in regular street clothes, and he and his family were the only Molokans similarly attired. Dan grinned at him as he approached. “Came through for you, didn’t I?”

Adam nodded. “Thanks, dude.” There was so much he wanted to say, so much he needed to explain, that he didn’t know where to start. The next words out of his mouth were totally off the subject.

“You seen Scott?”

Dan shook his head. “I haven’t been allowed to see either of you.”

“Until now.”

The other boy smiled wryly. “I guess they finally figured out that it wasn’t really our fault.”

“It wasn’t?”

Dan laughed. “Well, we’ll let ’em think it wasn’t.” “So what’s the plan? Do you guys . . . know what’s going on here?”

“Yes.”

“My dad went crazy and killed my sister Sasha. He tried to kill us, but I knocked him out with this flashlight, and then we ran over to the
banya,
where my grandma and those other Molokans did some sort of exorcism to force out the demons or ghosts or whatever was living in there.” The words tumbled out of him in a rush, and he was grateful to see Dan nodding at everything he said, not surprised, just accepting it.

“I told you,” Dan said, “weird things have always happened here. Like Scott said, it’s a haunted place.”

“But this is different.”

“Yeah.”

“Uninvited guests.”

His friend nodded.
“Na-ta-whay.”

“What do you guys think we need to do?”

Dan looked at him evenly. “Find it. Kill it.”

“It?”

“There’s a leader, a ringleader. Kill it and the others will scatter.”

Dan seemed so much more knowledgeable than he himself was, so much more mature than he felt. He wondered if that was an Indian thing or if that was just how Dan was.

The adults were talking now, and Adam listened in.

“They try get Vasili,” an old fat woman said in English even more halting than Babunya’s. “They no come back.”

“Maybe it’s only the sandstorm,” he heard his mother say. “Maybe they just got lost or didn’t want to chance the roads at night in this wind.”

The woman said something in Russian.

His mother turned toward Dan’s dad. “What do you think it is?”

The chief said basically the same thing his son had, about there being a host of evil spirits, about killing the leader, and he used some long, unpronounceable word to describe the creature.

His mother recited the name back to him perfectly, and for the first time, the chief allowed himself a small smile. “Very good.”

“We call him Jedushka Di Muvedushka,” Babunya said.

“So you know what this is, too?”

“Of course.”

“It is a mischievous spirit. It likes to play.”

“Play?” his mother repeated.

Dan’s father nodded grimly. “We are nothing to it. We are toys, meant to be used and discarded. It orders around the other spirits, makes them do its bidding, murders us, hunts us down. All for its entertainment.” He leaned forward. “That’s why it must be killed,” he said fiercely. “I know Molokans are pacifists—”

“Cannot kill what not alive,” Babunya said.

“
We
can kill it.”

Adam looked from one to the other, following the conversation. Creatures who used people as toys, for entertainment? It sounded like Greek mythology, like all of the gods and creatures they’d learned about in English class who had alleviated their boredom by playing chess with human lives.

Once again, he thought that maybe the legends of all cultures had some common root, and the idea made him shiver.

Because that root was right here in McGuane, the grain of truth at the core of it all located at the overlapping intersection of Russian and Indian myths.

He was struck by the fact that more than half of the Molokans were women but that there were no women among the Indians. It was a strange observation to be making at this time, and though it wasn’t a contest, he thought that his people were more progressive, more modern than Dan’s tribe, and for the first time he felt genuinely proud to be Russian, to be Molokan.

His mother looked from Babunya to the chief to the other Indians to the other Molokans. “So what do we do now?”

The chief looked at her, looked past her at the others. “We have to go back to your house.” His voice lowered. “And kill it.”

There were shapes in the sand, outlines. Small, light figures that cavorted behind a curtain of tan; larger, darker, unrecognizable creatures that slouched through the windblown dirt, barely seen. It was as if the dust-storm was a cover, a cover for . . . for what?

An army of monsters that was invading McGuane.

Scott turned away from the window. That was the thought that came to him, and while he knew it sounded crazy, he believed it. As he’d told Adam, McGuane was a haunted place, and it seemed to be getting worse by the minute.

His parents were fighting again, screaming at each other in the bedroom. Earlier, he’d taken advantage of the situation and tried to call Adam from the phone in his dad’s den, but the line had been busy. He’d tried again just now, but a recorded voice said that line had been disconnected.

He didn’t like that.

And he liked the shapes in the sandstorm even less.

For some reason they reminded him of the bathhouse, of the pictures he’d taken.

Like most of the people in town, his parents were blaming the Molokans for bringing this curse upon McGuane, and he was glad they hadn’t seen the shapes in the sand. They stupidly thought it was Adam’s influence that had made him throw rocks at cars on the highway and had led to his arrest—that was one of the things he’d wanted to talk to Adam about—and their anger had grown from there. Part of his parents’ current fight had been about his dad going off to “smoke some Russians.” Luckily his mom had refused to let him go, yelling at him, telling him he could pretend all he wanted outside these walls with his friends, but in here, where it counted, in the bedroom, she knew he was not a man.

The argument had branched out from that starting point to cover the usual issues and grievances, and for once he was glad his parents were fighting. It kept them occupied.

Ordinarily, he hit the road when his parents got into it like this, going over to someone else’s house, hanging out at French’s. But tonight he stayed home. Their screaming was the worst he’d ever heard, but he knew it was preferable to what was happening outside, and as he looked through the window at the obscured world out there, he thought that no matter how tense things got in here, right now there was no place else in town he’d rather be.