Adam nodded. He wished Roberto was here. Roberto would think this place was kickass. Maybe he’d take a picture of it, send it to him.
“It’s like something out of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn,” Dan said.
Scott nodded.
“But what’re we going to do with it?” Adam asked.
Scott grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll think of something.”
On the way home, he could not help wondering about that little space halfway up the cliff: how it had gotten there and who had made it. Dan was right. Even if the cave and the flat little section of ground behind the sandstone wall were natural, the path was not. It had been made by somebody, worn by the passage of feet, and for some reason that made him nervous. Why was it there? What was the purpose?
The shallow cave had reminded him of a shrine. There was something primitive and ritualistic about it, but since Dan had not mentioned anything, he assumed its origins weren’t Indian.
Was it older than that?
Younger?
Either way, the idea was creepy, and he could just as easily imagine a group of identically dressed townspeople trudging up the path to perform some sort of human sacrifice as he could a primitive tribe.
Dan was wrong. It wasn’t like something out of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.
It was like something out of a horror movie.
Suddenly the place didn’t seem quite so cool.
And Adam thought of the banya.
Before they’d parted ways at the foot of Ore Road, Scott had brought up the bathhouse again. He’d been harping on the subject for over a week, and he honestly seemed to think that they would be able to sell a photo of the banya to one of the tabloids and make a fortune. Although Dan had remained silently disapproving, Adam had finally agreed to let Scott go in there and take pictures.
“But I get half the cash if you sell them,” he said.
“Fair deal,” Scott told him.
Dan had said nothing but shot him a look of warning, shaking his head, and while Adam had not responded, the Indian boy’s reaction concerned him. He believed Dan, cared about what he thought, and despite his facade of California cool, he trusted Dan’s instincts far more than his own—and ten thousand times more than Scott’s.
Maybe it was a mistake.
He himself had not gone back to the banya since he’d shown it to his friends, though he’d felt the lure, felt the pull. He’d dreamed once of the femur bone, and in the dream he’d taken the femur and polished it and kept it on his dresser for a good-luck charm. It had seemed so real that when he awoke, he’d checked the top of his dresser to make sure the bone wasn’t there.
And he’d wanted to go out to the banya and make sure it was there.
But he’d managed to resist the temptation.
At least he hadn’t agreed to go with Scott. He’d half thought that that would dissuade his friend from going through with it, but Scott had acted as if he hadn’t even heard that provision, and he told Adam that he’d be by on the weekend.
“We’re gonna be rich,” he said.
Adam merely nodded as Dan walked on ahead.
The van was gone when he arrived home, and he assumed his dad was off somewhere, but it was his mom who was gone, and the house was totally silent when he walked inside. His dad was in the living room, reading a magazine.
“Hey, sport,” he said.
Adam nodded.
“Have a seat. Come and visit with me.”
He’d been intending to go straight to his room, but he recognized that tone in his dad’s voice and knew the suggestion was more mandatory than the words made it sound.
He sat down on the couch. “Where’s Teo?” he asked.
His father shrugged.
Adam frowned. His dad didn’t know? There was something strange about that. Both of his parents had always kept very close tabs on their movements. Too close a lot of times. He and Sasha—Sasha in particular—had often been embarrassed in front of their friends by the strictness of their parents’ monitoring.
Of course, it was just as strange for him to be inquiring about Teo. His sister was usually a pest and he was more likely to want her to leave him alone than to seek out her company, but he felt awkward being by himself with his dad, uncomfortable, and he thought it might be a little less tense to have Teo around.
Awkward? Uncomfortable? Tense? He had never felt that way about his father before, and he was not sure why he felt that way now, but he did, and it bothered him.
He sat there for several moments in silence, staring at the wall, before finally picking up a TV Guide.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” His dad smiled, looking over his magazine. “Just us men?”
Adam nodded, forced himself to smile back. “Yeah,” he lied. “Yeah, it is.”
2
They performed the Cleansing on a Monday, the Lord’s first workday, and the ten of them prayed in unison as they marched through the church, each carrying and clutching his or her own Bible.
Agafia would not have believed a house of God could be this tainted, particularly not one so small, but evil hung thick and heavy over the building, the scent of corruption so strong they could practically taste it. A cathedral she could understand. One of those old medieval churches with labyrinthine chambers and endless corridors. But their plain little house of worship did not seem as though it had room for such powerful and concentrated energy.
It was here, nevertheless, and as they walked in unison over the dusty floorboards, over the dried blood spots that marked the location where Jim Ivanovitch had been murdered, Agafia felt the pressure of its presence. Her sadness and anger at the loss of her old friend had been entirely supplanted by fear.
Was the specific spirit responsible for the minister’s murder still here? It was impossible to tell. Something was here, but whether that something was the actual entity that had killed him or whether it was merely related to that being remained to be seen.
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.
Vasili.
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.
Pra roak.
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 ro
cky 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.
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