Agafia thought of the prophet’s bony arm, wiping out the small town on the sandy floor of the cave.
She could not allow herself to think about that. She had to concentrate on what needed to be done now, and she quickly called Vera back, but the line was busy, so she dialed Semyon’s number. No one answered.
She made several phone calls, calling everyone in the church for whom she had a number, dialing Vera’s number in between each, but she could not get hold of anyone, and she made the decision to walk. It was foolish, perhaps, but it felt right, and, putting on her jacket, clutching her Bible, she sneaked out of the house and hurried up the drive, praying she would not hear Gregory’s or Julia’s voice behind her.
She headed for the church.
It was a long walk. She tired easily these days, and ordinarily she would have had to sit down and rest every so often, but the brisk air and pumping adrenaline gave her the sort of strength she had not had in years, and while she did not speed down to the church, she was able to make good time.
She remembered when she was younger and walked to the church all the time, when she and John and Gregory would get dressed up and all walk, and she found herself thinking that the years sped by far too fast, that life was too short.
It took only fifteen minutes for her to reach the street on which the church was located, and her step, which had been flagging, picked up as she hurried along the side of the road.
She did not see the building until she was nearly upon it—the bulk of the variety store blocked it from view—but as soon as she reached the vacant lot next to the church, she stopped dead in her tracks, her heart lurching painfully in her chest and causing her to gasp.
The church was covered with hair.
Not all of the other Molokans had arrived yet, but several of them had, and they were standing in the dirt parking lot, staring at the building. She hurried past the vacant lot, over to them.
Thick black hair had grown out from every inch of wood wall and stone step and shake roof, straight and shiny and several feet long. The church resembled nothing so much as some sort of fantastic beast from a children’s fairy tale, but there was no sense of the benign magic so common to children’s stories. This was wrong, this was evil, and it had been created not to amuse or inspire awe but to terrify.
Agafia had never seen such a thing before, and it was the absurd incongruity of the sight that made it so frightening. There was a cool, dry breeze blowing through the canyon, and the light wind caused the hair to waft left on unseen currents, waving slightly and giving the church beneath it the appearance of movement.
When had it happened? Last night? This morning? Had it occurred as these things usually did, under the cover of darkness, when no one was looking? Or had someone seen it? She imagined the transformation: the hair appearing, coming in, the church building suddenly growing darker, as though a shadow was passing over it, until the hair grew long enough to see and it became clear to anyone viewing the sight what it was.
Did this have any meaning? she wondered. And what was the significance of hair? She didn’t know, but she walked onto the church property feeling cowed and intimidated, certain that this bizarre desecration had somehow been meant as a warning to her.
Vera turned in her direction as she walked over. “It is you,” she said quietly. “You are the one who has brought this upon us.”
“What?”
“It is your fault. This. Everything.”
She understood now Vera’s diffidence over the phone, and she shook her head. “No.”
“Last night I dreamed of the prophet. He told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He told me you had been influenced. He said you must be cast out.” Vera looked at her evenly. “He said this is your fault. It is all your fault.”
She wanted to explain that it was her fault, that she had forgotten to invite the Owner of the House and that it was from that that everything else had sprung, but she knew that at this point Vera would not listen to her. The other woman was fixated on her dream, she believed it utterly, and nothing anyone could say would dissuade her.
“Pray for me,” Agafia challenged her.
“It is too late for that.” Vera turned away. “Leave. This is no longer your church.”
Pacifism or no pacifism, she heard hatred in Vera’s voice, hatred and fear, and she could sense the threat of violence just below the surface.
Agafia turned away, feeling frustrated and frightened, not knowing what to do. Other people were stopping, drivers on the street braking to a halt so they could look at the transformed building. A crowd was gathering.
She looked again at the church, and this time she saw it in a different light. She’d been thinking of this as a religious occurrence, an act of defiance against God, but now she saw it as vandalism. That was why the hair made no sense, she realized. Like everyone else, she had been thinking in biblical terms, trying to equate what was happening to the words and prophecies in the Bible, but this had nothing to do with that.
This was not sacred, it was secular.
A hand touched her shoulder, and she whirled around. It was Semyon. He’d obviously been standing nearby, listening to her and Vera, and he was offering his support. “I do not believe it,” he said. He smiled. “I know you, Agafia.”
She smiled back, took his hand, gave it a small squeeze of gratitude, but the expressions on the faces of the others were hard and harsh, judgmental and unyielding.
She pulled him aside, walked with him out toward the street. “Listen,” she said, quietly but earnestly. “We need Vasili. Someone needs to get him and bring him here. Our Cleansings are nothing, a squirt of water on a pile of dirt. There are . . . many entities. They are invading McGuane and there are more all the time. Nikolai knows nothing about this, and even Vera is in over her head. Maybe the prophet has some idea of what we can do to stop it.”
“He wasn’t much help last time.”
“Prophets only know what God wants them to know, and only when God wants them to know it. Vasili has no control over what is revealed to him. And perhaps he has had some revelations since that will let us know what to do.” She paused. “Besides, God may have nothing to do with this.”
She saw the look on his face, and she stopped him before he could start. “We don’t have time,” she said. “But this has nothing to do with prayers or God or Jesus Christ. It has to do with Jedushka Di Muvedushka . . .”
He frowned. “That’s just a . . . a tradition. A superstition.”
“It is not!” she said fiercely. “My father saw him, and I’m sure you know plenty of other people who have, too. And you and your family have always invited him when you moved, haven’t you?”
Semyon nodded a reluctant acknowledgment.
“So you believe. Don’t tell me you don’t.”
He was interested now.
She took a deep breath. “I forgot to invite him when we moved here. I cannot go into the details now, but as I’m sure you know, that left our house unprotected. And you know which house that is. You know what happened there.”
He swallowed, nodded. “The Megan house.”
“That is where it started. It grew from that.” She took his right hand in hers, looked into his eyes. “You see what I mean? This may have nothing to do with church.”
“The way it started might have nothing to do with the church, but the spirits that have come in, the evil that has come in since your house was unprotected . . .”
“That’s why I hope the church can help stop it. I don’t have any other ideas. So get the prophet. Tell him. Maybe he will know what to do.”
“I will,” Semyon promised.
“Vera will not listen to me, and that means Nikolai will not listen to me, but you talk to them, you make them know what is behind all this, what started it. And make sure someone brings the prophet here.”
“He may not come.”
“At least talk to him, tell him what is happening
, see if he knows what to do.”
The others were staring at them, and Agafia released him, used her left hand to help hold up the Bible sagging in her right. “Go,” she said “Talk to them. Tell them.”
He nodded, backed away. “I believe you,” he said.
She smiled her thanks.
It was getting near dusk, and the air was growing even colder. The others obviously had something planned, and she hoped they’d at least called in someone else for whatever ritual it was. She doubted it would work, but there needed to be ten of them. Just in case.
They were staring at her, waiting for her to leave, and so, clutching her Bible, Agafia turned and walked through the long shadows of downtown back toward home.
Only she didn’t get that far. She was in front of the hardware store, standing on the corner, looking both ways, when to her right she saw a small, dark figure crossing the road, a little man with a beard, and her heart jumped.
Jedushka Di Muvedushka.
She had never seen him before, but she recognized him instantly. There was about the small man an air of the unearthly. Something about him bespoke an unnatural origin, and though he appeared calm and benign, she was seized with fear at the sight of him.
When Father had seen the Owner of the House back in Mexico, it had been accidental, pure luck, and it, too, had been right around sundown. Father had never been sure whether it was the special qualities of the light which had given him that glimpse of the little man, the fact that it was the time halfway between day and night, or whether the Owner of the House had allowed him a glimpse, but he had never doubted what he’d seen and neither had anyone else in the family.
Agafia understood why. There was something so there about the man, something so substantial about his presence that he seemed in a way more real than his surroundings.
It was that observation which made her think he wanted her to see him.
But whose Owner was he? she wondered. Where had he come from? And why was he trying to communicate with her?
He turned, smiled, beckoned.
She followed him to Russiantown.
She remained far behind, ready to run at any moment, though she doubted she could actually escape him. He did not appear to be after her, made no effort to chase her, and though she was cold and tired and winded, she followed him through empty alleys and empty streets, along a route that seemed specifically designed to avoid contact with anyone else, until they were halfway up the canyon and in the ruins of Russiantown.
She could not recall the last time she’d been here, but she remembered the layout perfectly, and she knew, even before they reached their destination, where he was leading her and what he wanted her to see.
The small man passed through a yard of overgrown dead weeds higher than his head, then climbed up the rickety remnants of wooden steps to a doorway.
The doorway of their old home.
She stood before the ruins of the house, the memories of that last day and night flooding over her. She’d vowed never to return, had promised herself she would not come back to this spot, but here she was, and she faced the past boldly, unflinchingly, something which would not have been possible even a week ago but was absolutely necessary now.
She remembered what happened, remembered what they’d done.
It had been during the Copper Days celebration. Back then, the event had not drawn tourists and people from outside. It had been a local celebration, a miners’ holiday. Only there weren’t many miners anymore. The mine was closed. It had been closed since before the first Molokan had moved here, but that did not stop some of the more belligerent unemployed mineworkers from using them as scapegoats. They didn’t blame Molokans for the fact that the pit had run dry, or the fact that the mining company found it cheaper to move on rather than attempt to extract copper from the remaining low-grade ore—they blamed Molokans for the fact that they were no longer working. The Molokan farm was doing well, and that helped to focus their anger, provided them with a contrast between the Russian community’s growing success and their own falling fortunes.
Some of that hatred was directed at the Mormons as well, who were also surviving, if not thriving, during those tough economic times and who had stores of extra food in their homes and in the church. But it was the Molokans who bore the brunt of the resentment. They were foreigners. They talked funny, they dressed funny, and they didn’t even believe in war. They wanted to live in this country, but they didn’t want to fight for it, and that enraged many of the townspeople.
The seeds for what happened Saturday night had been sown Friday evening, during the first day of the celebration, when one of the bars had offered free drinks to all ex-miners. The First World War had just ended the year before, and the bar owner got up on his soapbox and started lecturing about what he’d seen in Europe and how important it was that every man be willing to fight when his country called him. The combination of alcohol, miners, and the subject of war had of course led to long, drunken diatribes against the Molokans and their anti-American way of life.
The horde of miners had slept it off Saturday morning, for the most part, and roused themselves for the fair in the afternoon, but by Saturday night they were at it again, paying for their own drinks this time, and angry about that as well.
This crowd was bigger. Not the whole town by any means, but a significant minority, and they added to their numbers as they barnstormed through the area, trying to drum up enough people to take some action, adopting a you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us tack that intimidated a lot of fence-sitters into joining them.
Agafia remembered the first smell of smoke, remembered seeing the orange glow from the top of the plateau as the Molokan fields were set on fire. She remembered, after that, how the drunken miners and their supporters had come after their homes.
And she remembered what they’d done in retaliation. It was something they had never spoken of since, something she never thought about and had almost convinced herself hadn’t happened.
But it had.
Russiantown had been destroyed that night. There’d been no real plot or plan, there was nothing organized or thought out. Roving gangs of angry, intoxicated citizens, true believers and the sheep who succumbed to mobthink, drove, walked, stormed through Russiantown, wanting to lash out, wanting to cause harm. And doing so. There had been beatings and assaults as well as property damage. Three women had been raped, two of them in front of their husbands. Her own uncle had been hanged by the miners, tied up and dragged downtown by the mob at the height of the frenzy, strung up on the cottonwood tree in the park, and it was after his murder, after seeing the suddenly lifeless body of a man who’d been alive only seconds before, that the riot or whatever it was ended, that the crowd, now cowed and silent, dispersed and went home, leaving rubble and broken lives in their wake.
They had watched the hanging from out in the street, her entire family, and though she had wanted to look away, she had not.
Nor had her mother made her.
The faces of the men who performed the act, who committed the murder, were seared into her memory. She knew they would never be caught or tried or prosecuted—not in this town—but she committed their faces to memory anyway.
Russiantown had burned to the ground, and the few buildings that were not burned had been looted and torn apart. Her family and John’s and Semyon’s and Vera’s and Alexander’s had been the hardest hit, and someone, she could not remember who, had told them that night, as they were nursing their wounds and surveying the damage and mourning the dead, as the fire wagons attempted to put out the fires so they would not spread to the rest of McGuane, that there was a way to get back at those who had perpetrated this wrong, that there was a way to exact revenge.
If it had been an hour earlier or an hour later, perhaps they would not have followed through, would not have allowed themselves to be led in this direction. But passions were high, and word spread quickly among the battered and displaced populace of Russianto
wn that they had recourse, that there was something that could be done to get back at the people who had destroyed their homes and lives.
They’d gathered together with a man she did not know, crouching in front of a fire next to a banya. The mood had been somber and secretive, and they had called forth a spirit from the forbidden texts of a prophet whose very name had been expunged from Molokan records and history. The prophet’s words had been saved, passed down haphazardly, here and there, by outsiders and malcontents, Molokans who weren’t really part of the church or the community, and though the existence of the words was known, it was not tacitly acknowledged.
Someone had found them, though, someone knew them, and after all these miles and all these years, the worst of them were spoken.
Jim had already been assisting Pavil Dalgov, their minister at the time, and it was Jim and the minister alone who had argued against revenge, who had told them in no uncertain terms that they were treading on the province of God. “Vengeance is mine, said the Lord,” the minister kept repeating, and he ran down a litany of the ills that had befallen those who had gone outside the words of the Bible for comfort or satisfaction, who had trusted not in the Lord but in their own basest instincts. They would pay dearly for this sacrilege, he told them.
The warnings were ignored, however, the forbidden words were spoken, and it had come out of the fire, a blackened thing of charcoal and ash, a creature of death that bowed before them and waited for their orders, willing to do their bidding.
Names had been shouted: the names of those who had inflicted the damage, the names of those who had accompanied the murderers and egged them on. The creature disappeared into the shadows.
And those men had died.
And their wives had died.
And their children had died.
Horribly.
It had been a betrayal of their Molokan beliefs and their covenant with God, this . . . summoning, this intervention from the spirit world. They knew that almost immediately, knew that the minister was right, that they had done wrong. There’d been no satisfaction in the deaths of their tormentors, no sense of rightness or justice, only grief and despair and the guilt of the wicked, but afterward they’d told themselves that something good had come out of it because it had reinforced their faith, had brought them back spiritually to where they were supposed to be. They had sinned, they all knew it, and they had rededicated themselves to God and the Molokan life.
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