The Town

by Bentley Little

  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.”

  5

  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 occup
ied.

  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.

  The cells were full. The sheriff tried once again to radio the Rio Verde sheriff’s station to ask if they had any open cells where prisoners could be transferred, but, as before, he was unable to get through.

  He tried Willcox, tried Safford, tried Benson.

  No answer.

  Roland slammed down the mike on the radio set, frustrated. Tish, holding down the front desk by herself, looked over at him, worried, and he forced himself to smile reassuringly at her.

  “Still no answer?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll try again in a few minutes.” He started to walk back to his office but noticed something strange when he passed the hallway leading to the holding area.

  Silence.

  He frowned, listening. The prisoners were awfully quiet all of a sudden, and that didn’t sit well with him. Not with things going the way they were. He made a detour down the hall, knocked on the metal door that led to the holding area. “Tom!” he called.

  He expected the door to be opened immediately, but when there was no response, he called his deputy’s name again and quickly pulled out his own keys, a feeling of dread growing within him. “Tom!”

  He pulled open the door.

  Tom was lying unmoving in the middle of the corridor that ran between the two rows of cells. In the cells themselves, the prisoners were dead. All of them. Pressed against the bars, faces blue-black from lack of oxygen, eyes bulging from their sockets in contrasting white.

  A cold fear gripped Roland’s heart and he turned around, wanting to get out of here as quickly as possible, not even bothering to check on Tom’s condition to make sure he was dead.

  The metal door slammed shut in his face.

  Faron Kent pulled to a stop in front of the temple. He’d been born and raised Mormon, had left the church only when he’d married Claire, but he still considered Mormons his people, and when he saw all of the cars and trucks parked in front of the temple, he knew where he had to go.

  He’d just come into town, and he’d almost pulled off to the side of the road to wait out the sandstorm once he’d come through the tunnel and experienced its ferocity. There’d been only a slight wind in the adjoining canyons through which he’d driven, nothing at all on the flat desert plain before. Which mean that this freakishly localized weather could not possibly last the night. It was probably safer to pull onto the shoulder and catch a couple winks than attempt to maneuver these narrow roads with zero visibility.

  But . . .

  But he saw shadows in the sandstorm. Figures. Creatures. And he heard things. And he thought it safer to try and navigate the roads than pull off and wait for . . . what?

  As he drove down the sloping highway into town, as the sand and its hidden inhabitants swirled about his car, old buried beliefs from his upbringing suddenly kicked in, and he found himself wondering if this was the end, if these were the last days.

  It did not seem that far-fetched, and when he saw all the vehicles parked in front of the dark Mormon temple, he immediately and impulsively pulled in.

  Even as he braked, however, the wind was lessening, the sandstorm dying down. There were still no lights on in McGuane, other than what looked like headlights further up the road, but a faint glow of moonlight from above the storm could now be seen filtering onto the scattered buildings.

  And the mine.

  For that was the only place where he saw movement, the open pit across the highway, and the movement that he saw, that instantly grabbed his attention, scared the living shit out of him.

  There were creatures crawling out from the mine, emerging from the pit onto the ground above, creatures of dirt and gravel, monsters made from copper tailings and animated with some hellish spark of life.

  The last days.

  His first instinct was to run inside the temple for sanctuary, but his experiences during the intervening years proved far stronger than the influence of his upbringing, and he reached for the rack behind him and pulled his shotgun down.

  He got out of the pickup, locked and loaded, and strode bravely across the highway. He pointed his shotgun, aimed it at the first sand creature and pulled the trigger.

  With a short, high wail, the creature dissolved into dust.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  He targeted the next monster pulling itself up, its mineral fingers still clutching the edge of the pit, and when its head exploded in a shower of dirt, it fell back into the mine.

  Behind him, a few of the braver men were walking out onto the steps from inside the temple to see what was going on. The wind had died down enough now that the sound of the shotgun blasts had carried.

  “Grab some weapons!” he yelled as loud as he could. “I need some help here!”

  There was a second’s hesitation, then two men sprinted down the steps and out to their pickups. A moment later, three others ran out of the temple to help.

  He smiled, feeling good, feeling strong, and blew the next monster into a cloud of dust that dissipated in the wind.

  6

  They were starting toward the cars when Agafia saw Gregory staggering up to the church through the blowing sand.

  Even with the flashlights pointed at him, he remained only a silhouette, but she would have recognized her son’s shape anywhere, and she drew in her breath sharply. He was lurching to the left, and it was obvious that there was something seriously wrong. Her first instinct was maternal, and she wanted to run to him and hug him and pray over him and make him feel better. But pragmatism took over instantly, and she ordered the others back into the shot-up and now hairless church, warning them to stay down. Julia shoved the kids through the door, and Adam’s little friend went with them. The older Molokans obeyed as well, but some merely doused their flashlights and moved off to the right or to the left, waiting to see what was going to happen. The Indians, following some plan of their own, broke up and began moving into the dust storm, into the night, attempting, she assumed, to sneak up behind Gregory.

  He came closer.

  She kept her flashlight trained on his indistinct form.

  The sight of him with a gun in his hand was not only shocking but repulsive, and her first thought was that she was glad his father was not alive to see this.

  She still had in her own hand the gun she’d taken from Julia—the gun he’d used to kill Sasha

  —and though she had no intention of using it, did not even know how to use it, she grasped it as she’d seen in movies and on television and pointed it at Gregory, illogically hoping that it would scare him away.

  He shot at her.

  Agafia jumped back, almost fell, and did drop the flashlight, though she managed to hold on to the revolver. She chanced a quick look behind her, but did not see anybody dead or injured, and she prayed that he had not hit anyone.

  Gregory ran forward as fast as he could.

  It was totally unexpected behavior, and in this place and under these circumstances, it appeared to be the move of a madman.

  Screaming crazily, shooting at the church, causing everyone to scatter, he ran toward her, past her, up the steps—

  And pointed his gun at Julia.

  Agafia knew she had to act fast. He was not playing around, not trying to gain leverage or make demands. He wanted only to kill his wife, and Agafia stepped up, shoving her gun hard against the side of his head, the side with all the blood. He winced but did not drop his weapon, did not waiver from his intent.

  “Forgive me,” Agafia said softly in Russian, not knowing if it was Gregory to whom she was speaking or God.

 
She pulled the trigger.

  Gregory dropped.

  Julia screamed. It was a cry of sheer pain unlike any she had ever heard, and Agafia felt a twin of that pain within herself, a cry that wanted to escape and be let out but that she kept bottled up inside for fear if allowed free rein it would never end.

  They were staring at her with horror, all of the other Russians. Aside from Gregory, she was the only Molokan she had ever known who had willingly and intentionally taken a human life, and that sin weighed on her like a mountain on a peasant’s back. Awareness that the life she had taken was also the life she had created, her son’s, made her crime that much more heinous, made Agafia feel empty inside. She almost expected God to strike her dead right here and now, but as the others started moving forward, as the Indians emerged from the storm, she understood that that was not going to happen. She would not be taken, she would not be granted an easy way out. She would have to live with what she’d done, with what she was.

  Evil.

  She thought of Russiantown.

  But she could have done nothing else. It was either her son or her daughter-in-law, and she had chosen. If she’d done nothing, Gregory would have killed her next, and the kids, and then however many others he could have before someone stopped him, so she’d made the decision to do it herself. It was something she would not have been able to carry out had she had time to think about it, but running on instinct, she’d made the split-second decision to kill him.

  It would be God who judged her finally, and she was prepared to accept His verdict no matter what it was.

  Julia was next to her, next to him, on the ground, touching Gregory’s face, but she was already pulling herself together, obviously attempting to be strong for the children, and Agafia admired that. Julia was tough. She was a survivor and, no matter what, could always be counted on to do what had to be done. Agafia was proud of the choice her son had made.

  Her son.

  She had no son any more.

  She had murdered him.

  Again, the scream was within her, threatening to escape, but she pressed it back, would not let it out. She looked down at Gregory’s bloody body, then turned away, looked over at the others watching her, staring at her.