The Town (24 page)

He’d been aiming for his belly button again, but again he’d missed, and the scissors sank blade-deep into his flesh. The pain was unbearable, unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, and he was glad to feel himself passing out from lack of oxygen so he wouldn’t have to experience the agony of the stab wound any longer.

He just hoped the umbilical cord died with him.

“I
found something really cool,” Scott said.

They were at lunch, and Adam had just traded his apple for half a Twinkie. He bit into the creme-filled snack cake. “What is it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“If you can’t tell me, why’d you bring it up?”

“I mean, I have to show you.” He grinned. “It’s so cool.”

Adam finished the Twinkie, wiped his hands on his jeans. “At least give me a hint.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re really annoying, you know that?”

“We all know that,” Dan said, sitting down on the opposite side of the table and opening his lunch sack.

“Where’ve you been?” Scott asked.

“The office.”

Scott leaned forward excitedly. “What happened? What did you do?”

“Nothing. I forgot my lunch and my mom brought it.” He shook his head. “I could’ve just bought my lunch at the cafeteria.”

“Nothing more embarrassing than having your mom come to school,” Scott agreed.

“Is there anything good in there?” Adam asked, looking over.

Dan pulled out a sandwich. “Salami,” he said.

“That’s it?”

Dan smiled. “A lot of trouble for just a sandwich, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “My mom . . .”

“I found something really cool,” Scott said. “I was telling Adam about it.”

“He wasn’t telling me anything.”

“I’m going to show you guys after school. Do you have to go home right away?”

Dan shook his head.

“I could call my parents,” Adam said.

“Call them. You won’t regret it.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Come on!”

Scott smiled mysteriously. “You’ll see.”

 

They met on the basketball court after school. Scott was the last to arrive, and as soon as he rounded the corner of the locker room, Adam and Dan stopped talking about who would win in a fair fight between Batman and Spiderman and walked over to their friend.

“So?” Adam said. “What is it?”

“Not what. Where.” He started across the asphalt toward the field. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Not even a hint?” Dan said.

“Nope.”

They left school, walking past the rows of old houses, through downtown and out to the highway. Several cars were traveling in both directions, and all three of them remained safely on the dirt shoulder as Scott led them up the road toward the tunnel at the end of town. Just before the diner, he dashed across the highway and stopped before a steep sandstone cliff practically covered with hanging succulents—green, cactusy plants that looked to Adam like the ubiquitous ground cover used to abut California freeways.

He looked around. “So?” he said.

Scott smiled. “Follow me.” He used his foot to push a clump of plants aside, and Adam saw a narrow dirt path leading slantways up the cliff.

“Cool,” he said.

“I hid the entrance so no one else would find it.”

“Where does it lead?”

“You’ll see.” Scott started up. “I discovered it when I was walking back from the diner. I’d never really noticed it before, but I spilled my Coke on the ground and I stopped to pick it up and saw this path.”

“And you took it?”

“I wanted to see where it led.”

“Was it night?”

“No. It was yesterday at lunch. I tried to call you doofuses when I got back, but neither of you were home.” He looked over his shoulder at Adam. “Thanks for calling me back, by the way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I left a message with your sister, and she told me she’d have you call me back.”

“She never told me,” he said.

“Bitch.”

The path was steep, and they were grabbing strings of succulents as though they were ropes, using the plants to help pull themselves up the trail. Adam looked to his right and saw that the highway was already a couple of stories below them. He stopped for a moment, looked ahead. The path continued sloping upward until it was above the diner’s tiny back parking lot, then switch-backed and returned in this direction farther up the cliff.

Dan poked him in the back. “Come on. Get moving.”

They followed Scott up.

Around the curve, three-fourths of the way to the top of the bluff, the path sank down a little, behind a low wall of sandstone and succulents, before suddenly dead-ending into the cliff face. Adam stopped. They were at a spot that couldn’t be seen from the road. Looking up from below, the cliff face had appeared to be even, with no indication that there was anyplace where people would be able to stand. The path itself was invisible from the bottom, but this little open space was completely unexpected. It was like a little secret clearing, a smuggler’s hideout, and he looked over to see Scott sitting on a chunk of rock and grinning hugely. “What’d I tell you?”

“It
is
cool,” Adam admitted.

Dan was looking around. “Who do you think made it?”

“No one. It’s natural.”

“I doubt it. And even if it was, do you think you’re the first person to find it?”

“Looks that way. I don’t see signs of anyone else up here.”

“There’s a path,” Dan pointed out. “That means someone had to make the path at least.”

“But that was a long time ago. Look around. I’m telling you, no one’s been here but us in . . . God knows.” He stood. “Now this is the really cool part.” He shoved his hand into the draping plants behind him, but instead of hitting rock wall, his arm went in up to the elbow. He pushed the plants aside, like a curtain.

Behind the succulents was an indentation in the cliff large enough to walk inside.

A cave.

Scott grinned. “Bitchin’, huh?”

It was. Even Dan had to admit it. They walked over, peeked behind the hanging strands. It was small enough that they could see the back wall, even with the afternoon shadows, but large enough that all three of them could have easily fit inside with room to spare.

It was like something out of a movie, and Adam took in the high ceiling, the sandy floor, the irregularly eroded sides, before heading over to the opposite end of their little clearing and peeking over the edge. The highway looked very far below, and he could not believe they had come up this high.

“This place is like a secret hideout,” Scott said behind him. “We can spy on people down there and they can’t see us. We can check out what’s happening at the diner and they won’t even know.”

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.”

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.