The Town (41 page)

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 Russiantown 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.

The demon had died after performing its assigned duty. It had been created out of hate and magic for one thing and one thing only, and when that was done, it had dissolved into nothingness, its life extinguished with the death of its purpose.

Perhaps that had been the true start of it, Agafia thought now. Perhaps that was why she and the Molokans were being targeted. They were being punished for what they had done in the past. Judgment had finally found them. Her unprotected opening had allowed the natural workings of supernatural events to resume, had allowed impulses and forces that had been blocked and dammed for all these years finally to take their course.

Did that mean there was nothing they could do to stop it?

No. She did not believe that. God would not let such a thing happen. And God would not allow the innocent to suffer. The children, like Sasha and Adam and Teo, the people who had moved into town since those days, none of them had had anything to do with the events of that time, and God would not turn His back on them.

But were any of them really innocent?

She recalled the look in her future husband’s eyes when he had helped to call forth the death spirit that night, and she remembered that there was something in the fierceness and determination of his expression that had appealed to her, that had drawn her to him. While she had not exactly been waffling in her commitment to him, it was that as much as anything else that had cemented her resolve to be his wife.

The sins of the father were visited upon the sons, she thought.

No, she thought. God would not allow it. He would not stand by while the innocent were taken.

Jim had been innocent, though. He had fought against the summoning of the spirit. He had not taken part in any of it.

And he had been killed.

Evil did not play by God’s rules.

And evil always came back.

In the doorway of what was left of her old house, Jedushka Di Muvedushka turned, looked at her. His face was middle-aged, but his eyes were ancient.

He smiled, beckoned, but she refused to follow him any farther and would not walk into the house.

Whose Owner was he? she wondered again. Someone’s who had been left behind when Russiantown had been abandoned? She remembered father inviting Jedushka Di Muvedushka to come with them when they moved, and she remembered, even on that terrible morning, the kids laughingly making room for him on the buggy, though they could not see anything there.

No, this one was not theirs.

Still smiling at her, the little man walked into the open entrance of her old house and promptly disappeared into the shadows.

 

She dreamed that night of the
pra roak
.

She was back in the cave, and she was alone with him. He looked up from his fire at her and grinned, and she turned away, wanting to leave, but the bones had blocked the path and she was barefoot.

He cackled, and she saw that he no longer had his unnaturally white teeth. His teeth were rotted, blackened stumps.

He reached out an arm and wiped out the town he had rebuilt in the sand.

“It’s here,” he said in English, and his voice was Gregory’s voice. “It’s time.”

Gregory met Odd at the bar. Paul had severed ties with the handyman as well as himself, and the two of them had spent the past several days commiserating about it, feeling sorry for themselves, drinking away their troubles. It was clear to Gregory that the bartender didn’t like him, that the man was one of those ignorant yokels who bought into that bullshit rumor that he and his family had brought bad luck or evil or whatever it was to McGuane, but as usual beliefs took a backseat to bucks, and since he and Odd were the bar’s most loyal customers, the man put his personal feelings aside and served them.

He didn’t participate in the conversations, though. And he kept a wary, careful distance.

He was listening, however. He kept his ears open, and he kept track of what was said and who said it, in case he needed the information in the future.

That ticked Gregory off.

It was one of
many
things that ticked him off. There was nothing he could do about any of it now, but he, like the bartender, was keeping track, keeping score, and one of these days he was going to tally everything up and the bill was going to come due.

Gregory finished his beer, motioned for another. The headaches had been really bad the past few days, much worse than usual, and he’d considered going to a doctor. Aspirin and Tylenol did no good, and it occurred to him that perhaps he had something serious, like a brain tumor.

Drinking took away the pain, though, and for the moment that was his medicine of choice.

The bartender brought him a beer, and Gregory nodded his thanks, smiling unctiously. The bartender ignored him and went back to the other end of the bar where he was pretending to dry shot glasses.

Gregory raised the mug to his lips, took a long, cool drink, then stared down at the dark wood countertop. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He and Julia had made up, or had pretended to make up, but for some reason he’d been avoiding her ever since. It was as if her capitulation had somehow tainted her in his eyes, and if he had found himself too often angry with her before, now he was simply disgusted. He had no respect for her whatsoever; in fact, it was hard to remember what had once convinced him to marry her.

He didn’t want to go home tonight, and he realized that he was drunk when he found himself trying to concentrate nonexistent psychic powers on Odd in an effort to get his friend to invite him over to his place. He kept repeating the same phrase over and over again in his mind, concentrating so hard that he gave himself a headache:
Invite me to sleep at your house. Invite me to sleep at your house.