The Town

1

“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.”

Sasha.

“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.”

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 rocky 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.

Finally, Semyon cleared his throat. “We need your help,” he said loudly.

Vasili grew silent. He remained crouched, did not stand, but he looked up at them, his gaze flicking over the face of each. Agafia shivered as his eyes met hers, and he smiled at her. He still had all of his teeth, she saw, and seeing strong teeth in his wrinkled head was disturbing somehow.

On the sand next to the pra roak was what looked like a small village made out of sticks and stones and bits of dried cactus. Looking closer, she saw that it was McGuane. Not McGuane as it was, but McGuane as it used to be, when they’d first come here. There was a hole at one end, representing the mine, and from it stretched the other buildings, leading all the way up to Russiantown.

Nikolai took over. “We’re here—” he began.

“I know.”

And Vasili began to recount the story of Jim’s death. It was a detailed description, filled with specific incidents none of them could have known. It had happened much the same way they’d assumed, but hearing it spelled out like this was sobering in its horror.

The prophet’s Russian was hard for her to understand. Despite his appearance and reputed origins, the old man spoke in a higher-class dialect than that of the other Molokans. It was closer to Brezhnev’s educated speech than Krushchev’s peasant dialect, and she had to listen carefully and reorder the accented syllables in her mind before she could tell what he was talking about.

As he described the agony of Jim’s last moments, she wished she could not understand him at all.

“What is causing this?” Nikolai asked when he was through. “And what can we do about it? We have performed a Cleansing—”

“There is not only one,” Vasili said, and they were silent, listening to him. A distorted shadow of his crouched form flickered on the rock wall behind him in concert with the flames of the fire. “There are many evil spirits in McGuane. And more are coming. The dead do not rest well there.”

Agafia shivered. The pra roak looked up at her, and she felt more than saw the unfettered intensity of his gaze.

She heard the voice in her mind: You have invited them.

She looked quickly around, but none of the others were reacting, none of the others had heard.

This was meant only for her.

It is your fault. You have invited them.

The fact that the prophet was communicating with her in this way, that he could communicate in this way, did not surprise her, but it frightened her. No less frightening than the nature of the communication were the ideas behind it, and she tried to think of what he meant, of what she could possibly have done to invite these sorts of… beings to McGuane.

Invite.

The word triggered an association in her mind. Perhaps she had not invited these spirits, but by not inviting one, she had inadvertently allowed them entrance.

Jedushka di Muvedushka.

That could not be it. They had forgotten to invite the Owner of the House when they’d moved to McGuane and that would account for any unusual or unexplainable events at their new home, but all of the other Molokans had Owners protecting their houses, and there was no way that their own lack of protection could be affecting the entire town. The pra roak had to mean something else—but she could not for the life of her figure out what it was.

“No!” he suddenly screeched. “No!”

They jumped, all of them, Katsya letting out a little gasped cry and clutching a hand to her breast.

Vasili was holding his ears and grimacing with pain. It looked like he was trying to keep his head from exploding.

Suddenly he slumped forward, toward the fire, then seemed to catch himself. He shook his head as though just waking up from a long nap.

“They must be stopped,” he said, looking up.

“That is why we are here,” Nikolai explained patiently. “We do not know what to do. Are we supposed to pray? Perform more Cleansings? What do we do?”

“God will show you.”

“Has he shown you?” Nikolai asked. “If so, tell us. We are lost.”

“God will show you,” he repeated. “You will know what to do.”

“What if we don’t know what to do?” Agafia got up the courage to ask. She faced him. “What if God shows us, but we are too stupid to figure it out? What will happen then?”

The prophet grinned, the translucent skin of his face pulling tighter, his too-strong teeth giving his head the look of a skull. “All gone,” he said, and with one sweeping arm flattened the makeshift town on the sand next to him. His beard swung to the side as he moved and she saw his wrinkled, shriveled genitals. “All gone.”

They were silent on the trip home, each of them thinking individually about what Vasili had said, about what his words and warnings meant.

That was the trouble with prophets. They had to be interpreted.

Agafia closed her eyes, thought about the meeting.

The McGuane he had destroyed with his hand was already gone.

All gone.

Had he meant by that that the Molokan community in McGuane would be destroyed, the community that had been born when the town really had looked like his model? Or had he meant that the existing town would be somehow turned to rubble? Had he meant that there would be some sort of earthquake or disaster, or that spirits would somehow bring about the destruction?

It was impossible to tell, and that’s what was so frustrating. She considered asking Vera, seeing if the old woman had any ideas or any feelings about this, but Vera was already dead asleep in the back of the van.

Agafia was tired, too. Tired not just physically but mentally, spiritually. Living seemed like such an effort, the energy required to get through a single day almost too much to bear. Would she had felt the same way if she was still back in California, she wondered, if she had not agreed to leave L.A. and come with Gregory? She did not know, but Los Angeles seemed far away now, part of another life, and she could not imagine leading that life again.

Was she ready to die?

She might have been, but it was her grandchildren that kept her going, that supplied what little spark of meaning she had in her life. She sensed that they needed her, and though there was no evidence of that, she felt it in her bones and knew it to be true, and that was what enabled her to keep on living.

It is your fault. You have invited them.

She’d been avoiding that, trying not to think about it. Vasili had said no more to her, either verbally or in her head, and the entire meeting, the entire experience, had been so strange and dreamlike that already the reality of it was fading, the sharp edges blurring in her mind.

But the emotional impact of it had not lessened. And that was how she knew it was real, that was why she knew it had actually happened. The fear she’d felt was still inside her and could be recalled at any time.

Had he spoken to the others that way as well? Had they all heard voices in their heads? She didn’t know, but somehow she didn’t think so. She’d looked around at that moment, and everyone else’s attention had been focused on the external reality of the old man crouched next to the fire. None of them appeared to have been hearing any inner voices.

Why had she been chosen?

Was it really her fault?

She didn’t know. She glanced around the van at her fellow passengers, her fellow parishioners, her friends. She felt guilty for not telling them everything, for not telling them about what the pra roak had said, but she felt guiltier for what she’d done, for forgetting to invite the Owner of the House, and now she was too embarrassed to tell them the truth. Especially at this late date. If she’d been honest with Jim from the very beginning, perhaps he could have thought of some way to counteract or counterbalance her mistake, perhaps it all could have been avoided. He had known a lot more about rituals and traditions and ceremonies than anyone else, and it was possible that he could have come up with an idea.

But it was here and it was now and all they could do was deal with it.

Besides, when it came right down to it, despite what the prophet had told her, she didn’t really believe that it was because they had not invited Jedushka di Muvedushka that all of this was happening. The Owner might have been able to protect their house from evil spirits, but that had no bearing on what was happening elsewhere in McGuane.

It wasn’t her fault, she told herself again.

But she could not make herself believe it.

3

Scott woke up early on Saturday and had two cold cinnamon Pop Tarts for breakfast, washing them down with the dregs of his dad’s coffee. His parents were gone already, off on their usual weekend rounds of McGuane garage sales, and he was once again on his own.

He watched cartoons while he ate, then dumped his cup and plate in the sink and took his dad’s 35-millimeter camera from the closet where it had been gathering dust since their last trip to Disneyland. It still had film in it, but the counter had broken and he didn’t know how many pictures were left.

One would be enough if everything went perfectly, but things hardly ever did, and he hoped there was at least half a roll to go. He pressed the “Test” button on the attached flash. It worked, and he turned off the TV, locked up the house, got his bike out from the backyard, and pedaled over to Adam’s place.

Their family’s van was gone when he arrived, and though the house looked empty, he checked to make sure anyway. He knocked on the door, waited, knocked on the door, waited, but there was no answer, and after the sixth round of knocks he gave up. He’d told Adam ahead of time that he was coming over this morning, but obviously his friend wasn’t home. Maybe he’d been corralled into some family outing, suckered into going on a hike or a shopping trip or something.

Maybe he really hadn’t wanted to help him.

Scott hadn’t actually considered that before. He knew Dan was uncomfortable with the idea of taking photos of the bathhouse, but he hadn’t taken Adam’s mild objections seriously, and now he found himself wondering if both of his friends weren’t afraid of the small building.

No, he told himself. Adam went there all the time. Alone. It was spooky, but it was cool, and there was a slight prickle at the back of his neck as he hopped back on his bike and pedaled around the side of the house and across the property toward the hill.

The bathhouse.

He saw it against the background of the old burned-out home as he emerged from the copse of paloverdes and stopped.

The day was bright, the sun high in the sky, but suddenly he was not so sure he wanted to go through with this. The idea was a winner, and he had no doubt that he would be able to sell any pictures he took, but he thought that maybe he should wait until Adam was here or at least someone was home at Adam’s house before trying to take any photos.

He did not want to go into the bathhouse alone.

That’s what it came down to.

He leaned his bike against a tree trunk and walked slowly through the jumble of boulders toward the small adobe structure. There were no birds here, he noticed. This area was completely silent, the only sounds the crunching of his tennis shoes on the ground. He took the lens cap off the camera as he walked, turned on the flash. Maybe he could just take the pictures quickly and then get out of here as fast as possible.

He approached the bathhouse, feeling nervous. He’d been too glib before, too flippant in his attitude. Dan was right. There was something here.

Of course there was something here. That’s why he’d come to take pictures.

But it was evil, he thought now. It was not merely weird and interesting and X-Files-ish. It was not just a freakish occurrence to be exploited. There was something wrong and profoundly unnatural about what lay inside that little building, and he was suddenly cowed, intimidated by its presence.

Maybe he should just forget about the whole thing.

No, he’d come this far, he might as well go through with it. Because, after this, he certainly wouldn’t be brave enough to come back and try it again.

After this, he didn’t plan ever to come back here again.

He shivered as a tingle of fear shot down his spine, but there was something exciting about it. It was exhilarating as well as frightening, and that extra rush of adrenaline gave him the courage to walk across the last few feet of ground and up to the bathhouse.

He stood in the doorway, aimed the camera. It was too dark inside the building for him to see anything—the scene in the viewfinder was completely black—but he pointed the camera toward where he knew the shadow of the man was and pressed the shutter. There was a blinding overwhelming strobe of light, then darkness once again.

He stepped back. He thought he’d seen something in the flash. Movement. It had been quick, almost too quick to see, but it had been there. He was sure of it. A quick-silver flow of shadow from one place to another.

Heart pounding, he leaned forward, took another picture.

Again, movement.

Movement and flesh.

Yes. This time he’d seen skin. Someone naked, sitting on a bench.

Someone waiting for a steam bath.

He should run, he thought, leave, get the hell out of here. It would take only a few seconds to reach his bike, then he’d be gone, speeding away. He already had two pictures. He’d gotten what he came for.

But he had to know what was in there. He could not leave without seeing this through.

This’ll make a great story at school, a foolishly brave part of him thought.

It gave him the strength to go on.

He took another picture.

Once more, something was illuminated by the flash. Something he could not see on his own. The scene was more complicated this time, and he had the impression that there were several people in there.

People?

No. Not people.

It was completely silent in the bathhouse, and the phrase “the silence of the grave” popped into his mind. He didn’t know where he’d heard it before, but he backed slowly away from the door, peering into the darkness, trying desperately to make out any shapes inside the room, but the light seemed to die immediately after crossing the threshold, and nothing could be made out.

He wanted to take one more photo, give it one last shot, but this time he stayed away from the door and pointed the camera in the general direction, not bothering to look through the viewfinder.

He saw flesh and shadows, movement more fluid than anything on this earth, and, overseeing everything, on the back wall, the figure of the Russian man.

He ran.

He’d reached the end of the film anyway, and the camera’s automatic rewind was whirring. Several long strides brought him to the paloverde tree against which he’d leaned his bike. He hopped on it and took off, not looking back.

I got it! he thought as he pedaled furiously, leaping the ruts and holes in the path. I got it!

He did not slow down until he was off Adam’s road and downtown. He took the film out of the camera and dropped it off at the 1-Hour Photo next to the video store.

He went back home and put the camera away, turning on the television and watching Scooby Doo, trying desperately not to think of what he’d seen and waiting in vain for his fear-accelerated heart rate to slow.

After an hour that seemed like a day and a series of cartoons that seemed to make no linear sense, Scott raided the sock drawer where his dad stored the loose change he collected, snagged five dollars’ worth of quarters, and hoping that would be enough, took off on his bike for the 1-Hour Photo.

He waited until he was outside the store and alone on the sidewalk before ripping open the package and sorting through the pictures. Disneyland… Disneyland… Disneyland… the beach…

The bathhouse.

He stopped, looked at the photo.

The picture began to slide through his suddenly sweaty fingers, but he gripped it tighter as he stared at a scene that did not exist. He recognized the door frame at the top of the photograph, but inside he saw neither the abandoned, neglected wreck that Adam had taken them through nor the creepy world of moving shadows that he’d almost seen in the flash illumination.

He saw a bunch of fat old people sitting naked on benches.

It was nothing he had expected, and he flipped to the next photograph.

Same thing.

The next.

The same.

He frowned at the last picture. The creepy ambiguity of the half-illuminated flash scene was nowhere in evidence. There was nothing remotely mysterious about the shot. About any of them. The scene was clear and well lit—two fat old couples, the men with towels around their waists, the women with towels around their waists and upper bodies. They were all sweating, though the photos showed no steam, and they appeared to be tired, the two women leaning back, eyes closed, the men leaning forward, with grimaces of discomfort on their faces. The back wall, he noticed, was clear. No ghostly shadow.

Maybe these people were ghosts.

Maybe. But somehow that didn’t seem right. They seemed too… real. These people were not spirits. They were flesh and blood. He could see the ugly mole on one man’s thigh, the sagging arm muscles of the heavier woman. It was too concrete, this scene, too specific. It was as if he had taken a photograph of a real event—only that event had not been the one before the camera in real life.

What had happened?

He’d taken pictures of the past!

It was the only logical explanation, and he quickly sorted through the bathhouse photos once again. He saw now the anachronistic hairdos and somehow old-timey faces of the women, the way the men looked more foreign than any Molokan he’d ever seen.

These were not just pictures of a spooky shadow. This was a miracle. These photos were worth way more than he’d ever hoped they could be. He shoved them back into the package and hopped on his bike, pedaling straight home. He was no longer scared. He was excited, tremendously excited, more excited than he had ever been in his life, and the first thing he did was immediately call Adam, but though he let the phone ring twenty times, no one answered.

Could they repeat this? he wondered. If they took more pictures of the inside of the bathhouse, would they get other scenes of other people, other times? He was eager to try it out, and he picked up the package and opened it up again, taking out the photos.

They were different.

His heart jumped, and he suddenly felt like he was back at the bathhouse, the fear in him so strong it was almost overpowering.

The people were seated in different spots, facing different directions. They were the same fat old men and women, but whereas before they’d been sitting together like husband and wife, now the two men were seated next to each other and the two women were on the opposite bench.

One of the women was smiling into the camera.

She no longer had a towel on.

He could see everything and it was gross. She was hairy and disgusting, and there were rolls of fat hanging down almost everywhere.

He dropped the photos, scared.

Even on the floor, the pictures creeped him out. All but one of the bathhouse photos had fallen facedown, but in that one he could still see the old lady’s inappropriate smile. He backed away from them.

He was still clutching the package, and on impulse he opened it and pulled out the negatives, searching quickly through them.

The ones from the bathhouse were blank.

He was having a hard time catching his breath. Something was going on here that he did not understand but that frightened him to the core. The near-euphoria he’d experienced only moments before at his discovery had curdled into terror, and he wanted nothing more than to be through with all this, to be safe and secure back in his normal old life. He would give up money and fame forever if he could just get rid of these pictures.

He considered leaving them where they were and letting his dad take care of them when he came home, but he knew he could not do that. He wanted to protect his parents from this. He did not want them to know anything about it. He wanted to keep it from Adam and Dan, too. He didn’t want anyone to know about what had happened.

He stared down at the photos on the ground. He was afraid to touch them, afraid to be anywhere near them, but he knew he had to get rid of the pictures, and he reached down, scooped them up, and ran to the kitchen sink, where he dumped them in. Their vacation photos were mixed up in there, too, but they were probably contaminated as well, and if he got rid of all the evidence, his parents would never miss them. They’d probably forgotten they still had film in the camera anyway.

He dumped the negatives into the sink as well.

He half expected the photographs to leap up, to start moving, to try and escape, to make noises, to do something in order to stop him, but nothing unusual happened as he pulled open a drawer, took out a soup ladle, and used the big spoon to herd the pictures over to the drain mouth and shove them into the garbage disposal.

He turned on the water, turned on the disposal.

A sense of relief coursed through him as he heard the grinding, as he saw the little flecks of paper that spit out from the drain mouth as the disposal chewed up the pictures.

He turned off the garbage disposal, took the 1-Hour Photo package in which the pictures and negatives had come, and shoved it down there as well.

He turned the disposal back on.

“Hey,” his mom said behind him. “What’re you doing?”

He turned to see his parents walking in, carrying sacks of junk they’d bought at the garage sales. He flipped off the disposal switch. “I was going to clean the breakfast dishes,” he lied. He was aware that his voice sounded too high, and he knew that he was sweating profusely. His heart was still pounding crazily in his chest.

“You don’t have to do that,” his mother told him. “I’ll get them.”

“Okay,” he said, backing away.

His dad frowned at him. “Is something wrong? You look a little funny.”

“No,” he said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”