There must have been thirty of them. Plum supplied that figure later on, and she had had time to count the house. It looked to me as though there were at least a hundred of them, and they made enough noise for a thousand.
I sort of stayed where I was. They happily did not. As if on a signal they tossed their bones into the air – the ones they had been waving about, that is. And before the bones could touch the ground, the men turned and ran screaming in all directions. The bones clattered to the ground and the men kept running and kept screaming, and their screams gradually faded in the distance.
I coughed and shrugged and said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” and otherwise reassured myself that I was still there. I scrambled the rest of the way out of the hole and turned to look at it. I looked down at myself and decided that I looked like something that might logically have crawled out of a grave.
I picked up one of the abandoned bones. I decided at first that it was a human leg bone, the meat but recently gnawed off by similarly human teeth. I looked at it some more and decided it was more likely the shinbone of an ox. I was still looking at it when Plum called to me. I turned, and she was just emerging from a clump of trees.
I said, “They didn’t have any drums.”
She looked at me oddly.
“Drums,” I insisted. “They were beating drums, it was driving me crazy. Then the drums stopped and I got out of there and I didn’t see any drums. Just these things.” I held up the bone. “What happened to the drums?”
“They used the bones.”
“How?”
“They beat on the ground with them,” she said. “Evan, we have to get out of here.”
I knelt down, pounded the bone on the ground. I could have made as much noise pounding a pillow with a sponge. “There must have been more to it than that,” I said.
“There were a great many of them, Evan.”
“I noticed.”
“And they pounded with great fervor.”
I pounded with great fervor myself. I began to see how it could have sounded like drumming, especially when it was all going on over my head.
Plum was busy apologizing. “I was sorry to run off without warning, Evan. But when I saw them coming I was frightened.” I couldn’t exactly blame her. “I wanted only to get away without attracting their attention. Others who have spied on their midnight rituals have been killed. I was afraid.”
“Who were they, anyway?”
“The Nishanti.”
“Oh.”
“They are outlawed, Evan. They have always been outlawed, but with the new government the penalties are most severe. And yet the Nishanti flourish. There are more of them than ever before.”
“What do they do? Besides pound bones on the ground?”
“They raise the Devil.”
“I’ll say they do,” I said. “They raise the devil, all right. But what’s the point of it all?”
“No, no, Evan. That is what they do.” She gestured. “Raise the Devil. It is their belief that they can come to the cemetery at midnight after a burial, and that they can chant their chants and beat bones upon the ground, and that the Devil himself will rise up out of the new grave and wreak havoc upon the entire world, and that all who do not believe will be destroyed, while the chosen believers, the Nishanti, will be carried into the Kingdom of Eternal Life.”
“The Devil Himself,” I said.
“Yes. They must have thought-”
“Up popped the Devil.”
“Yes. That is why they spared you, you see. And why you struck terror upon them.”
“They tried to raise the Devil, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and they ran off screaming. I suppose it’s always that way. I suppose the Jehovah’s Witnesses will be upset when the world comes to an end. But why should they be frightened if they’re the chosen believers?”
She pondered this. “Perhaps they did not truly believe,” she suggested.
“Well,” I said, “they do now.”
We left the cemetery without encountering devils or devil raisers. The bone yard was on the northeast edge of Griggstown, and the road which led to the interior of the country began in the center of town and cut northwest from there, so we made our way through the suburban sprawl along the top of the city. The rain lasted long enough to wash most of the mud off me, then turned itself off. We were both soaked through to the bone. I walked along shivering, and Plum ’s teeth chattered in the chill air. One of those hidden blessings – the cold and wet kept us from realizing how hungry we were.
The suburb we walked through had no formal name. It wasn’t a formal political division but was merely that part of Griggstown which had occurred during the last ten years or so. I couldn’t imagine why it had bothered. It was a suburb, and there is a sameness about suburbs which transcends geographical distinctions. It could have been a suburb of London or Rio de Janeiro. It was distinguished from the Eastern European suburbs in that its houses were all painted in pastels, here a pale green one, there a pale blue one, here a pink one, there a yellow one. Behind the Curtain all the houses are gray, that very gray used for the interior of every apartment building in Manhattan. But here all the little boxes were the color of infant apparel, and all the little boxes were made of concrete block, and each had a young and spindly tree in front, and a lawn of coarse-bladed grass, and an attached garage, and a car. Every once in awhile we would see a car that wasn’t a Volkswagen.
The car we stole was a Volkswagen. I could have saved a lot of time and trouble by stealing the first car we came to, but at the time I hadn’t yet decided on auto theft. It wasn’t that it hadn’t occurred to me. It came immediately to mind, but seemed extreme. As things stood, we were just a couple of nuts out for a walk in the middle of the night. We were both of us under house arrest, but house arrest didn’t seem to be that rigid a system in Griggstown. I was also supposed to be dead, so they had probably left off looking for me entirely.
So I figured that stealing a car would just be asking for trouble. At least it seemed that way at the time, and an hour’s worth of cold wet walking reduced the arguments against stealing the car a hundredfold, and Plum began talking in that mindless thick-tongued toneless way young girls talk when they are about to fall asleep on their feet. We came to a house with two Volkswagens, one in the garage and the other parked on the street, and I took it as a sign from Providence. The man was prepared. He had a spare, a reserve Volkswagen. He might miss the one I took, but he would not be utterly discommoded by its absence.
It was locked. I took out the Swiss Army pocketknife, examined the various blades, closed them all up, and popped the vent window with the edge of the closed knife. The glass starred. I hit it again and it shattered, and I reached in and opened the door and tucked Plum inside and climbed in after her. I located the screwdriver blade and loosened the screws on the ignition plate, and I went around back and opened the engine compartment and found a wire to yank. I picked one that looked unimportant, and it turned out later that it had something to do with the directionals. At least I think it did, because they didn’t work and everything else seemed to.
I used the wire to jump the ignition terminals. The whole process made me feel like a teen-ager again. I started the car, and Plum giggled with delight, and I waited for lights to go on in the house to which the car belonged. They didn’t, and I drove away. It took a few minutes to get the hang of the car. But I had driven VWs before, and there was no one around to complain if I ground the gears or oversteered.
When I had the car more or less mastered I turned to look at Plum. Her huge eyes were sometimes brown and sometimes green and sometimes in-between. Her face was dusted with freckles across the bridge of the nose and high on the cheekbones. Her face was longish, the features sharply drawn, the chin strong, the forehead broad, the mouth full. Her hair was almost blond and almost kinky and not quite either. Like the car, she took a little getting used to.