He walked back through the kitchen, out the doorway, and across the dusty open floor to the wall against which the benches were stacked. Next to the piled-up benches was the small chest of drawers where he stored his Bible. He pulled open the top drawer—
And his Bible screamed at him.
He leaped back, startled, practically tripping over his feet in his instinctive haste to get away from that horrible noise.
There was another scream—high-pitched, loud, short, strong—and the Bible shot up, out of the drawer and into the air, as if it had been thrown. Jim continued to stagger backward, praying out loud, as the Bible turned in midair and flew toward him, its pages flapping. It looked like some sort of hideously deformed bird, not like a book at all, and he ducked, losing his balance and falling to the floor, as it dove at his head.
He was shouting now, Molokan prayers against the devil and his minions, as the Bible flew up to the top of the ceiling, then dove at him again. This time it smacked hard against the top of his head before he could move out of the way. He grunted with pain at the force of the blow and tried to grab the Bible as it bounced off his head and hit the floor, but it shot up between his grasping hands, closed hard on the tip of his beard and pulled away, yanking out hair.
There was laughter accompanying the attack, a close relative of the screams, a hideous high-pitched cackle that sounded like nothing he had ever heard.
He had never been so terrified in his life. None of this made any sense. He did not know why this was happening or even what was happening. He knew only that his church had been invaded, that he was being attacked, and that his prayers seemed to be having no effect.
Agafia’s Bible.
Was this some sort of plague afflicting Russian Bibles, some type of evil that could only manifest itself in this manner? Or had this originated with Agafia? He did not know. All he knew was that he loved her, loved her with all his heart and soul, loved her almost as much as he loved God, and the thought at the forefront of his mind was that he needed to get out of here, needed to get to her, needed to protect her.
The Bible was circling in the air above the benches, and Jim clumsily scrambled to his feet and started across the church toward the front door.
He was not fast enough, however, and before he had gone even one-fourth of the distance, the Bible swooped down and slammed into his back, knocking him over. He tried to get up, but this time it did not fly back into the air. Instead, it remained on top of him, its weight unnaturally heavy, pulling itself up his body toward his head with a series of thumping pulses. He rolled over, trying to throw it off, but he only managed to get himself turned onto his back. The Bible was not knocked off his body but was still on top of him, now open on his chest and slowly, steadily creeping upward toward his face.
He grabbed the book with both hands, but it was stronger than he was, and with a suddenness he could not hope to match, the heavy volume jerked hard to the left, hard to the right, and forced his hands off. There was the sound of cracking bone as the weight of the Bible broke his right wrist.
Jim screamed.
And the open Bible plopped onto his face.
He was fighting for his life. He knew it, and he was doing the best he could, but he was old and not in the greatest health, and he was battling something that had the strength of hell behind it.
With his one good hand, he grabbed the leather spine and tried to pull the Bible off him, but it would not budge. Beneath the binding, each page seemed sentient, thin individual sheets of bound printed paper suddenly strong and sinewy, competing with each other for supremacy as they tried to force their way into his mouth.
He tried to fight off the book, biting with his teeth, clamping shut his jaws, but the pages turned, shifted to the side, pulled down, paper cuts slicing into his lips until he opened his mouth to cry out.
The pages shoved themselves into his mouth, sliding into the narrow spaces between his teeth and cutting into his gums, slitting the soft delicate flesh of his tongue. The flapping page in front of his eyes whipped back and forth, back and forth, and the movement of the words made it look like an animated cartoon, several lines printed in corresponding locations on double-sided paper forming one blasphemous, incongruous message before him: God is dead. Thou art evil. The Lord thy God is a glutton and must be stoned.
His good hand grabbed the book’s front cover, tried to rip it off, but the Bible lurched again, hard to the left, and there was another crack of bone as his left arm went dead.
He was not going to win, he realized. He was not going to make it. He did manage to get his mouth shut again, but then a page of the New Testament sliced across his right eye, cutting into the cornea, and as he screamed in agony, the Book of Ruth shoved its way down his throat.
4
It had been a long time since either of them had gone to a Molokan funeral—and if they had been in Southern California they probably would have skipped this one, too—but they were here and they felt obligated, so Gregory and Julia dutifully put on their traditional garb and, leaving Sasha in charge of Adam and Teo, took his mother from the church, where she’d been staying with the body, to the Molokan cemetery on the ridge above the mine.
Gregory glanced in the rearview mirror as he drove. In the backseat, his mother stared straight ahead, looking at nothing, her gaze focused not on Julia or himself, not on the scenery outside, but somewhere in the middle distance. She looked old. She’d aged several years in the last two days, and the lines on her face seemed suddenly more prominent, the vicissitudes of life more pronounced in the defeated cast of her features.
She was taking Jim’s death much harder than he would have expected.
Harder than his father’s?
He didn’t know, but he resented her feelings, found himself angry with her for caring so much. She hadn’t seen the guy in thirty years, had gotten reacquainted only a few weeks ago, and now she was acting as though she’d lost the love of her life.
The love of her life.
He didn’t want to think about that.
He knew he was being petty and childish. After all, she had a right to be sad and shocked, depressed and upset. One of her old friends had died—been killed—and it was selfish and inconsiderate of him to ascribe motives to her feelings, to feel betrayed because she was experiencing an understandable human reaction to an incomprehensibly horrific event.
Was she supposed to be cheerful and happy, to feel nothing at all and act as if murder were an ordinary everyday occurrence?
Of course not, and Gregory chided himself for his suspicious self-centered thoughtlessness.
But he still felt it.
Jim Petrovin’s death was the talk the town. Everyone in McGuane was stunned by what had happened, and there were rumors flying every which way. It was truly bizarre, like something out of one of those Vincent Price movies where the villains were dispatched in ironically appropriate ways. A minister killed with his own Bible? It was an unlikely murder weapon, to say the least, and Zeb Reynolds, the lead detective, was in the process of interviewing all church members, trying to find out if anyone had had a grudge against the old man. He had already spoken to Gregory’s mother, and she had answered all of his questions and pretended to be cooperative, but her English became a little worse when she talked to him, her already thick accent a little more pronounced, and Gregory could tell that she didn’t want to involve herself with the police.
She did not think they could solve Jim’s murder.