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.