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.”