But something changed before they even reached her, and as suddenly as it had come, her exultation disappeared, and she was left with a strange sense of dread that caused her to once again try to sit up and get back on her feet.
She rolled onto her right side and was up on her elbow, when the gravel beneath her shifted again, and she fell back down.
The lights danced above her head and landed on her body. Up close they no longer looked so beautiful.
They looked like they felt.
Terrible.
And the night continued on.
Nineteen
1
The voice talked to him.
It was a real voice, not an imaginary voice, not something he heard in his head. It was out there and it spoke to him, talking calmly and rationally about things that were not calm, not rational at all.
Gregory sat up on the bed, squinting at the brightness of dawn. He had not shut the drapes last night, and morning light streamed through the window—or came as close to streaming as was possible in this house.
Where was his mother? Had she ever come home last night? And where were Julia and the kids? Were they still in the house asleep, or had the treacherous little shits sneaked out on him? He felt for the van keys, was gratified to find that they were still in his pocket.
The voice continued to talk. He’d been hearing it all night, he realized. It had been speaking to him even as he slept, and he had incorporated its monologue into his dreams. He was awake now, though, and while he could not see the source of the voice, he knew it was in the room with him, and for the first time he listened specifically to what it had to say, to what it was trying to tell him.
“Remember when you caught Julia and Paul?” the voice whispered. “His hands were down her pants. How many fingers do you think were up her snatch? One? Two? Three? How many can she take up there? You think she was wet? You think he went sluicing through her juices?”
Gregory’s jaw muscles clenched. He didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to think about it.
But he could not stop listening.
“It’s not the first time she did it,” the voice said insinuatingly, and there seemed to him something familiar about it. “She’s fucked half the town. She blew Chilton Bodean before he bit the big one, sucked him dry, swallowed it down and begged for more. Your old pal the bartender? She licked his balls for over an hour while he worked behind the counter, crouching down and following him on her knees, servicing him as he served the customers.”
He recognized the voice now.
It was his father’s.
It switched to Russian. “Your mother was the same way, that whore. She’d spread her legs for Jim Ivanovitch, let him have her in whatever way he wanted, then come back and deny me my husbandly right. Bitch.”
He heard hatred in that voice, the threat of violence.
“I waited, though. I bided my time.”
“Did you kill Jim?” Gregory asked.
The voice was smooth. “Of course I did.” It was back to English. “Think I could let him bang my woman? Think I could let him fuck your mother? That little hypocrite. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ It’s one of the ten, and that lying little prick was giving your mother a sperm bath when he was supposed to be praying and reading the Good Book. Could I stand by while he fed my wife his tubesteak?”
It occurred to Gregory that his father’s English had never been this fluent, his command of slang and colloquialism never this well developed, but though he had the thought, it did not affect his belief in its authenticity, did not dissuade him from accepting his father as the true and ultimate source of the voice.
“I did what I had to do,” his father said. “As a man.”
Gregory nodded. His father was right. What he said made sense. Gregory stood, smoothing the wrinkles of the clothes in which he’d slept.
“Are you going to let Julia get away with this? Are you going to let her spread her legs for every swinging dick that comes along?”
“No,” Gregory whispered.
“Get the gun,” his father said softly. “You know you want to. Get the gun and stuff it up her pussy where all those other men have stuffed their cocks, and blow their leftover sperm out with a bullet. That’ll teach her. That’ll teach all of them.”
Gregory nodded.
“That’s what you bought the gun for, anyway. Use it. Do it tonight. Surprise her when she’s asleep, when she’s thinking about the taste of his hot sperm, when she’s dreaming about riding his cock. Do it then. Do it then.”
The voice continued to talk, but Gregory no longer heard it. It was like a radio that was on in the background, white noise, he could tune it in or out at will, and right now he had heard enough. He didn’t want to hear any more.
But he knew his father was right, and he was filled with a righteous anger, a molten core of fury that he knew he would have no trouble sustaining until tonight.
Part of him wondered why he had to wait, why he couldn’t just do it now, but that was like the thought concerning his father’s English. It was irrelevant, and he pushed it aside, ignored it.
He walked out of the bedroom, went immediately up to the attic, and pulled the ladder up, closing the door behind him as he headed to his gun shelf.
2
Teo was scared.
There was something wrong with her dad.
And something bad had happened to Sasha.
Her mom and Adam were scared, too, and that made it even more frightening. No one had talked to her about any of it—her mom had simply told her to stay in her room and not come out—but she had the feeling that it was the banya’s fault. She could not help thinking that if she had not stopped going there, not stopped seeing it, that none of this would be happening. She was being punished by the banya for her ingratitude, for the way she had treated it.
And it was taking out its anger on her family.
Teo felt like crying, but she forced herself not to, forced herself to be brave. She wanted to go back out to the banya and confront it, but her mom had ordered her not to leave her room—and she was afraid to do so anyway.
Her dad had been acting weird for the past few days, and she and Adam had talked about it, but neither of them had known how to bring it up with their mom. Besides, she wasn’t in the best shape herself. Whatever flue or illness she’d had, it had left her weak, and neither of them wanted to make things any more difficult.
But Dad was being weird.
Scary.
He was scary, and she wasn’t quite sure why. He wasn’t acting mean or angry or anything. He was either really, really cheerful or just sort of quiet and distant. But…
But neither of those was her father.
That was it exactly. He wasn’t himself. He didn’t seem like her dad. He seemed like a fake father, like someone who looked exactly the same and was trying really hard to be him but just couldn’t quite pull it off.
And that, she supposed, was what made her think of the banya.
That and the sense of danger.
For there seemed something dangerous about her dad right now. Beneath the cheerfulness, beneath the bland niceness, was something else, something deeper, something that reminded her of the swirling blackness of the banya shadows. She knew that Adam sensed it too. Their mom probably did as well, but she was staying away from all of them, keeping to herself.
She wished Babunya was here. Babunya would know what to do, and even Adam admitted that he’d feel safer if their grandmother was around. But Babunya hadn’t come home yesterday, still wasn’t back this morning, and no one seemed to know where she was.