The Miner’s Tavern was still open.
He walked inside. Candles were lit on the tables and on the bar, providing the only illumination save for the beer sign. The place was empty except for the bartender, and perhaps that was just as well. He thought of his father, humiliated here, degraded, cowed into being less than a man, and without stopping to confront the bartender or explain what he was doing, Gregory started shooting.
He stopped only when the hammer clicked on an empty magazine, but the bartender was already long dead.
He popped out the empty round, popped in another, then walked out of the bar.
Playtime was over.
It was time to get back to business.
It was time to kill his family.
4
The Molokans’ cars had been parked on the road that ran by the burned house on the other side of the banya. It was closer and quicker this way, and they didn’t have to go anywhere near their own home and risk seeing his father again. Adam was thankful for that.
He rode in a big car with his mom, Teo, and two Molokan men he didn’t know, moving slowly through the sandstorm. Babunya was traveling in one of the other two cars, and all three vehicles pulled up in front of the church together.
The wind was still blowing crazily, but the downtown buildings kept the worst of the dust out, and at least they could see here. The cars pulled into the small parking lot, and they all got out at once.
At the front of the church were the rest of the Molokans, twenty or thirty of them, old men and old women in white Russian clothes.
But it was the people with them who were the surprise.
Indians.
Standing next to the Molokans were several men from the reservation, dressed in what looked like the traditional clothing of their tribe. Dan and his father, the chief, were in the front, and Dan smiled at him, waved. Adam felt hope flare within him. Despite the reassurance he’d gotten from Babunya and her friends, despite the fact that they seemed to know what was happening and what to do about it, the Molokans seemed to him too old to be effective in any kind of fight. He did not think they would be able to stand up against the sort of power and force that could summon ghosts and kill people and haunt houses and possess his father.
But the stoic men of the Indian tribe seemed healthy and fit and reliably steady. He believed in them, he trusted them, and he knew from the clear, hard expressions on their faces that they could handle whatever trouble was thrown their way. They were clutching long spears painted with bands of alternating red and black and blue, fringed at the top with loops of leather cord and white feathers, and the fact that they carried weapons rather than Bibles made him feel a little more confident as well.
Although…
He squinted, looking closer.
They were not spears after all, he saw. They might not even be weapons. They were… painted sticks.
Dan said something to his father, started toward Adam. Adam looked up at his mom, wondering if it was all right for him to talk to his friend again, but he could tell by the expression on her face that their little rock-throwing incident and subsequent arrest was the last thing on her mind, and he hurried across the dirt to meet his pal.
Dan was the only Indian dressed in regular street clothes, and he and his family were the only Molokans similarly attired. Dan grinned at him as he approached. “Came through for you, didn’t I?”
Adam nodded. “Thanks, dude.” There was so much he wanted to say, so much he needed to explain, that he didn’t know where to start. The next words out of his mouth were totally off the subject.
“You seen Scott?”
Dan shook his head. “I haven’t been allowed to see either of you.”
“Until now.”
The other boy smiled wryly. “I guess they finally figured out that it wasn’t really our fault.”
“It wasn’t?”
Dan laughed. “Well, we’ll let ’em think it wasn’t.” “So what’s the plan? Do you guys… know what’s going on here?”
“Yes.”
“My dad went crazy and killed my sister Sasha. He tried to kill us, but I knocked him out with this flashlight, and then we ran over to the banya, where my grandma and those other Molokans did some sort of exorcism to force out the demons or ghosts or whatever was living in there.” The words tumbled out of him in a rush, and he was grateful to see Dan nodding at everything he said, not surprised, just accepting it.
“I told you,” Dan said, “weird things have always happened here. Like Scott said, it’s a haunted place.”
“But this is different.”
“Yeah.”
“Uninvited guests.”
His friend nodded. “Na-ta-whay.”
“What do you guys think we need to do?”
Dan looked at him evenly. “Find it. Kill it.”
“It?”
“There’s a leader, a ringleader. Kill it and the others will scatter.”
Dan seemed so much more knowledgeable than he himself was, so much more mature than he felt. He wondered if that was an Indian thing or if that was just how Dan was.
The adults were talking now, and Adam listened in.
“They try get Vasili,” an old fat woman said in English even more halting than Babunya’s. “They no come back.”
“Maybe it’s only the sandstorm,” he heard his mother say. “Maybe they just got lost or didn’t want to chance the roads at night in this wind.”
The woman said something in Russian.
His mother turned toward Dan’s dad. “What do you think it is?”
The chief said basically the same thing his son had, about there being a host of evil spirits, about killing the leader, and he used some long, unpronounceable word to describe the creature.
His mother recited the name back to him perfectly, and for the first time, the chief allowed himself a small smile. “Very good.”
“We call him Jedushka Di Muvedushka,” Babunya said.
“So you know what this is, too?”
“Of course.”
“It is a mischievous spirit. It likes to play.”
“Play?” his mother repeated.
Dan’s father nodded grimly. “We are nothing to it. We are toys, meant to be used and discarded. It orders around the other spirits, makes them do its bidding, murders us, hunts us down. All for its entertainment.” He leaned forward. “That’s why it must be killed,” he said fiercely. “I know Molokans are pacifists—”
“Cannot kill what not alive,” Babunya said.
“We can kill it.”
Adam looked from one to the other, following the conversation. Creatures who used people as toys, for entertainment? It sounded like Greek mythology, like all of the gods and creatures they’d learned about in English class who had alleviated their boredom by playing chess with human lives.
Once again, he thought that maybe the legends of all cultures had some common root, and the idea made him shiver.
Because that root was right here in McGuane, the grain of truth at the core of it all located at the overlapping intersection of Russian and Indian myths.
He was struck by the fact that more than half of the Molokans were women but that there were no women among the Indians. It was a strange observation to be making at this time, and though it wasn’t a contest, he thought that his people were more progressive, more modern than Dan’s tribe, and for the first time he felt genuinely proud to be Russian, to be Molokan.
His mother looked from Babunya to the chief to the other Indians to the other Molokans. “So what do we do now?”
The chief looked at her, looked past her at the others. “We have to go back to your house.” His voice lowered. “And kill it.”