There was a crash from the kitchen, the sound of dishes shattering, and Julia jumped, her heart lurching in her chest. Catching her breath, she hurried to the doorway, expecting, hoping to see that her mother-in-law had knocked over one of the boxes of dishes that had not yet been unpacked.
There was an overturned box on the floor. And the linoleum was covered with broken china and broken glass.
But there was no one else around.
A chill passed through her. She scanned the shadowy kitchen, eyed the closed, dead-bolted door that led outside, saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“Julia!” Gregory’s mother called from her bedroom. “Everything is all right?”
“It’s fine!” she called back, grateful to hear another voice.
She walked into the kitchen, bent down, and righted the box. Quite a few dishes were still inside, and many of them, thankfully, appeared to be intact. She must’ve put the box on the counter next to the refrigerator and it had just fallen off.
No. She distinctly remembered setting it on the table in the breakfast nook—on the other side of the room.
That was impossible.
She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out a plastic garbage sack and began picking up the broken pieces of china. She looked up at the counter. Obviously, she’d moved the box to the counter and simply forgotten that she’d done so. And she’d placed it too close to the edge and it had eventually fallen.
She tried to gauge the angle of descent.
Yes, she told herself. That must have been what happened.
But she could not make herself believe it.
3
Babunya didn’t like the banya, and Adam didn’t either. There was something about the small adobe building that made him uneasy. It was what attracted him to the structure as well, though, and over the past few weeks he found himself returning to the abandoned bathhouse again and again.
Looking up from the shed snakeskin he’d been examining, he glanced toward the house, making sure that Teo had gone back inside, then took off, dashing around the carport and past the overhanging cottonwood tree. His sister had been hanging around him way too much lately, and while he didn’t really mind, since neither of them had met any other kids or made any friends yet, it did get annoying after a while. Sometimes he just wanted to be by himself.
Besides, he liked to go to the banya alone.
He ducked under a tree branch and started down the path that led through the high, dry weeds. Their yard was massive, and the banya was not even within sight of the house. It stood alone on the other side of the property, almost around the curve of the hill, past a small copse of paloverde trees and a jumble of oversized boulders. Beyond the banya, the cement foundation of an old house emerged from the weeds, bits of blackened board dissecting the empty space between low irregular walls.
He and Babunya had been the first ones into the banya, the second day they were here, and both had had immediate reactions to the place. The moment that she stepped over the threshold, Babunya had staggered as if struck, grabbing the wall for support. She’d instantly turned around and exited the bathhouse, breathing heavily, but when he followed her out, asking what was wrong, she waved him away and said everything was fine.
Everything was not fine, though. He, too, had felt the oppressiveness of the atmosphere as he’d walked through the door, a sensation entirely unrelated to the darkness of the small building and the natural scent of mold and must. It was a creepy feeling completely divorced from anything physical.
It scared him, but he liked being scared, and as soon as Babunya had told him that she was all right, he went back in to explore.
He had been back several times since.
Now Adam passed under the thin green branches of a paloverde and headed up the slight incline to the bathhouse, feeling the familiar foreboding in the pit of his stomach.
The banya had obviously been abandoned for many years; the weeds that grew around it were almost as tall as the doorway. But inside, there were no spiderwebs as he’d first expected. The place was not crawling with bugs, and although it was not something that would have ordinarily occurred to him, he thought there seemed something ominous about the lack of pests. It was as if even insects were afraid of this place, and in his mind that only added to its exoticism and allure.
He had been in the banya many times now, but he had never touched anything, never moved or removed a single object, and all was exactly the same as it had been that first day. He stopped for a second in the doorway, peering in. There were bones on the rough wooden floor. Not skeletons but individual bones, although the impact was the same. They were clearly not chicken or beef but were from other animals—coyote or javelina, rodents or rabbits or pets or pigs—and there was one that looked like a femur from a human child.
That was the one that intrigued him the most. He’d learned most of the bones of the body in school last year, and that particular bone had jumped out at him the first time he saw it. It looked just like a femur bone, a small femur, and whenever he came into the bathhouse he always stopped to look at it.
He did the same thing this time, crouching down before it, once again trying to imagine where it had come from, how it had gotten here, feeling a delicious tingle of fear pass through him as he examined the yellowing object.
But the bone was only an appetizer.
He stood, turned.
At the back of the structure was the thing that really scared him, the thing that had sent him running back out into Babunya’s arms that first day and had haunted his nightmares ever since. The thing that had made him break his promise to his grandmother never to go into the banya alone.
The shadow.
It hovered on the adobe wall above the broken benches, bigger than life. The profile of a man. A Russian man with a fat stomach and a full, chest-length beard.
It was not a stain or discoloration, was not imprinted onto the wall, but was an honest-to-God shadow, and there was about it the insubstantiality of something that was only a shaded copy of an actual object.
Only there was no object. There was no source within the banya or within the sight line out the doorway, no comparable shape that it was thrown by. The shadow existed in seeming defiance of the laws of science, and he’d thought about it and thought about it, tried to attribute its form to everything from the weeds outside to the wooden beams of the ceiling inside, but nothing worked. For one thing, the shadow was always there, clear sky or cloudy, its contours immutable and unchanging. For another, it was not an accidental resemblance. It was not a coincidental configuration of images that happened to form the semblance of a man but was a specific, definite figure that could not under any circumstances be interpreted as anything else.
There was something foreboding about the shape itself, about the man being portrayed, something stern and commanding about his thick body and the way his head was held so unnaturally straight, something intimidating about the figure that, combined with the shadow’s unknown origin, lent to the entire banya an aura of dread.