Although perhaps it was not even their fault that things had turned out this way. This was a haunted place, according to Adam’s Indian friends, and maybe it was just the coincidental combination of a free and angry Owner and the indigenous spirits of this wild land that had led them to this pass, a unique mingling of the unseen forces of separate cultures, an accidental cross-pollination of different strains of neh chizni doohc that ordinarily would never have come into contact with each other but that had here created a monster.
The shaking of the house grew more intense, and Vasili closed his eyes and clasped his hands as around him the darkness began to swirl, gathering into shapes that she almost—but not quite—recognized and that spoke to her on some deep level she did not even know she possessed.
She held tightly to Julia’s arm, tried with all her might not to look at Sasha’s profaned form.
From the far edges of the room came a sound like the screeches of a tortured rat.
The pra roak began speaking in his upper-class Russian, a prayer Agafia could barely understand and that she had never heard before. She did not know if it was a prayer he had made up himself or a legitimate Molokan invocation that she was simply not familiar with, but either way it infuriated the little man, who began screaming crazily in a language that was clearly not human.
The swirls of darkness grew more solid, the black-and-white walls fading into monochromatic gray. The prophet’s beard burst into flame, orange fire starting at the bottom of the long, tangled mess of hair and flashing upward toward his face.
Yet still he kept talking, praying, his voice remaining calm even while the Owner’s inhuman screams grew ever more frenzied and intense.
The little man stomped his foot on the ground, pointed at Vasili, and the prophet’s genitals disappeared, smooth skin appearing between his legs and tightening the wrinkles on his thighs and stomach. The window of the room shattered, flying inward, and the dust devil snaked through the opening and slammed into the pra roak, its Gregory face contorted with rage.
Except…
Except the prophet was not knocked down by the wind. Instead, it only put out the fire that had engulfed all of his beard save a last bit of stubble on his cheeks.
And the tide shifted.
She was not sure exactly how it happened, but suddenly the dust devil was faceless and fading, the Owner’s screams were like background noise and the pra roak’s simply stated prayer was loud enough to be heard by all.
The Owner’s eyes widened in terror.
Now each line Vasili spoke was like a whip across Jedushka Di Muvedushka’s body. The small man recoiled, falling off the bed, rolling on the rug, jerking in spasms that coincided precisely with the end of each spoken phrase.
And he changed.
The clothes went first, melting off him, turning to liquid and running off his form, vaporizing into a foul-smelling gas before ever hitting the floor. The skin went next, then the hair and facial features. Layer by layer, the human veneer was stripped away, the pretenses of mortal existence cast aside. What was emerging was a monster. A squat, greenish-black creature with a strange, inky halo that gave off a smell like rotten garlic, a hideous, hellish being that looked like nothing Agafia had ever seen or imagined and that bespoke both plant and animal origins.
The chief and his men had pushed through the crowd and were now entering the room, and their eyes widened at the sight. They began speaking excitedly to each other in their own language. This was obviously something they recognized.
Evil had many forms and disguises, she thought.
But underneath, it was all the same.
The pra roak had moved on to another prayer, a prayer of binding that was part of the Cleansings she and the other church members had attempted to perform. She began chanting along with him, and from the doorway she heard Vera’s voice chiming in. Others took up the chant. Peter, Nikolai, Onya. The chorus of voices grew, and Agafia was gratified to hear the creature’s grunts and cries and hisses of pain.
The house had stopped shaking, and no longer were there shapes in the darkness, figures formed from shadow. The dust devil was gone. It was all Jedushka Di Muvedushka could do to protect himself from this onslaught of prayer, and he was wailing, gnashing his teeth.
At the end of the prayer, Vasili stopped speaking. The rest of them stopped with him. The freakish creature on the floor was immobile, frozen into a position of supplication. Only his eyes and mouth could move, the eyes darting angrily back and forth as if to escape this position into which he had been fixed, his mouth issuing cries of pain and fury.
The Indians moved forward.
“Kill it,” the chief said coldly.
They began beating him with their sticks.
The colors on the sticks changed, and with each hit, with each contact, the sticks seemed to desolidify for a brief fraction of a second, to wiggle and wobble in the men’s hands like snakes, like something alive, before stiffening once again.
Jedushka Di Muvedushka devolved under this assault, its form growing less specific, more generic, turning from what was recognizably a monster into a doughy, shapeless mass of quivering flesh that resembled a lump of polluted gelatin. Somewhere along the line, it lost its voice, and the electric change of power that had permeated not just this room but the entire house faded away into nothing.
The stench grew worse, and it was all Agafia could do not to throw up.
Was this what they were all like underneath? she wondered. All of the Jedushka Di Muvedushka? Or was their substance determined by their morality—were the evil ones made of this and the good ones of something nicer?
She didn’t know, but she suspected the latter. Somehow she found it hard to believe that the pleasant little man Father had seen, who had braided their horse’s hair and helped them through hard times, had anything in common with this hateful evil creature.
But who was to say?
She looked at the grotesque blob next to the bed and shivered.
The sticks were no longer changing color, and a few moments later the Owner of the House was gone. There was nothing left on the floor but a black puddle of brackish liquid.
Vasili mumbled something, dropped to his hands and knees and, like a dog, began lapping it up.
Agafia grimaced. She looked for the first time at Sasha’s bloody body atop the bed, then quickly back at the blank and stricken face of her daughter-in-law. Glancing at the silhouetted forms behind the flashlights, she made out Vera’s bulk, and though the two of them could not see each other’s faces a wordless understanding passed between them.
The prophet was snorting like an animal, finishing up the puddle.
Following Vera’s lead, Agafia lowered her head and prayed, giving thanks to God.
3
Her mother-in-law remained upstairs, as did several of the other Molokans and the naked old man who was licking up what was left of Jedushka Di Muvedushka. The rest of the Russians, the Indians, and herself walked downstairs and outside, exhausted.
The moon was up now, the stars were visible, and while most of the flashlights remained on, they weren’t really needed. The wind had disappeared, and looking up the drive, she could clearly see the cars on the road and the van in which her children waited.
She walked alongside the chief, Adam’s friend’s father. The Indian man was talking to her, but she wasn’t paying attention and couldn’t understand what he said, and she nodded dumbly, pretending to be listening.