There was a press of bodies behind her, and she moved forward, flashlight extended. They started with the hallway, checking the linen closet.
Nothing.
Their bedroom, bedroom closets, master bath. Nothing.
Adam’s bedroom. Nothing.
Sasha’s bedroom.
Julia sucked in her breath as the flashlights shone into the darkness and illuminated the bed.
It was him. The Owner of the House.
Jedushka Di Muvedushka.
He was crouching over the body of Sasha, and it was obvious that he’d been playing with her. There were patterns drawn in blood, obscene renderings on the wall above the headboard, and her limbs had been repositioned in a disgusting way that he obviously found comical.
She recognized him instantly. She had seen him before, in Russiantown. He was the figure she had encountered in the ruined buildings of the old Molokan neighborhood. She remembered perfectly the scrunched-together face, the abhorrent configuration of features, the aura of tremendous age. He was wearing traditional Russian clothing, but his white shirt was covered with red, and his stubby hands were drenched with blood.
Fear, horror, revulsion, sadness, despair, anger—all vied for supremacy within her, but it was anger that came out on top, and she was the first one to step through the door into the unnaturally cold room. He could not do that with
her
daughter’s body. Supernatural being or not, he could not desecrate her corpse and get away with it.
She acted without thinking, throwing her flashlight as hard as she could at the little man and feeling a small twinge of satisfaction as it bounced off his head and made him wince. “Leave her alone!” Julia screamed.
She felt Agafia’s reassuring hand on her arm.
“Get out of my house and leave my daughter alone! All of you!”
He looked at her, and in a sudden flash of insight she realized the truth.
There were no others. No ghosts, no demons, no other creatures, no other beings.
Only him.
Agafia was wrong. It was not that supernatural forces were attacking the town because he wasn’t there to protect them. It was simply that he was pissed off that they hadn’t invited him along when they’d moved.
And he was out for revenge.
The powers at his disposal, the ones he was supposed to turn outward against their enemies, he had turned inward against them. Not only was he not protecting them, he was attacking them, and in his face was the purest example of rage and hatred that she ever hoped to see. It was terrifying, the sheer power and intensity of those emotions, and her next invective died in her throat as she involuntarily backed up.
There were shouts coming from the stairs, everyone was running up, but there wasn’t enough room for everybody in the hallway, and she heard the people at the tail end calling out in confusion.
There were all these men and women against this one dwarfish creature, but the deck still seemed stacked, the odds in Jedushka Di Muvedushka’s favor, and it was clear that everyone knew it. The cold air was thick with power, an almost electrical charge that Julia could feel on her skin, in the shallow breaths she inhaled. Despite the rush of bodies, she and Agafia were still the only ones in the bedroom. A half-dozen flashlight beams were trained on the blood-spattered little man, but the men and women holding the lights remained out in the hall, afraid to come in.
The left-behind owner smiled at her, revealing small, sharp baby teeth, but there was no mirth or humor in the gesture. “There is only me,” he said, confirming her thoughts.
“The
banya
?” Julia said. “The hauntings? The murders?”
Jedushka Di Muvedushka grinned. “All me.” He chuckled. “My sandstorm, too.”
“It is not him,” Agafia said quietly in Russian.
“What?”
“It is not the right one.”
The little man chuckled, spoke Russian as well. “Then I guess I’m the wrong one.”
Julia understood. It was not their Jedushka Di Muvedushka. It was another one. A bad one.
An evil one.
She should have known that, should have been able to guess, but it made no practical difference, had no bearing on anything at this point.
“The
banya,
” Agafia said. “It used to be the Shubins’. They must not have invited him to come. They must have left him behind.”
And he’d been sitting here all these years, growing angrier, more bitter.
Stronger.
“Yes,” he said, grinning.
Around them, the house shook. Some of the Molokan women in the hallway screamed. Flashlight beams darted around. Color was bleeding from the walls, leaving them black and white. Hovering outside the window was a miniature funnel cloud, a dust devil.
A dust devil with a face.
Gregory’s face.
The Owner of the House laughed, the same ancient laugh she remembered from Russiantown, and Julia was chilled to the bone. The creature’s voice, when he spoke, was equally ancient. “I’m glad you all came. I’m glad you’re here.”
And a naked, dirty old man with a beard that hung down to his knees walked through the door.
2
“You have found him.”
Agafia heard him before she saw him, heard his voice in her mind, and she turned to see a commotion in the hallway, a jostling of bodies made apparent by the suddenly skewed flashlight beams.
And then the prophet walked into the room.
The feeling that coursed through her, that washed over her, was not gratitude, not relief, not joy, not hope, but some amalgam of the four that was stronger and more intense than all of them put together.
Peter and Nikolai had found him. And they’d brought him here. She felt like crying but knew she could not allow herself that luxury.
Agafia looked at the
pra roak
and wanted to apologize for not doing something sooner, for not realizing what was happening and putting a stop to it before it reached this point, but there was no time for that either, and she did not really know what to say.
“
It is
not
your fault,
” that voice in her mind said, and she saw on that wrinkled old face a look of contrition.
She blinked.
He
was apologizing to
her
?
“It is not your fault.”
That was true, she realized. Perhaps if they had invited their Jedushka Di Muvedushka to move with them from California he could have fought off this onslaught from his brethren, but it was equally likely that he would have ended up dead like the others, piled in the
banya
. It was the Shubins who had brought this about by ignoring tradition, by not following the Russian custom and inviting the Owner of the House to come with them, and it was their Owner that lay at the root of this disaster.
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.