The Town

1

In her dream, Agafia was walking through the Molokan cemetery toward the edge of the cliff. It was a cold day with a dark monsoon sky, and only occasional indistinct flashes of lightning illuminated the otherwise gloom-shrouded ridgetop.

She did not know why she was walking toward the cliff, but she was striding with purpose. She desperately wanted to see what lay over the edge, at the bottom of the mine—even though she knew that whatever was down there was evil and would destroy her.

There were no other thoughts in her mind, only that simple, instinctive desire to look into the pit, and she pressed forward with the single-mindedness of the obsessed.

She walked over her husband’s grave.

Walked over Jim’s.

The ground beneath her feet suddenly shifted, and in the second’s worth of illumination provided by a flash of double lightning, she saw a hand emerging from the rocky soil. She managed to avoid it, but another one grabbed her right ankle and held tight, cold fingers digging into the skin of her leg with death-grown nails. She kicked at it, stomped down as hard as she could, and got away, but in another flash of lightning she saw that hands were coming up everywhere.

She was still walking, making a beeline for the cliff, but she glanced quickly around and saw that there were no hands coming up from either Jim’s or her husband’s graves. The ground above their burial plots remained completely undisturbed.

That energized her for some reason, and she increased her speed, lifting her legs high and stomping her feet down hard in order to crush any hands that might be trying to grab her.

As the rain started to fall, she reached the edge of the cliff.

And looked into the pit.

Where, climbing up the slippery slope from a black pool of mud at the bottom, she saw Gregory, dressed all in red, his face painted white, grinning up at her.

Agafia awoke feeling cold, her hands shaking as they pulled up the covers she had kicked off during her dream. Her heart was pounding. She forced herself to remain unmoving and stare up at the ceiling as she took a series of deep breaths. This was the second nightmare that she’d had about her son in as many months, and that worried her. What did it mean? she wondered. This was not coincidence, not chance. It was not the random workings of her brain that had brought on these nightmares. They had been shown to her. She had been allowed to see them.

There was a reason she was being led in this direction, but although she could think of many possible explanations, none of them felt right to her, and that left her feeling not only frustrated and angry but afraid.

She sat up, took a drink of water from the glass atop the nightstand next to her bed. There was a lot going on that she could not explain, and she wished her father were here. Father would be able to make sense of this. He knew a lot about both this world and the next world.

About evil.

There was no one around now with that same level of knowledge and comprehension. Jim might have been able to understand what was happening, but she herself did not and there was no one else she could rely on.

One thing she knew for sure—one thing they all knew—was that the police were wasting their time conducting interviews and looking for fingerprints on the Bible and footprints in the dust. There was no murderer. Jim had not been killed by anything human. It was some type of evil spirit, and though they were not yet sure exactly how to proceed, they knew a Cleansing was in order.

She was still not sure who would take charge of that. Nikolai Michikoff was a well-meaning man, but he was not deep. He saw only the surface, repeated only what he’d been taught. He was not a seeker, not a thinker, and she did not think he had the leadership qualities necessary to see them through something like this.

They would do something, though. Vera Afonin was still alive and kicking. She seemed sharper than she ever had, and with Vera around, they could be sure that a Cleansing would occur.

Whether it would be the right one or not remained to be seen.

Agafia rubbed her eyes. Her breathing had returned to normal, her heart had stopped pounding so furiously, and already she was feeling sleepy again. She took one more sip of water, replaced the glass on the nightstand, and lay down, adjusting her body so that her feet, hands, and everything except her head were situated safely under the blanket.

She closed her eyes, sank quickly back into sleep.

She dreamed of the grave.

And Gregory.