Wes was across the cellar before anyone else had moved.
Kurt stood with his back against the stone and a chain from his ankle to a ring in the wall. His beard had grown in gray. Both legs, from the ankle to the knee, were cased in something black and hard and smooth, like pitch poured over them and left to set. He looked into the lantern and squinted.
"Is it you?" he said. "It talks like you. Every night it talks like you."
"It's me," said Wes. "It's me, you idiot."
Kurt put a hand on the back of his brother's neck and held it there.
Hassan knelt and put his hand on the black casing. It was warm, and seamless, and it rang faintly under his knuckle like horn. Under it the shin ran straight.
"Both of them went when I hit that door," Kurt said. "I heard them go. One of them came down every night after. Had its hands on them like a vet with a horse." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Hassan had spent his working life behind a pharmacy counter. A clean break took six weeks to knit, and these had not been clean, and it had been two nights. They had mended him the way a man mends a fence before the snow.
"The old woman came down the first night," Kurt said. "Mae. She was mad, but not at me. At one of hers. Said somebody couldn't wait. Took the boy off the fire before his time and cost her a winter." He looked at Dana. "Then she said, this one we keep whole."
Dana's hand went to the recorder over her heart.
Along the wall the others were waking into the light. Marit, sitting up, her eyes huge in her thin face. Two men Hassan didn't know, bearded, with the slow stare of people who had stopped expecting anything. A heavyset man in the torn tan shirt of a sheriff's deputy, who kept saying his own name, Hale, Hale, as if someone had asked.
The Iturri men went down the wall with their axes and took the chains off the rings one link at a time. Each blow rang in the low room. Above them, light came down between the floorboards, and a ladder stood under a trapdoor.
Behind them, down the stone steps and out through the plank door, the tunnel had gone quiet.
Then it hadn't. Hooves, many of them, coming from far off and coming fast.
"Up," Hassan said. "Everybody up. Now."
Wes cut his brother's chain and took him by the arm toward the ladder. Kurt shook him off.
"Give me the gun."
"You can walk. Walk."
"I can walk. I can't climb a ladder and shoot." Kurt nodded at the plank door. "Somebody holds those steps, buddy. I've been down here every night listening to them. I know how they come." "Give me the gun and the shells."
Wes gave him the rifle and emptied his pockets of shells into Kurt's coat. Kurt walked to the top of the stone steps on his own feet, the black casings knocking on the stone, and set his back against the wall.
"Once," Kurt said. He worked the bolt. "That's the rule, right? Once each?"
"Once each," said Hassan. "And they'll hit their own to raise them."
"Hell of a lion," said Kurt.
The plank door burst open, and Kurt fired. The first one dropped in the doorway. The second came through behind it and bent over it with its long hand raised, and Kurt shot the one bending. He waited. He fired. One shot for each gray thing, and never two into the same one, while the fallen piled in the doorway and smoked, and behind him they got Marit up the ladder, and the two men, and Hale, who couldn't climb and had to be pushed. Adam went up. Dana went up. Josu's wife went up with her face like stone.
Wes was the last but one. He stood at the foot of the ladder looking back at his brother.
"Go on," Kurt said, without turning his head. "Wes. Go on."
Hassan pushed Wes up the ladder and went after him. From the top he looked down once. Kurt was standing, reloading with his hands shaking, and the lantern on the step beside him was guttering, and then a long gray arm reached out of the dark and knocked the lantern over.
There was one more shot. Then nothing.
Wes dropped the trapdoor and lay on top of it.
The light in the nave was low and gold. Hassan looked at his watch and didn't believe it. Twenty past four. They had been under the ground for five hours.
Leah was in the church door with the three old men behind her. She looked at who had come up and who hadn't. She looked at Josu's wife. She didn't ask.
They tried to leave.
Hassan led them out the west end of town toward the county road with the sun at their backs, Marit carried between two of the Iturri men, Hale leaning on Dana, Adam holding his father's coat. The road was straight and white. They walked it for twenty minutes. Then they walked past the diner.
They tried again, slower. Hassan fixed his eyes on a far butte and walked straight at it, and the butte slid to his left, and the church came up on his right.
From the porch of the general store Leah had watched them do it.
"You walked a circle," she said. "All of you. Round and round the street. Like sheep at a gate."
"You didn't?"
"I walked to the end of the road and back. Twice. To be sure." She looked at the sun. "It's only you. The ones who answered. The ones who ate."
Hassan looked at the sun too, low over the playa, and understood what the morning had been. Mae had meant to keep them here until dark. Seven old ones in the top graves, a hole under the rest, and the street to hold the marked in town like a pen. It had cost her nothing she valued.
"Go home," he told Leah. "Take your people. Ring your bell. The children are on their ropes and Josu isn't there to ring it."
"I know who isn't there." She was quiet for a moment. Then she pointed up the slope above the cemetery, where a dry cut ran along the hill with a gray wooden headgate at its top. "That's the old ditch. It brings the creek down for the hay meadow below the playa. Our herders open it every June." She looked at the cemetery, at the holes. "At first light I'll bring every man from the sheep camps up the creek. You keep yourselves alive until then."
She took the Iturri people away up the ridge in the last of the sun.
The church had a steeple with a bell nobody had rung in fifty years. The rope hung down through a hole in the ceiling of the vestibule, frayed and gray.
At sunset Hassan climbed the ladder into the steeple, stood at the open slats facing north and a little east, and gave the call to prayer over Sweetwater.
They came up out of the graves while he was calling. Gray, low, many. They spread out across the cemetery and the street, and then they stopped, all together, in a ring around the church, at the place where his voice thinned out over the sage. They stood there with their eyeless heads lifted, and didn't come one step closer.
Every prayer, Yusuf had written. Never miss one, and you will never see them in the dark.
He prayed the sunset prayer in the nave with Adam beside him and Wes and Dana standing at the back. At the night prayer he climbed up and called again, and again the ring stood off.
And then there was no prayer left until dawn.
Hassan knew it before it happened. Iturri's stones had fifty-five years of a village praying behind them. This was their church, over their warren, in their town, and he was one tired man. Yusuf had written it too: I recite at the door until I sleep.
At ten the hooves came up the steps.
Hassan stood at the barred door with his mouth near the crack and recited. The Throne Verse. The last three short chapters. The opening chapter. The Throne Verse again. Each time he stopped for breath something leaned on the door, and each time he went on it leaned away. Wes and Dana sat with their backs to the pews and their tools in their laps and watched the door move.
By two in the morning his voice was a scrape. By three it was gone. He moved his lips and nothing came, and the door creaked inward on its bar.
Adam was standing behind him.
He had tied himself. The bell rope ran down through the ceiling and around his waist, in the flat ugly knot, twice. If he walked to the door in his sleep, the bell would ring over the whole valley.
"I know some of it," he said. "The short ones. You taught me when I was five. I remember the first one."
Hassan looked at his son. He nodded.
Adam put his mouth to the crack in the door. "Say: He is Allah, the One," he said in Arabic, in his bad Arabic, the vowels all American, his voice shaking and then not shaking.
The door stopped creaking.
Outside, on the steps, something laughed softly. It was a woman's laugh, low and tired. It came right up to the other side of the crack.
"There's my boy," Mae said. "I knew you'd come to the door."
The rope at Adam's waist came taut, and high up in the dark of the steeple the bell spoke once.