Page 44

On the church steps, alone, a heavy man in a dark suit stands with his hands in his pockets and no mask at all.

I take off Silas's canvas jacket and leave it on the ground. Underneath I'm wearing a white cotton dress I took from a clothesline on the lease road this afternoon, thin and too long, the kind of thing a girl might wear to a candle service. My hair is down. My face is bare, stitches and bruise and all. Delilah's locket hangs outside the dress where the firelight will catch it. The .38 is strapped to the inside of my thigh under the skirt.

I walk down the ridge into the light.

Nobody sees me for the first hundred yards. Then a child's mask, left behind on the grass, crunches under my foot, and the wolf nearest the bonfire turns his head.

He stares. He nudges the goat beside him. The goat turns. One by one, all along the rim, the masks swing toward me, and I keep walking, straight down the slope between the old tombs toward the bottom of the bowl, and nobody moves to stop me.

On the church steps, Judah Harlowe takes his hands out of his pockets.

Even from here, even in the jumping firelight, I can see him smile.

At my hip, the radio I've taped under the dress crackles. A voice, low and eager.

"She's here. Price girl's here. She walked right in."

Another voice. "Everybody down. Everybody from the hall, get down here now. Leave the girls. Judah wants her in the water."

I reach the bottom of the basin, stop among the flat new graves, and turn around to face them.

They come down the slope toward me the way cattle come down a hill to water, slow and heavy, spreading out. More of them are coming over the rim behind the first, jogging, masks bobbing. The men from the fellowship hall. I count as many as I can. Forty. More. A man in a deer mask carries a coil of rope over his shoulder. A man in a devil mask carries a length of pipe. Nobody hurries. Why would they? I'm one girl in a white dress at the bottom of a bowl, and there's nowhere for me to go.

They form a ring around me, thirty yards out, and they stop.

Up on the far slope, at the gatehouse, a flashlight bobs. A shape in a ram's mask bends over something in the dark.

At eleven o'clock exactly, I hear it. A long grinding scream of old iron. A shudder in the ground under my bare feet. Then a sound like wind in tall trees, rising and rising, until it's a roar.

The water comes down the spillway in a white rope, hits the bottom of the bowl twenty yards from where I'm standing, and spreads.

It's cold. It comes around my ankles first, black and fast, carrying leaves and paper plates and a child's plastic mask spinning in the current. The men in the ring look down at it and back up at me. Somebody laughs. The water climbs to my shins. To my knees. The white dress drags heavy around my legs.

They start to close in.

They come slowly, wading, rope and pipe and bare hands, and they're calling my name. Not shouting it. Calling. The way you'd call a girl home for supper. The way you'd call a dog. "Evie. Evie. Evie Price." Soft and singsong, all together, like a hymn.

I stand still and let them come.

The water reaches my thighs. The current tugs at me. It's coming faster now, and the roar from the spillway hasn't changed, hasn't slowed at all.

Up at the gatehouse, the ram is wrestling with the wheel. I can see the flashlight jerking. I can see him throw his weight against the spokes, again, and again, and hear him shout something up the slope that the water swallows.

The men nearest me have water to their waists. One of them, the man with the rope, stops and looks back up toward the gatehouse. Then at the water, black and rising, already over the tops of the lowest tombstones. His mask turns toward the man beside him.

"It ain't stopping."

"Boudreaux'll close it."

"It ain't stopping."

I stop standing still.

I turn my back on the church, on the high side, on the steps and Judah and Silas waiting in the oaks, and I walk away from all of it. I wade deeper, toward the middle of the bowl, where the old channel used to run and the ground drops lowest, where the water is already chest-deep and moving hard.

"She's running!"

"Get her!"