At eleven fifty-five Sunday morning, in the vestry behind the candlelit altar, the Reverend Peter Keyes released the bell rope and ended the resonant summons in the steeple belfry above. Then, opening the vestry door, he stepped out onto the pulpit and went to stand behind the lectern on the far right, to watch the last of the congregation file into All Faiths Church. Opposite him on the pulpit, Maude Fredericks sat waiting at the old wood-pipe organ, a hymnal propped open in front of her.
Seven of the twelve pews on each side of the center aisle were completely full, but the last five on either side were only partially taken. The Reverend Mr. Keyes had entertained little hope for a capacity attendance, but he had expected a larger turnout than this. He scanned the congregation-the women and girls in their warm, brightly colored winter finery (you did not see somber hues in church these days, which was, he thought, as it should be); the men and boys in carefully pressed suits and bright ties, to which they were for the most part unaccustomed-and a small frown tugged at the corners of his mouth. He did not see Matthew Hughes, and Matthew never missed Sunday services, was in fact always one of the first to arrive; very odd indeed that he was not present on this particular Sunday, two days before Christmas. He also did not see the Markhams or the Donnelly family, who rarely failed to attend as well; nor the San Francisco businessman, Charley Adams, to whom he had spoken on Thursday afternoon.
Maude Fredericks turned slightly on the organ bench and glanced at him, and he indicated that she should begin playing; it was just noon. Deep-toned chords, reverent and felicitous, filled the wide interior. The Reverend Mr. Keyes waited, looking out through the open half of the double doors at the empty, snow-dappled walk beyond; the Hugheses and the Markhams and the Connellys did not arrive. Finally, sighing inaudibly, he nodded to this Sunday’s usher, Dr. Webb Edwards. The middle-aged physician returned his nod, stepped out to look both ways along Sierra Street, and apparently saw no late arrivals in the vicinity; he came back inside, closed the open door, and took a place in one of the rear pews. The time was twelve five.
When the organ music had crescendoed into silence, the Reverend Mr. Keyes offered a brief invocation; a moment of silent and conjoined prayer followed. Then he led the congregation in the singing of “O Jesus, We Adore Thee” and “Saviour, Blessed Saviour” and “Joy to the World.” Time: twelve twenty. He arranged his notes on the lectern, cleared his throat, and prepared to deliver his traditional pre-Christmas sermon, the Bible text of which had been taken from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke.
Time: twelve twenty-one.
And the double doors burst apart, the two halves thudding loudly against the interior wall, and three men came quickly inside. Two of them held deer rifles and fanned one to either side along the coat-draped wall. The third, pointing a handgun, stood with his feet braced apart just inside the entrance.
Heads swiveled around; faces blanched with incredulity and nascent fear. Kubion, who had the handgun, called out in a sharp, commanding voice, “All right, everybody just sit still. We don’t want to hurt any of you but I’ll shoot the first one who makes a move in this direction, let’s get that understood right from the start.”
The Reverend Mr. Keyes stared at the man he knew as Charley Adams, the man whom he had thought to be a good and devout Christian, stared at the two strangers with the rifles-and he could not believe what he saw or what he had just heard. It simply could not be happening; it was utterly impossible. He felt an unfamiliar but suddenly acute sense of outrage; his round cheeks flamed with it, his fingers gripped the edges of the lectern until the knuckle joints seemed about to pop through the stretched white skin. “How dare you!” he shouted. “How dare you come in here with guns! This is a house of God! ”
“Calm down, Reverend,” Kubion said. He seemed to be smiling. “All of you calm down, keep your heads, and then I’ll tell you what it’s all about.”
The command turned the Reverend Mr. Keyes’ outrage to blind fury. He pushed away from the lectern and came down off the pulpit. Lew Coopersmith, sitting in the right front pew, said, “No, Reverend!” but Keyes did not even hear the words. He started into the center aisle, his eyes fixed on Kubion.
“Hold it right there, preacher man.”
Reverend Keyes brushed past the arm Coopersmith put out to restrain him and walked slowly and grimly down the aisle. He was not afraid because he knew he would not be harmed, not here; his anger was righteous, his position was sacrosanct, and he said, “I won’t have guns in my church, I won’t have you bringing weapons of destruction in God’s house,” and Kubion unhesitatingly shot him through the right hand.
The hushed, strained silence dissolved first into the hollow roar of the gunshot and then into terrified screams and cries from women and children, shocked articulations from the men. The Reverend Mr. Keyes had stopped moving. He held his hand up in front of him and stared at the blood beginning to stream from the hole just below the thumb: numbly, not believing what he saw any more than he quite believed, even now, that any of this was actually happening.
“Dear God,” he said then, and fainted.
Lew Coopersmith was on his feet and three steps into the center aisle before he realized he had moved at all. Abruptly he stopped and allowed his hands to unknot at his sides, standing rigidly. Others were on their feet now as well, faces stricken-John and Vince Tribucci, Webb Edwards, Verne Mullins-but none of them had moved from their places. The whimperings of the women and children intensified the atmosphere of horror which now pervaded the church.
Kubion said, “When I say something I mean it, you’d all better get that straight right now, the next one that makes a funny move I’ll shoot his face off. Okay-one of you’s the doctor, which one?”
“Here,” Edwards said.
“Get out here and tend to the Reverend.”
“I don’t have my bag. I’ll need-”
“You’ll need nothing. Get out here.”
Edwards went to where Reverend Keyes lay inert on the floor, knelt beside him, and examined the bullet-torn hand; it was still bleeding heavily. He used his belt as a tourniquet, his handkerchief to swab the wound.
Kubion said, “He got a key on him to the church doors?”
“I don’t know,” Edwards answered woodenly.
“Well look through his pockets and find out!”
Edwards probed quickly, gently, through the minister’s dark-gray suit and discovered a ring of keys. He held them up. Kubion made a tossing motion, and Edwards flipped the key ring underhand, as carefully as he would have thrown a ball to a three-year-old child. Making the catch with his left hand, Kubion turned and pulled the entrance doors nearly closed. He probed at the latch on one with three of the keys, found one that fitted, and then dropped the ring into the pocket of his coat. He faced the congregation again.
“Couple of you pick the Reverend up and put him on one of the benches.”
Coopersmith came forward, and Harry Chilton stepped out. With Edwards’ help, they lifted Keyes gently and laid him supine in the nearest pew.
“The rest of you men-shut those women and kids up,” Kubion said. “I want it quiet in, here, I want every one of you to hear what I’m going to say, and I don’t want to have to say it more than once, you got that?”
While husbands and parents did what they had been ordered to do, Coopersmith retreated a few steps and glanced over his shoulder to where Ellen was sitting; she was motionless, hands pressed against her white cheeks, her eyes round and glistening wet with tears. He saw Ann Tribucci sitting near Ellen, one arm wrapped in an unconsciously-or perhaps consciously-protective way around the huge convexity that was her unborn child, her other hand holding tightly to one of her husband’s. John Tribucci’s face, unlike most of the others, was as stiff and empty of expression as a store mannequin’s.
Kubion said as the congregation quieted, “That’s better. Here it is, then, plain and simple: we’re here because we’re taking over the valley and everybody in it and once we’ve got complete control we’re going to loot it, building by building. Money and expensive jewelry, that’s all we’re interested in, and if you people cooperate that’s all we’ll take, nobody else will get hurt.”
He paused to let the concept sink in fully. Then: “All right, now some details. When I’m done talking one of us will come around with a sack and you put your wallets and purses into it and anything else you’ve got in your pockets, don’t hold anything out, turn your pockets. After that’s done we’ll want a list of names of everybody who lives in the valley that’s not here right now, I mean everybody, because we’re going to go round them up one by one after we leave here and if we find anybody whose name isn’t on the list he’s dead. You can forget about the Markhams and the Donnellys and Matt Hughes and Peggy Tyler; we’ve-”
Agnes Tyler’s shrill, near hysterical voice cried, “Peggy? Peggy? Oh my God I should have known something was wrong, I should have known that telephone call last night was a lie!” She was standing, one hand clutching her breast, eyes like a pair of too-ripe grapes pressed into a lump of gray dough. “You’ve hurt her, you’ve hurt my daughter….”
Kubion looked at her and said, “Somebody shut that bitch the hell up.”
Beside her, Verne Mullins took hold of her shoulders and eased her down again. Agnes buried her face in her hands and began moaning softly. Coopersmith said in a carefully expressionless voice, “What do you mean we can forget about those people? What have you done to them?”
Kubion’s gaze shifted to him. “Nothing to any of them, old man-except Hughes. We’ll bring them in later.”
“Except Hughes?”
“He’s dead,” Kubion said, and the smile transformed on his mouth and made it look like an open wound. His voice was savage with impatience. “I killed him last night and he’s dead, you’ll all be dead you stupid hicks unless you shut up and listen to me and do what I say I don’t want any more questions I don’t want any more crap you understand me!”
The aura of horror had reached the point of tangibility now: it could be felt, it could be tasted, it lay like a pall of invisible mist inside the church. No one moved, no one made a sound; even the children and Agnes Tyler were silent. The Reverend Mr. Keyes shot in his own church, the valley about to be taken over and looted, Matt Hughes-their mayor, their friend, their benefactor-inexplicably murdered, all their lives suddenly in the hands of three armed men and one of whom was nothing less than a psychotic: they were literally petrified with fear.
Coopersmith swallowed against the rage and revulsion which burned in his throat, struggling to maintain calm and a clear head, and looked at each of the other two men, the ones with the rifles. Neither of them had made a single motion since their entrance; they were like wooden sentinels. But there was sanity in their faces, and the big heavy one was sweating copiously, and the fair-haired one, despite a guarded, stoic expression, appeared to be tensely uneasy as well. Why were they a part of this? he thought.
Merciful God, why any of this?
Kubion was smiling again, and when he spoke his voice was once more controlled, matter-of-fact. “Now like I said, once we have the list of names two of us will go round up the other people and bring them back here, and when everybody is in the church we go to work on the buildings-just two of us, the other one will be out front with a rifle, watching. We figure it’ll take us most of today to get the job done, but when we’re finished we might not be leaving right away, we might stay one day or two or even three before we go, and the way we’ll go is on snowmobiles so don’t get the idea we’re trapped in the valley until the pass is open. But you’ll wait until it’s cleared, you’ll stay in here until the day after Christmas. We’ll bring in some food later and some water and you’ll be nice and comfortable as long as you don’t try any stupid tricks. The important thing for you to remember is that you won’t know when we’ll be leaving, you won’t know when we’re gone, and if you try to break down the front doors or knock out a window before the day after Christmas and we’re still here, we’ll kill everybody we see. Clear? All of that clear?
Figures in stone.
Kubion said, “Good, we’re going to get along fine now; you keep on sitting there like you are now and we’re going to get along just fine.” He looked at the heavy, dull-faced rifleman and made a gesture with his free hand. Loxner came over and put the weapon down against the wall, moving mechanically, using his left arm as if it were stiff and sore; then he took a folded flour sack from under his coat and walked up the center aisle. Coopersmith watched him as he passed down to the end of the right front pew; his damp face contained what might have been a kind of masked fear of his own.
When Coopersmith faced front again, he saw that the fair-haired rifleman had also set his weapon against the wall and had produced a pencil and a pad of paper. Kubion said, “Names now, everybody not here and where they live in the village.” His eyes rested on Coopersmith. “You, old man, start it off. Who’s not here?”
Coopersmith hesitated. Then, because there was nothing else he could do, he began in a leaden voice to recite. And all the while he was talking the same cold, voracious thought kept running through his mind: I wish I had my gun now because I would kill you, I think God forgive me I would kill you right where you stand, right here in church, and sleep tonight with a clear conscience…