She turned to the young passengers in her care. She sensed their exhaustion and their anxiety. A long trip, now with an uncertain end. Some of the children in back were crying.
Joni called a chaperone meeting at the front. Amid frantic whispering, no one knew what to do.
“Out of range,” explained Joni’s cell phone, in an annoyingly patient voice.
One of them felt along the large dashboard for the operator’s radio but could not locate the handset. He did notice that the driver’s seat of cushioned plastic was still exceedingly warm.
Another chaperone, a brash nineteen-year-old named Joel, finally unfolded his cane and picked his way down the bus steps to the ground.
“It’s a grassy field,” he reported back. Then he yelled, to the driver or to anyone else who might be within earshot: “Hello! Is anybody there?”
“This is so wrong,” said Joni, who, as the lead chaperone, felt as helpless as the little ones in her care. “I just can’t understand it.”
“Wait,” said Joel, talking over her. “Do you hear that?”
They were all quiet, listening.
“Yes,” said another.
Joni heard nothing aside from an owl hooting in the distance. “What?”
“I don’t know. A… a humming.”
“What? Mechanical?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s more like… almost like a mantra from yoga class. You know, one of those sacred syllables?”
She listened longer. “I don’t hear a thing, but… okay. Look, we have two choices. Close the door and stay here, and be helpless—or get everybody outside and mobilize them to find help.”
No one wanted to stay. They had been on the bus too long.
“What if this is some test?” speculated Joel. “You know, part of the weekend.”
Another murmured her agreement.
That sparked something in Joni. “Fine,” she said. “If this is a test, then we’re going to ace it.”
They unloaded the children by rows, and shepherded them into tight columns where they could walk with one hand resting on the shoulder of the child in front of them. Some of the children acknowledged the “hum,” responding to it, trying to replicate the noise for the others. Its presence seemed to calm them. Its source gave them all a destination.
Three chaperones led the way, sweeping their sticks over the surface of the field. The ground was rugged but largely clear of rocks or other treacherous obstacles.
Soon, they heard animal noises in the distance. Someone guessed donkeys, but most agreed no. It sounded like pigs.
A farm? Maybe the humming was a large generator? Some sort of feed machine grinding at night?
Their pace quickened until they reached an impediment: a low wooden rail fence. Two of the three leaders split up left and right, searching for an opening. One was located, and the group was herded to it, moving inside. The grass turned to dirt beneath their shoes, and the pig noises grew louder, nearer. They were on some sort of broad path, and the chaperones drew the children into tighter columns, striding forward until they reached a building of some sort. The path led directly to a large, open doorway, and they entered, calling out but receiving no answer.
They were inside a vast room of various contrapuntal noises. The hogs reacted to their presence with squeals of curiosity that frightened the children. They butted their tight pens and scraped their hooves against the straw-laden floor. Joni felt for the stalls lining either side of the group. The smell was of animal excrement, but also… something more foul. Something like charnel.
They had found the inside of the swine wing of a slaughterhouse, though none of them would have called it by that name.
The hum had become a voice for some of them. Those children felt compelled to break ranks, apparently responding to something familiar in the voice—and the chaperones had to round them up again, some by force. They initiated a new head count to make sure they were all still together.
While she was participating in the count, Joni finally heard the voice. She recognized it as her own, the strangest sensation—the voice seeming to originate inside her own head, hailing her, as in a dream.
They followed the call of the voice, walking forward down a wide ramp to a common area thick with the smell of charnel.
“Hello?” said Joni, her voice trembling—still hoping that the corny bus driver would answer them. “Can you help us?”
A being awaited them. A shadow akin to an eclipse. They felt its heat and sensed its immensity. The droning noise swelled, filled their heads beyond distraction, blanketing their most profound remaining sense—aural recognition—and leaving them in a state of near-suspended animation.
None of them heard the tender crinkling of the Master’s burned flesh as he moved.
INTERLUDE I
Fall 1944
THE OX-DRIVEN CART BUMPED OVER DIRT AND MATTED grass, rolling stubbornly through the countryside. The oxen were agreeable beasts, as are most castrated draught animals, their thin, braided tails swaying in sync like pendulum rods.
The driver’s hands were leathered where he gripped the driving rope. The man seated next to the driver, his passenger, wore a long black gown over black pants. Around his neck hung the long holy beads of a Polish priest.
Yet this young man dressed in holy vestments was not a priest. He was not even Catholic.
He was a Jew in disguise.
An automobile approached from behind. It drew even with them on the rutted road, a military vehicle transporting Russian soldiers, then passed them on the left. The driver did not wave or even turn his head in acknowledgment, using his long stick to prod the slowed oxen as they pushed through the smoky exhaust of the diesel engine. “Doesn’t matter how fast you travel,” he said, once the fumes cleared. “In the end we all arrive at the same destination, eh, Father?”
Abraham Setrakian did not answer. Because he wasn’t certain anymore that what the man said was true.
The thick bandage Setrakian wore around his neck was a ruse. He had learned to understand much of the Polish language, but he could not speak it well enough to pass.
“They beat you, Father,” said the oxcart driver. “Broke your hands.”
Setrakian regarded his young, mangled hands. The smashed knuckles had healed improperly during his time on the run. A local surgeon took pity on him and re-broke and reset the middle joints, which relieved some of the bone-on-bone grinding. He had some mobility in them now, more so than he might have hoped. The surgeon told him his joints would get progressively worse as he aged. Setrakian flexed them throughout the day, up to and then well past the point of pain, in an effort to increase their flexibility. The war cast a dark shadow over any man’s hope for a long and productive life, but Setrakian had decided that, however much time he had left, he would never be considered a cripple.
He did not recognize this part of the countryside upon his return—but then how would he? He had arrived to this locale inside a closed, windowless train. He had never left camp until the uprising, and then—on the run, deep into the woods. He looked now for the train tracks, but, apparently, they had been pulled up. The train’s path remained, however, its telltale scar running through the farmland. One year’s time was not long enough for nature to reclaim that trail of infamy.
Setrakian climbed down off the cart near the final turn, with a blessing for the peasant driver. “Do not stay here long, Father,” said the driver, before whipping his oxen into action. “There’s a pall over this place.”
Setrakian watched his beasts amble off, then walked up the beaten path. He came to a modest brick
