DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH
by Chet Williamson
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2011 by Chet Williamson
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Ash Wednesday
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Second Chance
Reign
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But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
Melville, Moby Dick
~ * ~
One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.
Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
2009
Chapter 1
For the children, he thought as he moved around the corner and down the hall toward the light gleaming through the translucent glass of the door.
"For the children," he whispered softly, his pistol pointed down at the dark red carpet on the floor. In this place of blood, he thought, everything should be red.
He walked so slowly and gently that he could not hear the sounds of his own footfalls, and in another minute he stood outside the closed door, listening. He heard a scratching inside, and thought it must be the counselor roughly underlining things with a pencil.
Once he opened the door, once the counselor saw his face, there was no turning back. So he said the vow again, in his mind:
With the help of God, we will so order our lives that we may help to preserve this child through the dangers of infancy and childhood, defend him through the temptations of his youth, and lead him to shun the darkness and seek the light of Thy presence and the way that leads to eternal life...
Then he opened the door, crossed quickly to the counselor seated behind the desk, and shot her in the center of her forehead, an inch above her blue eyes.
The sound was loud, but he had placed wax plugs in his ears, and he now took them out, slipped them into his pocket, turned, and walked back through the door. There was no need to make sure the counselor was dead. He had done this before.
But now, unlike the other times, he was not alone with the dead. Someone else stood in the hall.
He was eighteen, and to the man he looked like a boy. He carried a parcel wrapped in brown paper, and appeared to have stepped from a shorter side corridor during the few seconds that the man had walked into the counselor's office and back out again. The boy looked startled by the sound of the shot and the appearance of the man with a pistol in his hand.
The man did not shoot the boy. He would not have done so under any circumstances. He had come for the counselor, and for her alone. No one else would die at his hands. He kept the gun at his side, and tried to see the boy's face. Though the hallway was dimly lit, he realized with a shock that pressed ice in his lungs that he knew the boy.
And the boy knew him.
The boy's mouth trembled, his cheek twitched, his eyes squinted as if to be sure of what they saw. Then he gave a sound that might have been a gasping laugh. "You," he said. "It was you."
There was no fear in the boy's face now. Instead, the man saw a mixture of incredulity, gratitude, and the kind of joy that the man had not felt since his wife was alive, so many years before.
~ * ~
When Lieutenant Olivia Feldman entered the room, she was glad that no one looked up. It had taken years for them to accept her as part of the scene, years that had frustrated and often infuriated her. But finally she had become just one more element of the crime scene unit, albeit the most important one.
For the past two years, Olivia Feldman had been chief homicide investigator for the city of Buchanan. At one time the job had been mostly a figurehead position. The small Pennsylvania city had an average of only seven or eight homicides a year, and most of those were open and shut cases in which the perpetrator was taken into custody within hours of the killing, if not immediately.
That wouldn't happen this time. Olivia was sure that this kill belonged to the person she thought of as the Crusader, and no one knew who he or she was.
She walked up to the desk and examined what was sitting there. The dead woman's head was back, and her eyes were partly open, her face fixed in an expression of mild surprise. There was a small entrance wound an inch above the bridge of her nose. Her flesh was stippled with powder burns that sat on her cheeks, nose, and forehead like black, malignant freckles.
Olivia walked behind the woman and saw the exit wound. It had taken out a piece of skull the diameter of a tennis ball before it had buried itself in the plaster of the wall behind the desk.
".38 special. Wad cutter," Olivia said to no one in particular.
The medical examiner looked up from his clipboard. "We don't know that, Olivia. Not till we dig it out and examine it."
"That's what it'll be, Ernie. You know and I know."
The M.E. nodded at the large exit wound. "Wouldn't surprise me."
Olivia shook her head. "Jesus. Jesus, Ernie." And to herself she asked, how does this start? What plants it? What nurtures it?
Jesus.
Chapter 2
Though Olivia Feldman didn't know it, she had been there at the beginning, the night Paul Blair's wife died. If she had lived, Paul would probably have gone through his life without ever killing another human being.
Paul already had guns, and a deep and abiding faith in God. His wife's death gave him a purpose, and the baptism of the children gave him the idea of how to fulfill it.
Evey died on a spring night in 1995. Paul was home alone when he heard the news. He had wanted to attend the Christian Men’s Alliance dinner at his church that evening, but instead had stayed home to finish painting the nursery. He and Evey were expecting their first child in the fall.
By nine-thirty Paul had finished the painting, cleaned the roller, and was just about to make sure his pistols were ready for tomorrow's match at the gun club, when he heard a car pull into the driveway. He knew from the sound that i
t was not Evey's little Chevy. The sound of the engine was deeper, more assured, authoritarian, and he ran quickly down the stairs.
The night was so warm that Paul had opened the front door, and when he looked through the screen at the woman standing there, he thought that he must have been wrong, that it was indeed Evey. But then he realized that although this woman looked like Evey, she was several years younger than his wife.
Her dark hair was short and its ends curled inward so that her face seemed round, but with no hint of fat. Her dark eyes looked at Paul with sincere concern, and it was the seriousness of those eyes that made him drop his glance to the silver shield on her dark blue uniform shirt, and the peaked cap she carried beneath one arm.
"Mr. Blair?" she said. "Paul Blair?"
He nodded. Realizing that she was a policewoman had made him uncomfortable, and he tried to recall if he had any unpaid parking tickets. "Is there...something wrong?" he asked her.
She opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again. Finally she said, "I'm Officer Marsh. I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, sir."
Evey was the first thing that came to him. It had to be, and it was.
"We believe that your wife, Eve Blair, was involved in an accident tonight."
No. Life was too good. Things like this couldn't happen. God wouldn't allow it.
Officer Marsh went on, softly telling Paul how a 1985 Chevrolet Citation registered to Paul and Eve Blair had been struck by another car that had jumped into the wrong lane at sixty miles per hour. Then she asked, "Was your wife driving that car tonight, Mr. Blair?"
Paul answered with a question of his own. "Was she...hurt?"
The policewoman swallowed, and Paul saw just how young she was, and wondered if this was the first time she ever had to say what Paul knew she was about to.
"I'm very sorry, sir, but yes. She was killed."
Killed.
No. No. This couldn't be. There was a mistake. "Are you sure?" he said. "Eve Blair?"
"That was the name in the purse, sir."
"Maybe..." Paul said, thinking desperately, "maybe she had her car stolen...by this woman."
"I don't know, sir. The only way to be certain is to come down to the hospital to try and make -- "
"Now," Paul said, not allowing her to finish an identification. "Right now," he added, determined to prove that this was all a mistake, ready to look a dead stranger in the face so that everyone would realize it had not been Evey who had been...
Killed.
He rode to the hospital in the back of the police car, watching the heads of the woman and her partner, who had introduced himself and said nothing more. Paul did not cry. He would not even grant himself the leisure of trembling.
It was a mistake, that was all, and one that could be quickly rectified. He thought about looking into the dead woman's face, and decided that the horror he would feel would be easily balanced by the relief when he saw that she was not Evey.
Officer Marsh led him directly to the emergency room, where Paul gave his name to the attending nurse. "I was told that my wife has been..." He paused, unable to say the word, even though he was certain it was not true. "I was told my wife is here."
"Just a minute, please," said the nurse, who called for a Doctor Candoli. The doctor appeared almost immediately, a lean, elegant man on whom sympathy seemed to sit uneasily.
"Mr. Blair," the doctor said in a dry tone. "I'm very sorry. Did you want to...make the identification now?"
God, thought Paul, so quickly. No small talk. A busy man. Paul nodded, and the doctor led him from the room, and down a twisting series of corridors.
Paul followed, his only fear that Evey might have been injured by this woman who had stolen her purse and her car. But he could worry about that later, once he had cleared things up here. Odds are she was fine, at a friend's house trying to call him at home.
The doctor stopped at a desk and took a clipboard with some forms on it. He turned to Paul, his eyes softer, and Paul glimpsed the compassion that had led the man to his position, and to this dark night. "Mr. Blair, are you sure you want to do this now? So quickly."
"Well...why not?"
"It could wait until tomorrow. You could go home, rest...I could prescribe a sedative to help you sleep."
"No." Paul waved away the offer with a loose hand. "Tonight is fine. Really."
The doctor looked at him cautiously, then slowly nodded his head. "All right. But I should prepare you. The accident was... devastating. Your wife was cut very badly. This kind of thing is never pleasant, but this is worse than many."
Your wife. What a silly mistake. Paul almost grinned, but twisted it into a soft, martyred smile. "It's all right. I'm ready."
Without another word, the doctor opened a closed door. They went in together.
The room was small and well lit. A form, covered with a sheet, lay on a metal gurney. The doctor took the sheet, and lifted it carefully away from the body so that Paul could see the face.
He laughed.
Then he looked at the doctor, who appeared as shocked as Paul supposed he ever got, looked back at the corpse, laughed again, and shuddered at the ruined face.
"Mr. Blair?" Doctor Candoli said, a tremor in his voice. "What..."
"I knew it," Paul said. His smile made his face feel as though Evey was cupping it with her hands. "I knew it couldn't be her."
"Mr. Blair, are you saying this isn't your wife?"
"No," Paul said, delighted at the look of amazement on the doctor's face. "That's not my wife!" He laughed again, realizing that it was tasteless to do so in the presence of this dead woman, but he was unable to restrain his joy, the wonderful confirmation of his certainty that this could not be Evey.
He laughed, and kept laughing, laughing so hard that he nearly cried, and had to sit down in a chair; laughed so hard and so loud that another doctor came, and nurses; laughed so hard that he could do nothing to stop them when they rolled up the sleeve of his shirt; laughed so hard that he didn't even feel the needle pierce his skin.
He laughed until the laughter took shape, and he followed it merrily as it sank into a spiral of darkness.
Chapter 3
Paul Blair awoke knowing.
He knew he had been mad. He knew that Evey was dead, that the woman he had seen on that metal gurney, that woman with the crushed face and shattered skull, was his wife. There were enough features spared, the curve of a cheek, the auburn tint of the hair, deeper than blood.
"No," he whispered.
But it was Evey.
"No," he said again, closing his eyes, pressing his hands over them. But still he saw. And he tasted her death in his mouth, like sour milk and metal.
He left the hospital that morning, after signing the proper identification forms and verifying that the body now in the hospital morgue was indeed Eve Anderson Blair. His mother drove him home to a house filled with a silence into which he stepped as if into a cathedral during prayer.
His mother made coffee, and then, in a weepy voice, she told Paul what she had learned about the accident.
"It was a boy named Raymond Walsh," she said. "He was only sixteen, at a friend's house whose parents were away. They were drinking beer, and he was probably drunk. He was speeding, and crossed the center line, and..."
"Was he killed?" Paul asked flatly.
"Yes."
"Good."
"Paul – "
"Stupid. God, what a stupid waste, that stupid boy, that... that sonovabitch..."
"Paul, I'm so sorry..."
He stood up, his eyes filled with tears. He futilely waved a hand, turned, and walked upstairs, into the bedroom. There he lay on the bed that he would no longer share with Evey, looked at her clothes that she would no longer wear, the perfumes she would no longer use, looked at his hands that would touch her no more, and felt empty of any emotion but loss.
It had taken him so long to find her, and for her to find him. After all those years, he had th
ought he would never marry. But then Evey, ten years his junior, had come along, and they had fallen in love as quickly and eagerly as two high school kids. After a year of marriage, they had decided to have a child, Evey had easily gotten pregnant...
And now she was dead. And so was their child.
After a while, Paul started thinking about who to blame. God came first to mind, and for a few minutes he felt the wrath of Job in his loss, and, almost before he realized what he was doing, cursed God in his mind. But the blasphemy lasted only until he recognized it as such. No, he thought, not God's fault. I can't blame God. I can't get through this without God.
He then thought about himself, what would have happened if he had driven Evey to the meeting.
But no, that was foolish. You can't protect people all the time.
For a moment he blamed Evey. She wasn't a very good driver. If it had been him, he could have gotten out of the boy's way...
The boy. Now that was where the fault lay, wasn't it? That stupid boy who barely knew how to drive, let alone drink. He got drunk, got in a car...and killed Evey. Put his own foolish pleasures before anything or anyone else, and had killed her as surely as with a gun.
Paul twisted on the bed, and pounded his fists into the mattress, saying, "Why..." deep in his throat until it was choked with phlegm, his eyes blinded by tears. He wished Raymond Walsh in hell, begged God to unleash the most terrible tortures upon the boy, to burn his flesh through all eternity. And even then the debt the boy owed Paul would be only partly repaid.
He rolled onto his back and saw the boy (he had given him long, stringy hair and a wispy beard) on the off-white screen of the ceiling. Raymond was naked, his mouth open, screaming in the middle of flames. Paul watched as the boy's skin reddened, split, oozed, blackened, but the joy he felt in it lasted only a moment, and the grief returned all the stronger. He grieved not only for Evey's loss, but for his own hatred.
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