Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  Suddenly Larry remembered about Jamey’s nightmare. The one that was so terrible that he had been asked never to tell anyone about it. He looked at Jamey. Was he having it at that moment, right then? Is that what he didn’t want to see?

  Stop thinking like that, Larry told himself. Stop—

  He looked up. There, not more than a hundred feet away, the asphalt road came to an abrupt, cracked end. From then on it twisted off into a clay road that kept up until it became nothing but dirt. A road everybody called simply the cutoff.

  “Jamey,” he whispered, “please, wake up.”

  They were at the end of the asphalt now. Jamey stumbled at the rough, fissured edge of the road but was only momentarily staggered, and a second later was walking as before, with that strange, hypnotized, zombie walk.

  The McInness house was far behind them now. Larry looked at it one last time, then went to turn around. As he did, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. He stopped, waiting to see if it would show itself again. But it didn’t.

  A dog, he thought. Or a rabbit.

  That was all.

  Turning back around, he saw Jamey was already a hundred feet ahead of him, only his white t-shirt visible in the moonlight as he walked farther down the narrow road, the woods steep on either side, always reminding him of that movie where Moses had ordered the Red Sea to part, each wing of water pulling itself back into a taut rolling wall, restless as an angered dog on a leash, just waiting to collapse back over the Egyptian host.

  Larry sniffed, rubbing his nose. Then, lurching onto the clay part of the road, he began hurrying after Jamey. Larry stumbled, then righted himself and tried to be more careful about the gullies and potholes. But, despite the moonlight, the road was hard to see, and more than once he had to lag behind Jamey, just to keep from tripping. Which was another strange thing. Always before, whenever he and Jamey had walked out on the old dirt roads, it was Larry who had to do the leading, while Jamey followed cautiously. But tonight it was different. Jamey’s feet moved over the twisted ridges and gullies as if they had memorized each of their ups and downs, each rock, each ditch, as if he knew them all by heart. Or as if something else were leading him.

  Still, Larry managed to keep up. And five minutes down the road, they came, side by side, to the spot where the pine trees and scrub bushes were slowly being taken over by kudzu, leading to a stretch where everything else had been submerged beneath a huge sea of the stuff, at points rising up in swells fifty or sixty feet above the road.

  Once, years before, he had heard Big Phil Beck teasing poor Hank about the kudzu, saying how smart and tricky it was and how fast it moved, claiming there was evidence of houses that had been covered up by it in a single night, with the people still in their beds, vines growing out of their mouths and eye sockets. Hank had listened in absolute terror, his eyes half bulging out of his head, until Tom Harlan, overhearing the conversation, put an abrupt end to it. But for Larry, even if he knew better, that was how the kudzu had always struck him as holding a secret, inscrutable menace, as if the world would end neither with fire nor water, but underneath a mountain of twisting, entangling vines.

  Glancing to the side, Larry saw one pillar of kudzu that draped a dead oak. In the moonlight it looked like a monstrous man. A man with half his face oozing off. And to his side something like an arm stuck out. Only it was not quite an arm. More like—

  A stump, Larry thought suddenly.

  He stopped, then turned away from it. “Shit,” he whispered. That was the last thing he had wanted to start thinking about. The stories. . .

  Suppressing a violent shudder, he looked up the road.

  You got to do it, he told himself. You got to wake him up before he gets too far. After all, what if he didn’t wake up? What if he kept on going until he got to the very end of the cutoff?

  Larry stopped.

  The end of the cutoff. The Randolph house was at the end of the cutoff.

  “Jamey!” he yelled out. He stared at the other boy. That was where he was going. Out to the Randolph house. And again he heard Jamey’s whispering, “Don’t make me go there, please. I don’t want to see them.”

  See what?

  “Shit,” Larry said with a hiss. He couldn’t be talking about that. About them. The boy was farther up the road now, about ready to go over and disappear down the other side of one of the many little rises in the dirt road’s winding course. Why hadn’t he awakened Jamey earlier, when they were in the backyard? He should have tackled him or yelled out for his dad. Done anything. Now he could yell his lungs off and it wouldn’t do him any good at all.

  But as he watched the way the other boy was walking, Larry realized why he hadn’t even tried to wake him a single time all the way out.

  He was afraid. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to wake him. That he would shake him and shake him and that nothing would happen. That he would yell and scream and shout but that Jamey would just keep walking.

  And then what?

  Stop him now, he told himself. No matter what you have to do. You’re bigger. You’re stronger. You can just carry him back if you have to. But stop him before. . . .

  Larry ran as fast as he could to the top of the rise, then jumped around ahead of Jamey. He grabbed the other boy’s thin arms. “WAKE UP, JAMEY! STOP! YOU GOT TO STOP! YOU HEAR ME? JAMEY!”

  Jamey stopped. His eyes were halfway open, his mouth slack. Then all at once his mouth twisted itself into a grin—a grin Larry had never seen on the other boy’s face and that, prior to that very moment, he couldn’t have imagined being there even if Jamey had stood in front of a mirror practicing it for three weeks in a row. “They out there, Jameyboy, just a-waiting for you. Them eyes are just a-waiting.”

  Larry froze. He let go of Jamey’s arm as if it had suddenly turned red-hot.

  It wasn’t Jamey’s voice coming out of the other boy’s mouth. It was someone else’s voice—a man’s, not a boy’s. But that was only part of it, and not the worst part, either. What made Larry feel a shudder from head to toe was the way the voice sounded, its tone automatically conjuring up in Larry’s mind the shadowy outline of a face to match it—a face that, if Larry had actually seen it at that moment, would have made him jump out of his skin. A face that could peek out at you only from the dimmest shadow regions of your darkest nightmare.

  “Jamey?”

  The grin hovered a moment, then vanished.

  “Jamey. . . . what was that? Who. . . who was that?”

  But Jamey had already started walking again, faster this time. Larry watched him as he made his way up toward the next rise. Larry glanced back behind him and whispered a quick, “Goddamnit, Jamey.” He hesitated, divided, not knowing what to do. Still, he told himself, no matter what, he just couldn’t let Jamey continue walking like that by himself. It was just too dangerous.

  “Wait up!” he called out and, hurrying as fast as- he could, followed after Jamey. But the other boy had stopped at the top of a rise. Larry, coming even with him, did the same thing. He looked at Jamey’s face and then looked at what the other boy was staring at.

  There, in the moonlight, it looked even larger and spookier than Larry remembered it. Half hidden by a canopy of kudzu, the Randolph house loomed against the horizon, its tower—the highest spot in Blount County—rising up fifty or sixty feet into the darkness. The same tower where, fourteen years before, Larry’s dad and old Doc had found the Klines’ daughter.

  And again Jamey started up, somehow moving even faster, more urgently than before. Larry followed after him, pushing aside the weeds and bushes as the two of them made their way up to what he could see of the dilapidated and overgrown front porch.

  A few moments later, Jamey went up the ancient rotten boards onto the porch itself. Larry managed to grab hold of Jamey’s arm again and said, “What are you doing? Don’t you know what this place is? Jam
ey? Wake up, please. Don’t go in there.”

  But Jamey pulled his arm away and trampled through the kudzu until he had disappeared through the gaping hole that had once been the front door of the house.

  “Wait up,” Larry said, nearly tripping as he hurried after the other boy.

  Jamey had stopped in the middle of the cavernous hallway. Larry, standing on the threshold, let his eyes adjust: There was enough moonlight filtering in through the various broken windows for Larry to make out at least the bare outline of the room. Directly in front of Jamey was an old set of stairs, its banister a wreck. Larry noticed something glinting in a patch of moonlight and walked over to it carefully, trying to avoid the debris scattered all over the floor. It was just an old mirror, cracked down the middle.

  Larry turned around. But the spot where Jamey had been standing only moments before was now empty.

  “Shit,” Larry whispered. He quickly went to the front door, wondering if the other boy had gone back outside. But the porch was desolate.

  He was somewhere inside the house.

  Larry stood there another moment. Then, swallowing hard, he walked back into the old house until he came to the first big doorway that led out of the main hall. He peered into the doorway and in the dim moonlight saw a long, narrow corridor. He hesitated, then stepped into it, trying to knock the cobwebs away with his hands. But new ones kept coming, coiling around his wrist and getting caught in his hair. “Shit,” he muttered, quickly rubbing them off. Then, backing up, he returned to the main hallway. Nobody could have made it through those cobwebs, he figured. He checked the other side hall and saw that it was in the same condition. Which left only one choice—the stairway.

  Jamey had to he up there someplace, wandering around in pitch darkness, going from room to room.

  Larry called out Jamey’s name once more. Then, carefully trying the first step with the tip of his shoe, Larry started up the staircase. Not putting much trust in the decayed banister, he went cautiously from one step to another, feeling each one to make sure it didn’t give way beneath him, startled each time by the loud creak of the boards. Halfway up, he stopped.

  Suddenly a question hit him.

  If Jamey had come up the stairs, why hadn’t Larry heard the boards creaking in the same way? Jamey might weigh fifteen or twenty pounds less than Larry, but that couldn’t have made too much difference. Only a ghost could climb these stairs without making a racket.

  Suddenly Larry jumped. There had been a noise. At first he thought it was from farther up on the staircase. He looked back down and scanned the huge hallway.

  Just shadows. The same shadows that had filled the house long ago when, alone in the middle of the night, Simon Randolph would wait for the thing to come to him. The thing that called itself an angel.

  Again he heard it. Only now he was sure it was coming from below.

  “Jamey?”

  Larry listened to it, straining to catch the sound, and all at once he realized: It was the sound of somebody walking down there, the sound of footsteps.

  “Jamey? Answer me...”

  He stared down, and in the dim moonlight coming through the broken windows he saw a figure. It was a man. At least it was much too big to be Jamey.

  Putting his hand tightly on the banister and trying to make as little noise as he possibly could, Larry began to back his way up the rest of the steps, praying each time that the creaking wouldn’t give him away. When he had made it to the landing, he stopped, listening for footsteps.

  But now there was not a sound.

  He stared down in the darkness, down to the bottom of the steps. It’s down there, he thought. Whatever it is, it’s right down there.

  He heard it. The sound seemed to suck the air right out of his lungs, as if he had been dragged under water with a sudden tug.

  The boards of the first step gave out a sharp creak, echoing in the cavernous room.

  It was coming up the steps.

  Quickly Larry turned and ran, tripping for a second on something in the darkness. Then, righting himself, he scrambled his way to the second flight of steps. They were in even worse shape than the first. As Larry groped his way in the darkness, he could feel them suddenly falling away, the next step opening into thin air, and himself slipping back down, down toward whatever was waiting for him at the bottom step. But he kept moving until he reached the third floor.

  Brushing away some cobwebs, he looked around, trying to catch his breath, hearing nothing anymore but the fear pounding in his temples. Still, one thing had improved: Here the moonlight not only came in through the windows but also through the various holes in the roof. Now, at least, he could see where he was going.

  “Jamey!” he called out. “Where the hell are you?”

  He hurried down the hall. He stopped to check one room after the other. Then at the very end of the hallway, he peered into the last room. “Jamey?”

  But the other boy didn’t hear him. Didn’t even notice that he was there. He was standing in a patch of moonlight, looking into a huge fireplace, the same trancelike look on his face.

  “Somebody’s down there,” Larry said. “He’s coming up the stairs. You got to wake up, Jamey. We got to get out of here.”

  But Jamey didn’t answer or even look around at him.

  “Jamey? Somebody’s—” But Larry stopped. He watched, his mouth open, as Jamey crouched down a little and stepped into the mouth of the fireplace. “What are you doing?”

  Jamey stepped into the fireplace and put his hand on the bricks behind it. Then Larry watched—hardly believing his eyes—as Jamey, without a sound, began to climb straight up the soot-black wall.

  Larry gasped in disbelief. He stood there until Jamey disappeared into the dark chimney. “Jamey,” he whispered hoarsely, then looked back at the bricks on the wall behind the fireplace. In what little moonlight there was, he saw that some of the bricks were missing. That’s how Jamey had been able to climb up, by using the gaps in the brick as a kind of foothold. He craned his neck, looking up, but there was no trace of Jamey. He had simply disappeared into the darkness. Larry glanced around behind him. It was then he thought: I’m dreaming. I’m just having a dream. But before he had time to absorb the thought, he heard the footsteps again, but this time right outside the room. He turned and looked up. “Jamey,” he whispered. If anything bad had happened to him up there, Larry thought, he would have heard something—a scream, a yell for help, even just a gasp. Besides, maybe Jamey, in some strange, incomprehensible way, knew what he was doing.

  Larry jerked his head around. The footsteps were getting closer. He looked up and, finding the first missing brick, put his foot into the space. He glanced back behind him with a shudder and started up. He climbed for about ten feet and then felt a ledge right above him. He lifted himself onto it and, turning around, blinked in amazement. There was light, dim light, but enough to make out a door right in front of him, a door that had been violently broken through, leaving jagged edges around the hole in the middle. Larry touched one of the splintered edges. It had been done with an ax, it looked like.

  And all at once it hit Larry, the very realization nearly knocking him back off the ledge. The door had been broken out with a pickax. The pickax Luther had traded his gold watch for. The debris from it had fallen into the charred logs of the fireplace. Anyone seeing them there would have simply taken them for pieces of unburned firewood.

  That was where the door led to. The hidden room.

  “Jamey?” Larry called out, feeling goosebumps covering every inch of his body. He peered through the hole in the door and saw, in the dim, flickering light, a cramped and narrow passageway leading to yet another broken-out door. It was from there that the unsteady light was coming.

  “Jamey?”

  He was back there, in the room now. Larry waited a second, then began to crawl along the passageway. He
stopped in front of the second door and again called for Jamey. He pushed the door all the way open and looked inside.

  The room was not very large, the ceiling was just high enough for him to stand up in. Jamey was sitting on the floor. Next to him was a candle—that explained the unsteadiness of the light. But that was not what riveted Larry’s attention. His mouth open, he stared at the thing Jamey was peering into. It was a canvas, without a frame. Larry kneeled down next to Jamey and stared at the canvas in the flickering light of the candle. He had never seen anything like it. At first he thought it was a photograph. Every detail was etched on so perfectly, so precisely, that it was hard to imagine how anybody could ever have painted it. Only it couldn’t have been a photograph. At least, none he had ever seen, for a photograph had to be a photograph of something, something you could see with your own two eyes. But what he saw in front of him wasn’t like that. You could never see anything like that. There was something too strange about it, as if everything were floating in mist, only the mist was made up of all different colors. And there was something else about it. As the candlelight flickered over the surface, the canvas seemed to be moving, swirling mists within mists, like looking at the bottom of a shallow stream as the water rushed and rippled over the many-colored pebbles.

  His mouth open, Larry stared at it harder and suddenly it seemed to emerge in front of his eyes, not like something that had been there all along, but something that had just floated to the surface of the stream, or like a photographic print developing in its solution.

  It was a girl. She was naked, her long hair tattered and streaked with slime. Her eyes were glassy, her mouth distended. Looking into it, Larry could almost hear the sounds she was making. The crazy, uncontrollable laughter.

  “It’s Catherine, isn’t it?” Larry looked over at Jamey, but his eyes were still fixed on the picture. Larry looked back at the picture and, somehow, it seemed to happen again. He saw the things float to the surface of the picture, covering the girl’s skin with them, covering her until not an inch was left.