The Evil Returned

by Richard Raven

  God, let it still be here. Daren said they took nothing with them, so maybe they didn’t find it. He reached under the bed and sighed audibly when his fingers touched cold steel.

  Thank you, thank you.

  He quickly pulled a small lock box from under the bed and opened it with a key he kept in a zippered pocket in his wallet. Inside the box were three items: a wad of cash that amounted to just over eight hundred dollars, a small .380 automatic with a blue steel finish, and a box of ammunition for it.

  The money he shoved in a pocket of his jeans; the automatic he unloaded. He worked the action several times, assuring himself that all was as it should be with the pistol. Then he reloaded it, making sure there wasn’t a round in the chamber, and set the safety. He took a handful of the cartridges from the box of ammo, the rest he dropped back in the lock box. The extra ammo went into a pocket of his jacket; he stowed the automatic in the other. He zipped both pockets closed.

  As he relocked the box and shoved it back under the bed, he remembered how Angela had given him nine kinds of hell when he first bought the gun. That had been the same day he got the word that Damon would soon be walking out of prison, though it was three days after that before he could take the gun with him. Angela had really hit the ceiling when she saw it for the first time. “Jeff, those damn things scare me—and I told you I don’t want it in the house!” It took a lot of convincing, but Angela had finally relented and went with him and got her own Concealed Carry Permit.

  If only she had it in her purse that night. It might’ve made a world of difference. Well, it still just might make a difference.

  Especially if Damon or some other nut showed up from out of nowhere with the intention of cracking open his skull.

  “Jeff.”

  He was checking his wallet for his own permit for the gun and had just found it when the voice said his name. It was faint and it seemed to come from somewhere there in the bedroom. The sound of it was like a vicious kick to the testicles. His eyes shot up from his wallet and he felt a little jump in his chest.

  “Jeff, take it easy, baby. Don’t be afraid.”

  The voice was definitely there in the room and not in his head, and there was no mistaking that it was Angela’s voice. The very thing he had feared.

  “Please, don’t be afraid, but you have to listen to me. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to help me help the others.”

  Jeff began to shake from head to foot. Now I’m hearing this shit when I’m not even asleep…and I thought it was just a dream. His dropped his head and closed his eyes and expelled a long and quivering breath. I know I let you down that night. It doesn’t matter what you did or why you did it—I never should’ve left you alone in that car…and you’ll never know how much hell I’m going through because of it. But there’s nothing I can do for you now, so please, please, just leave me alone. Just leave me to my own hell and misery. Surely, that’s punishment enough.

  In one fluid motion Jeff shoved his wallet into his pocket and bolted for the bedroom door. In only seconds he was out of the house and heading for his pickup.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  From the top of the front steps, the figure of a woman watched the red pickup as it shot backwards out of the driveway and speed away from the house. For a long moment she remained on the steps, gazing forlornly to the south, the direction in which the truck had left. She knew where he was going. It was where he always went when he was upset and needed to clear his head. She moved slowly down the steps and into the light rain. The rain didn’t seem to touch her at all.

  She crossed the yard to the edge of the road, and there she stood looking, but the truck was already out of sight. She prayed silently that he would find calm and slow the truck down before he had a wreck and killed himself. He didn’t deserve that…and it would never do. He had to stay alive, and while it was up to her to ensure he did, she was beginning to understand what the woman she knew as Marie meant by failure. It could be so hard to have a positive influence when trying to reach out to someone from the other side.

  Yet she soon realized that her prayer was working. The power of her simple and unspoken words had found him, touched him, and she could feel that both his heart and the truck were slowing…slowing.

  “I’m so sorry,” murmured the small and bare-foot woman wearing a black dress. “I swear, I never meant to hurt you. God, what a fool believes and will do when she feels the hand of desperation close around her throat. Please, let him feel that, too, and let him know that what happened to me wasn’t his fault.”

  For now it was all she could do. All she dared to do. She would leave him alone and let him have the time he desperately needed to gather and prepare himself. He would need all the will and strength and purpose he could find in that refuge where he had so often sought and found solace. It never took him long to find that sense of peace and all he derived from it, and she hoped it would be no different this time.

  For the evil was coming. And coming very soon.

  The rain was falling a little harder as she began moving slowly along the edge of the road. After only a few feet she began losing shape, her essence weakening and beginning to fade. After only a few seconds she had winked out of sight.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Soon after leaving the house and crossing the line into Grant County, the big red Ram began slowing as Jeff’s foot eased off the gas and he began to feel a little better. Only a little, though, and it was all physical. Mentally, he felt he had reached the breaking point and had left it behind in the dust. He was the first to admit that he was no angel, that he had done some things he regretted, but he had always done the best he could with what he had to work with at the time. Keep it simple and down to earth, take care of his own and his part of the deal, and let the rest of it sort itself out.

  So where the hell did he go wrong? What sin or offense was he guilty of that had led him straight into the heart of the nightmare that he had been living since Friday night? Not even for a moment had he ever envisioned that he would someday experience the things he had. To think the things he had; to hear what he had…especially there in the bedroom of his own home. That little episode was the worst kind of nightmare, the kind that left a man to wonder and worry if he was making a complete break with reality. He was still so spooked and confused that he really didn’t have a clue what he should do about anything. All he knew for sure was that he had to do something, quick.

  Otherwise, he was going to end up back in the hospital. Worse, some people in crisp white uniforms would come for him and fit him for a straight-jacket.

  A little less than thirty minutes after leaving home, Jeff reached his destination. A light but steady rain falling, he pulled off the highway and drove through the wide and open gate in the chain-link fence that enclosed the cemetery grounds. Perhaps ten acres in size, a wide gravel lane with several smaller branches that snaked off from it cut through the grounds, twisting among the pines and sweet-gums and the oaks that stood in silent vigil. To Jeff, the gray and wet afternoon lent the place an air that seemed even more austere and final than usual.

  He steered his Ram beyond the gate and took the first fork in the path to the left, stopping a short distance later. The rain pinging softly off the truck’s cab, Jeff cracked open his window just enough for him to see beyond the first few headstones to a pair of simple flat bronze markers. They were too far away for him to see what was inscribed on them, but he didn’t need to see them to know.

  The graves of his mother and father: George and Carolyn Taylor.

  Even now, after all that had happened and with all that he believed was the truth about Angela, he felt the pierce of regret as he always did over the fact that he never had a chance to bring her home to meet his folks. Never meant to be. Jeff was twenty-four when his father died and twenty-nine when he lost his mother. It was more than a year after his mother passed before he found Angela, the head-teller at the bank where the landscape company he worked for at the time
had its accounts. Within six months she had stolen his heart and moved to one of the city’s rising law firms, becoming a secretary working directly with one of the junior partners. Jeff married her just after his thirty-first birthday. He had always believed his folks would have loved her, just as he was sure that she, Angela, would have thought the world of them.

  Would it have really worked out both ways like that? Jeff could now only wonder.

  As he stared at their graves, Jeff wondered bitterly if his no-good half-brother had ever bothered to visit their mother’s grave. He doubted it; Damon didn’t even bother to show up at her funeral. That was when Jeff had finally decided that he really had no brother and had never had one. A feeling that was not only mutual, but Damon had felt that way about it as far back as Jeff could remember. There were pitifully few happy days in the Taylor household when Jeff was growing up, and all because of Damon and his hatred of George Taylor and his resentment toward their mother for marrying the man.

  What else was she supposed to do? Jeff had often demanded an answer to that question from Damon during their many and always heated arguments on the subject. Damon’s father, a long-haul truck driver, died in a fiery crash with another truck when Damon was barely a year old. He and their mother lived a penniless existence with various members of her family until she met and married George Taylor two years later. Jeff had told Damon many times that she did what she had to do—and she didn’t do all that bad. George Taylor was one hell of a good man. A simple man, hard-working and quiet, a truly kind soul. He not only loved Carolyn—worshiped her, really—but he willingly and cheerfully gave her son everything he could, including his name. Yet nothing the man did seemed to matter to Damon whose resentment and hatred only grew deeper and hotter with each passing day.

  Jeff could still remember lying in his bed at night, listening to his mother cry herself to sleep in the room next to his. Mom had never put one son above the other; in her kind and gentle eyes they were equals in every way and she loved both her boys with a fierceness that only a mother could possess. To hear his mother crying and knowing it was because of Damon fueled Jeff’s own sense of resentment. He not only resented him but, as Jeff grew older, he came to fear Damon. Something about Damon just wasn’t right. Jeff didn’t know what it was; a mere kid at the time, he knew little of such things. What he did know was that Damon was unpredictable and volatile and that he had developed a nasty and vicious habit of slapping or punching something or someone out of his way whenever he felt like it. Jeff had taken many such punches and slaps when he was growing up, and he learned the hard way to stay out of Damon’s way as much as possible.

  It all came to a head early one evening at the supper table. Damon, seventeen at the time and only weeks away from graduating high school (barely, for Damon never did more than he had to in class to get by), had gotten into trouble that day for fighting. He had cornered the star forward on the school’s basketball team in the gym and had left the guy on the floor with a bloody nose, a split lip, a black eye and a host of bruises. Though Jeff was never completely sure about it, the wholly one-sided fight was apparently over some insulting remark the jock had made that pissed Damon off. Damon drew a three day suspension, and that had enraged him. The jock had wronged him, and he, Damon, was the only one being punished? That was bullshit, and Damon was having none of it. He told the Principle right to the man’s face to “Kiss my ass and go to hell, you stinking two-faced fuck—and you can take that other fuck I bloodied with you.” Then he jammed his middle finger right between the man’s eyes and walked out. Just like that.

  The irate Principle had already called their mother and told her about the incident in his office before Damon made it home. Damon ignored their mother and her outraged questions, pushed past her without a word and locked himself in his room. There he stayed until the evening meal, acknowledging neither their mother nor his step-father when he got home from work. The moment Damon strode into the kitchen, clearly with a chip the size of a house on his shoulder, George Taylor fixed him with an angry glare. It was one of the few times while growing up that Jeff could remember when his father was truly an angry man.

  “So,” the senior Taylor asked as soon as Damon sat down at the table, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

  Damon slammed his fork down so hard that it broke his plate and splattered food all over the table. He returned his step-father’s glare with equal intensity. “What do I have to say?” he hissed, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. “I say you’re nothing but the insignificant asshole that’s balling the bitch that stopped being my mother a long time ago, so you can shut the fuck up and get out of my face because if you don’t, I’m going to put you on your ass, right here, right now. You think I’m fucking with you, just you goddamn try me.”

  George Taylor’s face turned a shade of scarlet; Carolyn burst into tears and fled the room. Jeff could only stare in shock and horror at his brother, but Damon ignored him completely, his blazing eyes still leveled like a pair of pistols at his step-father as if daring the man to say another word or to get out of his seat. Though he never took his eyes from Damon, George Taylor didn’t speak or move. He knew that he didn’t have to do either. Damon had crossed the line; it was the end of the road for him in that house.

  Only when he seemed satisfied that he had made some monumental point did Damon flash George Taylor a smirk of pure contempt and leave the house.

  It was Sunday afternoon, three days later, when he came back. He was so dirty and disheveled that Jeff wondered if he had spent the past days and nights in a ditch. Damon gathered up a few possessions and all of his clothes, stuffing all of it into an old Army duffel bag he dug out of his closet. Then he took a shower, grabbed some cold meatloaf and a small carton of milk from the refrigerator, then left again without a word to anyone. He never came back.

  To Jeff’s certain knowledge, it was the last time that George and Carolyn ever laid eyes on him. The last contact either of them had with Damon was shortly after he turned twenty-one. That was when he legally changed his name from Taylor back to his father’s name. Damon had called the house and had said to George Taylor, “Take your fucking name and cram it up your ass.” Then he hung up.

  Jeff, on the other hand, had seen him many times over the years. The first time wasn’t until years later after Jeff had left home, moving out on his own. By that time Damon had already had numerous run-ins with the law. He was always fighting and brawling, spilling blood and leaving mayhem in his wake. The older Damon got, the worse it seemed to get. Damon took a savage delight in squaring off with someone and laying into them. It never took more than one wrong word or glance to set him off, and when he blew, it was never less than at least a ton of C-4 going off at once. He never faced anything harsher than a fine and damages and 30 days in County, all of which he shrugged off like a pestering fly. He always managed to skate by the skin of his ass.

  Until that last time. That time, much the way he did that evening at the Taylor supper table, Damon crossed a line.

  Her name was Melinda. Jeff understood that she was a pretty and sweet and vivacious woman. Not so after Damon got hold of her. All that Jeff really knew about it was what he found out during the course of Damon’s one-day trial. Apparently, Damon accidentally bumped into her at a crowded bar in a way she found offensive; she called him a creep, told him to drop dead, and he promptly backhanded her off the barstool she was sitting on. According to witness testimony, no one had time to even react before Damon had slapped the woman at least three more times as she lay screaming on the floor and had landed no less than three punishing punches with his fists to her chest and stomach area. By this time no less than four men were rushing to her aid, one the woman’s boyfriend. Each man received a swift and sound pounding for his trouble.

  After that, with five unconscious people on the floor at his feet, Damon had stood there in that bar, his eyes moving to those of every patron in place, daring one and all to try their luck
or say a word, making his point. There always seemed to be a point he had to make, something he had to prove. When he finally left, he didn’t run away or even hurry; he strolled casually into the night, looking for all the world like a man with no worries at all.

  The police, however, were after him soon enough.

  The woman, by far, got the worst of it; she spent ten days in the hospital. Jeff understood that she still suffered lingering effects, physically and mentally. Damon drew four years in State, of which he served just over twenty-one months. Months shy of his first parole hearing, he got his release due to a court order issued to ease overcrowding. The last time Jeff laid eyes on Damon was after his sentencing as three Sheriff’s Deputies led him, feet manacled and handcuffed to a waist-chain, out of the courtroom. Just before Damon disappeared from sight he had looked around, found Jeff and left him with a frigid smile and a little wink.

  Jeff had felt the wink much more than the smile. That wink was Damon’s way of letting him know that, someday, he would keep the promise he had made Jeff.

  That promise, made in a seething rage and as it had so many times before, cycled through Jeff’s head as he gazed at his parent’s graves.

  Neither of you deserved all the hell he put you through. None of us deserved it. Mom, I know he broke your heart, but at least there were some happy times and harmony in your marriage after he left, and right up until the time we lost dad. But I’m still here, and I still have to deal with him and the things he’s done. I have to face the world every day and hope that no one figures out that animal is my brother. The cops are already thinking I’m just like him—my God, my own wife was, evidently, beginning to think it and fear me. Now she’s gone and I know a couple of things that I need to tell the cops. Some things that just might help them figure out what happened to Angela. If not her, then maybe help them find another woman––I’m almost certain of that much, anyway. But I’m scared to say a word to the cops and it’s not just because of Damon and the curse he’s put on me and on our name. I’ve got people calling me up and threatening me now. Jesus Christ, mom, what am I going to do?