Evil Never Dies

by Mick Ridgewell

  His muscles twitched, and he couldn't stop shivering. Roland pushed himself away from the rock. He spun on his butt and rose to his knees. He remained there on all fours, waiting to see if he would vomit again.

  After a minute or two, he stood and began to jog back to the road. His gait was staggered, but he kept running. The farther from the rock he ran, the stronger he felt and the faster his strides came.

  When he got to the bench, Patricia was sitting with the book in her lap and her hands folded neatly on the cover. An O.P.P. cruiser pulled to a stop beside them.

  "Is everything okay, Miss Owens?" the officer called over from the driver's side.

  Roland collapsed on the bench next to Patricia. His chest heaved as he took huge gulps of air to feed his burning lungs. Sweat ran down his face in torrents, and his shirt was wet under the arms, and along his back and chest.

  "Everything is as good as it can be, Jimmy," she replied. "This here is Roland Millhouse. He is a reporter, here from Toronto. He came to wish me a happy birthday. Isn't that nice?"

  Patricia patted Roland's leg and smiled at Officer Jimmy. When the black and white Crown Vic disappeared up the road, Roland's gaze went from the car to the old woman on the bench next to him.

  "Wha wha…wha…" He took a few deep breaths and tried again. "What was that?"

  "It's the evil," she said. "I told you, evil never dies."

  "I touched the ground," he said. His eyes were wide with fear. "I felt, I felt like…"

  "I think, Roland, that you have no idea what you felt like," she said. "I doubt you have ever felt anything like that."

  "It made me physically ill," he said, wiping a tear from his cheek. "I threw up when my hand touched the ground over there."

  "Let's go back to the house," she said. "I think we can both use a glass of iced tea."

  Chapter 7

  They walked along without saying a word. Roland didn't have to adjust his stride or effort to accommodate the centenarian's diminished stride. His own feet were dragging, his pricey leather shoes looked like rejects from a rummage sale as he scuffed his feet through the gravel at the edge of the blacktop.

  Patricia let him be for a while. She knew that sooner was better than later to try to give him an explanation. She would have to make him understand, at least as much as she understood what he had just experienced.

  "It isn't known for sure what is down there," she said. "I can only relay what I overheard. One of the old men in town told this story to my father."

  Roland said nothing, just nodded and continued to shuffle his feet toward Patricia's house. His color was returning and the stoop in his shoulders had gone, but he remained silent.

  "It began back in 1872," she said. "Kings Shore was not much more than an outpost for the fur trade, but a few families had settled here."

  She looked at him and immediately felt uncertain about continuing. His face dripped with sweat; his shoulders slumped again as though the mere suggestion of what he felt at the rock had caused a relapse. He shuffled onward toward the old mansion with the posture of an old man, and his stride was again unsteady and staggered.

  "Are you sure you are well enough to hear this, Roland?" she asked.

  He nodded but remained silent.

  Patricia took his elbow in her left hand while her right continued to caress her journal.

  "In 1872, children started to disappear. Girls, every one of them was a girl, most between ten and thirteen, some from Kings Shore and some from what is now called Sauble Beach and the surrounding area between here and there.

  "I can see you're not much in the mood for talking but I would appreciate it if you would just let me tell you what the old man told my father without asking any questions. Can you do that, Roland?" Another nod.

  "Good! I have had nightmares about this story so many times through my years. I can almost recite it just as that man told it. That is what I will try to do, but I would rather tell it straight through. The man who told it was a coward, but he told the girl's family where she was, the girl in the story I am about to tell you. While the child's father and uncle and the others gathered, this man rushed out like he was going to help, but he didn't help. He cowered in the shadows of the woods watching. The girl would not have been saved if the others arrived just minutes later than they did. The man would have hid there, and watched."

  Patricia walked on for a while without speaking. She made it seem like she needed to catch her breath, but really she was stalling. She didn't fear much after what she'd lived through, but she feared this story.

  "This is, in his words, what the old man told my father…"

  Terror doesn't belong on a pretty face, certainly not on the face of young Winifred Samuels. In the moonlight, Winnie's eyes seemed preternaturally large. Her golden hair, surely neatly braided when she left for school that morning, hung behind each ear like two frazzled ropes. The girl balanced on a rough-cut plank stretched across an open stone well, her arms bound at the wrists and pulled taut above her head by a rope tied off on an overhanging limb of a sugar maple.

  Her shoulders must have ached from the strain, and her thighs quivered as the terrified child struggled to maintain her balance. Small for her age and fragile from repeated bouts of all manner of illness, Winnie looked much younger than her thirteen years. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her body shuddered with uncontrollable weeping.

  Malachi Adams admired the beauty and purity of the child. Excited by the vision before him, his breathing quickened to match the rapid heaving of Winnie's naked torso. Most would think the girl diseased as the moon's glow seeped through the trees leaving blotches of shadow on her pale skin.

  "You are the prettiest one yet," Malachi told her.

  Winnie didn't reply. The only sounds she made came in barely audible whimpers and the fast rhythmic rush of her breathing. The girl looked down on him, not speaking, but her eyes conveyed her thoughts more clearly than words ever could.

  Please don't hurt me. I want to go home. Daddy, save me.

  "You will be number thirteen," Malachi told her. "After the blood of thirteen virgins has been spilled in the circle, a succubus will come to me. She will be enslaved by me, and do as I bid. So you see, child, you should be honored."

  He stepped over the circle of salt running around the well, dropped his robe and stood naked before the girl, his body as hairless as a newborn.

  Winnie squeezed her eyes shut. Her crying came in loud gasps. Her small frame convulsed with the effort to stop.

  "I know this is very frightening," Malachi said in a soothing voice. "But you are here to become a part of a greater existence than you can comprehend."

  At the base of the well, Malachi opened a wooden box and retrieved a silver dagger. The ivory handle absorbed the moonlight, becoming luminescent. Winnie opened her eyes at the sound of the complaining hinges of the box. The sight of the gleaming double-edged blade was too much for her. From her very soul, the girl screamed for her mother and her father.

  "Child, child," Malachi said, trying to soothe her. "No one can hear you."

  Winnie stopped screaming, but her sobs came steady and her small body jerked with each breath. The plank beneath her feet wobbled violently.

  "Succubus," Malachi called, his face looking up to the sky. "Tonight I shall bathe in the blood of the thirteenth virgin sacrificed in your name."

  He stepped up to the edge of the well and lightly traced a line down the length of Winnie's thigh. Her screams filled the air. Seconds later Winnie's pleas were replaced by a thunderous report to Malachi's left. He dropped the dagger as a musket-ball struck his shoulder.

  The smell of spent gunpowder filled the air. Five men appeared from the darkness of the trees. Amos Smith, a stout man in the middle of the pack took charge immediately.

  "Demon,"Amos shouted at Malachi. Malachi made no attempt to escape. He looked at those men, with contempt.

  Desmond Samuals called to his daughter, "Winnie, are you unharmed?"

/>   "Desmond," said Amos. "Take your little girl home."

  "Daddy, Daddy," the child cried as Desmond rushed to her, removing his shirt.

  He gingerly untied her hands, then covered his daughter with the shirt. Winnie wrapped her arms around her father's neck, and he carried her into the woods.

  "John," Amos said. "The child is your niece, see to it your brother gets her home." With that, John followed Desmond and Winnie into the trees.

  Blood streamed through the fingers of Malachi's left hand as he tried to staunch the gush. He stared in confused wonder, first at his shoulder, then at the three men before him. Fear hadn't left the circle when Desmond carried his baby girl away, it just changed vessels. Malachi Adams, naked and bleeding, fell to his knees, and all three men looked down at fear. Malachi was not afraid. Malachi was fear. He looked up at his captors with defiant indifference.

  "The walls around that house of evil won't protect you here, Malachi Adams," Amos said.

  Malachi looked up into his accusers' faces with a nonchalance that bordered on boredom. It was almost like he didn't feel these men were worthy of his full attention.

  "Drop him in the well," Amos yelled. Some of the bravado had left his face, replaced by fear of the bleeding man at his feet.

  They seized Malachi by the arms. He didn't resist, or plead for his life. Malachi was calm. Malachi himself would be the thirteenth virgin sacrificed. He didn't cry out in pain as they pulled him across the grass to the base of the well, his wounded shoulder tugged and twisted with the effort. The well gaped open in the moonlight like the very mouth of Satan awaiting a tasty morsel. Malachi didn't make a sound as his body fell through the blackness to what was surely death. He just disappeared.

  Amos Smith and his companions stood before the mouth of the open well. They looked to each other for a sign that what they had just done was right. Without making eye contact, they seemed to agree. It was the only thing they could do.

  All three men then looked to the edge of the well, but none had dared to look down into the black chasm. None had the nerve to look down on the evil they had just cast to the blackness of the earth for fear evil would jump up and pull them down with it.

  "Tomorrow bring a team of horses up here and drag that rock over top of the hole," said Amos, motioning to a large boulder ten yards away.

  "It'll take a team of four, maybe six," one of the men said.

  "Then bring eight," replied Amos.

  Patricia released Roland's elbow, clung to her journal and hugged it to her bosom.

  "The man who told Daddy this story crept over to the well. He didn't look down to the blackness, but he said he heard Malachi Adams laughing."

  Chapter 8

  Roland had recovered some as they walked, and he listened.

  "So you're telling me that that is the rock, and there is a dead serial killer at the bottom of a well beneath it?" he said, breaking his silence.

  "That is the rock. And beneath the rock is what was a well. More than likely it has all filled in by now. As memory serves, that rock used to sit much higher when I was young."

  "And it's been there since that night?" he asked.

  "If only that were true," she replied, shaking her head. "If only it were."

  "What do you mean?"

  "As it turns out a family of squatters came to town. That was quite common back then. They happened on the abandoned home of Malachi Adams and moved in. This was in 1911, just before the first frost. Name was Steen, Ben and Gloria and a little girl named Lizzy. Nice couple, the Steens, but they mostly kept to themselves, and nobody thought to mention what was beneath that rock. I guess they couldn't imagine anybody moving it. But, somehow they did move it.

  Mr. Steen saw it for what it was. A covered well. Turns out it was dry as a bone."

  "Dry as a whole skeleton, more like it," Roland whispered.

  "The girl, Lizzy, fell in that hellhole. Poor thing split her head open on the rocks down there. Bled to death before Mr. Steen could lower himself down with a rope."

  "Jesus," Roland said. "Did he find…"

  "The only thing he found down there was his little girl. Her broken body lying on the blood-stained stones at the bottom of a black hole."

  "But how?"

  "Well, to begin with, everyone who lived around there in '72, was by this time either dead or moved away. Everyone had gone except that cowardly old man, the man who told that awful story to my father. So, you see, the whole Malachi Adams story was more folklore than history. Not the kind of thing a town wants to remember. Not the kind of story they tell new residents."

  "So it was just a story that old man made up?" Roland asked.

  "Roland, why do you think they would have covered the well with a rock that big?"

  He pondered this question for a moment. "It went dry, and they covered it so little girls didn't fall in."

  "Yes," she said. "That is a possibility. But, surely they would have just filled it in with field stones and dirt. Or, as was the practice back then, carpentered from planks a cover for it.

  "Do you remember me saying the girl was lying on the blood-stained rocks?"

  He nodded.

  "The rocks were stained, but there was no blood." She looked at him to see if this was sinking in. "The girl bled to death down there. Her father got there minutes later. The rocks were red, but the blood was gone."

  "Are you trying to tell me that Malachi Adams waited, buried alive for what? Forty years, then lapped up that girl's blood?"

  "I am not trying to tell you anything, yet."

  They had gotten to the driveway where Roland's Bimmer gleamed in the late afternoon sun. She saw him looking at it longingly, as they made their way toward the house.

  "It's a bit late to head back to Toronto, Roland. If you want to stay, I have plenty of spare rooms. If you are convinced I'm as mad as a rabid dog and would rather be on your way, I would recommend you drop in on the Twin Oaks B&B. You've had quite a long day."

  "Thank you for your time, and sharing your story, Patricia," he said. "The B&B sounds like a good idea. Can I stop in tomorrow before I leave?"

  "Of course, Roland. You must know that I have only told you a small part of the story. I hope you can find some time in the morning to hear more before you leave."

  "We shall see," he said.

  Roland left Patricia standing on the porch. He fully intended to return to Toronto. He would do a fluff piece about the nice old lady. Include a picture of her standing on the porch, and hope his next assignment would get him attention from the right people.

  What Roland hadn't anticipated was the pull of the evil. He had to pass by the path that led him to the VW-sized rock. When he got there, he pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. He didn't plan it. He couldn't even say he did it intentionally, yet there he was, staring along the path toward that evil place as the sun fell below the horizon. It was almost as though the thing called to him and he was powerless to resist.

  Roland reached for the handle to open the door, and just as he was about to push the door open, a pickup buzzed by, horn blaring. Roland recoiled from the sudden noise, put the car in gear, checked for more cars, then slowly guided the Bimmer back onto the road. He watched the path disappear behind him, then resumed a comfortable 60 k/h.

  Roland's heart was pounding, and he realized Patricia was right. He had a long, tough day and the B&B was a good idea.

  Chapter 9

  Dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved blouse, Patricia opened the door moments after the bell rang.

  "I didn't expect to see you again young man," she said.

  Roland gave her a shy grin. "To tell you the truth, I didn't expect to be back."

  "What changed your mind?"

  "A couple of things," he said. "First thing, I left my camera in your parlor." They both shared a chuckle.

  "By the look of your casual attire this morning, you do plan to be driving back to the city," she said, motioning to his tan chinos and navy pol
o shirt.

  He shuffled his canvas deck shoes on the porch boards and worked on his nonchalant posture.

  "You said there was two things that brought you back."

  "The evil," he said. "Last night when I left, I stopped where the path goes down from the road. I don't even remember stopping the car. If it wasn't for a truck horn, I may have gone back down there. Something tells me that would have been a bad idea."

  "Have you had breakfast, Roland?" she asked.

  "I was just going to grab a coffee at Tim Horton's, and get lunch on the road."

  She stepped to the side, still holding the door open. Roland entered the house and followed her into the kitchen.

  "I was just about to have some fruit and a cup of tea," she said. "Would you like some?"

  "That would be fine, but what I would really like is to hear the rest of your story."

  Patricia set a bowl of fruit salad in front of him. She retrieved a cup and saucer from the cupboard and set it next to the fruit. She filled his cup from the teapot and left the room.

  Roland marveled at the serving tray on the table. A small dish of lemon wedges, a bowl of sugar, a stack of cookies and a tiny honey pot surrounded the teapot.

  He squeezed a lemon wedge into his cup, then added a teaspoon of honey. After a small sip to taste, he added another spoonful of honey.

  He nibbled a cookie when Patricia returned carrying the journal. The book looked older and somehow more ominous to her young guest. Roland watched the book as if it had a life of its own. As if it might be dangerous.

  She must have noticed his unease. "It is only a book, dear."

  He gave her a nervous smile, then asked, "Patricia, before you continue telling me any more. Why now? You have kept this to yourself for one hundred years. Why have you decided to tell the story now? And, why me?"

  "As I mentioned, Roland, I am not going to live forever. I dearly hope that all you get from me is a fantastic story. What I fear is that what happened all those years ago can happen again. If it does, the things I am about to tell you may save the lives of many if you give heed to my words."