by Ninie Hammon
“Everything I’ve told you is the God’s own truth, Crock. I swear it is.”
“Oh, I don’t have any doubt about that. I just want to know the part you haven’t told me.”
Again, Jack said nothing.
Crock studied him, then stood and stepped nearer the bed. He put his hand on Jack’s arm and said in an earnest voice.
“I’m only trying to help, Jack.”
“There’s nothing I need help with.”
“How about what’s going on in Bradford’s Ridge, Kentucky? You need help with that?”
“How do you—?”
“When Sheriff Lincoln heard what happened to you and the reverend, he gave me a call and the two of us had a nice long talk.” Crock stopped, seemed to be considering what to say next. “Shoot Jack, I know there’s something going on here that isn’t…something that’s outside what you can set down in neat rows on a police report.”
He stopped again, then continued in a soft voice.
“Something not governed by the law…not the laws of man, anyway. Jack, you’ve been up against something that’s…other.”
He drew another breath.
“I was raised Catholic, quit going to church when I was a teenager, then went back to take my kids when they were growing up. Haven’t been in a church since…But I believe it. I believe in…supernatural good and supernatural evil. I believe they’re real.”
“I know they’re real,” Jack said. But that was all, and after awhile Crock gave up asking and headed for the door.
He stopped before opening it, though, and turned back to Jack.
“According to Sheriff Lincoln, there’s more fish to fry back there in that hometown of yours.”
Jack said nothing.
“And if I know Jack Carpenter, you’re going to be right there in the middle of it.” He stopped, seemed to be considering what to say or how to say it. “If you ever need a friend, a friend who’ll believe whatever you tell him no matter how bizarre it sounds—you’ve got me on speed dial.”
* * * * * * *
The new normal of Daniel’s life was entwined with Jack’s and Theresa’s lives as naturally and effortlessly as their lives had been entwined twenty-six years ago. It wasn’t just that together they harbored a horrible secret. It was because with the lifting of some of the fog from their minds, Jack and Daniel had recovered more than just memories of past events. They’d reclaimed the emotional connections that went along with them.
It was nice to have a brother again. And Theresa was so good with Andi, who desperately needed a mother figure in her life right now.
Emily.
Everything always came back to Emily. Daniel had learned a valuable lesson, one every minister needed to know. He’d learned that the axiom, “Time Heals All Wounds,” was a pile of the warm, sticky substance you found on the south side of a horse going north. Time didn’t heal, it only blunted. After awhile, the loss didn’t slice you open with a switchblade, it hacked at you with a rusty Boy Scout hatchet.
He missed her with every breath, with every memory, and the desire just to hold her, talk to her, was so powerful sometimes he’d get in the car and drive around with the windows rolled up, yelling and crying until he was hoarse and exhausted.
Andi kept him sane, centered and focused. Emily had brought her into the world at great risk and then given her life to save the child. He would do everything he could to love the little girl enough for both of them.
The doorbell rang, and when he heard Andi squeal, “Miss Theresa!” he smiled.
Daniel had been teaching himself how to prepare meals that required more skill than popping a Healthy Home dinner into the microwave. Despite the awkwardness of maneuvering his still-casted wrist, he’d discovered he actually enjoyed cooking. For this get-together, he’d selected steak—which Jack ate so close to raw it was downright disgusting. Theresa’d stopped by Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald’s on her way, and arrived bearing a cache of homemade jellies, jams and Miss Minnie’s famous tomato preserves.
There was laughter now among them, gentle and soft as confetti. It struck Daniel that each had suffered such great loss that the blessing of laughter was a grace as unexpected as it was joyful.
They’d been in a war, were still in a war.
In war, there were casualties; innocents died.
In war, everything good and pure was damaged; lives were changed irrevocably.
In war, you learned to treasure what you had left with a fierce, determined delight. Because in war, it could all be taken away from you in a heartbeat.
As Daniel served after-dinner coffee in the living room, Jack turned on the television set to see if the Indianapolis Colts were playing. They were—behind twenty-one to nothing—so he hit the mute button. That way he could glance at it now and then but not have to endure the play-by-play agony of yet another loss.
“Bishop was a Steelers fan,” Theresa said, “and they’s my team, too.”
“A pox on you,” Daniel said.
“I liked you a whole lot better before you told me that,” Jack said.
“I’m gonna make brownies,” Andi said, both cheeks dented with deep-dish dimples. “Well, heat them up in the microwave so they smell like I just made them.” She headed off to the kitchen with Ossy following, his tail stuck as straight in the air as a flagpole.
In the brief beat after her departure, Jack dropped words nobody wanted to hear, into the room.
“Sheriff Lincoln called yesterday,” he said. “He’s got a little boy up before the juvie judge this week for—caught red-handed trying to set fire to a cat and—”
“We can’t wait no longer,” Theresa said. “Them young-uns is only doin’ little-kid harm now, but just ’cause they’s too young to do something awful don’t mean we can let them stay like they is, suffering inside like that.”
* * *
Jack remembered the flashes he’d seen of Cole Stuart’s tortured soul and shuddered. Still, he hadn’t wanted to bring it up, didn’t want even to think about it. But there was no way around it. Poor Daniel was only beginning to lose that desolate, haggard look, just beginning to get some bounce back into his step.
And Theresa had aged. Jack might not be remembering properly, but he could have sworn her hair had had only a few streaks of gray around the temples when he saw her that day in Andi’s hospital room. Now, the gray was rushing out over her whole head in streaks. It was almost pure white around her face.
And Andi…she’d have to be a part of this. His whole mind and heart backed up from that.
It had started the day Daniel went in for the second out-patient surgery on his wrist. Uncle Jack sneaked off with Andi and taught her how to shoot pool. To her father’s great distress, Jack had later reported solemnly that the child was destined to become a shark someday. Jack taught her how to roller skate, too, at an old rink a friend opened on Saturday mornings just for the two of them. He’d taken to renting movies every so often and they’d all curl up with a big bowl of popcorn—Daniel, Theresa, Andi, Jack and Ossy—and enjoy Andi’s favorites, putting Jack on a first-name basis with beings he’d never dreamed existed—Woody and Buzz, Sully and Mike Wazowski, Nemo and Dorie and Wall-E and a rat chef in Paris. Jack was already planning what he was going to get Andi for her eleventh birthday and it was still months away.
To drag that little girl into a battle with a monster demon…Jack could still feel her limp body in his arms, her warm blood soaking into his shirt.
I don’t ever have to be afraid, Uncle Jack, because you’ll always keep me safe.
He’d lay his life down for that child, but that would be small protection, a fragile, pallid shield against the dark monster rising out of the lake of fire.
“Seems like the first thing we need to do is understand a lot more about what we’re up against,” Daniel said. “It’s all there in Bishop’s study…somewhere. We—”
He stopped. The Colts game had given way to a news short and apparently Bradford’s Ridg
e’s famous native son was the subject of the story.
Daniel picked up the remote and flipped on the sound as Jack grumbled under his breath.
“The president issued a statement earlier today and I am humbled by his faith in me,” Chapman Whitworth said. “This position is not one I have sought out or desired but I am compelled by a responsibility to serve my country—”
“Oh, please.” Jack rolled his eyes.
“—and I have therefore accepted the president’s nomination to the vacant seat on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.”
“Goody,” Jack groaned. “Chappy’s gotten more mileage out of one simple sentence than Lincoln got out of the whole Gettysburg Address.”
Chapman Whitworth stepped back from the podium to thunderous applause and cheers. He smiled, raised both hands in victory and waved.
“You’ll have to go through—” Jack began, mocking Whitworth’s pompous tones. Then he froze, stopped breathing. Whitworth had touched the fingertips of his left hand to his forehead and snapped them upward in a strange salute to the crowd.
Flames all around him. Harsh heat and red light. Screams of agony.
Chapman Whitworth stands next to a hospital bed in a burning room where a skinny old man in wet pajamas is feebly trying to push him away. Whitworth turns to a table—his eyes never leaving Jack’s face—and picks up a vase that flaming silk flowers have turned into a torch. That’s when he does it. He touches the fingertips of his left hand to his forehead and snaps them upward in a strange salute to Jack. Then he drops the flaming flowers on the old man. The man is an instant fireball from head to foot. His pajamas—that was gasoline! Whitworth watches him burning and screaming, writhing, twisting for a few moments, then drops a blanket on him to smother most of the flames and—
A shriek like the sound of ripping cloth came from the doorway into the kitchen. Jack turned as Andi let the plate of micro-wave-warmed brownies slip out of her fingers and shatter on the floor at her feet. Then she backed away, shaking her head, her eyes fixed on the television screen in the corner.
Daniel ran to the child, grabbed her into his arms and asked her what was wrong.
“That man…” she couldn’t go on.
“Is there a demon—?” Daniel began.
“No!” She shook her head violently. “Not a demon. It’s…there’s red light coming from him, all around him, he glows red and there’s a face in the light.” Jack could see she wanted to look away but couldn’t. “The face…” She shook her head, couldn’t describe it. “He’s so angry, so full of hate. His teeth are like—”
“They look like knives, three rows of them.” The voice came from behind them. It was Theresa. She wasn’t looking at Whitworth, though. She was looking at Andi. “And he’s got red eyes with a black center that’s slit up and down like a cat.”
Andi nodded, her eyes fixed in horror and revulsion on the screen until the image suddenly blinked out. Daniel had picked up the remote and turned the television off.
Andi fell against her father’s chest as if released from some unseen force. Theresa slumped back on the couch and put her hands over her face.
“Perfect possession,” she said, her voice so low it was barely audible. She lowered her hands and looked from Jack to Daniel. “That’s not like when a demon possesses a person, forces his way in, shoves the person aside. It’s called perfect possession when a person invites a demon in. Asks for possession. Joins with the demon. Only a powerful demon, one with the authority to—”
“The efreet.” Jack heard the word come out of his mouth before he thought it. “Chappy invited it. Wanted it. Shoot, maybe even summoned it—that’d make sense, with his father, the sticky-fingered anthropologist, going to all those ancient digs.”
Jack struggled for words to continue. “I just…saw something. One of those expelled memories.”
Suddenly, he understood. “The Twin Oaks fire—I was there! I saw Whitworth, and he—”
“—done all those amazing, heroic things he done because he was in league with the Devil,” Theresa said.
Jack took in a great gulp of air that smelled like brownies. “And now that demon prince—”
Daniel’s voice was almost too soft to hear as he finished Jack’s thought.
“—has just been nominated to the United States Supreme Court.”
THE DECEIVING
BOOK TWO OF THE KNOWING TRILOGY
By
NINIE
HAMMON
Click FREE DOWNLOAD
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers,
against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.
Ephesians 6:12
There are more things in Heaven and Earth
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare
The devil went down to Georgia, lookin’ for a soul to steal.
Charlie Daniels
All that is required for evil to triumph is
for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
* * *
CHAPTER 1
Harrelton, Ohio
September 22,
2011
Something was wrong. Sixty-four-year-old Theresa Washington could sense it the way her grandpa could feel the sudden ache of arthritis in his bones when the weather was about to change. She tried to deny it, of course, would likely continue to deny it all the way up until she found out what the bad was.
Lightning shattered the darkness, shards of a broken mirror raining out of the sky. She tensed for the bowling-alley rumble of thunder that would follow as the street ahead appeared and disappeared in rhythm with the wipers’ sweep across the windshield.
“Fool!” she muttered aloud. “Out in a storm like this. You deserve to run off the road into a ditch.” Course you seldom got what it was you deserved in this life, and most times that was a good thing.
She turned down Elmcrest Circle, where the streetlights glowed through the wall of rain, but all the houses was dark. The storm must have knocked out the 'lectricity. She could see lights in the windows of most houses, though, flickerin' candles or the bright, almost-yellow glow of a lantern.
Miss Minnie got decorative candlesticks in every room in that whole house. Even the bathroom. They’s fine!
That was the thing, though, wasn’t it? Theresa didn’t really believe Minnie and Gerald Cohen was fine at all. Oh, today was Thursday, and she hadn’t missed goin' to see the elderly Jewish couple every Thursday evenin' in years. But that’s not why she was out in this monsoon. She was here 'cause of the ache of evil in her bones.
The house at 1107 wasn't quite as dignified as the other old homes on the tree-lined street, courtesy of the bronze lions that sat like they was standin' guard on either side of the driveway. The whole yard would have been littered with concrete ducks, garden gnomes and bird baths, too, if Mr. Gerald hadn’t drawn a line in the sand at the lions. Oh, how Miss Minnie did love to shop at garage sales and flea markets back when she could still get around by herself! And she hadn't never been able to pass up a bargain. Mr. Gerald said she’d a'brought home a dead horse if she coulda got it for half price.
Theresa’s headlights washed the lions in a harsh light when she turned off the street. The house was totally dark. Not a single light in any of the rooms that faced the street. Aw, but that didn't mean nothin'. They had them heavy drapes pulled was all. There was plush drapes in every room. Miss Minnie called the ones in the parlor Scarlet O'Hara drapes 'cause they was made out of green velvet and had tassels on the tiebacks.
Theresa opened the car door and held the mini umbrella she kept stuck up under the front seat out into the cold rain, openin' it to cover her as she got out. Didn’t do hardly no good at all, though, soon's she stepped away from the car. Wasn’t nothin' mini gonna cover up her maxi. But it did keep her head dry as she went splashin' up the sidewalk through ankle-deep puddles.
The wet rub
ber soles on her new shoes squeaked on the Moroccan tiles on the porch. The shoes wasn’t broke in yet, hurt her feet, but they went with the white Good Samaritan Hospital’s Ladies Auxiliary uniform she wore, and the old ones was worn out. She could have stopped by her house for some shoes that didn’t pain her—and to get a raincoat!—but that’s when the knowing of it come on her, and she drove straight to the Cohens’ house.
There was no sound from inside when she knocked on the door. It was a big house, though. If neither one of them had they hearing aids in, they’d miss her knockin' altogether. But they'd be listenin' for it. They was expectin' her. And what about Buscuit? The old couple had took in a mongrel pup a couple of years ago, and now the dog never left Mr. Gerald's side. He always set up a ruckus, barkin' and carrin' on when Theresa come to visit, so excited he'd near wet himself.
Where was the dog?
She started to go around to the side door but didn't want to step back out into the cold downpour. She tried the knob instead. The door wasn’t locked. Theresa grunted in annoyance as she pushed it open. It was time for the lecture again, 'bout how they'd oughta lock—
The darkness wasn’t from the drapes. Wasn't a single candle lit anywhere. The entry hall was a black cavern, and the house beyond was still and quiet. Theresa’s heart kicked into a gallop. She closed her umbrella and stepped inside, and even though she knew it wouldn't do no good, she still reached out to the switch beside the door. There was a crystal chandelier high above her head, all decorated with cobwebs, that had become a word-picture for Theresa of the decay of the huge house the old couple didn't have the means or the energy to care for anymore.
She flipped the switch up and down a time or two, but no light danced in the dusty crystals. Though some part of her didn't want to disturb the silence all around her, Theresa called out, "Miss Minnie. Mr. Gerald. Where you at?"