I picked up the knife from a puddle of waste oil. The black, fetid corpse liquor was all that was left of Janis Mezzanotte. With one swipe of the blade, I severed the rope that tethered my Diane to the gibbet. She stumbled forward, then stood there befuddled, wearing the rope like a tail. I yelled, “Run for it!”
Diane hesitated, staring at her reflection in the puddle of Janis’s remains. Realizing what I had left undone, I grabbed Diane’s amulet and gave another yank.
Diane’s mole caught fire in a hissing, bottle-rocket flameout. A creaking sound escaped her lips, followed by a taut groaning—that low, guttural rattle in the throat that means too much pain to scream. She tried to run but fell to the ground in agony. When she rose again I knew she had come to herself. She covered her breasts as fully as possible with one forearm, her genitals with the other. We looked at each other as though seeing ourselves naked for the first time.
“Ricky,” she whispered, “what happened?”
Artie stepped forward, still holding the pistol. I moved to shield Diane, brandishing the dagger at him like a ginsu knife. He laughed, then opened his other hand. In it were a quantity of white tablets and a vial containing clear liquid.
“Take two or three of these and call me in the morning,” he said. “Otherwise her fucking moneybags are coming right off, Counselor. There ain’t no third way. And hand over that goddamn toad-sticker before you hurt somebody.”
I looked at him warily, without moving.
“C’mon, man. Take these, you and your old lady, and mellow out. Mad’s watching your kids back at the mansion. She ain’t even gonna charge you for it this time.” He moved closer and muttered under his breath, “Just give Kokker his knife and get this party the fuck over with. Nobody’s in the mood for no human sacrifice tonight. Be kind of anticlimactic after the meltdown shit we already seen, you know?”
An annoying two-toned alarm clock going off in my ear. Or was it the doorbell? Flashing lights, sirens, and confusion. I must have fallen asleep again sitting up in the recliner with the TV on and had one of those dreams where I was the only one naked. Except that Diane was in the dream too, and she was as naked as I was, but for the barn-red paint all over her. The paramedics sure seemed to notice it. But it was when they noticed our four kids whimpering in the rear of Diane’s van that I really picked up on their disapproval.
Now I’m in the Lawyers’ Assistance Program—the one for attorney drunks and druggies—and the Department of Children and Family Services is so much a part of our lives we often feel like setting them a place at the dinner table. Fortunately, all the leading and suggestive videotaped interviews in the world couldn’t shake our kids from the truth: they hadn’t been molested, especially not by Mommy and Daddy. Besides, they’d all seen both of us naked before, though never unconscious in a van parked in traffic and facing the wrong direction on the Poplar Street Bridge.
The State of Illinois let me keep my law license but not my driver’s license. Go figure. I’m still working on completing the remaining eighteen-hundred forty-nine of my two thousand hours’ community service, which fits in nicely with my new position directing a legal aid agency specializing in child advocacy. Fortunately, Diane’s antique business is doing well enough to pay the mortgage for now.
Those late nights when the house is quiet and I can’t sleep, when Diane’s eyes have become narrow cat slits once more, I gaze into her sleeping paradise face and try to draw some grand philosophical principle from everything that has happened to us.
So far, this is the best I’ve been able to come up with. While it is undeniably true that evil can and often does wear a human face, I have witnessed the free-ranging power of bodiless evil, have looked into its awful countenance and shuddered at its voice. I’ll take the human face of evil any day.
The way I look at things now, we all co-exist in an uneasy symbiosis with evil in the world. Perhaps there’s a chess game going on between God and the devil. God knows He’s bound to win, but He hasn’t cleared the board yet and the devil may be enjoying the game so much that he’s not ready to concede. Until that final checkmate happens, my game plan is to stick to my own assigned square and avoid any sudden moves.
THE END
St. Agnes' Eve Page 32