Cursed Be the Child

by Mort Castle

  Knuckles hard against her teeth, Vicki pressed down a cry. Then she sprang at Warren and grabbed his upper right arm, sinking her fingers into the muscle.

  Ignoring her, Warren brandished his left fist in Evan’s face. “Afraid? I’m afraid I might knock your pious ass into the middle of next week.” Warren twisted and pulled back, freeing himself of Vicki’s grasp.

  “You have your faith healing party tonight,” Warren said, “and then you take your holy nose out of our business or I’ll…” He backed out of the kitchen, eyes shifting paranoiacally from one to the other.

  The threat hung in the air, the more menacing for being uncompleted.

  “I’m sorry,” Vicki said, eyes down. “He’s upset.”

  Yes, Evan Kyle Dean grimly decided, but his brother-in-law’s fear and fury were somehow linked to the living wickedness in this house. Like heavy invisible fog, evil filled the rooms of the Barringers’ home. He felt it clinging to him, could smell its sour corruption with each breath, hear it whispering lewd promises and hideous threats just beyond the range of normal hearing.

  That evil had in some way touched Warren Barringer.

  But not Vicki Barringer. He saw that. His sister-in-law’s innocence might have been an aura, a pure light emanating from a soul that had no secrets.

  He would discover the secrets. He would command all that lay hidden to become known!

  He would cast the devils of this house back into the pit of darkness.

  “Warren doesn’t mean anything,” Vicki was saying. “Sometimes he can…”

  “Don’t apologize, Vicki. I do understand. It’s all right.” Evan gently took her hand. “Now, I’d like to meet my niece, Melissa.”

  That is what he said.

  What he meant was that he was ready to vanquish evil.

  As he went down the hall, his heart pounded so much that he feared it would pop the buttons off his shirt. A savage, rough-edged pressure roared in his ears. He wanted to kill, to take his bullshit brother-in-law by the throat and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until those fucking sincere eyes popped out of that cornpone face!

  Brother-in-law Evan Kyle looked at him and somehow saw right through him. It was as if Warren Barringer could not conceal anything from the fucking minister!

  The moment he closed the door of his study behind him, he felt better. Sanctuary! He switched on the light. He could breathe now. He felt okay—no anger, no fear. Another deep and calming breath. He had to admit he had come near to freaking, but it was his house, and he was in charge.

  A place for everything. Everything in its place. All right. Work on the book a little? His secret and wonderful, audacious and true book!

  He was tackling this one in an unusual way, just letting it flow without elaborate plot outlines or character sketches. Nothing but what popped into his head was transferred directly to the page. Later, he would compile it and put it all together so that it made sense for a reader.

  Right now, the book had to make sense only for him.

  He pulled back the desk chair and sat down. Again, he assured himself that he had nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear. He was Warren Barringer, respectable college professor and respected writer. He was goddamned Mr. Clean. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, no vices to speak of…

  Warren Barringer, family man, was a decent provider, a thoughtful and considerate husband, an attentive father.

  He rolled a sheet of paper into the Underwood.

  He loved his kid.

  He loved kids.

  His fingers went to the typewriter, but they didn’t move, fingertips rooted on the keys. Nothing flowed from mind to paper. His mind was empty.

  He slid open the right hand desk drawer. He took out the white china doll, the little girl with the bonnet and basket of eggs…

  He knew what he had to do. He knew what he would do.

  He remembered the promise he had made, and the loving promise she had made.

  His brain was bursting with things he had to say. With a very few words, he said all of them:

  He loved the little girl.

  He could not help himself.

  He was what he was.

  He studied the three sentences.

  He read them aloud in a monotone.

  It was said, and there came to him an instant of perfect understanding as he abandoned his last vestiges of hope in the lie called free will.

  Warren Barringer was lost.

  And he knew it.

  — | — | —

  Thirty-Nine

  She turned her head and looked up from the Snow White coloring book. A lovely child, he thought, just lovely.

  Standing beside him, just inside Melissa’s room, Vicki said, “Melissa, this is your Uncle Evan.”

  “Hi, Uncle Evan.” The smile came immediately with no hint of shyness. Her eyes shone. “Everyone calls me Missy, except sometimes Mom when I’m bad.”

  “Hello, Missy,” he said.

  She put the red crayon down on her table and stood up. “I didn’t have to go to school today, and we bought this new dress this morning ’cause you were coming.” She smoothed her dress, dark green corduroy with lace collar and sleeve trim. “You know, I usually just like to wear my jeans, but this is a pretty neat dress. Even though it’s brand new, there’s something kinda old-fashioned about it, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Evan Kyle Dean agreed. Something old-fashioned about the child herself, he thought. With her golden hair combed simply back and the wispy lace about her pale, swanlike neck, she reminded him of an antique cameo portrait, an idealized artistic image of the way children ought to be.

  This was a mistake, he thought. He did not belong here. His niece had no need of his power to bring healing, to cleanse souls. As rude as Warren had been, his brother-in-law, it appeared, had accurately assessed the situation. And Vicki had been deceived by others or by herself in this age of high anxiety, tabloid terrors, fundamentalist fanatics and false prophets.

  Why, look at the little girl! Melissa Barringer, guileless and bubbling, absolutely glowed with physical and spiritual well-being. Could he believe that she…

  He tensed. Evan Kyle Dean cautioned himself to take a moment for the most profound consideration. First impressions, that was all! First impressions gathered only by his five senses, not his soul-sense, the intuitive, godly feeling within that unerringly discerned truth from falsehood.

  The nice little girl standing before him was a lie! A blackness, thick and menacing, pressed down on him. He felt it. There was evil here. It shook his confidence, so easily had he almost allowed himself to be gulled by this deception! The home of the Barringers, his in-laws, was a temple of lies, all of them stemming from the father of lies who had dared him to test his soul’s mettle against the powers of evil.

  Melissa put a hand to her head and wound a strand of hair around her first two fingers. She gazed at him placidly, and this time, he truly gazed back and looked within her. What he saw was not innocent and young and untainted. What he saw was not beautiful.

  In the child’s eyes burned depravity, a relentless will that acknowledged neither the evolving ethics of Man or the eternal laws of God.

  There was something else there—a cold and confident dare. I will do as I want. Who are you to oppose me?

  He spoke the answer only to himself. I am the blessed and chosen of the Lord God Almighty. I will prevail.

  He gently took Vicki’s elbow and steered her from the room. “Missy and I need to get to know each other,” he said. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

  The little girl untwirled the spirals of hair around her fingers.

  With the door closed, he said, “Now we can talk, just you and I. Uncle Evan and Missy.”

  “Sure,” she said, “but is it okay if I finish coloring my picture?”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She seated herself again at her little table, concentrating, lips pursed, gui
ding the tip of the red crayon precisely within the outline of the apple the warty-nosed, black-cowled woman offered Snow White.

  He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. The apple grew ferociously red. Without turning her head, she said, “I’m glad you’re here, Uncle Evan.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I get to stay up late an’ everything. I’ll get to finish this picture tonight. And Mom said I won’t have to go to school tomorrow.” She giggled. “I’ve missed a lot of school. I could care less. You miss a year, and all you have to do is three pages from your workbook and you’re all made up!”

  “You’re doing a fine job of coloring,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I do pretty good, I guess. My friend Dorothy Morgan says she’s the best colorer in the whole second grade, but I am. No brag. Just fact.”

  “Is that who you are?” Evan asked. “The best colorer in the second grade?”

  She turned around to look at him and grinned. “Yup, that’s me.” Then she tapped the crayon tip on the nose of the hag. “And she is a little old lady, except she really isn’t. Sometimes she’s a wicked witch. And sometimes she’s the evil queen. Isn’t it funny how she can be two people at once like that, Uncle Evan?”

  “Do you think it’s funny?”

  “Kinda. It’s like she’s got this big secret, and she’s fooling everybody!” She put down the crayon. She began to play with her hair, winding it around her fingers.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Do you have a big secret?”

  She hesitated. “Maybe…” she said, her tone noncommittal.

  But now on her face, he saw the plea, the desperation and hope that the dark furies within her eyes might be cast out. Had she been speaking to him, he could have heard her no more clearly: I have secrets, terrible sinful secrets. Bring these dark secrets before the holy light of God that is yours, Uncle Evan, and they will disappear. Help me, Uncle. Save me.

  I will, he vowed.

  Her fingers curled a strand of hair.

  “Do you want to tell me your secret?”

  She nodded, then her face twisted, lower lip curling down like a crescent of raw flesh, eyes brimming with tears.

  He picked her up, and she clung to him. It felt as though he were holding a living, sobbing, block of ice. Evil had attacked her, was inside her and attacking her at this very instant. He felt that.

  “You cry, Melissa,” he said. “Tears will help.” He sat down on the foot of her bed, holding her on his lap. “And when you’ve cried as much as you need to, then we’ll fix it all.”

  He shivered as she squeezed tighter against him. His arms encircled her—and he could not see the too-wise, most unchildlike grin she pressed into his shirt.

  She cried. She wanted to laugh, but she wept. Uncle was patting her back, telling her it was okay for her to cry.

  Of course. Uncle wanted her to cry. Uncles liked tears. If they didn’t, would uncles know so many ways to make you cry?

  But she was smart. She had learned the lessons she needed to know to survive. She knew all about mamas who went away and mamas who had no love for you, and she knew all about uncles who could hurt you even while they were saying how much they loved you.

  Now she knew games and secrets and tricks to stay alive.

  I will not die! Never!

  She sniffled. She crawled her right hand up his chest. Almost invisible between the pads of her thumb and index finger was a single blond hair plucked from her head, charged with her life force and will and energy.

  As he told her he would help her, that he would free her, that he would return her to goodness, she carefully slipped the hair inside his shirt collar.

  “Uncle, do you love me?” she asked.

  Certainly he…

  Of course he loved her. There are ways to make the men love you, to make Uncle love you.

  …loved her. She was his very own niece, and she was one of God’s children.

  “Come with me,” she said to him.

  And holding her hand, he did.

  He heard his blood hissing in his veins. He had gone beyond the restraints of mundane self and mortal flesh. He felt exalted and radiant with a peculiar grace that was his and his alone, the grace of goodness that was the gift of the servant of the Lord, Evan Kyle Dean.

  Holding the child’s hand as she led him downstairs, he did not doubt that now would come his battle with evil—his battle and his victory.

  He had no intimation of the form evil might take nor of how it would rise up to attempt to destroy him, but Evan Kyle Dean did not doubt. He had faith. He knew what manner of miracles he had worked and could work, he knew among his gifts was the powerful gift of casting out unclean spirits, he knew that he was above all a good man, a righteous and true man.

  In the living room, Vicki Barringer started to rise from the sofa. He saw the worried questions on her face.

  “It’s all right,” he told her.

  The child took him down another flight of stairs to the basement.

  Television, comfortable lounging furniture, a wet bar and a stereo system were all supposed to make it the family room, but it was the basement, and he felt the chill and the cold, smelled the wet and the lingering black odor of coal, the stomach-turning stink of rotten food and urine and feces and sickness. Though the lights were on, there was no light, only in the pungent, cruel dark glow of her eyes.

  And Evan Kyle Dean knew. Transcendent, he had freed himself from the prison of the present, and he had journeyed into the past, as real for him as this instant’s present.

  He understood now that this singular manifestation of evil came into this world in the past.

  Right here, in a cold and damp basement, was a place of torment and perversion, wickedness and death, and what had happened here, like the memory of evil, could never entirely disappear from the universe.

  I’m so alone, Uncle. I’m afraid and alone. Please be good to me…

  Did Melissa say that? He thought she did. Something like confusion wriggled in the back of his mind. Melissa had changed. She looked the same, but not the same.

  But she was alone and afraid, and he had to give her comfort and shield and protect her from the evil surrounding her…surrounding them.

  “Please, won’t you hold me, Uncle? Be nice to me.”

  Like a man coming out of anesthesia, he was disoriented; past and present, reality and illusion were a soft fuzz. But in the floating uncertainty, he did know one thing. Hold her. Be nice to her.

  He had to do what she’d asked.

  So he sat on the sofa, rocking her on his lap, and she was whispering to him, her breath a warm wind in his ear, petting his face, whispering in his ear, wiggling on his lap, patting his back, whispering warm secrets in his ear, whispering…

  He felt tired, as though he were on the verge of badly needed sleep. No, it was more like he had dropped directly into dream without first drifting, into slumber.

  And she whispered in his ear and whispered. Her voice was wetly sweet with promises. She promised to be nice to him. She promised to love him. She promised to be good to him. She promised to make him happy, to make him very, very happy.

  A lovely child, a dear little girl. It was a wavy, feathery thought, exactly like a thought in a dream. He did want her to love him. He would be gentle and kind to her and she would always love him.

  She slipped off his lap and stood between his knees. Then she knelt.

  His mind lay buried beneath lazy dream weight, but in his belly and below was a stirring, a tingling of arousal.

  She unzipped his trousers…

  Yes!

  …and her hand, small and warm, reached for him.

  Something like lightning flared in his brain and he rocked forward, sinking his fingers into her shoulders, paralyzing her with his grip. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “I love you, Uncle. Don’t hurt me!”

  Hurt her? He wanted to kill her! He wanted to use
his fists, to feel her body break and tear as he hit her and hit her and hit her. He wanted to work her destruction with his own bare hands. She was a temptress, a monster! She was a…

  “Whore! You whore!” He was a good man, and she was a whore who sought to ruin him, to destroy him, and he would punish her for that. He would kill her. He sank the fingers of his left hand deep into her shoulder, and she writhed in his grasp as he balled his right hand into a fist and drew it back.

  She smiled.

  He groaned. He released her. With a knee, he unintentionally pushed her back on the carpet as he got up. Fingers palsied, he yanked up his zipper, then he reeled up the stairs. He heard her call after him. “Uncle! You want me…”

  Then he was in the kitchen.

  With a deep breath, he understood. He had gone down to the basement to learn about the wicked spirit that threatened his niece, to meet the evil of the Barringer house.

  He had indeed.

  And somehow the evil had invaded him.

  He could not deal with it now. He felt as though he had been beaten with clubs. He was exhausted. He needed to sleep.

  Then she was there, standing at the head of the stairs to the family room. Her look was one of studied innocence even while it proclaimed that they shared a guilty secret.

  She was there, too, a few minutes later, as he stood with Vicki and Warren in the foyer. There were things he had to think about, to consider, he said, and so for the time being, he didn’t want to say anything.

  Vicki said she understood, but her expression told him she didn’t, not at all. “Have faith,” he told her.

  Then Warren, surprisingly, stepped forward with an apology. He was sorry. He was out of line.

  He knew they all wanted to do the right thing for Melissa.

  “So, please, forget all the earlier brouhaha and stay the night.”

  “No, thank you,” Evan Kyle Dean said. He needed distance from this place, he thought, and from the child. He needed to rest and gather his strength.

  Warren got Evan his coat. He thanked him, and Evan thought he sounded sincere.

  “I’m glad you came, Uncle,” the child said.