Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  This lasted nearly ten years. Then one day Simon returned. He opened up the house again, but it was not the same. In fact, Simon was not the same. Whereas before he had been infallibly pleasant and well-mannered, he was now surly and brusque. To account for this change, various explanations cropped up, one that he had been jilted by a woman, most likely an Italian countess. Others said Simon’s mind had been twisted and poisoned by the Church of Rome. But there was another and more probable explanation—namely, that Simon was simply bitter at his failure to prove himself the great artist he had always felt himself to be. Then, too, there was the incident that happened right after Simon returned from Italy. Ordering his servants to gather together the paintings and drawings of his youth, he had them all piled in a heap behind the house. “Now burn them,” he had ordered. “All of them.”

  Shortly after this, people began to suspect that Simon’s problem went more deeply than simply having been disappointed in his artistic aspirations. Simon spent both his days and nights locked up in his studio, refusing to let anyone enter the room either to clean it or to bring him his food. The handful of servants Simon kept on told of hearing Simon late at night pacing back and forth or talking loudly to himself, or suddenly breaking into strange, frightening bouts of laughter that often went on for a half hour at a time. Finally, there was the report of the oldest servant, a black man named Jasper Washington, who claimed that he would sometimes hear not one but two sets of footsteps coming from the upstairs floor in the middle of the night.

  By this time only one man still came to see Simon, the town’s Methodist minister, with whom Simon had long been friends. Having always respected the minister for his learning as well as for his high character, Simon continued to allow his presence.

  It was on one of the minister’s visits that Simon first communicated his secret. He had begun seeing visions. Simon said they had all started simply enough, coming to him in a dream. At first, however, he did not grasp what was happening, dismissing it all as the play of his imagination. But then one night, after the same dream had continued for nearly a week, Simon began to think perhaps he was losing his mind. “But then,” Simon went on, “he told me why I had been chosen, and of the work I had been chosen to accomplish.”

  “What is that?” the minister had asked him.

  To create the greatest work of art any human being has ever been called upon to create. Something beside which the Sistine Chapel pales,” Simon had whispered, his eyes dancing wildly. “I have been asked to paint the Second Coming.”

  “And who had asked you to do this?” the minister asked, still not sure whether Simon was serious.

  “A messenger of the Lord. An angel who comes to me in my sleep, in my dreams. Each night he unfurls some new piece of the great vision, and each morning, on waking up, I must commit that piece of it to my canvas.”

  Week after week the minister returned to the house, concerned with what evidently was happening to Simon’s mind. But on each visit he was greeted with the same proud, joyous confidence. Then one day the minister found Simon in a different frame of mind, gloomy, downcast, visibly upset by something. He asked Simon if something had happened. Was the messenger still coming?

  Simon nodded yes.

  “The visions, then? Is he still giving you the visions?”

  Simon’s dazed and vacant eyes momentarily flickered. “They aren’t visions,” he whispered.

  “What are they, then?”

  “Nightmares,” Simon whispered. He looked for a moment at the minister and said with a croak. “It isn’t what I thought it would be. The Second Coming. It isn’t what I thought—”

  “Can’t you just stop?” the minister asked, disturbed by Simon’s expression no less than by his words.

  But Simon only shook his head. “Too late,” he whispered. And then, without another word, he turned away and slowly ascended the stairway of the mammoth mansion.

  For the next two months Simon refused to open his doors to anyone, even the minister. He was absolutely alone now. Finally, one night in midsummer, the minister made one last try to see Simon. This time Simon let him in.

  Although only two months had passed, Simon looked as though he had aged twenty years. His hair had turned white; his cheeks were sunken; his eyes were vacant. Everything about him showed plainly that he was a dying man.

  Simon had been given the final vision. It was on this that Simon had been working, day and night for the past two months. It was this that was literally draining him of his life, stroke by stroke.

  “What is this vision?” the minister had asked.

  “His face.”

  “You mean, the face of Christ?”

  Looking into the minister’s eyes, Simon shook his head. “I thought it was at first, but now I don’t know any longer.”

  “When will it be finished?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  Simon went on, “I have been shown everything. Everything except the eyes. And tonight I must paint the eyes.”

  It was the last time the minister saw Simon.

  Two nights later, only hours after the Randolph mill had been burned to the ground, a farmer told of a strange incident. He claimed to have seen Simon Randolph wandering, more dead than alive, by the side of a narrow dirt road not too far from the mill. The farmer got out and asked what was wrong, but Simon didn’t seem to hear him. He just kept walking in the direction of the river, mumbling the same words over and over again.

  “The eyes...the eyes.”

  No one, after that night, ever saw Simon Randolph again. Naturally, people being the way they are, there were claims from time to time of seeing a ghostly figure walking through an orchard or peeping into a window. Still, the general consensus was that Simon had drowned out in the river. If he had kept on walking the way he was going that night, there would have been no avoiding it.

  Shortly afterward, word got around of Simon’s visions and the paintings he had made of them. The Randolph house was carefully examined in the hope of coming across these “masterpieces.” But no trace of them was found. There simply were no paintings. The studio Simon had worked in was empty. Even the paints and brushes were dry, looking as if they hadn’t been touched in months. Some concluded that Simon destroyed the paintings just as he had destroyed the earlier ones. Others maintained he had never painted them at all. Crazy as he was, he only thought he was painting them, which would explain why no one was ever allowed to see what they looked like.

  But there was another school of thought. It insisted that Simon had merely hidden the paintings somewhere. Perhaps buried them in one of his fields; or, more probably, concealed them in a secret room that only Simon knew how to enter.

  At this point in the story, Larry told Jamey, Hattie had gotten a certain spooky look in her eyes, dropping her voice to a hush as she continued.

  There was a boy who had come to Lucerne. A strange boy. No one knew much about him. They just assumed his parents had died and left him on his own. He said his name was Luther. Going about from farm to farm, he took up odd jobs lasting a day or two and then moved on.

  There was something, people said, about the way he looked at you, something that made a shiver run up your spine. And then, too, there was his hand. His right hand had been cut off at the wrist, clean as if an ax had sliced it. When asked how he came by it, the boy grinned—a mean, shuddery grin—and said, it was all on account of Jesus. His daddy, inflamed by the words of an itinerant preacher, had taken to heart the passage in the Gospel about cutting off the offending hand. And one night, when drunk, he had caught his boy out in the toolshed doing something with that hand he ought not to have been doing.

  For the most part people didn’t take either the boy or his story seriously. At least, not until the last night he went to the Randolph house.

  No one knows who told the boy the story of the pain
tings. But from the first moment he heard it, it seemed to become his obsession. Each evening he would walk the five miles out to the old house, by then deserted, and would search it once more, tapping on the walls, pulling up floorboards, peeking into cracks.

  Some said he was interested in the money, laboring under the doubtful impression that the paintings would be worth something. Others said he was a plain sex maniac and just wanted to get his hands on some dirty pictures, figuring that Simon wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble hiding them if they hadn’t been real eye-poppers.

  But there was yet another view. The boy, it was whispered, simply wanted to look into the eyes that drove Simon Randolph to the final pitch of madness. The eyes of Him in whose name the boy’s daddy had whacked off his right hand. The boy would stare into those eyes until they blinked.

  One night the boy Luther showed up at Tim Jackson’s farmhouse, announcing that he had found the way into the secret room. Taking out his only thing of value—a watch—he offered it in exchange for a pickax. Tim Jackson, not wishing to pass up a good deal, agreed.

  The next morning, after Tim Jackson’s story had gotten around, people went out to the place, curious to see what the hoy had been talking about. After a thorough search, they found not a single splinter of wood. No wall had been hacked out, no secret compartment opened. It was just as it always had been.

  They found the boy sitting on the cupola, his legs dangling through the railing. He was staring out into the woods behind the house.

  Those who saw him said they had never seen a face that looked the way his did. And never wanted to see another one.

  He was grinning, his eyes crazy on the nothingness in front of him.

  “I seen him,” he whispered in a kind of demented exaltation, though seeming to speak to nobody. “I seen him.”

  He was sent off two days later to the charity wards at the Milledgeville Hospital for the Insane. There he waited, as Hattie put it, just biding his time, staring in the same crazy way at the walls and whispering the same words over and over. Stayed there until the night when, somehow, he managed to slip between the bars in the window of the cell they kept him in.

  It was at this point that Hattie would tie in the other strand of the story.

  The minister, while shaken by what had happened at the Randolph house, was able to resume his normal life. Some years earlier, the minister’s wife had given birth to their first and only child, a girl they named Catherine. To her parents, both well into their forties, the girl was nothing less than a godsend, a blessing to them, much as Isaac had been to Abraham and Sarah. And for the next three or fours years, the minister was able to push from his mind the incident with Simon, dismissing it as an isolated case of insanity and nothing more.

  Here, in the original telling of the story, Hattie had stopped and taken a sip of whiskey, her face darkening with the recollection. “And then one night old Hattie had a dream. And the Lord, he done told her to go to that little girl.” And Hattie told of how she turned up at the parish house one day, her famous suitcase in hand, asking the minister and his wife if there was any work she could do for them. Kline and his wife, both good-hearted people, looked at the old woman’s gnarled and arthritic hands and asked her what kind of work she was able to do. “I’ll come and tell my stories,” she said. Just as Rev. Kline was about to ask her what she meant, his four-year-old daughter, Catherine, stepped into the room. Hattie kneeled down and opened her arms. “Why, just look at that sweet little angel,” Hattie said. And the girl ran to her. “What stories?” she asked. “I want to hear them.”

  And so for the next year Hattie walked the five miles every day to the parish house. Then one afternoon the minister happened to overhear the two of them talking quietly in Catherine’s room. Hattie had told Catherine of the power she had gotten from her daddy. The girl had looked at Hattie and whispered, “How will I die?” The old woman’s face had darkened over and she shook her head. “Don’t be asking me that.” But the girl had persisted. Finally, stroking her hair and pulling the child to her, Hattie had said, “Terrible—”

  Walking past the room, Rev. Kline snatched Hattie aside and told her to leave his house at once. Hattie looked him in the eyes, sadly shaking her head. “Ain’t nothing you can do to stop it a-coming,” she told him. “Can’t lock enough windows, can’t bolt enough doors. ’Cause what’s coming, it don’t need no door.” And then Hattie left, never to set foot in the Klines’ house again.

  Hattie had continued her story for Larry. “He loved his girl in the goodness of his heart. And he couldn’t bear to think of that sweet angel of his suffering. So he done everything he could to keep all that suffering away from his child. But you see, honey, ain’t nobody can keep suffering away, or darkness, neither. Ain’t nobody can suffer in somebody else’s place. Best we can do in this world, if we love somebody, is to get them ready for it, make them strong and ready for the suffering that’s a-coming. And that’s what old Hattie was tryin’ to do, best she knew how.”

  Then Hattie went on to say how even before she came to the Klines’ house, the preacher and his wife had already begun to notice there was something peculiar about the girl. Despite all her sweetness—which no one ever denied—there was something about their daughter that made people feel uneasy. Something too candid and penetrating about her eyes when they looked, at you. And something too remote and dreamlike when they looked away, as if they were fixed on some invisible presence that hovered right behind your back or over your shoulder. Though, as she got older, the flicker turned into something else. Into conversation and games. Into laughter and tears that nothing anyone else could see had brought on. And then the “incidents” began. Like the day when Catherine and the rest of her Sunday school class went on a picnic down by the Allatoona. Right when everyone was ready to go back home, they noticed that Catherine was missing. Afraid that something had happened to her, parties were sent out to try to find her. When they did, sometime later, she was standing on the bank of the river, gazing at something, smiling and even talking to it. But judging from the account of those who found her, there was nothing there but thin air. When asked who she was talking to, she turned and said, with genuine surprise, “Don’t you see him, too?” But they didn’t. Turning back around, her smile suddenly dissolved. “He’s gone now. He was so nice. But he’s gone.” She was seven.

  Later there were other episodes. Once Miss Amelia, the Sunday school teacher, came across Catherine in an empty room in the Methodist annex. She was standing with Hank. She was eleven and he was fourteen. Catherine was saying, “You can kiss me if you’d like to.” Hank, trembling and whispering the word “pretty,” had leaned forward toward Catherine, at which point Miss Amelia had screamed at him to stop. Later she asked Catherine why she had done it. “I felt sorry for him,” Catherine explained. “I thought he’d like to.”

  Yet even this was not as disturbing to the Klines as their daughter’s continuing fantasies. They had started when the girl was only three. Then Rev. Kline and his wife had simply acted as if there were nothing unusual in their daughter’s fantasy life, explaining her behavior as the result of an intelligent child’s overactive imagination. If she seemed to see things that weren’t there, she was doing no more than a thousand other normal children. And if she also talked to these creatures of hers, that, too, was not so peculiar. But the fantasies went on, and, after Hattie’s dismissal, became increasingly upsetting to her parents, though now they were at least able to blame their child’s behavior on the stories Hattie had told her. Still, Rev. Kline continued to hope that his daughter would suddenly grow out of it. But, as night after night he and his wife lay awake listening to the whispers coming from their daughter’s room, they began to wonder if that day would ever come.

  When Catherine was twelve, her father decided it was no longer enough to hope it would all go away. And so, one night, when he came upstairs to kiss his child good night, he sat do
wn on the edge of her bed. Earlier that week he had talked to old Doc about the problem and had been given the name of a good child psychologist in Macon. He began by telling Catherine that there was someone in Macon who wanted to talk to her about her imaginary playmates, and how they were going to drive up the next day so she could see the man.

  “Is he a doctor?” she asked, without looking up at her father.

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, honey.”

  “Is something wrong with me?” she whispered, her eyes sadly gazing down.

  Rev. Kline shook his head, heartstruck by the sadness in his daughter’s voice. Then, hugging her close to him, he kissed her on the back of the neck. “No, honey. It isn’t anything like that. Nothing like that at all. It’s just that sometimes little boys and girls think they see things that aren’t there. Sometimes they even talk to them. But when we start to grow up, they all go away. And, honey, you’re going to be a big girl soon. And that’s why we want you to talk to this doctor, honey. Because we think... we think it’s time that they all go away for you.”

  “But what if they don’t go, Daddy?”

  “They will. The doctor, he’ll be able to make them go away. I promise.” And then, as he had done many times before, Rev. Kline tried to explain it to her, saying it was simply her imagination playing tricks on her, adding how the doctor would help her see that he was right. As he spoke, Catherine said nothing, simply resting her head on her father’s chest, letting him stroke her long, honey-colored hair. Yet. when he had finished and went to lift Catherine up to kiss her, he saw that her eyes—the bluest, most heart- breakingly beautiful eyes he had ever seen—were full of tears. “What’s wrong, Catherine?” Collapsing her face back onto her father s chest, she started to sob softly, whispering, “I just want to be good, Daddy, I just want to make you happy.”

  “But you do make us happy, honey. You make us happier than anything in this whole world ever could.”