Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  He knew what they were. He had heard about them. The tattoos, crudely cut into the skin with the blade of a razor, then dabbed with ink until the wound had absorbed it. Once they were on, there was no way of getting them off.

  That much Larry knew already. But what he didn’t know—what no one knew except those few who had seen her—was how thickly they covered her slender body. The tattoos Larry had seen were always the kind men get in the Navy. The name of their sweetheart. The insignia of the Marine Corps. A rose. And, in the back of his mind, that was what Larry had always thought of.

  But these tattoos were different.

  The girl’s body seemed to crawl with them. Snakes undulated around her shoulders and arms, their mouths biting into her nipples, her stomach alive with huge, bloated penises. Crudely etched drops of sperm dripped down her sides, while scattered everywhere were open orifices: Mouths gaping, some with tongues darting out, some with blood oozing from them, vaginas spread wide, like ghastly jaws, bristling with hair. Into some of these had been stuck the penises, into others the snakes’ tails. And, running down from her navel, one huge snake, the largest, seemed to disappear, headfirst, between the girl’s spread-eagled legs.

  “Jesus,” Larry whispered, for the first time realizing why Doc had never allowed anyone else to see the girl after Luther had finished with her.

  Larry stood up and turned away.

  “Let’s get out of here, Jamey, ” he said. “It’s not right to look at them. They made Luther go crazy, just looking at them.”

  But Jamey was already staring at another picture, holding the flashlight in front of it. Larry looked around the room and saw that there were other pictures, all over, piled in each corner. One of the paintings caught his eye. He went toward it, staring down into the murky canvas. And once again he watched it, watched as the image seemed to rise up from some great depth, appearing to form before his eyes.

  He told himself: It’s just the shadows cast from the flickering candle. It had to be. He realized what he was looking at. His mouth went slack. “Jamey,” he said with a gasp.

  From behind him there was not a sound. His eyes still fixed on the image before him, Larry took another step back.

  “Look, Jamey. It’s...” Larry stopped, shaking his head. He couldn’t even say it.

  But there, on the thing in front of him, emerging from the darkness, was a face, a face that Larry had instantly recognized. It was Jamey’s. Only, in the swirling, flickering image, Larry saw something he had never seen before. In the picture Jamey’s eyes were wide. He was screaming. Screaming at something that must have been right in front of him. Larry moved closer, peering into the eyes. And, for a moment, as the details emerged, it was like something was glowing in the pupils of the eyes, the reflection of the thing in front of him.

  “Jamey,” Larry whispered. “It’s you.”

  Turning around, Larry saw that Jamey wasn’t where he had been a few moments before. He was now sitting in front of another picture. The one farthest back.

  Larry stared at him, feeling a chill that ran from his head to his foot.

  His face there in the dim glow, it was like the face Larry had just been looking at in the painting. A face that seemed to be looking down into some unfathomable horror, into the secret behind all darkness.

  Larry went toward him.

  “What is it? ” Then he gasped.

  Before, when Jamey had been looking into the picture of Catherine, his eyes had only seemed far away. But now they showed something else. Terror. That’s what Larry saw in the eyes of the other boy. Total and absolute terror.

  “Jamey, what is it?”

  And suddenly Larry heard the same voice that had somehow come out of Jamey’s mouth back when they had stopped on the dirt road. Only the voice sounded even meaner now, with a mocking, cruel meanness.

  “You take you a good look, Jameyboy. A real good look,” the voice said with a hiss. And then there was another voice. Jamey’s. It whispered desperately: “The eyes. . . the eyes. .”

  “The—” Larry stopped. It was right there in front of them. The last vision that the angel had given to Simon. The face. . .

  Sweat standing out on his forehead, his mouth open, his eyes full of horror, Jamey continued to whisper the same words over and over.

  “Jamey!” Larry called out. “Please, don’t look at it!”

  “The eyes,” Jamey whispered. “The eyes. . .”

  “Stop it! Look away! Jamey!”

  Larry suddenly vaulted across the floor, taking hold of Jamey’s arm. It was cold. Cold as ice. “Let’s get out of here, Jamey. Please. Here, you hold on to me. I’ll get you out.” Larry lifted the other boy to his feet. His body felt limp, like there was not a muscle in it. Half shoving, half dragging him, Larry got him through the first door and partway into the narrow corridor. Larry stopped, leaning back against the cold bare stone wall, to catch his breath. He looked at Jamey. His eyes still seemed glazed, and yet something told Larry that Jamey was no longer asleep. “Jamey. . . ?”

  And for the first time since he had found Jamey in the backyard that night, the other boy actually looked at him, looked at him in the dim light and met his eyes. Larry had never seen anything like it. Confused, dazed, numb with terror, Jamey’s eyes stared at Larry. “Why isn’t it over? The nightmare. Why isn’t it over?”

  Larry shook his head. He was about to say, “Because it’s not a nightmare.” But at that moment he heard something. He looked around, toward the door that opened back into the fireplace. He listened. The noises—muffled scraping; heavy, labored breathing; even a few half-caught words—were coming from the other side of the first door, from down in the fireplace. Or maybe even higher up. And before his mind could grasp it, his body knew what he had heard, and as he went to whisper. “Oh, shit,” Larry felt himself nearly gagging on the word and on the fear that had prompted it.

  Somebody was down there. Somebody had found the footholds and was struggling to come up. To come up to the hidden room. He waited a second, hoping he was wrong, hoping to see that it was just his overheated imagination. But he wasn’t wrong.

  “Christ!” he whispered, “we got to go back to that room. We got to hide. Jamey?”

  Jamey didn’t budge. “No,” he whispered. “We can’t hide from him. He’s the nightmare man. We can’t get away. He’ll find me. He’ll always find me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Larry gasped. But before Jamey could answer, Larry heard it again. The noise was closer now. It was coming from the ledge. Whoever, whatever it was had gotten to the ledge, was lifting itself up to it.

  “Shit, Jamey, move!” Larry said with a hiss. Again grabbing the other boy while still managing to hold on to the flashlight, Larry yanked him back into the hidden room. Inside, Larry took the candle up from the floor. “Here, Jamey, get behind this,” Larry said, lifting one of the canvases back from the wall and wedging Jamey behind it. Extinguishing the candle with his fingertips, Larry scooted next to the other boy, pressing as close to him as he could, then let the canvas fall back against them. His knees up, Larry could feel the chill damp of the stone walls against his already wet t-shirt. The room was totally dark, darker than anything Larry could ever have imagined darkness to be. Pressed against Jamey’s frail body, he could feel that he was shivering all over. “Try to be still.”

  Larry held his breath, listening. A thought occurred to him: Maybe it was just his dad. He might have followed him out to the Randolph house. And now he was coming up, just to make sure he and Jamey hadn’t hurt themselves. But if it were his dad. why hadn’t he called out for them?

  Please, he thought, call out. Call out my name and be my dad. Call out—

  At that moment Larry’s heart leaped and he was on the point of shouting, “Dad, it’s us! Me and Jamey!” The room had suddenly ceased to be pitch black: There was a dim light coming from the corr
idor. It had to be his dad. Who else...who else could it be? After all, no one else had even stepped foot into the room before tonight. No one except Simon and Luther.

  Larry’s heart racing wildly, he watched the light. Call out, call out and everything will be okay.

  And yet all he could hear was labored breathing. The breathing of someone either very sick or very old or both. It was a sound that Larry had never heard his father make. A sound he couldn’t even imagine him making.

  All at once, Larry saw it, the harsh, sudden explosion of light against his retinas. He closed his eyes: It was a flashlight. Whoever it was had just pointed it into the room, by accident aiming it directly at Larry. He moved back, pressing even harder against Jamey, then waited.

  The light turned away. Larry, from where he was crouched, could see only the dark outline of the stooping figure as it entered the room. It stopped, then moved to one of the paintings, the one Larry had first looked at. He waited, holding his breath. The figure was motionless for nearly a minute, then gave out a low moan. “Catherine,” it said with a croak. Then it moved deeper into the room and closer to Larry. The beam of the flashlight fell on a few more canvases, then came to rest on the last one. Here the figure crouched down, peering into the painting. Larry could see only part of the figure’s face, but enough to tell that it was a man and that the man was old.

  Suddenly Larry heard the old man make another sound. At first it was a low gurgle, as if the figure was unable to catch his breath and was gasping hopelessly tor air. But somehow it went on, growing louder, as if at any moment it would become something recognizable, a wail or a sob, and yet, as Larry listened to it in horror, it refused to resolve itself into anything so definite and simple but simply kept on building up, growing louder and more agonized, until it became like nothing Larry had ever heard come from a human being before. It seemed to be wrenched out of him, out of the depths of the old man’s soul, like a cry that could come to utterance only by tearing apart the creature that expressed it. Only once before had Larry heard anything so terrible. He had been out in the woods, hunting with his father. All night they had listened to the sound of an animal in agonizing pain. The next morning they found out what had caused it. Only thirty yards from where they had camped, Larry’s dad found a steel trap. Inside, bloody and mangled, was the foot of a raccoon, and nothing else. The animal in its struggle to escape had chewed through its own leg.

  Then all at once the sound became a word. A name.

  Jamey.

  Larry’s blood froze. He flinched back hard against the stone wall. And yet as he waited for the man to grab him he realized that it wasn’t what he had thought. The man hadn’t said the name because he had seen them. His gaze was still fixed on the painting, on the last painting, the one that had pushed Simon Randolph into the final despair of madness. The old man was looking into that face, into those eyes. But the name he had spoken was Jamey’s.

  Suddenly the old man stood up, wobbling, lurching back, knocking to the floor another one of the dark paintings. “He tricked me. . . he tricked me,” he hissed. “It was all a trick. He knew what I would do. He knew I would be too weak.”

  Then, pushing his way through the paintings, the old man turned and staggered back to the doorway. A moment later, he was gone. And again the room was black. Larry breathed openly for the first time since the man had entered the room. Next to him he could feel Jamey s trembling body.

  “Jamey?” he whispered.

  But the other boy didn’t answer. That was when Larry realized he was sobbing.

  Jamey, it’s okay. He’s gone,” Larry said, putting his arm around Jamey’s shoulder.

  “I wasn’t crazy,” Jamey said, his voice choked. “I wasn’t.” As Larry listened to the other boy’s strange words he was struck by the tone in which he spoke them, not like somebody vindicating himself, but almost the exact opposite, as if he had just been robbed of some last shred of hope, as if something he had wished for more deeply than anything else in the world had just been snatched away from him forever. “I wasn’t just crazy. . . .”

  “It’s going to be alright, Jamey. Okay? Please. Believe me. Well leave in just a little bit. Just a little bit.”

  Then, moving from behind the painting, Larry managed to get to his feet in the darkness. He listened. There was no longer any sound coming from outside the room. Larry groped his way back to where Jamey was and said, “I think we can go now.” Larry reached down and felt until he found the other boy’s shoulder in the darkness. He took hold of it. “Come on. We got to get back.”

  After helping Jamey up, Larry felt his way back to the door, guiding Jamey by the arm. Slowly, carefully they made their way through the corridor and down the back of the chimney wall until once again they could see in the moonlight. Larry stopped and looked at the other boy.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Jamey whispered. Larry shook his head. And then, still holding Jamey by the arm, he led him back out of the Randolph house.

  8

  The whole way back, Larry kept turning everything over and over in his mind. Several times he had been on the point of saying something to Jamey, but just glancing at the other boy’s face, he figured it would be better to wait.

  They did not stop until they were safely back in the tree house. Trembling, Jamey sat down on the sleeping bag, his knees drawn up to him. Larry stood a moment, looking at his friend’s pale, stricken face, then sat down next to him. He put his arm around his shoulder, then said, “It’s okay. We just got the hell scared out of us. But that’s what you get going to a spooky house in the middle of the night. Right?”

  But Jamey said nothing. His eyes were fixed on something off the edge of the tree house, something in the darkness beyond.

  “I thought about it the whole way back, Jamey. I mean, about how the paintings looked like they were moving and everything. It was just the way the candle lit them up. And probably there was dust all over them, too. Then, when we started messing with them, the paintings, the dust started to come off and it just made them look like they were, you know, coming alive or something.”

  “Didn’t you see it?” Jamey whispered. “The last painting?” Larry looked away from Jamey’s eyes. He hesitated, then said: “Damn, Jamey. . . it was dark and we were scared, and that candle, it was making us see things crazy. You know?”

  “It was me,” Jamey whispered.

  Larry stood up and, almost angrily, said, “It couldn’t have been. How? Don’t you remember what I told you about those paintings, Jamey? I mean, just think about it. How could it be you? That painting, it was made a long time ago. Years and years before you were born. So how could it be you?”

  “Because he was painting what was going to happen. What he thought was the Second Coming. Only it wasn’t.”

  “Simon was crazy, just plain crazy. The whole thing’s crazy, Jamey. You’re making a lot out of. . . nothing. I mean, how could any of that stuff have anything to do with you? It’s nuts.”

  Jamey said nothing for a moment, then he whispered—in the saddest tone of voice Larry had ever heard from anyone: “He said my name, Larry. He looked at it and he said my name. He knew.”

  Larry frowned. “That old guy? So what? I mean, we don’t even know who that old guy in there was. Maybe he didn’t really say it, anyway. Maybe you just thought that’s what he said. I mean, when you’re scared, you just start seeing and hearing crazy things. Everybody does, Jamey. Besides, I got a pretty good look at him and I know he’s not even from around here. He was probably some old guv just passing through, a bum or something, lost, looking for someplace to sleep, something to steal. It wasn’t even anybody from here. I know everybody from Lucerne. Everybody.”

  “Not everybody, ” Jamey said with sudden vehemence.

  “How could there be somebody from around here I don’t know but who knows who you are?”

  “There is.”

&
nbsp; His mouth open, Larry waited a moment, expecting Jamey to explain what he meant. And then, all at once, he understood. “You know who it was, don’t you?”

  Jamey didn’t move for a moment, then nodded. “Yes.”

  “Who? Tell me, Jamey.”

  Suddenly Jamey stood up. “I got to get back,” he said, carefully avoiding Larry’s gaze.

  “Who was it, Jamey?” Larry said, taking hold of the other boy’s arm.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I just c-c-can’t, Larry.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I promised him. I promised that nobody else would ever know about us. Him and me. ’

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have to go now.”

  “Wait. . .” Larry said, again taking hold of Jamey’s arm.

  “I have to. Let me go, please,” Jamey said, pulling his arm loose. He turned and quickly went down the ladder from the tree house. Larry stood there a moment, then hurried down after him. He caught up with the other boy at the gate leading out of the backyard.

  “Tell me who that old man was, Jamey.”

  Jamey looked up at him, his eyes feverish and confused. There were tears in them. “You have to promise me. You have to swear. . . swear never to tell anybody. Even your dad. Never to say what we saw tonight.”

  “I swear, Jamey.”

  Jamey looked into Larry’s eyes for a second. “It was old Doc,” Jamey whispered.

  Larry’s mouth dropped. He shook his head and was on the point of saying, “That’s crazy.” But before he could get the words out, the other boy had turned and started running. Larry stood there and watched until he could no longer make out Jamey’s t-shirt in the darkness.

  Part Three:

  And the Darkness He Called Night

  1

  At a little after six the next morning, Miss Etila Watkins stepped out onto her hack porch. Up in her eighties and stooped over nearly double, Miss Eula shuffled slowly toward the screen door, carrying a saucer of milk for her cat. She managed to push the door open with her elbow, then called out the cat’s name. When the cat didn’t appear, she craned her neck and looked around to the other side of the porch steps.