Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  She told him that, personally, she had always found a night-light helpful.

  She still remembered how his face looked. How sad and weary. He didn’t say another word, merely turned and walked out of her house. Neither of them ever mentioned the incident again.

  And now Doc was laying out in the basement of Tommy Lee Anderson’s. And she was still alone. Still using a night-light.

  “Such silly, foolish thoughts,” she said to herself. Then, reasserting her usual cheerful nature, she began one of her “happy exercises,” forcing herself to think back to a time when everything was pleasant and nice. Like the very first day her brother took her swimming in the Allatoona—before the incident with the snake, of course. They had brought a huge black inner tube and he had set her inside it, swimming along next to her, her arms dangling into the sun- warmed water, buoyant as a breeze in the air, her hair dripping down behind her in the current. She would close her eyes then, too, and imagine herself floating out through space, over mountains and hills and valleys, gilding like a great and majestic bird, far, far above all crawling creeping things, soaring and soaring higher still, peaceful and safe.

  There was not a snake in the world.

  6

  “Who’s that?”

  Abigail Parker peeked into the dark second-floor hallway. A few moments earlier she had awakened and heard a noise right outside her door—it sounded like footsteps. But looking from one end of the hall to the other, she saw nothing. She pulled her housecoat tight and stepped outside her door.

  “Jamey?”

  But there was no answer.

  She walked to the door of his room and eased it open. She blinked inside and saw the empty bed. “Jamey?”

  She snorted. “Reckon he’s over at that friend of his.” She turned around and went back to her room. She was about to get back into the bed when she remembered that she had forgotten to check her money before going to sleep. She got up and went over to her armoire. It was huge, nearly the size of the wall. She reached underneath it, pulled out the key, and put it in the lock. Then, after jiggling around just the right way, she opened up the panels of the double door. She reached up and pulled out the hatbox she kept hidden inside, then carried it back to her bed.

  She took the top off and peered inside. There, nestled in the bottom, under her brand-new red hat—the very one that Edna May McGee had remarked on at the Circle meeting— was the money lawyer Spalding had been instructed to give to her every week for Jamey’s upkeep. She took it out and, a smile of satisfaction hovering on her lips, counted it, every last dollar, then returned the money to the hatbox and the hatbox to the armoire. She went to lock the doors back up, but the key didn’t want to work. She turned and twisted it every which way, but the latch just wouldn’t take hold. Finally she twisted it with all her might—which was considerable—and heard the top of the key snap. She looked down and saw that it had broken off. She snarled at it and flung it down to the floor. She stood there and then walked back to her bed and lay down. But she didn’t close her eyes. She kept looking at the armoire, at the open doors and the darkness inside. She got up again and went to try to close the doors, but no matter what she did, the doors always kept coming open again. She got into her bed and sat staring at the armoire.

  It wasn’t merely that Abigail didn’t like leaving the armoire unlocked on account of the money—though that was a concern. There was something else that bothered her about leaving its doors open. When she was little, she and her brothers used to play hide-and-seek in it, the main closet part being large enough to contain two or even three of them. Then one night her cousins had played a trick on her. She had gone to hide inside it and they had locked her in. When she realized she was trapped, she began crying and yelling for help, though it wasn’t until her daddy came home—three hours later—that she was let out. That same night she had a nightmare about being locked inside again. Only this time, she remembered, there was something else in there with her. Something awful, something she could feel breathing on the back of her neck.

  Abigail frowned, then got up from the bed again. She went over and pulled her chair out from in front of her vanity, then carried it over to the armoire. She closed the two doors and set the chair right in front of them, to keep them closed. She stepped back.

  It was okay now.

  She rolled over and promptly went to sleep.

  7

  Miss Amelia’s first thought was, I’ve fallen asleep and drowned.

  She blinked, sitting up some. The room was pitch black. The water was cold, cold as ice. She looked at the door, trying to see if there was light under the crack. There wasn’t. She sat there, trying to remember if she had left the light on in the hall. Maybe, without realizing it, she had turned them off—that meant it could simply be the one bulb over the bathroom sink that had blown.

  No.

  She had left the hall light on. She distinctly remembered now. And the bedroom light.

  It was the main fuse. It had to be.

  That just happened sometimes. Especially in such an old house with poor wiring.

  She sat there, telling herself to stay calm. She had just fallen asleep for a moment. That’s all. That was why the water was so cold. She tried to visualize what she had to do. Get out of the tub, grope along the wall for her robe, and put it on. And then she had to get down the steps into the front hall. And then? Find the basement door in the dark.

  She stopped. Even if she made it that far, she knew she just couldn’t go down those last steps into the basement.

  She could get up, she thought, and call Charlie.

  What if the phone lines were cut? she suddenly wondered. She stared in front of her, at the darkness. Why did she even think such a thing? No, she had to keep control of herself That was the most important thing. Not to panic.

  She tried to reach up for the handle to help herself out of the water, but it wasn’t there.

  Maybe it had fallen off. No, she thought, that was stupid.

  That was when she heard it. The noise coming from the other side of the door.

  There were footsteps. Footsteps coming closer.

  Her breath caught in her throat. The tip of her tongue felt like it was touching cold metal. She looked toward the door. But there was nothing but darkness, undifferentiated, without circumference or breadth or height. No wall, no floor, no ceiling, but all as if she were floating at the bottom of an infinite void.

  She listened.

  Call out, she told herself. Ask who it is.

  Then she heard a new sound. It was the doorknob. Someone was slowly twisting it around.

  Call out. Be polite but firm.

  She looked but still there was only blackness. Maybe she still had her eyes closed. Maybe she had forgotten to open her eyes—that was why everything was so dark. All she had to do was open them and everything would be as it was. She lifted up her hand and felt her face, felt her eyes. They were soft and cold, like something horrible to scare children with at a church Halloween booth. She drew her hand away.

  The doorknob clicked.

  That was when it came to her. She must be dreaming. That was it. Maybe she had never gotten into the bathtub at all. She was still asleep in her bed, warm and dry. That was it. She had fallen asleep, only she didn’t realize it. It had happened before, ever since she was a child.

  The door creaked open slowly and behind it was just more of the same darkness.

  Wake up, she told herself. That was how she could wake herself up. By screaming.

  She opened her mouth.

  Nothing. There was not a sound.

  She heard footsteps on the bathroom tile.

  SCREAM!

  No, of course not. If it was a nightmare, how could she scream? You can never scream in a nightmare. Always, when the thing is after you, when you know you have to escape from it down the long and d
ark passageway, that is when every muscle stops, the throat contracts, everything becomes frozen in silence.

  She reached up again. This time, to her horror, she felt the cold metal of the handle. Its familiar reality seemed to blister the palm of her hand. She let go of it as if it had been a red-hot poker.

  She heard it, down at the other end of the tub, the soft splashing, like a child playing in his water.

  She shook her head, gasping and jerking her legs back toward her, hut even then she felt the thing slither up against her ankle. She gasped and jerked back, but felt it again. She pushed her hands down into the water, trying to knock it away.

  It was then she heard the voice, so close to her that it sounded like the mouth was right next to her ear. It recited in a singsong voice:

  Poor Miss Amelia, so nice and sweet.

  Felt a slithering by her feet.

  Oh, my, she thinks, as one bites her thumb. Where did all these snakes come from?

  If the world is such a lovely place,

  Why are their fangs sticking in my face?

  She had heard the voice before somewhere. But as she was about to say, “Who are you?’’ she again heard something dropped into the water.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she whimpered.

  There was more than one now.

  “No, please.”

  She felt one across her leg, swishing quickly away.

  And again she heard more of them being dropped into the water in the darkness. Whole buckets full, it sounded like.

  Wake up, she told herself. Dear God, let me wake up before...

  She felt them all around her now, wiggling crazily in the pitch-black water. She knocked against one and suddenly felt a sharp, stinging pain in the palm of her hand as the fangs went into her skin. Then all at once she felt her head as it was twisted painfully against the back of the tub. She went to scream but felt something on her lips.

  It was a mouth. At first it was as if she were being kissed, kissed hard, painfully hard. But then she felt as the mouth opened, wider and wider. And then she tasted something vile and sickening oozing out from the mouth that held hers down, and felt the tickle of the thing as it slithered in between her teeth, wiggling wildly against her tongue, then pushing deeper and deeper into her throat. She tried to bite down on it, but what she felt was no longer the soft tongue but was hard and scaly. She gagged and felt it pushing down into her, the enormous head of the thing slithering down and down into her throat.

  8

  Abigail Parker sat up sharply in her bed. She tensed, listening. From somewhere she heard a voice calling out to her. Calling her by name. She got out of her bed and went to the window, peering down into the yard. Leaves blocked what darkness didn’t.

  “Abigail, it’s me, honey. Come down and let me show you something,” the sweet singsong voice called out.

  “Amelia?” Abigail whispered in disbelief. She glanced over at the clock by her bed. It was a little after four-thirty. What was Miss Amelia doing on her lawn at that time of night?

  Abigail hesitated. Then, buttoning up her nightgown, she hurried down the steps, into the hallway, then turned on her porch light. She peeped through the window, to try to catch a glimpse of Amelia. But she wasn’t on the porch. Apparently she was out somewhere in the yard. Abigail unbolted her door and cracked it. “Amelia? That you out there?” She waited, then opened the door a little wider, squinting out into the dark.

  “Turn off the porch light, hon, then you’ll see me.”

  Abigail did. She looked back again and frowned. “I still don’t see nothing,” she said, more to herself than to whoever was out there in the darkness.

  “Why, I’m right over here, hon. Here I am.”

  Abigail stepped onto the porch. There, right beneath the nearest pecan tree, she saw something move. “That you, Amelia?”

  “Course it’s me. Who you expecting, Abigail?”

  “I wasn’t expecting nobody. Not at four-thirty in the morning.”

  “It’s such a lovely night, hon. Why don’t you come on out here with me. It’s so strange. But I used to be afraid of the dark. But we change as we grow older, don’t we? And now I see how wrong I was about it. So very wrong. And wrong about many other things. That’s why I came right over here, as soon as I heard the good news. To show you where you went wrong, too, hon. Just like he showed me.”

  “Who showed you? What are you talking about, anyways?” Abigail said, stepping nearer to the edge of her porch and still not able to make out Amelia’s face

  “Why, Newjesus...”

  Abigail scowled. “Amelia, you been drinking?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then what’s got into you?”

  “Newjesus. He’s got into me. Right down deep inside of me. And he wants to get right down deep inside of you, too.”

  “What the hell you talkin about? What’s this Newjesus?”

  The figure under the pecan tree had stepped closer to the porch, the face dimly lit by a patch of moonlight. Abigail stared at the figure, knowing something was wrong about the way Amelia looked but not knowing yet quite what it was.

  “How’d you get so wet?” Abigail asked. “How’d your hair get so wet?” Abigail went to the porch steps. She squinted. “And what done happened to your mouth?”

  “I was called,” Amelia said. “To be one of his Twelve.”

  “Twelve what? What you talking about? I ain’t standing here listening to no more of—”

  Just then Amelia stepped into clear view for the first time. Her face was covered with welts, her mouth was bleeding, her cheeks had been ripped. But worst of all, it was the way her eyes looked.

  “You look like. . . like you was dead.”

  “No, hon. I’ve just been born again. Born in the blood of Newjesus. Just like you’re going to be.”

  Abigail shook her head and let out a scream. She turned and ran to the front door. She slammed it behind her and locked the bolt. She run up the stairway to her room and locked the door. She looked around. She hurried to the other side of the armoire and put her shoulder against it. She strained with all her might, trying to push it even an inch, but it wouldn’t budge. She stepped back and looked at it. Even if she could just move it a foot, it would be enough to keep the door from being forced open.

  “Please, Lord,” she whispered. She went back around it and this time kneeled down so she could get better leverage. She remembered back to all the stories she had heard about women who had saved their babies by lifting up the front of cars. If you were frightened enough, you could do anything.

  She pushed all her weight against the armoire. Suddenly, her heart leaping, she felt the armoire make a jerky motion as it creaked an inch toward the door. She pushed again, even harder this time, straining with every fiber of her being. Again it creaked and moved an inch. She kept on like this until she had moved the huge piece a full two feet. It was totally blocking the door now. There was no way anybody was going to get through it.

  Still badly shaken, Abigail backed away from the armoire. She sat down on the edge of the bed and listened to see if she could hear any noises from downstairs.

  But there was only a faint scratching. Abigail turned and looked at the window. That was where it was coming from. There at the bottom of the windowpane she could see the fingernails scratching against the glass while Miss Amelia’s voice called out: “He’s going to get you sooner or later, hon. Why don’t you just make it easy on yourself. Let Newjesus inside of you.”

  Abigail turned and, seeing the armoire, she went over to it and pushed the double panel doors even farther back. She looked inside, then crouched down and scooted herself into the main closet section. She reached out and pulled the doors shut as best she could.

  All Abigail could hear in the darkness was the sound of her own heavy panicked breathing. She reached over to her side
and felt her hatbox. But there was something funny about it. The top wasn’t on, and she remembered having put it back on when she checked it earlier that night. “The money, somebody done took my money,” she said with a whimper. She felt inside the box.

  But what her hands touched was neither her brand-new red hat nor the money she had hidden under it. What she touched was hair. Human hair. She reached down lower and felt—one after the other—the eyes, a nose, an empty, sagging mouth. It was a head. Her hands trembling, she felt at the hole at the base of the neck.

  One of the doors of the armoire creaked open. Abigail stared down at what she had in her hand.

  It was her own face.

  At that moment she felt the arms come out from behind her, from somewhere in the darkness of the armoire and she heard the same sweet, syrupy voice whispering all around her, “Open up and let Newjesus inside.”

  10

  At about ten o’clock the next morning, Charlie walked over to old Doc’s place. Robins was already up and around, trying to sort through his grandfather’s enormous library. Charlie, after some initial chitchat, extended an offer to have supper with them that evening, though, going on Robins’s somewhat dismal appearance—in addition to the information Larry had given the night before—Charlie was careful to provide the other man with a way out. “Course, if you’re busy or something.” But to Charlie’s surprise Robins accepted and said he would be there at five.

  At four the doorbell rang and Larry answered it.

  “How’s it going?” Robins asked him airily, swaying just enough for Larry to realize that the man was in much the same state as he had been the previous evening. “Remember me? I’m the one Abigail kicked out.”

  Larry nodded, not sure whether this was meant as a joke. “Come on in. Mom’s still making supper. But Dad’s in the living room.”

  He led the man into the other room, where, after the initial pleasantries, Robins sat down in one of the big over-stuffered chairs and, for the next half hour, stared glumly at the TV set. Charlie, for his part, did his best to keep the conversation flowing smoothly, but each question Robins would answer with a simple “Yes” or “No.” Finally, right when Lou Anne announced that supper would be ready in fifteen minutes, Robins looked up and said, “You got anything to drink?”