Hank waited and then, creeping closer again, he watched as the fallen boy moved, as he sat up, and Hank saw that his neck wasn’t crooked and twisted anymore. “Jamey?” the boy whispered.
But the other boy only said, “Hush. Go back to sleep, go back to sleep, Larry.’’ The boy closed his eyes and now was asleep. And then the boy who was kneeling whispered. “Thank you.”
Hank stepped back and watched the boy who was awake bend down and pick up the sleeping boy in his arms. He held the boy there a moment and then turned and began to walk, carrying the boy away. Hank watched and then saw the lights from the car that had stopped at the place where the woods stopped and the road began. And he heard the calling out of new voices, a man’s and a woman’s.
Hank crouched down and waited. The woman was making a crying sound, and then he heard a man call out, “Wait! Don’t go, Jamey! Not yet! Not yet!”
Hank stood up.
One of the boys, the one who had carried the sleeping boy. was walking back away from the road. Hank watched him in the moonlight as he walked back and back, closer to the woods, and then watched him as he disappeared into the darkness under the trees. The man was still calling after him.
Epilogue:
Jacob’s Ladder
1
A week had passed.
Robins had come by the McAlister house to check on Larry’s progress. The day before, for the first time, Larry had been able to walk around, though with the aid of a crutch. This afternoon Robins helped Larry walk outside. Robins set out two chairs under the tree house, eased Larry into one of them, then set down in the other.
Larry was silent for a few minutes, then nodded toward the far corner of the backyard. “Right over there’s where I taught Jamey how to play baseball. He could have gotten pretty good at it, I think.”
Robins stood up. He walked around the tree. “Looks like a pretty nice tree house up there.”
“Yeah, me and Dad built it,” Larry said. He stared down at the cast on his leg. “You talked to those guys again?”
Robins said he had. He knew what Larry was referring to. Earlier that afternoon, for the fifth time that week, Robins had talked to an agent from the GBI. “They still think it was Jamey, don’t they?” Larry asked.
“‘Fraid so.”
“Can’t you explain to them? What he was like?”
“I’ve tried. But you’ve got to remember. They didn’t know him the way we did. They didn’t go through the things you did. Besides, once they found out about Jamey’s past— the fire at the foster home, the psychiatric evaluation—I guess I would have come to the same conclusion in their shoes.”
“Will they keep looking for him?”
“For a while, I expect.”
“They won’t find him,” Larry said firmly. Robins glanced back over at him, struck by the tone in which he had said this. Larry looked up and frowned. “I had this dream last night. Jamey was in it.”
“Oh?”
“I mean, he was in it. Really in it,” Larry said. “He told me some things.”
“Like what?”
“He thanked me,” Larry said, looking up at Robins with genuine puzzlement. “He said I had taught him something important he had never understood before. Only—”
“Only what?”
“I don’t see how I could have,” Larry said with a frown. “How can you teach somebody something you don’t know anything about yourself?”
Robins shrugged. “I’m not sure. Did he tell you what it was?” Larry nodded. “He told me, nobody can ever suffer for somebody else. We can only suffer along with them. And then he said that’s all even God can do. Even He can’t stop us from suffering. He can only suffer with us.” Larry looked up at Robins. “I’m not sure I understand what it means. Do you?”
Robins stared down at the boy and nodded pensively. “Maybe. Maybe it means that in the end the best you or anybody can do for someone else is just to help them to face whatever they have to face. Darkness. Loneliness. Death. Because there’s nobody who can make those things go away. Not our mother or father. Not our best friend. Not even God. All we can do is help each other to face them the way we have to. And always remember that maybe we’re not as alone as we think we are. It’s kind of like the way your dad brought you up, by showing you what it is to be strong and to have courage, so you would be able to do the right thing when you had to. Like you did that night out at the Randolph house.”
“Yeah,” Larry whispered. His head was down, and tears were in his eyes. There was a pause. Then Larry looked up. “Who do you think he was? Jamey, I mean?”
Robins reflected a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what difference it makes anymore. I used to think everything had to be one thing or another. But I’m not so sure now.”
“You think he was who that boy down at Milledgeville thought he was?”
“I don’t know,” Robins whispered.
“I do,” Larry said softly.
A half hour later, Larry was back in his room. Robins was in the kitchen with Lou Anne. He looked up from the cup of coffee she had made for him. “Larry asked me who I thought Jamey was.”
Lou Anne looked at Robins. “What did you say?”
The truth. That I didn’t know. He waited, examining Lou Anne’s face. “You know, though, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Robins stared into his cup. “Maybe it’s because I don’t want to believe that He could come again, only to be treated the same way. I keep going back to Jesus’s words on the cross ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ I keep wondering if as a species we will ever be good enough even to be held accountable for our sins.”
Lou Anne stood up and went to the window. “I’ve been thinking, too. What if all those ideas we’re raised with are wrong? What if it had to be this way?”
“What way?”
“The Last Judgment and the Second Coming, maybe they’re not events waiting to happen in the distant future. What if, instead, they’re always with us, at every moment? Maybe throughout the world there’s always a Second Coming and a Last Judgment. Isn’t that what Jesus said? There’s a passage in the Bible where he talked about returning as judge. He says He will come and accuse us, saying, ‘I was hungry and you didn’t feed me. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.’ And we’ll look at him with surprise and say, ‘When did you come to us? When did we refuse you these things?’ And he says, ‘As you’ve done unto the least of these, so have you done unto me.’” Lou Anne looked at Robins again. “Wasn’t He trying to tell us that it didn’t make any difference what we called Him? That He would come again, over and over. To judge, but not like we imagined. Not with fire and brimstone, but with a look, a glance. To judge us without even whispering a single word. And wasn’t Jamey, for most of his life, the least of these? How else could the world see him? Just think of Rev. Kline. As good a man as he was, what was his first impulse? To murder the child. All he saw in him was the horror of how he came to be—the offspring of a mental defective and an insane girl. The product of rape. Abandoned. Orphaned. Carted from one unloving foster home to another. And finally locked in a state-run mental institute, exposed to the most sickening side of human existence. How could there be a harsher judge of us than that? And yet he didn’t judge us. He forgave us. Didn’t he?”
“I sure hope he did, Robins whispered. The two of them said nothing to each other for the next few minutes. Outside, it was evening.
Finally, Robins stood up and carried his coffee cup to the kitchen sink. “I guess I’ll be going. If there’s anything I can do, now or ever, for you and Larry, just ask. You understand?”
“Okay,” Lou Anne whispered.
When Robins left, Lou Anne went into the den. She sat down at the piano and began to play softly the first few notes of a Mozart piano sonata. But by the tim
e she got to the third bar it had become “The Streets of Laredo.”
She stopped and looked around. Larry was standing at the door, leaning against his crutch. He looked at her and there were tears in his eyes. He walked over to the sofa and sat down on it.
“Play it some more,” he told her. “Please.”
She looked at him and nodded. Then she began playing it again, softly, slowly, sadly.
She played it until her son was asleep. She got up and got a blanket and spread it over him, then sat back down at the piano. Outside she could hear the crickets.
And then, just for herself this time, she played it again.
2
Rev. Kline stood on the back porch of his house and watched his wife standing in the heavy shadows under their pecan trees, slowly and carefully pulling off crumbs from a slice of bread she was holding in her hand. He adjusted his brace, then went down the steps toward her.
“Sadie,” he whispered, “it’s getting kind of late, hon. Why don’t you come on in?”
“I will,” she said, turning around and smiling at him. “It’s such a nice night, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“The birds are happy tonight about something. Sometimes I can tell. Some nights I’ll come out and I know that something’s made them sad. But some nights I know they’re happy. Tonight they’re happy.’’
She stood there, smiling absently. “The birds love God, too. Sometimes I think they love Him in the best way. They don’t expect Him to be like this or that, or to be here or there. They wait for Him and sometimes they’re surprised.”
Sadie turned, scattering the rest of the bread into the yard, and together the two of them began walking back to the porch. She stopped and looked up at the night sky. “The stars are so lovely, aren’t they?” she said, smiling again. Then she frowned for a moment. It was as if she had noticed something in the distance. “It’s funny, but sometimes I almost think I can see it out there, out there among the stars.”
“See what?”
“Jacob’s ladder,” she whispered. “And I can almost see them coming down it and going back up. Sometimes they help us. But sometimes we help them, too. Don’t we?” Kline nodded.
Together they began up the porch steps, Sadie waiting for her husband to adjust his brace. Then, in her old voice, she began singing, though quietly so no one could have heard unless he had been standing beside her.
Come, O thou Traveler unknown
Whom still I hold, but cannot see
My company before is gone
And I am left alone with thee
With thee all night I mean to stay
And wrestle till the break of day
With thee all night I mean to stay
And wrestle till the break of day.
3
Robins was standing in the backyard of old Doc’s house. It was the spot where he and his grandfather used to sit out on the long summer evenings. He stood there and looked up at the night. From long ago he heard his grandfather’s voice, quoting in the German that he loved so much his two favorite lines from Faust. It was the scene in which Faust first sees Mephistopheles. He asks the apparition who he is, and the devil replies:
Ein Teil von jener Kraft
Die das Bose will und stets das Cute schafft.
Doc had given Robins a rough translation: “ I’m just a part of that power that wishes to do evil but always ends up doing good.’ Kind of an interesting way for the devil to introduce himself, isn’t it?” Doc had asked Robins. “Makes you wonder.” When Robins asked what he meant, his grandfather said, “What he’s getting at is how evil isn’t anything by itself. It feeds off goodness. By twisting it into something else. But it always seems like something goes wrong with his plans and the thing that was meant to be evil turns right back around and becomes good!” And Robins asked if that was really true. Doc thought a moment. “I don’t know. Sometimes I’ve found myself wondering if the devil didn’t say that to set a trap. To make you think evil wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. You know, to put us off our guard. Make us less wary of its power. In fact, I’ve often wondered if the statement wasn’t really upside down, that what the devil was really counting on was just the opposite: That whatever good men try to do, I can twist it so it comes out evil.
Robins, looking up at the house, realized that was precisely how his grandfather must have felt at the end of his life. He must have thought his own goodness—in letting the child live—had been turned against him, so that he had been tricked not only into letting the child live but also into bringing him back to Lucerne. Though even at the end, Doc still wasn’t sure, Robins reflected. After all, his grandfather could no more bring himself to kill the boy then than he could bring himself to kill him fourteen years earlier when, acting on an obscure but irresistible impulse to simple decency, he had hidden Catherine’s child in the attic of the old house.
Robins walked toward the house, going up the steps, and onto the side porch, the porch where he and his grandfather slept so many years before. Robins pulled open the screen door. He turned one last time to look up at the stars—the stars that both the old man and the strange boy had loved so much.
As Robins stood there he could again hear his grandfather’s voice and words he had spoken so long ago, words that, when Robins first heard them as a boy, he had not been able to make heads or tails of: “The wonder is not that there’s so much darkness,” his grandfather had told him. “The wonder is there’s any light at all.”
Looking up that night, Robins finally understood.
About the Author
Allen Lee Harris lives in Georgia with his eight cats. He began college when he was 14, graduated at 19, then attended Harvard Divinity School before getting a Masters in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He returned to Georgia, where he was working toward his Ph.D when he began writing full-time. While writing he supported, himself at various jobs, including tending an all-night gas station where he wrote some of the more frightening parts of Deliver Us From Evil.
For more vintage horror novels from our
‘Resurrected Horrors’ line, check out these titles
available on Kindle and print on demand:
THE MOUNTAIN KING by George Ernsberger
SOUL-EATER by Dana Brookins
WHAT’S WRONG WITH VALERIE? by D.A. Fowler
DARK VISIONS by Maxine O’Callaghan
THE BOGEYMAN by Maxine O’Callaghan
LET THERE BE DARK by Allen Lee Harris
DISTURB NOT THE DREAM by Paula Trachtman
Deliver Us From Evil Page 36