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  DELIVER US FROM EVIL

  ALLEN LEE HARRIS

  Copyright © 1988 by Allen Lee Harris

  This edition published 2019 by Capricorn Literary

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental

  For my father and mother

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my deepest gratitude and thanks to the people who have made this hook possible: my parents, who stood with me every inch of the way; Frank Coffey— friend, agent, and untiring adviser—whose faith sustained me even when mine did not; my editors at Bantam, Alison Acker, whose dedication overcame every obstacle I threw in her way, and whose charm and intelligence acted as an unerring guide through years of work, and Peter Guzzardi, whose commitment carried me through to the end; my agent, Jay Acton, who has been like a second Providence to me; Inga Hansen, for looking after me so well; Tom Biraeree, for giving me those first kind words.

  I also want to thank my friends William Eikenberry; my ninth grade teacher, who kindled the spark and changed my life; Thomas Barron, for his lifelong friendship and indefatigable loyalty; Don and Jan McCormick, for their angelic patience and love; my cats Hillary, Tigger, and Achilles, for their long and sometimes solitary vigils on top of my word processor; Dr. Mark McLeod, who helped me find myself; and, finally, Clint Berrong, for being both a joy and an inspiration.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE: The Snake Well 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part One: The Return 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Part Two: Abigail’s Orphan 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part Three: And the Darkness He Called Night 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Part Four: In the Forests of the Night 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue: Jacob’s Ladder 1

  2

  3

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE:

  The Snake Well

  1

  She was making the sounds.

  “Pretty,” Hank gasped, then sidled closer to the tree that was nearest to him in the birch grove. He had pure white hair, white as a bar of Ivory soap. His momma told him it was so white because he was an angel from heaven. Hank put his arm around the tree and looked down toward the clearing where the hole was.

  The man was on top of the girl. He was doing something to her back. He did it and stopped and then looked at what he had done. The cutting thing in his hand was bright, then became dark. He moved slowly along her back. She wasn’t wearing anything. Hank clutched harder to the side of the birch tree.

  The man’s back was bare, too. He was standing up and the girl was in the tall grass below him. They were next to the hole that Hank’s momma told him to stay away from on account of the snakes.

  The girl kept on and on, making the sounds, louder and louder. Hank moved to the next tree, just a foot and a half from him. He put his palm on its papery bark and went down to it, rocking from side to side.

  The man stood up in the grass. He raised his other arm. There was no hand on it. The arm ended at the wrist.

  The man put down the shining thing and picked up something long that shimmered, and began winding it around the girl’s foot. She was making the sounds, getting higher and louder and faster. It was like someone was tickling her all over and wouldn’t stop, no matter how hard she begged.

  “Pretty,’’ Hank whimpered as he reached out to another tree. Before he could stop, his hand missed the tree, and he fell forward, rolling down the side of the hill through the tall grass. The sky scattered over him.

  When Hank stopped, the man was poking him with his one big hand the way a snake strikes from the other side of a log. “Well, looky here, if it ain’t that half-wit boy.” Hank could feel and smell the man’s breath on the back of his neck. Hank went to jump up, but he felt the other thing twisting down sharp into his back, the hard, bony stump where there was no hand. Hank screamed and squirmed to get away, but the man held him fixed. He rolled Hank over with a laugh.

  Hank looked at the face. It was like the man’s eyes had been taken out and the eyes he had now had once belonged to something else. They were like eyes Hank had seen before, down by the river when the still water would ripple with the head of a water moccasin and all he could see would be eyes bobbing and rippling through the stagnant water. To Hank it seemed that the moccasin had crawled in through one of the empty sockets of the man’s face and coiled up inside his head and was now trying to look back out through the holes, only its eyes were smaller and didn’t fit. The man’s lips were so jagged and scarred it looked like something had chewed on them. His tongue darted out and licked the ragged lips.

  “Pretty, ” Hank gasped, catching sight of the girl.

  “You ever seen so many of them old, sweet dreams?” the man asked, mocking. “Old Luther, lie’s got him a heap more of them sweet dreams. A whole heap more.”

  “Heapmore,’’ Hank gasped in terror, looking at the unspeakable things that covered the girl’s slender white body.

  All at once Hank felt the hand dropping him, and without looking around again he scrambled forward into the tall grass, then got up on his feet. He ran as fast as he could back up the hill, tripping twice, grabbing on to weeds and briars and grass, pulling himself up frantically, but always coming from behind him he heard the sounds the girl was making by the hole, the high squealing, delirious and uncontrollable, as if she couldn’t even catch her breath, drowning out the other noises of the morning.

  Hank stopped at the very top of the hill. It had suddenly gotten quiet. Hank looked back down, but he could no longer see the girl. The man was standing by the side of the big hole and holding the rope into it. Only now the rope was no longer winding and twisted, but running straight as a table leg into the darkness of the hole.

  Hank tried to call out, but the only sound he made was a deep and terrible sob.

  2

  Four days later, Catherine Kline was found.

  It was Dr. Kennedy—or Doc, as everybody called him—- who carried the girl down the spiral stairway of the abandoned Randolph mansion, five miles out of town. Her body was wrapped entirely in the blanket the Doc had brought along with him. Even before finding Catherine, he had told Charlie McAlister, the town’s young sheriff, t
hat he wanted no one else to see her. Although Doc did not offer an explanation, Charlie had enough respect for the older man not to ask him why.

  “Is she alive?” Charlie asked. Doc nodded. “Barely. And God only knows how.”

  Back in Lucerne, Doc carried the girl from the car to the door around the side of his house that led to the medical office in the basement. Catherine was still wrapped in the blanket when Doc set her down on the examination table. It was then that Charlie saw the side of her leg, only a few inches where the blanket had come loose. He stared at what had been done to her flesh. Doc glanced at him, then quickly pulled the blanket over the exposed part of her body. “Prison tattoos. They were cut in with a razor, then ink was rubbed in,” Doc said, struggling to sound professional even at that moment. “They’re all over her body,” he whispered, his voice finally cracking. “Every inch of her.”

  Charlie stepped back, feeling faint and dizzy. “Why. . . why would anybody—”

  Doc shook his head. “The things he put on her. . .” But he didn’t explain himself. Instead he looked back at Charlie. Doc’s eyes were full of tears. He shook his head helplessly. “What am I supposed to tell her folks, Charlie? How can I let them even see her like this? How can I—”

  At that moment Charlie heard a voice from behind him. When he turned around, he saw Rev. Kline, the girl’s father, standing in the doorway. “I saw your car,” Kline said, hut his eyes were not on Charlie. He was staring at the hidden mound of his child’s body through the door of the examination room. “Is she alive?”

  Charlie stepped back. Rev. Kline, his face ashen and yet still composed, walked slowly into the examination room.

  “Why is she covered up like that?” he asked.

  Doc took Charlie by the arm. “Go outside,” he said, his voice urgent and commanding, like a father ordering his child to leave a burning building in which the father was trapped. “Quick.”

  Charlie had just closed the door behind him when he heard it. A sound he would never forget as long as he lived, the sound Rev. Kline made as he pulled back the blanket from his daughter’s body.

  Charlie drove around for an hour before finally going home. And even then, he sat out in his car for another ten minutes. It was difficult for him to begin to absorb what had happened. Six days before, when twelve-year-old Catherine Kline had disappeared, he had told her parents that everything would be okay. He had said it because he believed it. His world, up until that afternoon, simply didn’t allow for such things as this. He had been taught to believe in the fundamental goodness of his fellow human beings, to believe if some of them erred they did so simply because they walked in less light than others. But now as what he had seen began to sink in, he realized that sometimes it was not a matter of more or less light. Sometimes it was a question of absolute darkness.

  Charlie looked up and saw his wife. She was standing on the front porch. Until the period of Catherine’s illness, when the Klines began to keep their daughter in, Lou Anne had been her Sunday school teacher at the Methodist church. She told Charlie that she’d never seen a more beautiful child in her life. “Sometimes it’s like she’s from another world,” Lou Anne once told him. “The way she takes to the Bible stories. When I tell them, most of the children look out the window or fidget or pull on each other’s dresses. But with Catherine, you just have to look into her eyes. It’s like she’s actually watching it all take place right in front of her—like she’s really there.”

  And now, what was there to say?

  “Charlie?” Lou Anne called out.

  He stepped out of the ear. Lou Anne ran a few feet toward him, then stopped. He looked up at her face. On her cheeks were two purplish spots: they had appeared the night the girl had been reported missing, same as they always did whenever she got worried or upset by something.

  “Charlie?” she repeated.

  He looked up at her and took a deep breath. “We found her, he said hoarsely. He heard his wife’s voice break: “She’s not dead, is she, Charlie?” He didn’t look at her; he couldn’t. “Doc, he figures she won’t last the night.”

  Lou Anne made a stifled noise, her hand up to her mouth.

  “It was Luther,” Charlie said. “Doc’s sure of it.”

  Lou Anne stood there, her hand still covering her mouth, her eyes filled with tears. “But why, Charlie? Why would anybody want to hurt Catherine?”

  Charlie walked over to his wife and put his arms around her. He buried his face into her neck. “Christ,” he whispered, holding on to her as tightly as he could. “I wish I knew.”

  That evening, Lou Anne found Charlie in their room, sitting on the edge of the bed. He was staring somberly into the crib they had set up there three months before, right after Charlie had brought her and their newborn son, Larry, back from the hospital. Usually, when Charlie sat over the crib, it was to play and talk to the baby. To tell him what a great baseball player he was going to be when he grew up, to tickle him under the chin, or to perform little puppet shows with the assortment of stuffed animals that accompanied the child’s sleep. But tonight Charlie seemed a million miles away. Lou Anne came over to him and put her hands on his shoulders. Startled, he turned around, his eyes momentarily panicked. “Sorry. I’m just jumpy, that’s all.” He looked back down at the sleeping child. “I feel like I want to stay here forever, he said. “To watch over him. To make sure nothing ever hurts him.”

  Lou Anne shook her head.

  “Sitting here, looking at him, all I can think about is how they must feel right now, Rev. Kline and Sadie. We waited ten years for Larry, and look how we feel about him. They waited even longer for Catherine. And then, after all that, something happens, something you could never have prepared for, no matter how hard you tried. Something that comes one night and sweeps everything away.” Lou Anne was sitting next to him now, and he had reached one hand over to rest it on her knee. “And yet you know what people will be saying a week from now, don’t you?” Charlie looked at her directly. “They’ll all be telling each other the same thing: Life goes on. Life goes on,” he said softly. “Even me. I’ll be saying it, too. Only what if sometimes life doesn’t go on? How can it ever go on again for the Klines?”

  Lou Anne said nothing. She knew better. To everybody else Charlie was the image of even-tempered cheerfulness, but she, and she alone, knew that there was another side to him. A melancholy side that Charlie fought against. She put her arm across his broad shoulders.

  At that moment the baby stirred and opened his eyes. They were deep blue, like Charlies. The child stared up blankly, momentarily disoriented. Then he broke into a grin. Lou Anne went over and picked the boy up from the crib. She held it close against her and smiled. The baby leaned toward Charlie, extending one hand. “I think he wants you, Charlie,” Lou Anne said, then gently put the child into her husband’s arms.

  Charlie looked down at the happy face of his son. Lou Anne had wanted to name him after his father, but Charlie had resisted. They had compromised and named him after Charlie’s dad. Larry.

  Lou Anne had never come across a man as effortlessly gentle with a child. She watched as Charlie s face changed its expression, moving almost imperceptibly from deep gloom to joy. “Life does go on, Charlie,” she whispered to him. “It has to. For his sake, if nothing else.”

  Charlie looked into his son’s eyes and nodded. “Nothing’s ever going to happen to you,” he said. “You hear that, Larry? Your daddy’s going to see to it. At least he’s going to do his damnedest.”

  3

  It was nearly evening the next day when Doc and Charlie found Luther. Acting on a hunch of Doc’s, they had decided to check a clearing deep in the woods, the place referred to in local stories simply as the snake well. There, in the growing twilight, Charlie saw Luther sitting on the ground, his back propped against the crumbled sides of the well. His head was hanging limp, his mouth open. Earlier Doc had read
Charlie the report he had obtained from the state mental hospital from which Luther had escaped. Self-mutilation was part of his extreme psychosis, along with “visions and auditory hallucinations.” Yet despite being forewarned, Charlie had to fight off nausea as he stared into the slack face for the first time. “Shit,” he whispered. As the two men stepped closer, Charlie, noticing the peculiar cast of Luther’s eyes, asked Doc: “Is he dead?”

  “No. That’s catatonia.” Charlie looked at the glassy, lifeless eyes. “You sure?” he whispered.

  Doc didn’t answer. He was talking to Luther. “Get up. We’re not going to hurt you,” he said, his rifle pointed at Luther’s temple.

  To Charlie’s astonishment, Luther suddenly came to life. He looked up and twisted his disfigured mouth into a grin. “Can’t hurt old Luther no more, ” he said, his words slurred. “Can’t nobody hurt him no more.”

  “Don’t count on it. You make one wrong move, I’ll blow your head off. Now get up,” Doc said, his voice shaking with rage.

  But Luther’s expression didn’t change. “You seen it? You seen the bomination? I done her up right, purple and scarlet, just like it says in Scripture. Ain’t that right?” Luther said, staring at Doc. “He come and showed me them words in them Revelations, and he says, ‘Luther, you go and do likewise.’ ”

  “Who? Who showed you?” Charlie asked, glancing at Doc.

  “Why, the one that come to me down where they had me. Every night he come, whispering them words of his, teaching me Scripture,” Luther said. “Last night, too. He done said, ‘I ain’t leaving you. I ain’t forgetting about you none. I’ll be coming for you tomorrow. You done just right. Just right.’’ Them’s his words.”

  “Who’s coming for you?” Charlie persisted.

  But Luther never answered. He sprang up and knocked one shoulder into Doc, making him drop the gun, then went tearing off through the woods. Doc picked up his rifle, and followed closely by Charlie, chased after him, through bushes and vines for what seemed like ages until they came to the shallows at the edge of the Allatoona River. They stopped on the bank opposite the shallows and watched as Luther tried to cross the river. “He’ll never make it,” Doc said. A moment later Luther gave out a scream, but by then the quicksand was already up to his knees. Twisting around, he struggled to get loose, but with each jerk of his legs, he only sank in deeper.