Cursed Be the Child (36 page)

He loved his kid.

He loved kids.

His fingers went to the typewriter, but they didn’t move, fingertips rooted on the keys. Nothing flowed from mind to paper. His mind was empty.

He slid open the right hand desk drawer. He took out the white china doll, the little girl with the bonnet and basket of eggs…

He knew what he had to do. He knew what he would do.

He remembered the promise he had made, and the loving promise she had made.

His brain was bursting with things he had to say. With a very few words, he said all of them:

He loved the little girl.

He could not help himself.

He was what he was.

He studied the three sentences.

He read them aloud in a monotone.

It was said, and there came to him an instant of perfect understanding as he abandoned his last vestiges of hope in the lie called free will.

Warren Barringer was lost.

And he knew it.

— | — | —

Thirty-Nine

She turned her head and looked up from the Snow White coloring book. A lovely child, he thought, just lovely.

Standing beside him, just inside Melissa’s room, Vicki said, “Melissa, this is your Uncle Evan.”

“Hi, Uncle Evan.” The smile came immediately with no hint of shyness. Her eyes shone. “Everyone calls me Missy, except sometimes Mom when I’m bad.”

“Hello, Missy,” he said.

She put the red crayon down on her table and stood up. “I didn’t have to go to school today, and we bought this new dress this morning ’cause you were coming.” She smoothed her dress, dark green corduroy with lace collar and sleeve trim. “You know, I usually just like to wear my jeans, but this is a pretty neat dress. Even though it’s brand new, there’s something kinda old-fashioned about it, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Evan Kyle Dean agreed. Something old-fashioned about the child herself, he thought. With her golden hair combed simply back and the wispy lace about her pale, swanlike neck, she reminded him of an antique cameo portrait, an idealized artistic image of the way children ought to be.

This was a mistake, he thought. He did not belong here. His niece had no need of his power to bring healing, to cleanse souls. As rude as Warren had been, his brother-in-law, it appeared, had accurately assessed the situation. And Vicki had been deceived by others or by herself in this age of high anxiety, tabloid terrors, fundamentalist fanatics and false prophets.

Why, look at the little girl! Melissa Barringer, guileless and bubbling, absolutely glowed with physical and spiritual well-being. Could he believe that she…

He tensed. Evan Kyle Dean cautioned himself to take a moment for the most profound consideration. First impressions, that was all! First impressions gathered only by his five senses, not his soul-sense, the intuitive, godly feeling within that unerringly discerned truth from falsehood.

The nice little girl standing before him was a lie! A blackness, thick and menacing, pressed down on him. He felt it. There was evil here. It shook his confidence, so easily had he almost allowed himself to be gulled by this deception! The home of the Barringers, his in-laws, was a temple of lies, all of them stemming from the father of lies who had dared him to test his soul’s mettle against the powers of evil.

Melissa put a hand to her head and wound a strand of hair around her first two fingers. She gazed at him placidly, and this time, he truly gazed back and looked within her. What he saw was not innocent and young and untainted. What he saw was
not
beautiful.

In the child’s eyes burned depravity, a relentless will that acknowledged neither the evolving ethics of Man or the eternal laws of God.

There was something else there—a cold and confident dare. I will do as I want. Who are you to oppose me?

He spoke the answer only to himself. I am the blessed and chosen of the Lord God Almighty. I will prevail.

He gently took Vicki’s elbow and steered her from the room. “Missy and I need to get to know each other,” he said. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

The little girl untwirled the spirals of hair around her fingers.

With the door closed, he said, “Now we can talk, just you and I. Uncle Evan and Missy.”

“Sure,” she said, “but is it okay if I finish coloring my picture?”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. She seated herself again at her little table, concentrating, lips pursed, guiding the tip of the red crayon precisely within the outline of the apple the warty-nosed, black-cowled woman offered Snow White.

He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. The apple grew ferociously red. Without turning her head, she said, “I’m glad you’re here, Uncle Evan.”

“Are you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I get to stay up late an’ everything. I’ll get to finish this picture tonight. And Mom said I won’t have to go to school tomorrow.” She giggled. “I’ve missed a lot of school. I could care less. You miss a year, and all you have to do is three pages from your workbook and you’re all made up!”

“You’re doing a fine job of coloring,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “I do pretty good, I guess. My friend Dorothy Morgan says she’s the best colorer in the whole second grade, but I am. No brag. Just fact.”

“Is that who you are?” Evan asked. “The best colorer in the second grade?”

She turned around to look at him and grinned. “Yup, that’s me.” Then she tapped the crayon tip on the nose of the hag. “And she is a little old lady, except she really isn’t. Sometimes she’s a wicked witch. And sometimes she’s the evil queen. Isn’t it funny how she can be two people at once like that, Uncle Evan?”

“Do you think it’s funny?”

“Kinda. It’s like she’s got this big secret, and she’s fooling everybody!” She put down the crayon. She began to play with her hair, winding it around her fingers.

“What about you?” he asked. “Do you have a big secret?”

She hesitated. “Maybe…” she said, her tone noncommittal.

But now on her face, he saw the plea, the desperation and hope that the dark furies within her eyes might be cast out. Had she been speaking to him, he could have heard her no more clearly:
I have secrets, terrible sinful secrets. Bring these dark secrets before the holy light of God that is yours, Uncle Evan, and they will disappear. Help me, Uncle. Save me.

I will, he vowed.

Her fingers curled a strand of hair.

“Do you want to tell me your secret?”

She nodded, then her face twisted, lower lip curling down like a crescent of raw flesh, eyes brimming with tears.

He picked her up, and she clung to him. It felt as though he were holding a living, sobbing, block of ice. Evil had attacked her, was inside her and attacking her at this very instant. He felt that.

“You cry, Melissa,” he said. “Tears will help.” He sat down on the foot of her bed, holding her on his lap. “And when you’ve cried as much as you need to, then we’ll fix it all.”

He shivered as she squeezed tighter against him. His arms encircled her—and he could not see the too-wise, most unchildlike grin she pressed into his shirt.

She cried. She wanted to laugh, but she wept. Uncle was patting her back, telling her it was okay for her to cry.

Of course. Uncle wanted her to cry. Uncles liked tears. If they didn’t, would uncles know so many ways to make you cry?

But she was smart. She had learned the lessons she needed to know to survive. She knew all about mamas who went away and mamas who had no love for you, and she knew all about uncles who could hurt you even while they were saying how much they loved you.

Now she knew games and secrets and tricks to stay alive.

I will not die! Never!

She sniffled. She crawled her right hand up his chest. Almost invisible between the pads of her thumb and index finger was a single blond hair plucked from her head, charged with her life force and will and energy.

As he told her he would help her, that he would free her, that he would return her to goodness, she carefully slipped the hair inside his shirt collar.

“Uncle, do you love me?” she asked.

Certainly he…

Of course he loved her. There are ways to make the men love you, to make Uncle love you.

…loved her. She was his very own niece, and she was one of God’s children.

“Come with me,” she said to him.

And holding her hand, he did.

He heard his blood hissing in his veins. He had gone beyond the restraints of mundane self and mortal flesh. He felt exalted and radiant with a peculiar grace that was his and his alone, the grace of goodness that was the gift of the servant of the Lord, Evan Kyle Dean.

Holding the child’s hand as she led him downstairs, he did not doubt that now would come his battle with evil—his battle and his victory.

He had no intimation of the form evil might take nor of how it would rise up to attempt to destroy him, but Evan Kyle Dean did not doubt. He had faith. He knew what manner of miracles he had worked and could work, he knew among his gifts was the powerful gift of casting out unclean spirits, he knew that he was above all a good man, a righteous and true man.

In the living room, Vicki Barringer started to rise from the sofa. He saw the worried questions on her face.

“It’s all right,” he told her.

The child took him down another flight of stairs to the basement.

Television, comfortable lounging furniture, a wet bar and a stereo system were all supposed to make it the family room, but it was the basement, and he felt the chill and the cold, smelled the wet and the lingering black odor of coal, the stomach-turning stink of rotten food and urine and feces and sickness. Though the lights were on, there was no light, only in the pungent, cruel dark glow of her eyes.

And Evan Kyle Dean knew. Transcendent, he had freed himself from the prison of the present, and he had journeyed into the past, as real for him as this instant’s present.

He understood now that this singular manifestation of evil came into this world in the past.

Right here, in a cold and damp basement, was a place of torment and perversion, wickedness and death, and what had happened here, like the memory of evil, could never entirely disappear from the universe.

I’m so alone, Uncle. I’m afraid and alone. Please be good to me…

Did Melissa say that? He thought she did. Something like confusion wriggled in the back of his mind. Melissa had changed. She looked the same, but not the same.

But she was alone and afraid, and he had to give her comfort and shield and protect her from the evil surrounding her…surrounding them.

“Please, won’t you hold me, Uncle? Be nice to me.”