Right Hand of Evil (29 page)

It was nearly five minutes before Ellie's head turned just enough so her eyes could gaze into his. When their eyes met, Father MacNeill knew there was something different about her, that something deep inside her had changed.

"What is it?" he asked. "What happened, Ellie?"

Her fingers tightened painfully on the priest's hands. When she finally spoke, her voice trembled and her eyes filled with terror. "Evil," Ellie whispered. "I've seen the face of Evil, Father."

Father MacNeill felt a chill, but did his best to slough it off. "It was only an accident, Ellie," he soothed.

Ellie shook her head. "No!" Her voice took on a harsh intensity as her fingers clamped the priest's more tightly. "No, you don't understand, Father. It wasn't an accident!"

Father MacNeill felt the icy mantle of foreboding close around him. "Tell me," he whispered, his voice trembling. "Tell me exactly what happened."

Ellie Roberts tensed. She didn't want to tell the priest what she'd seen, didn't want to remember it at all. Yet since Sue Ellen Simmons had asked her about the accident, she'd been fixated on the image that had seared her mind the instant before Clarie Van Waters's car struck her.

There'd been nothing wrong. Nothing at all. She was waiting to cross the street, and no matter what anyone said, she hadn't been careless. She looked both ways, just as she always did, and saw Clarie's car coming around the corner. She could still remember it perfectly; even remember the exact words that had gone through her mind:
Uh-oh, here comes Clarie
-
better stay on the curb until she's gone all the way past.

But for some reason, which she hadn't understood, she found herself stepping off the curb between two of the cars parked across the street from Town Hall.

She'd seen Clarie bearing down on her. Even now she could watch it like a movie running in her head. Clarie's car was coming around the corner and heading right toward her. If she didn't stop, didn't stay where she was, safely tucked between the red Taurus and the white minivan, there would be no way Clarie could avoid hitting her.

But she didn't stop.

Couldn't
stop.

It was as if some force-some unseen power-had taken control of her and pushed her out from between the cars, impelling her to step in front of Clarie's old DeSoto just as if she hadn't seen it.

At the last second she tried to turn away from the force, to rip herself loose from its grip. Twisting around, her eyes hunted for the source of the power that held her, and then she saw it.

Jared Conway!

He was standing only a few yards from her, and looking right at her.

But how did she know it was him? She'd never seen him before-she was sure of it.

Yet the moment her eyes met his, she knew who he was.

And then, as Clarie's car bore down on her, he smiled.

But it wasn't a smile; not really. Rather, it was a cruel twisting of his lips, as if he was anticipating what was about to happen to her, and relishing the pain she was about to feel.

Then, in an instant, his face changed.

His lips twisted and stretched, and she saw sharp fangs jutting from bloodied gums. Saliva dripped from his mouth, and when his tongue flicked out, she could feel the sting of its forked tip, even though he stood less than ten yards away.

Everything about him changed in that instant. His ears grew pointed, and his skin red and scaly. His body swelled, and his clothes fell away, revealing skin that was a tissue of suppurating, festering boils oozing pus that clung to him in reeking globules. His eyes narrowed to glowing slits, and his fingers lengthened into viciously taloned claws that stretched toward her.

The single scream she uttered, the one cut off by the impact of Clarie's car, had less to do with her fear of the oncoming car than her shock and terror at the visage she beheld. For in that single instant before she was lifted off the street and tossed from the hood of the DeSoto, she recognized the face of evil.

"The Devil," she whispered now as she clung to Father MacNeill's hand, which had turned cold and clammy as he listened. "That's what I saw, Father. The Devil himself." But then a glint of triumph flickered in Ellie Roberts's eyes. "He didn't get me, though. He tried, but I'm still here. And tomorrow morning I'll be in church, just like always."

"You don't have to do that, Ellie," Father MacNeill told her, but she shook her head.

"I do," she whispered. "I've looked on the Devil himself, and now I need to look to God. I'll be there."

As Ellie Roberts dropped back against the pillow, exhausted after recounting what she'd seen, a series of images flicked through Father MacNeill's mind.

Beau Simmons, whose innate stubbornness had evaporated in the face of Ted Conway's mesmerizing speech in Town Hall. His opinion, usually so stubbornly held that no logic in the world could change his mind once he'd made it up, had bent to Ted Conway's will that night like a reed bowing to the wind.

Jake Cumberland, rising at the back of the room to point an accusing finger at all of them, his voice nearly echoing what Ellie Roberts had just told him:
"The work of the Devil! I'm telling you, this is the work of the Devil!"

Releasing Ellie's hand, he rose from the hard chair and went to the window. The moon, nearly full, was high in the sky, bathing the town in silvery light.

Was it possible?

Surely it had to be something else.

Jake was a superstitious man whose mother had filled his imagination with all kinds of tales as he'd grown up.

Beau Simmons, for once in his life, might simply have changed his mind. Even he himself, Father MacNeill recalled, had felt his resolve weakening in the face of Ted Conway's spellbinding speech. And if he could be swayed, who in the hall that night could not have been?

And Ellie Roberts? Who knew what aberrations the shock and pain of the accident might have caused in her mind? She might easily have blacked out, even for a few seconds, and seen some fragment of a nightmare left over from her childhood. But to have seen the Devil in the body of a fifteen-year-old boy? Surely it was impossible.

And yet, deep inside, Father MacNeill knew he was lying to himself.

He knew that at the core of his being, in the place where his faith and his religion resided, he believed every word she'd told him.

She'd seen the Devil.

He was right here, in the heart of St. Albans.

Just as he'd always been.

It was well past midnight-long after the hour that normally found Monsignor Devlin whispering the last prayers of the evening before offering his arthritic bones the respite of his bed. On this night, though, he was aware of neither the hour nor the pain in his body, so consumed was he with the final pages of the Bible that Cora Conway had entrusted to his care. For a quarter of a century after Bessie Delacourt's scrawled entry, no one had written in the Bible at all, but then Abigail Smithers Conway had taken up a pen and continued the account of the Conway family. Abigail's hand was far more sure than Bessie's had been, but the story she had slowly unfolded was so painful that the old priest had been able to read only small pieces of it at a time.

Tonight, though, he went back and read it through from the beginning…

15 May 1937

Today I opened this Bible for the first time. My purpose was only to record the death of my husband, Francis Conway, three days ago. I had not wished to read these pages, for I am afraid I have always been something of an ostrich-I prefer not to see things as they truly are. But Frank is gone and I must now Face the truth of the last twenty-five years.

Though I would not let myself even think it, I believe I must have known that Bessie Delacourt did not leave my husband's house the night before our wedding to go to Atlanta, as he always told me. I chose to believe him that day, and in making that choice I condemned myself to accept whatever he told me during all the years of our marriage. It seems that a lie must become the truth if one is to live with it throughout one's life.

Believing Frank, though, did not mean I was deaf to the whispers that have swirled like dead leaves around this house for all the years I have lived in it, and though I tried not to, I always heard Bessie's voice in my mind, telling me that I would know when it was time to read
these pages.

Frank killed Bessie.

I believe that, just as I believe he killed Francesca's sister-his own daughter!

I thought-hoped?-that all the terrible things I have dreamed over the years were only nightmares filled, with demons and rituals from which I would awaken screaming.

After my nightmares I would hear the rumors, though no one ever spoke them to my face.

So many babies-ltttle girls all-vanishing in the night without a trace.

I always told myself the children never came to play with Phillip and George because of other things, but after reading these pages, I know the truth.

My sons had no friends because the other children's parents were afraid for them.

It seems that they were right.

Phillip must have known, too, for he left when he was fifteen and has not come back-I fear I shall never see him again…

I do not know what the future holds, though I am sure that I, like Francesca and her little daughter Eulalie, will never be able to escape this place. I do not know about Francy's husband. Abraham Lincoln Cumber-
l
and seems a good man, but surely he must hate all
of us.

1 November 1937

Abe Cumberland was hanged last night. The men came for him at midnight, wrapped in sheets, their torches filling the air with smoke. It was like one of my nightmares come to life, and when George pointed to the rooms above the carriage house where Abe and Francy live with their little Eulalie, I screamed and screamed, hoping to wake up.

I did not.

Instead I was condemned to watch little Eulalie-who is only five-as my own son helped the mob to lynch her father.

They said Abe had stolen a baby, and killed her.

I do not believe it, for I saw that infant die in one of my dreams, and I saw my son holding the knife above her little breast. But even now I cannot bring myself to speak any of it aloud.

22 January 1950

Eulalie Cumberland's child will be born soon. If it is a girl, I fear for what my son might do. I-

AS THE PAIN STRUCK HER CHEST, THE PEN IN ABIGAIL CONWAY'S HAND SKIDDED ACROSS THE PAGE, LEAVING A JAGGED LINE THAT WOULD BE THE LAST MARK SHE MADE IN THE WORLD. SHE CRIED OUT AS THE SECOND STAB OF PAIN LASHED THROUGH HER, SHOOTING DOWN HER LEFT ARM INTO HER FINGERTIPS. AS THE AGONY MOMENTARILY RECEDED, THE DOOR TO HER ROOM OPENED AND HER DAUGHTER-IN-LAW HURRIED IN.

"MOTHER CONWAY?" CORA ASKED ANXIOUSLY. "WHAT IS IT? ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?"

ABIGAIL STRUGGLED AGAINST THE SURGE OF PAIN, AND SHOOK HER HEAD. HER HANDS TREMBLING, SHE CLOSED THE BIBLE THAT LAY OPEN ON THE DESK IN FRONT OF HER, AND REPEATED THE SAME WORDS TO CORA THAT BESSIE DELACOURT HAD SPOKEN TO HER THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS EARLIER. "YOU'LL KNOW WHEN TO READ IT," SHE WHISPERED AS ONCE AGAIN THE HOT KNIVES SLICED HER. "YOU'LL KNOW."

AS CORA CONWAY RELIEVED HER OF THE BURDEN OF THE BIBLE, ABIGAIL SLUMPED IN THE CHAIR. DARKNESS CLOSED AROUND HER AND SHE WAS FINALLY RELEASED FROM THE AGONY OF HER RUPTURING HEART, AND THE TERROR THAT HAD RULED HER LIFE. SHE DESERTED HER BODY GRATEFULLY; WHATEVER ETERNITY HELD FOR HER COULD NOT BE AS TERRIBLE AS THE YEARS SHE HAD SPENT IN THE CONWAY HOUSE.

"So much evil," Monsignor Devlin muttered as he finished the last entry, which had been written by Cora Conway a few days before her husband hanged himself, and her baby-along with Eulalie Cumberland-had vanished. Cora herself had done little more than describe Abigail's last moments, and add a few cryptic words of her own:

Perhaps Eulalie's magic can end the evil of the Conways. I doubt it, though, for I often wonder if it is not the Conways who are evil, but this house itself.

And that was the end. Except for the missing pages, the dark history of the family was complete.

As he closed the Bible, Monsignor Devlin felt someone behind him, and turned to find Father MacNeill standing close to his chair.

"So Jake is one of them," the younger priest said softly. "It's no wonder he hates them, is it?"

Monsignor Devlin shook his head. "Nor can we blame him, can we?" Not waiting for any reply, he went on, "But we still don't know how it started-where it began."

Father MacNeill was silent for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was grim. "'The work of the Devil,'" he said. "That's what Jake called it tonight at the meeting. 'The work of the Devil.' Maybe he's right."

Monsignor Devlin sighed, wishing he could argue with Father MacNeill. But he could not, for every syllable the younger man had spoken rang with truth.

Halloween

Father MacNeill barely slept. When the first light of the sun crept through the window of his small room on the second floor of the rectory, he wished he could pull his single thin blanket over his head and hide from the day. But he resisted temptation, despite his certainty that he would find no more rest in the brilliance of the morning than in the darkness of the night that had finally passed, so upset had he been by the last entries he and Monsignor Devlin had read in the Bible Cora Conway had entrusted to her last confessor.

The Bible that was itself a confession of the sins of the Conways.

But more than those chronicles of ancient wrongs had kept him awake. Through those early hours when sleep refused to come, he'd also had the uneasy sense that somewhere beyond the walls of the rectory, evil was afoot. He tried to tell himself it was nothing more than a reaction to the horrors of which he'd read, but the feeling stayed with him. Several times he left his bed to peer out into the darkness, searching for the source of the unease that kept him from sleep.

There had been nothing.

Nothing, at least, that he could see or hear, save for the flickering of a few jack-o'-lanterns left lit on porches or in darkened windows, and the plaintive hooting of an owl hunting in the darkness.

Yet he'd known that somewhere, concealed in the blackness, some evil was hidden. Each time he turned away from the window, he dropped to his knees in prayer-prayer that brought him no comfort. The hours seemed to stretch on forever in an endless cycle of searching, praying, and tossing restlessly on the thin pallet that was all he allowed himself for a mattress.

Now, he rose, stretched the knots of tension from his arms, pulled on his clothes, and went down to the kitchen. Putting on a pot of coffee, he went to the front door, where the Sunday newspaper would be waiting. As he was bending down to pick up the paper, something in the periphery of his vision caught his attention. The unease of the last hours flooding back to him, Father MacNeill straightened up, scanning the gardens around the rectory, the churchyard, and the cemetery. Nothing seemed amiss. But as he looked at the cemetery a second time, he saw it.

One of the mausoleums-one whose very presence had always offended him-didn't look quite right.

From where he stood on the porch of the rectory, staring at it, he could see that the door of the crypt was slightly ajar. It was the narrow shadow cast by the open door, he realized, that had caught his attention as he bent down to pick up the paper.

Going back into the rectory, Father MacNeill called the police department, and was relieved when one of his own parishioners answered the telephone. As he sat down to await the arrival of Ray Beckwith-who had spent his entire career as one-quarter of the town's tiny police force-his fingers counted the beads of his rosary. His lips moved rapidly as he silently spoke the words of his prayers, repeating them until his orisons were interrupted by the chime of the doorbell. As he opened the door, the look of mild curiosity on Sheriff Beckwith's face turned to one of concern.

"Are you all right, Father Mack?" the officer asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I didn't sleep well last night," the priest confessed. "I had a sort of-well, I suppose you could call it a premonition. And I'm afraid it might have come true."

Beckwith's brows knit into a worried frown. "What's going on?"

"I'm not sure yet," Father MacNeill said. "But something happened in the cemetery last night, and I called you right away. I didn't want to run the risk of disturbing anything."

"Disturbing anything? You mean like one of the graves?"

"One of the crypts," MacNeill told him. "Let me show you."

Together, the two men made their way through the cemetery until they were standing in front of the mausoleum. Now, though, they could see that it wasn't simply that the door had been opened.

It had been defaced, as well: above the door, staining the white marble, was a bloodred pentagram.

"Oh, Jesus," Ray said softly. "Who'd want to do a thing like that?"

The priest gazed at the pentagram in silence, and then the inscription beneath the crypt's door:

GEORGE CONWAY

BORN JULY 29, 1916

DIED JUNE 4, 1959

"I'm afraid I can think of a lot of people who might want to do something like that," the priest said, his voice grim. He shook his head. "I still don't understand why they let him be buried here. He died in sin."

Beckwith's lips pursed. "That's why they deconsecrated this part of the cemetery. That's how come the fence is around the mausoleum."

Father MacNeill shook his head. "It's still within the grounds of the church," he insisted, his agitation rising. "It should never have been done."

Beckwith sighed, unwilling to argue with the priest. "Not much anybody can do about it now. Do you want to take a look at the coffin?"

"Don't you need to find out if there are fingerprints?" the priest countered.

Beckwith shook his head. "Everything's so weathered and rough, nothing would show." He glanced around at the empty streets. "But if you want to have a look inside, we better do it now, while there's no one around. Otherwise the whole town'll be talking. Let's just not touch anything more'n we absolutely have to."

Together the two men slid the coffin just far enough out of the crypt to reveal its broken latches. As Beckwith supported the weight of the coffin, Father MacNeill carefully lifted the lid open and peered down into the moldering face of George Conway.

The man's eyes had sunk so deep into their sockets they had almost vanished, and his skin, no doubt initially treated with embalming fluid, had dried and stretched over the years, until now it was a transparent sheath over the skull itself. The teeth showed clearly, and the flesh of the neck, though still showing the abrasion of the noose that had killed him, had desiccated to the point that it seemed the black suit George Conway had been buried in had been put on nothing more than a skeleton.

The priest leaned closer. As his eyes fell on the hands that had been crossed over Conway's chest, he gasped.

The right hand was missing, severed at the wrist.

When the priest gasped, Ray Beckwith struggled to peer around the open lid, and finally worked his way far enough around the end to afford a clear view. "Oh, Christ," he whispered. "What in hell is going on?" Then, remembering to whom he was talking, he quickly apologized. Holding his breath against the odor of ancient death drifting out of the open casket, Beckwith bent to examine the corpse. The cut in the leathery skin looked fresh, and there was a clean nick in the end of one of the arm bones.

"It was done last night," the priest said softly. "I'm sure of it."

"Okay," Beckwith said. "Let's just close it up for now. I'll get a crew out here later on to examine the area more closely. Let's just have us a look around the rest of the cemetery and see if they did anything else."

Sliding the coffin back into the crypt, they closed the door as carefully as they'd handled the coffin itself, then walked through the cemetery, looking for any other signs of vandalism.

The graveyard appeared undisturbed, until they came to the grave of Cora Conway.

On a tree next to her grave, held in place by the sharpened end of a crucifix, was the skin of a dead cat, complete except for its head.

But it wasn't the grizzly hide of the cat upon which Father MacNeill's eyes instantly fixed, but the profaned crucifix.

He recognized it immediately.

It had come from inside his own church.

He turned to face the policeman.

"We're going to find out who did this," he said, his voice unsteady. "We're going to find out, or I fear all our souls will burn in Hell. Every single one of us."