Deliver Us From Evil, Excerpt

Very quickly, I understood whom the footsteps belonged to. Lloyd Chandler was approaching and Martin and I were laying in wait for him. As our prey approached us, I noticed that I could smell the city. There was a thick dankness in the air that was musky and pungent. As the dirty air rushed down my throat, it left traces of itself that I could taste in the back of my throat. I had to fight back the urge to gag. Martin and I stepped out of the alley as we had before and the confrontation began its encore presentation. Once again, Martin accused and Nick tried to offer an excuse. As I listened to Lloyd’s whiny pleading, I became absolutely disgusted with him. The way he took advantage of the sick and the elderly disgusted me and the way he begged and whined and acted like a sissy disgusted me. I grew angrier by the mili-second. Then, just as before, the silver flash of Martin’s walking stick darted across my face.

I heard that same grotesque sound his skull made as it fractured, into God-only-knew how many pieces. This time, though, there was a distinct and profound difference. This time, I felt the impact of the blow in my hand as it ran through the shaft of the cane. It felt like I had just made a perfect connection on a fastball with a wooden Louisville Slugger. Instinctively, I held my hand up in front of my face in disbelief, only it was Martin’s hand I held up. “This is a new development,” I thought.

I was still burning with hatred toward Lloyd, so to test my new hypothesis, I attempted to raise the cane above our head. I paused briefly at the apex of the up-swing to adjust my grip, and in an axe-chopping motion, brought the head of the cane down again onto Lloyd’s head as he lay on the sidewalk. I continued landing blows to his head until he stopped twitching and convulsing. All of a sudden, I felt extremely tired. I didn’t have the strength to lift the weight of my/Martin’s arm. The only way I can describe what happened next was I took a step back from the front of Martin’s mind and let him take back over.

As I did this, my mind caught a glimpse of Martin’s confusion at what had just happened. He stared down at Lloyd, as if trying to figure out what had just happened before he shrugged it off. At this point, the original version of the dream picked up where it had left off.

I didn’t know how or why, but I had been able to take over Martin’s body and actually interact with the scene. I don’t suppose I really should have been all that surprised. Stranger things have happened in dreams and I was dreaming, but somehow, I wasn’t. I had just participated in a murder that happened over a hundred years ago.

As Martin walked us along his zig-zag route, I continued to try to wrap my mind around the idea. Up ‘til then, I had been a spectator, but out of nowhere, the coach pointed up to me in the stands and put me in the game.

Then another mind-blowing idea hit me. I had seen this all before, but Martin was still doing this for the first time. It was my dream, but it was his reality. Then I remembered that we had stopped because he thought he had heard or seen something. I knew it was coming. So, I decided that I would try and use all I could remember about the surroundings when this had happened and anticipate the snap to get the jump on the quarterback, so to speak.

As we walked, I replayed as much of the previous dream as I could. We rounded several corners before the familiarity of the particular street hit me, and I began watching very closely for the exact spot we had stopped before. I couldn’t tell too far in advance, but I knew that I would recognize it when I saw it. I just hoped that I could react in time. For some reason, it became almost obsessively important for me to find out if Martin’s hunch about seeing or hearing someone was correct.

We continued on and I kept staring at spots on the sidewalk and the buildings we passed, trying to find my landmark. I was just beginning to think I wouldn’t see it in time when my eyes landed on a crack in the brick wall of the building we were walking past. The crack was no more than five feet in front of us and when Martin had spun on his heels the first time, we were a half a step from reaching it. I was so excited that I had found it that I almost forgot why I was looking for it to begin with.

I stepped forward in Martin’s mind and grabbed the reigns again spinning us around almost violently. This time, we caught the sight of a shadow racing across the street and down an alley. From the shape of it, it looked like it was a woman.

I stepped back to see what Martin would do, but I was determined that if he didn’t chase after the shadow, I would take back over and do it myself. I wanted to know who it was. It may have even been more important to me and my situation than it was to Martin. I didn’t have to guess long. Before I had settled back into my roll as spectator, Martin was chasing after the shadow with surprising speed. He slid around the corner just in time to see the shadow make a quick right hand turn out of the alley. It was a woman. Definitely a woman. Instead of chasing after her, he raced back the way he had come in an effort to cut her off. At the next street, he quickly rounded the corner and raced toward the street she had turned down. When we arrived at this intersection, there was no trace of her. It was if she had vanished.

To err on the side of caution, Martin began creating a new zig-zag route that first took us far away from this area before finally pointing us back in the original direction of travel. Just as we were resuming our course, I felt like something was pulling at me, trying to pull me out of Martin. Just then, there was a violent jerk and a sensation of having fallen and landing hard on my seat.

As the now all-too-familiar feeling of vertigo subsided, I began taking inventory of my new surroundings. I was still in Martin, or back in Martin, as the case may be, but we were sitting in a wingback chair in front of a fire. Martin was smoking a pipe. I tried to stand up but couldn’t. My role had been relegated back to strictly that of a spectator, so I did the only thing I could do: wait.

There was a peace and serenity to Martin that was drastically different to the coldness of unfeeling and the fire of rage he had felt before. He was feeling content.

Then I heard just about the sweetest, most angelic voice I had ever heard. “Martin, dinner is on the table,” the voice said from just behind us.

“Thank you,” Martin said with a sweetness to his voice that I had not heard before. When he got up and turned toward the voice, I immediately recognized her. She was a little younger than when I had seen her stretched out in her room, but there she stood. And Sarah looked every bit as angelic as she sounded. She smiled such a tender smile at Martin that any man who saw it would have fallen in love with her. He walked up to her and she stood on her tip-toes to kiss him softly on the cheek.

They walked together into the dining room where she had prepared a lavish meal. I have seen my grandmother cook like that, so I knew how much time and energy she had put into it. Even though the table was large and customs of the time dictated that they sat at opposite ends of the table, she sat in the seat closest to him, as if she couldn’t bear to be any farther away from him.

After they had eaten, she served him coffee and they sat at the table for the better part of an hour talking to one another. During this entire time, I felt like I had no business to witness them interacting in that way. I was spying in on them on some private, tender moment that I had no right to see. I almost felt dirty. I felt worse about witnessing this scene than I had felt after I beat the hell out of Mr. Punk-ass drug dealer. When Martin stood up and took Sarah’s hand and began to lead her up the stairs, I decided that if I was still around, I would have to shut my eyes to everything else that happened. I would not invade that far.

I couldn’t believe that the man I had traveled through the course of three murders with could have the capacity to love someone as much as he did her. Nor could I believe that a man like that was capable of being loved by someone else that much.
         I was not to be allowed anywhere near this loving union, though. As we stepped onto the landing, I was barely able to catch a glimpse of the odd stained glass window I had seen earlier before I was jerked back out of Martin.

This time, I did not land back in him. I was standing on my own in a doorway to a room I had seen before. Taking stock of this room, I recognized it as the smoking room Martin had been sitting in before being called to dinner and also the very same room where I had seen him dead.

Martin was there in the room, sitting in the same spot I had seen him in earlier. I heard him say with anger and sadness in his voice, “You lied to me.” I turned and saw he was talking to the man with the red eyes.

“No, not exactly,” the other man said.

“You lied. See if you get anymore out of me now. Let’s see if I keep my word after you have broken yours. Father, forgive me,” he said, as he raised a revolver to his head that I had not noticed before and pulled the trigger.

I was stunned for a moment, then a fear gripped my gut and twisted it into a hundred different knots. I tore up the stairs and went directly to Sarah’s room. I was as afraid for Sarah as I would have been if Kyra were upstairs instead. There she was as I had seen her before, clutching a small vial. The warmth had not yet left her body.

"Noooo!” I screamed.