A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans

Author:Justin Evans [Evans, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General & Literary Fiction, Thriller
ISBN: 9780307351227
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2007-05-22T06:00:00+00:00

A row of massive, whitewashed columns fronted the main campus, where most Early College classrooms and administrative offices were housed. Under the narrow porch of these columns ran a narrow walkway, paved unevenly with centuries-old brick. The students had gone for the day. I walked alone, an undersized figure in the twilight. I stopped at a warped stone stoop—flanked by iron cleats for demucking the boots of the college’s eighteenth-century founders—and entered Massie Hall, home of the English Department. Most lights had been extinguished. A pug-nosed secretary sat alone behind a desk, tidying papers, preparing to leave.

“Excuse me.”

She jumped. “Yes?” she said curtly.

“Where is Tom Harris’s office, please?”

“He’s on the third floor. But office hours are over,” she warned. “May I ask what your business is?”

I ignored her and climbed the stairs at my accustomed, sluggish pace. I passed a corkboard covered with exam schedules, framed posters of Ireland and Shakespeare, and finally reached a door with a black plastic plate reading TOM HARRIS in white letters. I knocked. Next door, the brass knocker my father had screwed to his office door—a lion’s head—remained. But the nameplate had been changed. I could not read it in the dark.

A voice boomed. “Lasciare ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate.”

I pushed open Tom Harris’s door and blinked in the yellow glow. “Can I come in?”

He had propped his cast on the desk, where it gave the impression of being a small cannon ready to fire five toes into the ceiling. He read a stapled composition and held a red felt-tip pen poised over it.

He took a beat to recognize me. “Have you come here to complain about a grade?” he drawled. “The seventh grade, perhaps?”

I placed The Ancient Prayer on the desk beside Tom Harris’s cast, and sat. He glanced at the book, touched it, recognized it. Very deliberately, he set down the composition.

“Reading this?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Why?”

“Uncle Freddie mentioned it.”

“Did you read all of it?”

“I read chapter nine,” I said.

“Refresh my memory,” said Tom Harris. Then he rubbed his forehead as if he’d suddenly acquired a headache. “No—don’t.”

“It’s the one about being possessed by demons.”

“I know,” he said. “Your father got in trouble over that chapter.”

“So?” I said. “Are demons real?”

The question lay at the heart of my father’s alienation from the college; his public humiliation by peers, reviewers, and readers; maybe even unhappiness in his marriage. I expected an explanation worthy of the subject.

“Yes,” Tom Harris said flatly, then he scowled at me over his plaster foot. He seemed to be wishing vehemently that I would go away.

“Demons are real,” I repeated. “How do you know?”

“Your father and I helped the Diocese of Virginia diagnose true cases of possession,” he said, shifting uncomfortably. “We would visit people. See if the case met the three tests set by the medieval church.” He paused, then seeing my expectant face, counted off: “Knowledge of things it is impossible for the subject to know. Doing things impossible for a human being to do. Revulsion at Christian tokens or rituals.

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