Deliver Us From Evil by Allen Lee Harris

Author:Allen Lee Harris [Harris, Allen Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Capricorn Literary
Published: 2019-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

5

“Doc,” Miss Amelia said with a gasp as she jerked herself bolt upright in her bed, her eyes fixed on the window. “Doc?” She lay motionless for a second, then jumped up and went to the window. She looked out into the dark yard. She scanned it, tilting her head one way, then another. No, it had just been a dream. But such a bad dream.

Miss Amelia went back and sat down on the edge of her bed, trying to recompose herself. “You’re just being such a silly, ” she told herself out loud, and in the same voice she used when scolding her preschoolers. She glanced over at the clock, then frowned in disappointment: It was only a little after eleven-thirty. Somehow it didn’t seem like that could be right. But pulling the clock closer to her, she saw she hadn’t made a mistake.

It was still a long way to morning.

Miss Amelia looked on the floor by the bed and saw where she had knocked off her Sunday school lesson book as well as the memo pad she had been writing on earlier. She leaned over and picked them up. On the memo pad were some lines she had jotted down when she had come back from the McAlisters earlier in the evening, lines she particularly wanted to include in her poem for old Doc’s funeral. She read them over, reciting them aloud:

You gave us all so much, oh, best of docs,

You cured our mumps, measles, and chicken pox.

You healed us of our stomach aches and headaches, too. You made us better when we had the flu.

But most of all. Lucerne is grateful

That you were always kind and never hateful.

You sat by our beds when we were ailing,

You came to us without ever failing.

This was as far as she had gotten.

Miss Amelia set the memo pad on the nightstand next to her, then looked toward the window again.

Such a crazy dream, she thought. So, so crazy. Somehow or other she was walking down a dirt road at night and she heard a voice call to her. She turned around and saw old Doc.

Come look, Miss Amelia, he said. “Come see what I’ve done.” That was the beginning of the craziness: Doc was talking to her like a little boy, like one of the boys in her Sunday school class. “Doc? That you?” She had called out in surprise, remembering that he was, after all, dead, and making a note not to mention anything about it to him, out of politeness. But she did wonder. “What is it you want me to see?” But Doc just smiled and said, “Come look.” And Miss Amelia had walked over to where he was standing, and that was when she saw the sign. It was the one she had taken up contributions for after the Kline girl’s death, the sign that read “CHRIST OUR ONLY HOPE.” Only something was wrong about it. There were holes all over it and in the dark she could see the things slithering in and out of them.

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