THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL by John Saul

Author:John Saul [Saul, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1999-06-13T21:00:00+00:00

Clean the church.

Clean the freakin’ church!

What kind of crap was that? Jared wondered, though he was careful to say nothing out loud until he and Luke were safely out of the school building. So they’d been a few minutes late getting back from lunch. What was the big deal? It wasn’t like they were going to miss out on learning the secret of life, for Christ’s sake. So they didn’t get to hear Sister Clarence discuss the proper use of the subjunctive tense, or whatever the hell she’d been talking about. Who cared? But the thing that had pissed Jared off most was that Father Bernard left them waiting outside his office all afternoon. It wasn’t like he’d been doing anything important—Jared was sure that most of the time he’d just been sitting there, inside. But they’d had to stand and wait, with everyone else in the school staring at them during the breaks.

No one had spoken to them, as if they were afraid they might catch some dread disease.

Bunch of kiss-ups, that’s all they were, he thought.

Then, when they’d finally been called into Father Bernard’s office, the priest made them stand at attention, like they were in some kind of military academy or something! And he’d even given them the “this hurts me as much as it hurts you” line of crap, like he really cared what happened to either one of them.

The way the priest had spoken, Jared assumed they would be suspended, but in the end he told them they were going to have to clean the church. “Perhaps if you see what it’s like to work as a janitor, you might appreciate your classes a bit more.”

More likely it was free labor that Father Bernard wanted, Jared decided.

“I bet he finds some reason to make a kid clean the church every single week,” he said when he and Luke left the school. Sometime during the afternoon the weather had shifted, and the heavy mugginess in the air made Jared wish he could just go home and maybe sprawl out and take a nap. “What do you ‘spose he’d do if we ditch it?” he asked.

Luke scuffed at the sidewalk, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. “You can do whatever you want. But if I don’t show, my mom’ll find out, and she’ll kill me.”

Jared eyed the church that loomed across the street. The last time he’d been inside was for his aunt Cora’s funeral. He remembered thinking it had been kind of pretty, with the light coming through the stained-glass windows. But now it seemed forbidding, and as he came to the steps, he suddenly didn’t want to go inside.

But why should I want to? he wondered. Going inside meant spending the next three hours scrubbing the floors, polishing the brass railing in front of the altar, and cleaning all the statues. But even as he silently ticked off the list of chores Father Bernard had assigned them, he knew there was more to his reluctance to enter than just that.

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