Cursed Be the Child by Mort Castle Page B

wrapped around the knife handle, she opened the door to the basement with her left. Soundless and surefooted, she walked down the stairs.
    Warren lay snoring on the rec-room sofa.
    She glided across the floor. With each step, she raised the knife a bit higher until it was right before her face, and she stood over Warren Barringer as his Adam’s apple bobbed with each breath he took.
     
    — | — | —
     

Sixteen
     
    “Evan?”
    On his knees at the side of the bed, eyes red, lower lip chapped and scaly, Evan Kyle Dean did not respond to his name or the knock at the door. His hands were clasped for prayer, but he was not praying. A prayer came from the heart, but his heart was dead, a heavy black stone in his chest.
    Across the room, the nine-inch color television on the dresser chattered away. Two women, their faces too pink, happily compared the absorbability of paper towels. He needed the television’s gibberish, since he couldn’t stand the awful silence of the room and the hurricane rushing—of the thousands of thoughts in his mind.
    “Evan, may I come in?” Carol Grace called through the door.
    “No,” he said. For the past week, they had not been sleeping together. She’d moved to one of the guest rooms.
    “Are you all right, Evan?”
    He heard the concern in her words. “Yes,” he lied. “I just need to be alone. I need to think.”
    “Could I fix you breakfast?”
    “No.” He had eaten—when was it?—yesterday? The food’s melted cellophane taste had sent him staggering to the bathroom to throw up.
    In the eight days since he had broken down at True Witness Church, Evan Kyle Dean had lost 20 pounds. He had slept perhaps ten hours total. He could not turn off his mind. In all that time, minute by excruciating minute, thoughts raced through his brain like tracer bullets, but when he tried to catch one and hold it long enough to make some sense of it, it turned to smoke.
    And he could not pray. He simply could not pray.
    “Evan, are you sure…”
    “Please, just let me be!” he curtly called out, instantly regretting it. He suppressed a groan, as with his hands on the unmade bed, he lifted himself to his feet.
    Retying the belt of the blue terry cloth robe he wore over his pajamas, he went to the door and opened it.
    The sickly, frightened look on Carol Grace’s face knifed into him, cutting into his own pain and adding to it. He tried to smile. “I…I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “I don’t mean to be short with you.”
    “Evan,” Carol Grace said, “we have to…”
    “See a doctor?” he concluded the sentence for her. “Or a psychiatrist?” He gave a snort of mirthless laughter. “No, dear, this is something I have to work out on my own.”
    Unlike numerous others who healed through God’s power, or claimed to, Evan Kyle Dean did not disparage doctors and psychiatrists. Their minds and their talents were God-given, and in their own ways, they were as much God’s workers as any preacher who cast out unclean spirits by the power of the Holy Name. But a doctor’s task was to heal afflictions of the body, and a psychiatrist’s, afflictions of the mind.
    His affliction was of the soul.
    “Carol Grace,” Evan said softly, “my own wife, good and true.” He gently took her face in his hands. “Our union is based on trust, our trust in one another”—his mouth was dry “—and our trust in God. What’s happened…what is happening to me is part of the Lord’s plan. I know that. I don’t understand it yet, but I trust Him. I beg you to trust me now. And to remember that I love you.”
    The smile she tried did not quite work. “All right, then,” she said, “I’m going to the store. While I’m out, I think it would be good for you to get cleaned up and dressed.”
    “Yes.” He nodded. “I’ve been brooding. I need to get on with the business of living.”
    “Good,” Carol Grace said, “and when I come home, I’ll put together a nice breakfast for