Cursed Be the Child (38 page)

“I am sorry. Pola Janichka, I did not mean to cause you pain. I wanted only to learn…”

“To learn what?”

“To learn who I was. To discover my place in the world. And I feared that would be denied me if I lived my life as the sorceress, the
ababina,
the Romany said I had to be.” Selena Lazone looked into the ancient and mystery-laden eyes of Pola Janichka. “I did not mean to cause you pain,” she said. “For that, I am sorry.”

Pola Janichka said, “I am pleased you are sorry. A day will come and yet once more will I weep for you, Selena Lazone, but for those tears, you will not owe me nor your people an apology. They will be sad tears and good tears.”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“Then you are not meant to know what I mean.”

“As you say, Rawnie.”

“As the good God,
O Del,
wills, Selena Lazone.”

“Bater.”

“Now we have much to do.”

“Then let it be done.”

“Bater,”
said Pola Janichka.

In a low and holy voice, Pola Janichka invoked the Rom, called on the collective power that beat in the living heart of the Gypsy people. She invoked the
mule Romano,
the spirits of the Gypsy dead, Gypsy spirits who would remain alive as long as they were remembered by the living. Pola Janichka invoked those who had come before, those who were and those who would come after. She invoked all Rom in the name of
O Del,
the living God, and in the name of a contrite Selena Lazone and in her own name, Pola Janichka.

In Romany, Pola Janichka said, “Wrong can be forgiven but it should never be hidden.”

“Nor can it be hidden,” Selena Lazone answered, as Pola Janichka had long ago taught her to answer.

“Then together let us find the truth for you,” Pola Janichka said, not without a note of sorrow.

The holy
solakh
commenced, the sacred ritual of truth and confession.

Of forgiveness and redemption.

— | — | —

Forty-One

As he drove west on the unfamiliar US Route 30, Lincoln Highway, Evan Kyle Dean shivered and not only with the chill of weariness. The night had become almost insufferably windy and cold, and the rented Ford Escort’s heater produced gurgling and wheezing but virtually no heat. He wished he had put on his coat before getting behind the wheel.

He yawned and waited for the increased rush of oxygen to revive him, but it did not come. He heard the wind’s cold muttering on the glass and steel surfaces of the automobile. He felt alone. It was a strange, almost unreal, torpor that, like freezing smoke, seemed to be swirling sluggishly in his arms and legs and chest and belly and brain. It was unnatural, like nothing he had ever before experienced.

He was afraid he would fall asleep. The wind was a demonic lullaby urging him to nod off, to just let the car go where it would. But he had to keep driving, had to put the miles between himself and the Barringer home. He could rest only when he was so far away he could no longer sense the evil, invisible tentacles reaching for him.

How many miles behind him were the Barringers, his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law, his niece? Melissa, what was she? Innocent child or impious child? Victim? Victimizer?

Change lanes. Stay awake. The standard advice is, if you feel sleepy, you roll down the window and let the air blast you in the face, but he couldn’t bear the thought. It was so cold tonight, so damnably cold. So play little driving games to give yourself something to do. Move over a lane. Shift back. Speed up. Slow down.

It was almost midnight, and he was exhausted.

Then he saw it, the promise of rest—a neon-bright Holiday Inn sign no more than a mile or so ahead.

The desk clerk politely took his Mastercharge card and gave him a room. It smelled of room freshener that couldn’t completely mask old cigarette smoke. He dropped his travel bag on the rickety luggage stand and hung his coat on the clothes rod. No surprises at a Holiday Inn and no closets, either. He did not mind. All he needed was a bed.

He yanked down the bed coverings. Fully dressed, except for shoes and socks, he slipped between the sheets. In under 30 seconds, he was asleep.

And dreaming.

The relief is so overwhelming he thinks he might cry. He has escaped from an oily blackness into a world of familiar light. He is home. He is in his own living room with his own wife, Carol Grace.

He kisses her passionately. He needs her. He loves her. He loves her. But…

Carol Grace is not Carol Grace. She is Vicki Barringer, who says, “I need you.”

The complacency with which he accepts the impossible metamorphosis assures him this is a dream. He need fear nothing that happens, because it is not truly happening; a dream comments on reality but is not reality. So let the dream proceed in its own dreamy way, and should anything prove too disturbing, he will end the dream.

There is neither surprise nor transition before he is transported to bed with Vicki, kissing her breasts, kissing a meandering path down her belly, tasting salt on a rising and falling satin surface. He has no guilt. This is but a dream, and he is a dream adulterer. Conscious thought might be sinful, an affront to your fellow man and yourself and God, but dreams sprang from the unconscious and were beyond your rational control, often beyond your understanding.

“I’m your girl. I’m your own little girl,” she tells him.

That is right. She is his own little girl. He has always wanted a little girl, his own little girl.

He wants to possess her. He will. His will be done. Now.

He is inside her, inside her heated core, the clutching ooze and heat and clinging flesh. He feels a moment of foolishness as he is looking down at himself and Vicki, his little girl, watching the clumsy gyrations of his own naked buttocks.

Participating in the dream as well as observing it, Evan Kyle Dean is experiencing the wildest, most frantic lovemaking he has ever known.

She squeals and begs for more. Harder. “Give it to me! Oh, Daddy! Oh, Uncle! Give it to me! Give it to me! Oh, fuck me! Fuck meeee…”

Then she turns her head to look back over her shoulder in salacious victory.

With sinking dread but no surprise, he sees Melissa peering at him as he skewers her, as he fucks her, and she is laughing, and so, just as a test, he tries to stop fucking her or to make her change to Carol Grace, but he cannot do that. He cannot quit fucking the little girl.

Evan Kyle Dean awoke.

He sat up in bed.

Dreams, he told himself, neither holy revelation or self-condemnation. A pornographic fantasy staged on his mental movie screen, and given recent events, one with none too ambiguous symbolism! There was, however, he mused, nothing symbolic about the erection he still sported. There was no reason for concern, though; indeed, it made him feel he was not so many decades removed from that youngster who’d awakened each and every morning with his manhood at attention!

Evan Kyle Dean lay back. He fluffed his pillows and, beneath the warm comfort of the blankets, folded his hands on his chest. Eyes closed, he concentrated on nothing and felt his breathing deepen so that each exhalation came all the way up from his toes.

He was not sure when exactly he went from waking to sleep, but he knew he was dreaming because what he saw could not be real.

She is an angel, an ectoplasmic imitation of flesh. She burns with divine light. She is naked, of course, but there is nothing in the least sexual about her nakedness. She is the perfect image of a perfect child, the Angel of Innocence, and he knows she has chosen this form to suit him.

“Evan Kyle Dean,” the angel says, “will you be the beloved and chosen of the Lord?”

“I will.”

“You are a good man?”

“I am.”

“You are a righteous man?”

“I am.”

“Then save me, righteous and good man who would be the Lord’s beloved, the Lord’s chosen. Save me, and I will reveal to you my name.”

He thinks of the Old Testament’s Jacob who wrestled all night with the angel, who strove to learn the celestial being’s name and did not. Jacob became Israel, the Father of Nations, of the Chosen People.

Now he would be told the mystical name of his angel. He will learn her name and will come to learn the secrets of the seraphim.

“Save me, Evan Kyle Dean, save me and be honored among the most godly.”

He sees it then, surrounded by blackness. It has a naked man’s flabby body, made all the more sickening by its pink-whiteness, and its erect penis is a purple-capped weapon. Its head is not the head of a man, but of a rat. The rat’s fangs gleam yellow and wet. The sharp nose twitches, whiskers testing the air.

This is the enemy; this is the hideous shape evil has chosen to assume. The Rat.

“Take me from here, Evan Kyle Dean,” says the angel.

He will. He will take her wherever she wishes to go.

She wants to go out.

But it is cold out, so cold.

The Rat is coming for her. Help her. Save her. Learn the angel’s name.

Evan Kyle Dean got out of bed. He did not want to be cold. He could not stand any more cold tonight, so he took his coat and slipped it on. He did not, however, put on his socks and shoes. He looked at the green LED clock numbers on the television’s top panel. It was 5:48 in the morning. His conscious mind registered that. He opened the door of the motel room.

Where is she? Where has his angel gone?

Here, Evan Kyle Dean, I am here.

He put his hand in his right hand coat pocket. His fingers touched something smooth and cool. He took it out.

His angel has changed. She is small and perfect. He can hold her in the palm of his hand.

Coat flapping, Evan Kyle Dean walked barefoot through the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. The icy wind whirled viciously around him.

Angel’s eyes shine so very bright. Her eyes become bigger. Their radiance fills him. There is nothing but the light of angel eyes.

He hears her laughter.

And he knows, held captive by her growing, gleaming eyes, that she is not an angel, but a spirit who means his destruction. He knows he is betrayed.

The wind was encircling him, holding him, paralyzing him.

He understands he has betrayed himself. The admonishment from Proverbs 3:5 comes to him. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” A good, righteous man. That’s what he arrogantly thought himself. He thought himself “God’s anointed,” but the anointing was by Evan Kyle Dean and not by the hand of the Lord. He asks the question of himself that King David the Psalmist asked of all men: “How long will you love vanity?”

Huge, glowing, hellish eyes accuse and condemn him like a mirror.

A whisper, “My name is Lisette…”

The dream ends…

…but he could still see the enormous eyes. He stood in the center of the eastbound passing lane on Route 30, a prisoner of the wind and the night and the evil. In his right hand, he held a china doll, the figure of a little girl in an old fashioned bonnet, a basket of eggs on her lap. He felt drained, without strength. He could not move as the truck bore down on him, headlights looming larger and larger. A horn blared, a loud and lonely and futile sound.