John Saul - The Right Hand of Evil

"Stop her!"

Jared, a glittering dagger clutched in his right hand, started toward his mother.

Father MacNeill held Kim's hands in his and looked deep into her eyes. He could still see the terror that had taken root inside her, but now there was something else as well: a look of resolve was displacing the fear. As they stood in front of the house, the girl's determination was overcoming the paralyzing panic that had overpowered her in the biology lab at school. "You can do it, Kimberley," he said quietly. "Just remember, your aunt was right. The cross will protect you. You're going to see more frightening things than you can even imagine, but as long as you wear the cross, you will be safe. Do you understand that?"

Kim hesitated only a fraction of a second before nodding. Safe, she whispered to herself. The word had become a mantra, which she kept silently repeating as her fingers constantly went to the cross suspended from her neck on the thin gold chain: Safe… Safe… Safe… But what if the chain broke? What if the cross fell away and-

"Kim… Kiiimmmmm…"

Jared's voice again! But it sounded weaker, as if he were sinking farther into the depths she'd seen in her dreams, sinking beyond her reach. "Now," she whispered, almost as much to herself as to the two priests who flanked her. Leaving them on the sidewalk, she started toward the house.

"We can't let her go in there by herself," Father Bernard said as she moved across the lawn.

Father MacNeill said nothing until Kim mounted the steps to the porch. Even from here he could feel the icy chill emanating from the structure, almost see the heavy aura of evil that hung over it. "We don't have a choice," he finally replied. "Neither you nor I could even cross the threshold. We don't have the strength."

As Kimberley Conway slowly opened the front door, stepped through it, then closed it behind her, the two priests began to pray.

As it echoed through the vast emptiness of the house, the sound of the door closing behind Kim had a terrible finality to it. She stood perfectly still. Everything about the house had changed; the icy chill was all-pervasive now, and Kim knew there was nothing she could do to protect herself from it. The air had taken on a heaviness that made it difficult to breathe, and every instinct within Kim told her to leave.

To leave now, before it was too late.

But even as her instincts tried to force her to turn away, she started toward the stairs.

A rat came out of nowhere, darting toward her. Kim reflexively flinched backward, a shriek of revulsion rising in her throat.

Not real!

The words rose in her mind as her right hand clutched the cross around her neck.

The rat vanished.

Vanished, or only veered away to disappear through the open doors of the dining room?

Steeling herself against the panic the rat's appearance had brought on, Kim continued toward the stairs. The atmosphere grew even heavier, and her feet seemed mired in quicksand, as if she were caught up in a terrible nightmare.

She came to the bottom of the stairs, but even as she set foot on the first tread, the staircase itself came alive with snakes. They were everywhere, writhing among themselves, then rising up, their heads swaying as their tongues flicked out at her.

Kim's fingers tightened on the cross, and she took a second step, then a third.

The serpents parted before her.

As she came to the landing, a high-pitched shriek rent the silence of the house, and Kim whirled around, but saw nothing.

Another shriek, once again behind her.

She spun around again, but again saw nothing. Now the shrieking built to a howl, and Kim covered her ears, bolting up the flight to the mezzanine. A moment later she stood in front of the door to her parents' room, and as she reached for the knob, she tried to prepare herself for whatever might wait within.

She turned the knob, pushed the door open.

The corpse, naked, hung from the chandelier, a thick rope knotted around its neck.

The mouth hung open, the tongue lolled out.

The empty, dead eyes fixed on Kim.

It was her mother.

Once again a scream boiled up in Kim's throat; once again the voice inside spoke as her fingers tightened on her cross: Not real!

Her mother's lifeless arm came up; her finger pointed accusingly at her. "Your fault!" The words croaked from her mother's constricted throat, dribbled from lips grayed with death.

Kim's heart thudded, her legs went weak. Hysteria threatened to overwhelm her. But then, from somewhere deep within, she heard her aunt's voice whispering. "It will protect you. The cross will protect you." Forcing back the hysteria that threatened to paralyze her, Kim turned away from the specter hanging from the chandelier, and went to the small dresser on which her mother's jewelry box sat. Opening the lid, she began searching, hunting for the second cross. The top tray was filled with a tangle of necklaces and a few inexpensive rings, but there was no sign of the cross. Kim lifted out the tray. Beneath it was another compartment, in which lay three boxes. The first one contained a single strand of pearls; the second an ornately carved jade pendant Kim hadn't seen since her grandmother had died a dozen years earlier. Attached to the pendant's chain was a small tag, with a message written in her grandmother's shaky hand:

For Kim on her 21st birthday. She clutched the pendant for a moment, then put it back and opened the third box.

The second gold cross glittered brightly. As Kim lifted it out of the box, a scream of agony erupted behind her. She whirled around to see her mother's corpse twitching at the end of the rope; both hands were now stretched toward Kim as greedy fingers tried to snatch away the cross.

"No!" Kim breathed. "Never!"

The specter screamed again, the dead features of the face contorting with rage. The arms stretched toward her until the fingers almost touched Kim's flesh.

Her courage teetered as her heart pounded. But she didn't flinch away.

With one final howl of enraged frustration, the terrible specter of her mother's corpse dropped away.

The chain wrapped around Kim's fingers, the cross itself clutched tightly in her left hand, she returned to the bedroom door and paused, listening. Through the door's thick panels she could hear something-something that sounded faintly familiar, but that she couldn't quite put a name to.

She opened the door a crack, and instantly the sound threatened to deafen her.

Wasps!

Millions of them, swirling in a cloud so thick she almost couldn't see across to the opposite side of the hall. All her instincts told her to slam the door closed again, to cower in the safety of the bedroom until the stinging horde was gone. But once again she forced her instincts aside and threw the door wide.

The wasps swirled around her head.

Steadily, Kim began walking toward the head of the stairs, her skin crawling with the anticipation of millions of tiny feet clinging to her, thousands of stingers plunging into her body. She broke into a run, pounded down the stairs, then through the doors into the dining room. She slammed the dining room doors closed. Instantly, the droning of the insects died away.

As she moved toward the door to the basement stairs, she tried not to even glance at her mother's mural, terrified of what she might now see there. But her eyes were drawn to it, and her breath caught in her throat as she gazed into a blazing inferno beyond the French doors she had watched her mother draw. Flames were everywhere; the trees bore limbs of fire, and clouds of smoke hung in the sky. Burning figures whirled and spun across the fiery lawn. The cacophonic moans of a thousand tortured souls rolled out of the scene, and Kim felt an unbearable hopelessness pervade her.