The Right Hand of Evil

  AS CORA CONWAY RELIEVED HER OF THE BURDEN OF THE BIBLE, ABIGAIL SLUMPED IN THE CHAIR. DARKNESS CLOSED AROUND HER AND SHE WAS FINALLY RELEASED FROM THE AGONY OF HER RUPTURING HEART, AND THE TERROR THAT HAD RULED HER LIFE. SHE DESERTED HER BODY GRATEFULLY; WHATEVER ETERNITY HELD FOR HER COULD NOT BE AS TERRIBLE AS THE YEARS SHE HAD SPENT IN THE CONWAY HOUSE.

  "So much evil," Monsignor Devlin muttered as he finished the last entry, which had been written by Cora Conway a few days before her husband hanged himself, and her baby—along with Eulalie Cumberland—had vanished. Cora herself had done little more than describe Abigail's last moments, and add a few cryptic words of her own:

  Perhaps Eulalie's magic can end the evil of the Conways. I doubt it, though, for I often wonder if it is not the Conways who are evil, but this house itself.

  And that was the end. Except for the missing pages, the dark history of the family was complete.

  As he closed the Bible, Monsignor Devlin felt someone behind him, and turned to find Father MacNeill standing close to his chair.

  "So Jake is one of them," the younger priest said softly. "It's no wonder he hates them, is it?"

  Monsignor Devlin shook his head. "Nor can we blame him, can we?" Not waiting for any reply, he went on, "But we still don't know how it started—where it began."

  Father MacNeill was silent for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was grim. "'The work of the Devil,'" he said. "That's what Jake called it tonight at the meeting. 'The work of the Devil.' Maybe he's right."

  Monsignor Devlin sighed, wishing he could argue with Father MacNeill. But he could not, for every syllable the younger man had spoken rang with truth.

  Halloween

  CHAPTER 30

  Father MacNeill barely slept. When the first light of the sun crept through the window of his small room on the second floor of the rectory, he wished he could pull his single thin blanket over his head and hide from the day. But he resisted temptation, despite his certainty that he would find no more rest in the brilliance of the morning than in the darkness of the night that had finally passed, so upset had he been by the last entries he and Monsignor Devlin had read in the Bible Cora Conway had entrusted to her last confessor.

  The Bible that was itself a confession of the sins of the Conways.

  But more than those chronicles of ancient wrongs had kept him awake. Through those early hours when sleep refused to come, he'd also had the uneasy sense that somewhere beyond the walls of the rectory, evil was afoot. He tried to tell himself it was nothing more than a reaction to the horrors of which he'd read, but the feeling stayed with him. Several times he left his bed to peer out into the darkness, searching for the source of the unease that kept him from sleep.

  There had been nothing.

  Nothing, at least, that he could see or hear, save for the flickering of a few jack-o'-lanterns left lit on porches or in darkened windows, and the plaintive hooting of an owl hunting in the darkness.

  Yet he'd known that somewhere, concealed in the blackness, some evil was hidden. Each time he turned away from the window, he dropped to his knees in prayer—prayer that brought him no comfort. The hours seemed to stretch on forever in an endless cycle of searching, praying, and tossing restlessly on the thin pallet that was all he allowed himself for a mattress.

  Now, he rose, stretched the knots of tension from his arms, pulled on his clothes, and went down to the kitchen. Putting on a pot of coffee, he went to the front door, where the Sunday newspaper would be waiting. As he was bending down to pick up the paper, something in the periphery of his vision caught his attention. The unease of the last hours flooding back to him, Father MacNeill straightened up, scanning the gardens around the rectory, the churchyard, and the cemetery. Nothing seemed amiss. But as he looked at the cemetery a second time, he saw it.

  One of the mausoleums—one whose very presence had always offended him—didn't look quite right.

  From where he stood on the porch of the rectory, staring at it, he could see that the door of the crypt was slightly ajar. It was the narrow shadow cast by the open door, he realized, that had caught his attention as he bent down to pick up the paper.

  Going back into the rectory, Father MacNeill called the police department, and was relieved when one of his own parishioners answered the telephone. As he sat down to await the arrival of Ray Beckwith—who had spent his entire career as one-quarter of the town's tiny police force—his fingers counted the beads of his rosary. His lips moved rapidly as he silently spoke the words of his prayers, repeating them until his orisons were interrupted by the chime of the doorbell. As he opened the door, the look of mild curiosity on Sheriff Beckwith's face turned to one of concern.

  "Are you all right, Father Mack?" the officer asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

  "I didn't sleep well last night," the priest confessed. "I had a sort of—well, I suppose you could call it a premonition. And I'm afraid it might have come true."

  Beckwith's brows knit into a worried frown. "What's going on?"

  "I'm not sure yet," Father MacNeill said. "But something happened in the cemetery last night, and I called you right away. I didn't want to run the risk of disturbing anything."

  "Disturbing anything? You mean like one of the graves?"

  "One of the crypts," MacNeill told him. "Let me show you."

  Together, the two men made their way through the cemetery until they were standing in front of the mausoleum. Now, though, they could see that it wasn't simply that the door had been opened.

  It had been defaced, as well: above the door, staining the white marble, was a bloodred pentagram.

  "Oh, Jesus," Ray said softly. "Who'd want to do a thing like that?"

  The priest gazed at the pentagram in silence, and then the inscription beneath the crypt's door:

  GEORGE CONWAY

  BORN JULY 29, 1916

  DIED JUNE 4, 1959

  "I'm afraid I can think of a lot of people who might want to do something like that," the priest said, his voice grim. He shook his head. "I still don't understand why they let him be buried here. He died in sin."

  Beckwith's lips pursed. "That's why they deconsecrated this part of the cemetery. That's how come the fence is around the mausoleum."

  Father MacNeill shook his head. "It's still within the grounds of the church," he insisted, his agitation rising. "It should never have been done."

  Beckwith sighed, unwilling to argue with the priest. "Not much anybody can do about it now. Do you want to take a look at the coffin?"

  "Don't you need to find out if there are fingerprints?" the priest countered.

  Beckwith shook his head. "Everything's so weathered and rough, nothing would show." He glanced around at the empty streets. "But if you want to have a look inside, we better do it now, while there's no one around. Otherwise the whole town'll be talking. Let's just not touch anything more'n we absolutely have to."

  Together the two men slid the coffin just far enough out of the crypt to reveal its broken latches. As Beckwith supported the weight of the coffin, Father MacNeill carefully lifted the lid open and peered down into the moldering face of George Conway.

  The man's eyes had sunk so deep into their sockets they had almost vanished, and his skin, no doubt initially treated with embalming fluid, had dried and stretched over the years, until now it was a transparent sheath over the skull itself. The teeth showed clearly, and the flesh of the neck, though still showing the abrasion of the noose that had killed him, had desiccated to the point that it seemed the black suit George Conway had been buried in had been put on nothing more than a skeleton.

  The priest leaned closer. As his eyes fell on the hands that had been crossed over Conway's chest, he gasped.

  The right hand was missing, severed at the wrist.

  When the priest gasped, Ray Beckwith struggled to peer around the open lid, and finally worked his way far enough around the end to afford a clear view. "Oh, Christ," he whispered. "What in hell is going on?" The
n, remembering to whom he was talking, he quickly apologized. Holding his breath against the odor of ancient death drifting out of the open casket, Beckwith bent to examine the corpse. The cut in the leathery skin looked fresh, and there was a clean nick in the end of one of the arm bones.

  "It was done last night," the priest said softly. "I'm sure of it."

  "Okay," Beckwith said. "Let's just close it up for now. I'll get a crew out here later on to examine the area more closely. Let's just have us a look around the rest of the cemetery and see if they did anything else."

  Sliding the coffin back into the crypt, they closed the door as carefully as they'd handled the coffin itself, then walked through the cemetery, looking for any other signs of vandalism.

  The graveyard appeared undisturbed, until they came to the grave of Cora Conway.

  On a tree next to her grave, held in place by the sharpened end of a crucifix, was the skin of a dead cat, complete except for its head.

  But it wasn't the grizzly hide of the cat upon which Father MacNeill's eyes instantly fixed, but the profaned crucifix.

  He recognized it immediately.

  It had come from inside his own church.

  He turned to face the policeman.

  "We're going to find out who did this," he said, his voice unsteady. "We're going to find out, or I fear all our souls will burn in Hell. Every single one of us."

  CHAPTER 31

  But what will Father MacNeill say?" Marge Engstrom waited for her words to have their expected effect on her daughter. But when Sandy announced that she didn't care what Father MacNeill said, she was too tired to go to church that morning, Marge's brow creased in frustration. "I don't know what's gotten into you, Sandra Anne," she declared, using her daughter's full name, which she only did when seriously annoyed. "You know perfectly well that after last night—"

  "After last night, why would it matter if any of us go?" Sandy protested. "Father MacNeill's already mad at us, isn't he? I don't see how me going to church is going to make any difference!"

  "He's not angry at us," Marge explained with a note of exaggerated patience that only made Sandy want to dig her heels in and stick to her position. "It wasn't your father who swayed the meeting last night—it was Ted Conway. But if we don't go to church this morning, Father MacNeill might very well assume that we've taken a position against him."

  "Well, haven't we?" Sandy demanded.

  Marge pursed her lips. "As mayor, your father didn't vote last night, and though you may not have noticed, neither did I. Your father wants to maintain a position of neutrality, for the good of the entire community."

  "You mean he wants to be reelected," Sandy said, and saw by her mother's wince that she was right.

  Marge Engstrom recovered quickly. "Your father is a very good mayor, and part of the reason he's a good mayor is that he maintains bridges to every part of our community. If you look at the votes two years ago—"

  Sandy rolled her eyes. "I read Dad's campaign brochure, Mom. I even wrote part of it, remember? And I'm still not going to church!"

  Marge eyed Sandy carefully, wondering yet again if perhaps it had been a mistake to let her spend the night at the Conways'. It was a thought that had occurred to her when Sandy came home looking like death warmed over. Her face had been sallow, and her eyes so dark that Marge didn't think she could have slept at all. What on earth had she and Kim Conway been up to?

  "Nothing," Sandy had insisted. "All we did was watch a couple of horror movies and go to bed."

  "Well, no wonder you look so terrible," Marge had replied. "I swear, I don't know why they let them make those terrible movies. All that blood and violence! Why can't you and your friends watch nice movies? I'll bet you didn't sleep a wink. Not a single wink."

  By yesterday afternoon, after Sandy had a long nap, she'd seemed fine. But this morning she looked pale again.

  The argument over church had been going on for half an hour. Now, with only fifteen minutes left before mass, Marge gave up. "Well, I guess I can't force you," she told Sandy, making one last effort, "but you're the one who'll have to answer to your father. He'll be very disappointed in you. It's very important to him that the family be together on Sunday morning."

  It's important for us to be seen together, Sandy silently corrected, certain her mother knew as well as she did that if her father really wanted them all to be together, he wouldn't go off to play golf every Sunday morning, and meet them at church just in time for them to walk down the aisle together. Did he really think he was fooling anybody? "Maybe I'll go later," she offered, but knew she wouldn't.

  The moment she woke up that morning, she knew she couldn't sit through one of Father MacNeill's masses today. Just the thought of it made her feel almost as sick as she'd been yesterday morning at Kim's. But now that she'd gotten out of church, she was starting to feel better. Maybe, after her mother left, she'd just go back to bed for another hour.

  When Marge Engstrom stepped out into the bright fall morning a few minutes later, she decided that if Sandy didn't want to go to church, it was her daughter's loss, not her own. Besides, Sandy didn't look well, and perhaps just this once it really would be better for her to lie down for a while. Surely Phil—and God—would forgive her this once!

  Marge set out toward St. Ignatius briskly, nodding to everyone she met. Birds were chirping, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and by the time she was across the street from St. Ignatius, even her concern about Sandy had all but vanished. Then she saw the activity in the graveyard, and stopped short.

  Had someone died?

  But no—surely she would have heard about it!

  Marge hurried her step. "What's happened?" she asked Corinne Beckwith, who was standing just inside the cemetery gate, whispering to Sister Clarence.

  "It's terrible." Corinne glanced around to be certain no one else was listening, though Marge suspected that whatever Corinne was about to reveal had already been repeated—in strictest confidence—to everyone Corinne had talked to already. "Ray told me this in the strictest confidence, so you have to promise not to breathe a word to anyone. Not anyone!" Then, without waiting for the demanded promise to be tendered, she plunged on. "Someone opened up George Conway's coffin last night, and cut off his right hand. Can you imagine such a thing? Just cut it off! What kind of person would do such a thing! Well, of course it's the fault of those Conways. Everything was fine until they came to town. Now the church has been vandalized, and people's pets are being slaughtered, and..."

  But Marge had stopped listening, her attention drawn to the cat that was pinned to the tree with the broken crucifix. For some reason, what kept running through her mind over and over like a stuck record were the words Jake Cumberland had spoken at the meeting last night: "The work of the Devil! I'm tellin' you, this is the work of the Devil!"

  For the first time in years, Marge Engstrom didn't wait for Phil to arrive before going into the church. With all the tales she'd heard since she was a little girl, all the whisperings about the things that had supposedly gone on in the Conway house spinning anew through her head, she dipped her fingers in the font, made her genuflection, and slipped into her regular pew. When her husband sat down at her side a few minutes later, she slid her hand into his. "There's going to be trouble," she whispered. "I can feel it."

  Then she began to pray. But this morning, her prayers went far beyond her regular pleadings for her husband and daughter.

  This morning she prayed for the souls of every single person in St. Albans.

  Father MacNeill dressed for mass with deliberation. Slipping first into the finely woven linen alb—pressed perfectly wrinkle-free by his housekeeper, Sister Margaret Michael—he fastened the cincture around his waist, then added a stole. Finally he put on the chasuble, then gazed at himself in the mirror. Beyond the closed door of the vestry he could hear the murmuring of the crowd gathering in the sanctuary, but instead of the usual soft, almost chanting rhythms of prayer, this morning he heard the excited buz
z of gossip winging through the church.

  Of course, he had no one to blame but himself—he should never have called the police, at least not until he'd investigated the vandalism in the cemetery himself. It might even have been all right if they'd sent someone other than Ray Beckwith; he should have realized that Ray would be unable to hold anything back from Corinne, and everyone in St. Albans knew that if you wanted a piece of news spread as rapidly as possible, you simply told Corinne Beckwith, first swearing her to absolute secrecy and making her promise not to mention it in the newspaper.

  And he was certain where they would place the blame: after Ted Conway's performance last night, he had gained the support of much of the town—even of the St. Ignatius congregation. So it was hardly likely blame would fall where Father MacNeill was already certain it belonged. No, much more likely they would turn their wrath on Jake Cumberland. Poor, ignorant Jake, who had stood at the back of Town Hall last night, denouncing Ted Conway as a tool of the Devil.

  And why wouldn't they turn on him? After the accusation he'd made, wouldn't it be logical to assume he'd also desecrated the corpse of the man he'd always held responsible for the death of his own mother?

  "Best them Conways don't come back here ever again," Jake had told him not too many weeks ago, when Cora Conway lay dying at the Willows. "They come here, they'll have me to deal with. And I know what to do, too. Don't think I don't!"

  Father MacNeill had known Jake was speaking of the voodoo crafts he'd learned from his mother so many years ago. He hadn't bothered to argue—the priest had always understood that one man's faith is another man's superstition, and that trying to destroy Jake's belief in his mother's religion would be as useless as trying to destroy his own faith in the living Christ.