Methuselah's Daughter, Part 4 Chapter 32
J.A. Eddy
Excerpt:
He didn’t look amused. Instead his eyes narrowed, then he slumped forward, his forehead resting in his hands. He looked exhausted and a little embarrassed. “So what do you believe she is?” he asked, not looking up.
I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know. Instead I thought about it. How did I get involved in this, anyhow? She’d played to my ego and to my needs—my family had been fighting the financial beast for years with no end in sight until she showed up and dropped a year’s salary in my lap. I was still wrestling with that when Joshua spoke again. This time his voice was darker and he still wasn’t looking up.
“My mother is a Presbyterian, but my father, he was a Baptist through and through. Any time mother would let him he’d haul us off to his church to listen to old Pastor Fisher preach the gospel. One thing he taught always stuck with me: The war between good and evil is purely spiritual and it’s fought on the battlefield of the soul. Evil doesn’t show up on your doorstep and make you rob banks or kill people. No, it invites you out for a soda pop, or an ice cream. It offers you help by showing you easy solutions to difficult problems. It helps you to take the things you did and find ways to justify them. ‘Evil,’ he’d say, ‘leads us to Hell in baby steps’. I look at the way she has worked her way into our lives. I see the way everything we do, and everything we care about, is slowly but surely being twisted into tools that serve her purposes.”
He stopped, then went on. “I step back and I see how she’s bound my family and this town to her, emotionally, financially… and I see how I helped her do it… and all I can hear is that old preacher.”
He finally looked up and fixed his steely gaze on me, waiting. Finally I found my voice. “Okay, but what’s she asked you to do that’s bad or wrong? So far you haven’t said anything… and she’s never, not even once, asked me to do anything bad or….”
He shook his head. “So far, nothing even remotely sinister. Yet she’s obviously got these plans she isn’t always clear about, and sometimes she has a way of changing the subject… and if she is this ancient thing, and she’s lying to us about her desires, about her purposes, then…” He paused, taking a breath and then slowly letting it out. “If she’s lying we are all of us well and truly damned.”
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Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.