When the Day of Evil Comes (33 page)

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The clear day had left no warm blanket of clouds for the city, and I shivered through that bitter night. My quilt and my electric blanket—meager defenses against an inadequate heating system in an old, drafty house—could not keep the cold at bay.

So I slept in shallow dreams, whipped by snow and wind. White, swirling cold bit at my extremities like packs of wolves. My toes were icy, my fingers curled under my chin to ward off the freeze. And my nose a little sniffley block of ice.

Somewhere around 3:30—a witching hour for me, for many terrible and frightening things have happened to me at 3:30 in the morning—I heard a thump. I do not know if this was a thump in my dream or in my house, but it terrified me, coming as it did from the door that leads from my bedroom to the kitchen. I’d closed that door. Wanting to close myself into the smallest corner of the house. An innate nesting instinct, perhaps, to provide for myself some illusion of safety.

But after the thump, I swear I heard footsteps on my creaky wood floor, coming from the kitchen and striding through the bedroom, stopping at the garage door. I lay there, careful not to move, and slowly opened my eyes, my heart in my throat, fully expecting to see an axe murderer standing at the foot of my bed.

No one was there. The bedroom door was still closed. I moved my eyes around the room.

I had just about convinced myself I’d dreamed the whole thing when the door to the garage burst open, letting in a blast of icy air.

I bolted out of bed, slamming myself against the garage door and dead bolting it from the inside. I reached to the bedside table, fumbled for the light, and then stared, panting, at the empty room.

It dawned on me that someone might have come in through the front door. I raced out of the bedroom and hurled myself against the front door, grabbing the dead bolt.

It didn’t move. It was already locked.

I chained the door, raced to the kitchen, and snatched the phone out of its cradle. To call whom? The police? David? Just exactly who did I think was going to rescue me? And from what? A draft?

I replaced the phone slowly, feeling the cold settle in on me as I sat down, quiet and still, on a barstool.

And then I remembered. I’d been dreaming when I’d heard the thump. About a lumberjack. A lumberjack standing in my bedroom doorway.

He was tall and thin, clad in chinos and a plaid flannel shirt and boots. The one incongruous thing about him—other than the fact that he was a lumberjack (we don’t have many of those in Dallas) and that he was standing in my bedroom at 3:30 a.m.—was that he was sickly white and bone thin. Not a Daniel Boone sort of lumberjack, all hearty and lively. He was more of a Michael-Stipes-with-a-terminal-disease sort of lumberjack. Puny. Sickly. Weak. And he was bald. Bald as a mountain peak in the dead of winter. And just as white. I didn’t have to see him without his hat to know it.

The lumberjack’s name was Peter Terry. At least that’s how he’d introduced himself to me a year before, though he probably had used dozens of names, maybe hundreds, over the centuries of his work. He’d been wearing bathing trunks that day last summer, his white pasty skin taking on a surreal sheen in the Texas sunshine. I knew that the plaid lumberjack shirt he wore tonight—a sick nod, no doubt, to the bloody axe that had appeared mysteriously at my front door the day before—concealed a horizontal slash that ran between his shoulder blades. A slash representing, I believe, the confiscation of his wings at the moment of judgment, millennia before.

Peter Terry was bad news. I held both a healthy fear of him and a steely resolve toward him. I knew him to be capricious, deceitful, and thoroughly malevolent. He was capable of both patient planning and violent fits of impulsive, pernicious rage. He was wildly immature and at the same time sagacious and shrewd. He was a raw nerve—petulant, churlish, childish, vengeful, dangerous.

Peter Terry was evil. Evil as the viper of Eden.

Had he just walked through my bedroom and into my garage? Or had I dreamed the whole thing? But the door. The door had burst open, I reminded myself.

I wasn’t sure which option was worse. That Peter Terry had trespassed in my house or in my mind. Both possibilities terrified me.

I sat there in my kitchen, shivering from cold, knowing somehow that he would not breach either barrier again tonight. It would be unlike him. He was more of a skulker than one to attack directly. He would content himself with the scare, with his sick little lumberjack joke. And he’d spend his night—if time divides into days and nights for such beings—satisfied that he’d reminded me of his presence.

How easily we forget about the war raging around us.

I filled the teakettle and lit the gas stove, then padded back into the bedroom and slipped a sweatshirt over my head and found myself some warm socks. Naturally, I developed a sudden, desperate interest in God again, now that I felt personally threatened by the other side. I sat in my kitchen and read my Bible, drinking hot tea with milk and sugar, until the sun came up.

I looked for an obscure passage that I’d remembered finding a year before—something about God allowing one of those assorted kings or Old Testament characters whose names I could never remember to see the angels around him.

I couldn’t find the passage, but I longed to see the angels. I’d seen the enemy. It seemed only fair that I should get to see the allies too.

No angels appeared for me that morning, in Scripture or in my kitchen. But I did read long enough to remind myself of the vastness of the battle, of the invisible, insidious nature of spiritual warfare.

God would win, I knew, with or without me. And I would fight, knowing I was on the winning side, but I did not look forward to the wounds I knew I would receive.

I knew that courage would come in the moment. God had a way of doling it out at the very second I needed it most. But fear would be just as present in the coming days.

I didn’t waste any time asking why this was happening to me. I could wonder all I wanted. There would be no answer forthcoming. God’s ways were not my ways. He’d made that little fact perfectly plain to me the year before.

Somehow, I’d gotten caught up in the swirl of battle again. Like the citizens of those little French towns after D-Day those unlucky natives who learned to duck, to run, to fight, to hide. They managed to feed and clothe themselves, all the while mustering the courage to withstand the bombs.

They watched their archives burn, their monuments shatter, their loved ones die. They endured the cacophony, the chaos, the carnage. All with the firm and undeniable certainty that the battle had nothing to do with them. It was a clash of ideologies, of powers exponentially larger and more powerful than themselves. A raging thunderclap of conflict between two mighty forces.

They just happened to be in the way.

I’d learned, though, that it was possible, even necessary to participate, just as the bravest among them had. Doing their part. Joining the resistance.

I would fight, wearing both my citizenship in the kingdom and my spiritual armor with resolute defiance. I would never, ever go down without a fight. Peter Terry should know that about me by now.

My contribution to the war effort would be small. This war had raged, after all, since the beginning of time. But faithfulness to the task, for those of us who find ourselves in the crossfire, is utterly necessary. God has designed it that way. And I intended to gear up and show up.

As the sun rose that morning, bringing with it the hope of a new day, my bones hurt; I was so cold. If I was going into battle, I wanted a hot shower first.

I lit a match in the bathroom, turned on the little hiss of gas in the heater on the wall, and enjoyed the small whoosh as the blue flame leapt to life and did its job. I shut the door and the bathroom began to warm. I held my hands out and toasted them in front of the flame.

After the circulation returned to my fingers, I turned around and twisted the faucet handle in the tub, letting the water run onto the icy porcelain, holding my hand under the stream, waiting for the heat.

It didn’t come. The water stayed cold, my fingers bluing as I held them there. I turned the faucet off and stared at it. The “H” was right there, staring at me. “H” for hot. I turned the knob again and waited, thinking maybe the pipes were so cold the hot water would take longer to heat up. Still nothing.

It finally dawned on me that the footsteps had come through the kitchen last night. The water heater was in the kitchen.

Feeling the rage rise up inside me, I moved to the kitchen and yanked open the water heater closet and touched the skin of the water heater. It was ice cold. I knelt down, eye level now with the base of the unit and the little wads of dust and foul mysterious clumps of nastiness that accumulate in such places. I listened for the pilot light. Absolute dead silence. The jerk had blown out my pilot light.

I found some matches, dismantled the metal screen that sheltered the pilot light from the outside world (an invention of Satan, I’m certain. Why can’t they make it easy to light these things?), and spent half an hour trying unsuccessfully to light that stupid little blue flame.

I got it lit once and experienced a quick rush of ecstasy, only to hear the flame sputter and die as I held my ear to the water heater and prayed for success.

I ended up taking an arctic shower, my skin purple and goose-bumped when I was done, and shampoo still tangled in my long auburn hair.

My mood at that point was beyond foul. And all nine of the fruits of the Spirit evaded me. I had no love, joy, or peace. And don’t even talk to me about patience and all the rest.

I was bitter. Angry. And cold. The fruits of a dead pilot light and a long, disastrous night.

I dried my hair and got myself ready for the day, throwing on my oldest pair of jeans and my warmest sweater. I clicked the lock behind me as I stepped into the shivery chill of my garage. More cold air rushed in as I pushed the button to raise the door.

My truck started, to my great relief. I turned the heater on high, pulled out of the driveway, and left, closing the garage door behind me.

I made it halfway down my street before I realized what day it was.

Happy birthday to me.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the
authors imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.

WHEN THE DAY OF EVIL COMES
published by Multnomah Books
A
division of Random House Inc.

© 2005 by Melanie Wells

Multnomah
and its mountain colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House Inc.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission.

For information:
MULTNOMAH BOOKS
12265 ORACLE BOULEVARD, SUITE 200
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO 80921

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wells, Melanie.

  When the day of evil comes : a novel / Melanie Wells.
        p. cm.
  I. Title.
  PS3623.E476W47 2005
  813′.6—dc22

2004029822

eISBN: 978-0-307-56336-1

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