The Forgiving Read online

  The FORGIVING

  Wesley McCraw

  First Edition © 2013 Wesley McCraw

  Revised Edition © 2018 Wesley McCraw

  All rights reserved.

  ASIN: B00DZZIEX2

  For those who need forgiveness.

  “The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin.”

  Book of Enoch 10:8

  1

  Two Houses

  Jacobi House, privately referred to as the House of Skulls, perched high on a bluff on the Willamette River, not in isolation, but in Portland, Oregon, a city of more than six hundred thousand souls. In decay, the house remained defiant, but that was true of most historic buildings that had survived into the new millennium. Evil may have walked its halls, but the building itself wasn’t evil in any of its parts. Its foundation didn’t disturb any burial plots, American Indian or otherwise, and its architectural design wasn’t a demonic summoning glyph, though, those theories had been suggested each time the building had been partially demolished and rebuilt. People feared the place as they feared the dark. Hope died there. Horror had put down roots. But Jacobi House was like any other house.

  Save for one thing.

  Jacobi House needed forgiveness. And it would have forgiveness, hell or high heaven.

  ◆◆◆

  If Jacobi House was the dark star, Stonecipher House was its satellite.

  After the railway had connected Portland to Sellwood in the early 1900s, the Stonecipher tradesmen, mostly carpenters, built a blue and white Victorian Revival next door for the same reason lighthouse keepers build family lodging near lighthouses. The Stonecipher men took shifts in Jacobi House fixing plumbing, replacing rot and rust, minding the electric, and remodeling whole rooms, but they needed accommodations less harsh and unforgiving for their wives and children.

  The caretaking of Jacobi House passed down through the generations until only three Stoneciphers remained alive: Mrs. Stonecipher and her two young children, Zelda and Alexander.

  ◆◆◆

  “In the beginning—” At her desk in her austere bedroom, seven-year-old Zelda read from a Bible opened to a picture of the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. “—God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

  Zelda’s hair, having never been cut, was the same length as Eve’s in the picture. Members of The Cross of the Lamb had to follow a long list of rules: conservative dress, long hair for girls, prayer three times a day, no unclean meats, no caffeine, no spicy foods, memorization of the whole Bible before the age of twelve. The list went on from there.

  As required, she read from the Bible every day in the light from her window, though many of the words were a mystery to her. She had five more years to get it right. “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” She yawned into her fingers. “And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.”

  Antsy, she flipped ahead. “And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” The Bible was the longest, most boring book in the world. It had illustrations, but she already knew them all, even what pages they were on.

  Across the way, Jacobi House stared back through razor wire that topped a stone dividing wall. Dead leaves blew past. Today was windy, as it often was on the bluff above the river. Zelda usually paid the house next door no mind, but her father’s rattling, wet coughs had echoed the past few nights, keeping her awake. Mother had buried Father out back more than six months ago, and Zelda figured the cursed house next door was what made his suffering linger.

  She put her ear to her door and held her breath to listen for Mother. Zelda swallowed excess spit. Satisfied no one was coming, she crept back across the room, knelt beside her desk, and removed a baseboard. Inside the wall waited Dolly, a cornhusk doll Father had let Zelda squirrel away, and she hugged it and kissed its corn silk hair. The doll was all she had left of him.

  “You be a good little girl,” she whispered. “Or your skin will burn like paper.”

  She replaced the baseboard, sat at her desk, and repressed the urge to tell Dolly stories (Mother might hear). Instead, she silently danced the doll across the picture Bible, across the burning of Sodom, across the Nile red with first-born blood, across the Jews wandering the desert, and finally into the loving arms of Jesus.

  As she played behind the glass of her window, the wind outside howled like hellhounds. The trees behind Stonecipher House undulated and lost more leaves in the tumult. The leaves covered her father’s grave. They floated out over Sellwood Park and the river. Within the rustle and the howl came human screams from Jacobi House.

  In contrast, Zelda’s room was relatively soundless. She pulled at the tight, itchy collar of her Puritan dress. More leaves blew past her window. How nice the fresh air would feel.

  She crawled onto her child-size desk and pushed up on the window frame. It wouldn’t budge. She braced her feet on the surface of the desk and pushed up with all her strength. The window burst open with a loud CLACK and let air rush in. The gust swirled around the room like a dervish and blew the doll between Zelda's feet, off the desk, and out the window. The razor wire caught the doll on the dividing wall.

  “Dolly!”

  It danced on the razor until another gust sent it flying onto the Jacobi property.

  Dolly was gone.

  The raucous wind died down and left a distant, horrible screaming pinned in the air. Zelda backed off the desk and covered her ears. Her eyes watered. She could still hear it. From a barred second-story window across the way, the screaming intensified. Sometimes, she glimpsed children in Jacobi House. But these weren’t the playful screams of a child. A lace curtain wavered behind the bars.

  Zelda’s window slammed shut. Mother, buttoned up in her own murrey Puritan dress, stood with her hand clutching the window frame. “Zelda! What've I told you? You know better! Never open your window. What've I told you about Jacobi House?”

  “It's haunted.”

  “What haunts Jacobi House?”

  “Sin.”

  “I've warned you. I've told you about this.” She continued in a more controlled tone. “If not for the House of Skulls, that sin would rest on us. And what would happen then?”

  “We'd burn.”

  Her mother gazed out the window. “You must promise me to not go to that house. Never ever.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good girl.” Mother forced a smile. “Now, have you studied your Bible verses?”

  Zelda nodded a hesitant “yes” and looked away, avoiding her mother's gaze.

  “Zelda.”

  She had studied her verses, just not enough of them. It wasn’t a lie. “But Alex gets to go to school!”

  Mother reached for her disobedient daughter, who flinched, and fixed her hair. “Yes, but Alex is a boy.”

  The girl flushed with anger. Since Father had died, she often wished that her mother wasn’t her mother, that Alex wasn’t her brother, and that she herself wasn’t Zelda anymore. She needed Dolly back from that dark, no-good house. Going during the day wouldn’t work; Mother would see. But at night! In the shroud of darkness, she would go to Jacobi House and save the one thing she still loved and that loved her back.

  ◆◆◆

  Under a timeworn quilt hand-stitched by her grandmother from rent dresses, Zelda pretended to sleep. An oak crucifix carved by a Muslim slave during the Middle Ages hung on th
e wall, and the realistically rendered Christ, in striking sorrow and agony, watched over Zelda in her bed. Lashes crisscrossed his emaciated abdomen and obvious ribcage, and carved blood rivulets streamed from his thorn crown. Below the corpus, a skull and crossbones referred to the original name of Calvary: the Place of the Skull.

  Zelda bided her time under the cover, her slight body trembling with anticipation. Jacobi House waited. Its form loomed behind her eyelids and grew there in her mind’s eye like a sinister carnivorous plant that wanted to swallow her up. She wiped her sweaty palms on her nightgown and fitfully turned her head against her pillow.

  She wasn't the only Stonecipher awake and disturbed by the house next door.

  At the end of the hall, Alex ran water into the bathroom sink. He filled his glass. A naked light bulb, screwed in above a medicine cabinet, gave off a harsh light and a lonely heat. The boy repeatedly glanced at the intense filament and watched the spot in his vision fade. He poured the water down the drain, refilled the glass, poured it slower this time, and refilled it again. If he went back to bed he'd have another nightmare: falling through a black terror-void, fangs and hissing, duct tape binding his wrists. His dry tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, yet he didn’t take a drink. He remembered the drawing he had made, the ouroboros, how his hand had moved on its own. How long had he not been himself? And if he wasn't himself, who was he?

  Father's razor was missing from the medicine cabinet, likely thrown out by Mother. Alex closed the cabinet. He expected someone else to be in the mirror, yet a little boy still looked back.

  “Escape,” he saw himself say.

  Resting on a shelf next to a pile of hand towels was a stone with the word “LAMB” carved into it. The stone and the crucifix in Zelda’s room were the only decorative things in the house. He often stroked the stone as if it were a pet. He wished he had a crucifix of his own.

  “Let her,” the boy in the mirror said.

  If he hooked his thumb in the “L,” he could hold the stone in one hand without the risk of dropping it. If it slipped, such a heavy thing could crush his toes. Good for bashing, he thought.

  “Don't.”

  In his mind, a woman in a soiled slip ran barefoot down Ferry Street. Wrinkled lips sewn tight with fishing line made the boy flinch. How did the fishing line get there in the woman’s dirty lips? Who was she? Did she do something bad?

  In the weeks following Father’s death, Alex often dreamed of stuffing his backpack with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and running north as far as Washington, maybe farther. With Father gone, the oppressive ceiling of Mother and her religious fervor descended until the only thing to do was to crawl. No play. No talking back. No “frivolous” actions. Then Alex had started second grade, and life became bearable again. His teacher Isabel Torres had shone as a beacon in a darkened world. She was an angel. He suffered through the nights knowing that relief came in the mornings when he got on the school bus. He assumed his sister, who never left the house, who never talked to anyone outside the family, must long for escape every minute.

  He thought wrong. He didn’t understand his sister. Zelda never dreamed of escape; she never understood it existed. Her entire world was the purity of Stonecipher House, the sin of Jacobi House, Mother’s rules, and Dolly’s love.

  Once Zelda decided everyone had finally fallen asleep (though, it was only an hour or so after sunset), she folded back the quilt and slipped from bed without a sound. Her heavy nightgown hung to the floor. The darkness made it hard to see anything besides the square of her window, but there was nothing to trip on, and with haste, she tiptoed forward until she felt her desk and could climb on top.

  Out the window, the gabled roof of Jacobi House pressed against rows and rows of clouds that were lit from underneath by Portland’s light.

  The window slid up easily this time. Air rushed in too warm for a night this late in September, like an exhaled breath. Her door creaked open behind her, and light intruded from the hall.

  There stood Alex in his starched PJs, his right arm dangling straight from the weight of the “LAMB” stone.

  Don't let her escape, his mind whispered. He thought maybe Zelda heard it too, but she didn’t. “Are you running?” he asked. He would have to stop her if she was running.

  She shook her head. “I lost her. To the house.”

  Who was she talking about? Zelda was friendless, and their mother slept soundly downstairs. He didn't know about Dolly.

  Zelda, without explanation, awkwardly backed off the desk and out the window into the night. In the blustering wind, she clung to the top rung of the emergency fire escape ladder. As she descended, she stared at each ladder-rung, too scared to look down at the yard below. If she fell, surely she'd break all her bones.

  God will protect me, she thought.

  Halfway down, an anguished scream from Jacobi House startled her. With her arm hooked around a ladder-rung, she listened. The scream could be from a woman, but Zelda knew that men, when truly terrified, could sound like women too.

  The scream died away. Whoever it was, maybe their suffering was over.

  “Zelda!” Alex was leaning out the window with the “LAMB” stone in his hand. Shadow hid his expression, but moonlight shone on the stone, which hung directly above Zelda's face. Seeing it dangle there, she flinched and tensed up. He had never hurt her before, but she had seen him kill a stray once, a fluffy calico.

  “I’ll pray for you,” he said.

  The heavy stone would crack her skull. Dash out her brains. She hurried down. If she looked up, it could fall and smash her nose or her teeth or put out her eyes. Her bare foot touched grass, and she leaped away from the side of the house. Once at a safe distance, she looked back.

  Alex had already gone from the window.

  Jacobi’s surrounding wall towered taller than it had ever towered before. She traced her hand along its lichen-blotched stones and stepped through fallen leaves. Above her was the razor wire, uncoiled like a slinky pulled tight. As a game, she and her brother often dared each other to touch the wall. Tonight, that transgression was nothing. Far worse was still to come; she was going to slip through the gate and search the forbidden grounds of Jacobi House.

  Be brave, she told herself. Be brave!

  The damp leaves clung to her feet and caught between her toes.

  From the darkness of her room, Alex watched her go. Don't let her escape, his mind said again. But Zelda wasn't trying to escape; she was going to the house.

  The house would have her.

  Along the south edge of their family’s property ran Ferry Street. No one drove it at night (the Willamette River created a series of dead ends that stymied any through traffic), but street lamps lit Zelda’s way with a pale, sickly light and gave her enough confidence to keep going forward. She traipsed, tiptoed, and sometimes skipped here and there. The play of it made her less afraid. Up ahead, past Jacobi House’s outer wall, the street dead-ended with a metal railing and a warning sign that stopped cars from plummeting into Sellwood Park hundreds of feet below. Jacobi House was the last house before the drop-off. From the riverbank below, the surrounding wall made the Jacobi estate look like a windowless warehouse. From the sidewalk, the place had the appearance of a small prison.

  She touched each lamppost, playing a game of tag, until she reached the gravel driveway and the massive iron gate that blocked the way onto the grounds. A two-hundred-year-old black cherry tree stood in front of the wall next to the gate like a sentry standing guard. For a time, the tree wept blood at the witching hour, but its tears had dried up decades ago. Even a tree can only weep for so long. Zelda went to touch the bark but thought better of it. She was here to find Dolly, not say “hi” to an old, sad tree.

  She peered through the bars. The street lamp behind her cast light a few yards into a courtyard. Past that, the dark form of Jacobi House, a cross between a two-story hotel and a Gothic Revival church, loomed in the moonlight. Between the edge of the light and th
e house was a deep darkness. Zelda remembered an old fountain there, and a gravel drive, and dead shrubbery. It was all dark now. Her mother had forbidden her from entering this place, but her mother forbade her everything.

  Zelda touched the gate. The iron bars left grease on her fingers as if she'd been eating her mother’s fried chicken. The girl slipped her arm and shoulder through the bars without any trouble, and then with a little more force, her head popped to the other side. She kept pushing forward. The farther the bars slid across her chest, the more they felt like a tightening snare.

  Two figures advanced in the shadows of the courtyard. The first figure had a bloody hacksaw used exclusively to cut off the heads of children. The second figure had a pair of shearing scissors the length of Zelda’s forearm. They hid their weapons behind their backs as they crept forward.

  Zelda didn’t see the weapons, just the dark forms advancing. The forms, while not threatening in size, moved with a frightening stealth, like shadows come alive.

  The little girl cried out and tried to pull back. Her efforts wedged her tighter between the bars. She whimpered, mewling like a caught animal.

  “Little girl!” the first figure said in a hoarse shout that seemed to cross an impossible distance to reach Zelda’s ears.

  Zelda pulled and squirmed. She tried to get her head back through, but her ears caught on the bars. Despite the pain, she kept pulling and squirming and finally slipped free just as the two figures reached the edge of the lamplight.

  “Don't go!”

  The streetlamp illuminated the first figure’s bloodstained clothes but failed to reveal a face. The second figure hung back in the darkness, almost invisible.

  Zelda wanted to rub the hurt from her ears but was too terrified to move. “Are—are you a ghost?” she stammered. Did the things have substance? Could they pass through the chained and padlocked gate?