The Case Against Satan Read Online Free Page B

French windows of the parlor, looked at the walls, looked at the floor, looked at his fingernails, looked at Garth’s necktie, looked everywhere but at Garth’s face.
    â€œAnd when he was through talking,” said Garth, “he just sort of stood there for a second, and then he walked out of the room. Just like that, no handshake, no good-bye, just out. A few weeks later, we heard he was going to be transferred. Something about an orphanage, and how he had always wanted to take charge of an orphanage, but I knew better. I told myself I’ll just bet he asked to be transferred. Because he thought he’d failed, I guess. ‘I cannot help her,’ is what he told me. ‘Only the grace of God can help her.’ But the way he said it was like he was saying, ‘
Not even
the grace of God can help her.’”
    Gregory assured Garth Father Halloran couldn’t have meant that. Then he asked Susan, “But what kind of help? From what do you want to be saved, my dear?”
    The blue eyes were clouded, the soft voice hollow. “From Hell. From being damned forever to Hell.”
    â€œI read in a book once,” she went on, “that the fire of Hell is black and gives no light, and damned souls burn forever in darkness, heaped one on top of another so tight they can’t move even to brush away the worms that eat their eyes . . . and there’s nothing but terrible noise and pain and stench and darkness forever and ever and ever . . .”
    â€œDon’t worry about Hell, my dear,” said Gregory. “Nobody has said you are damned to Hell.”
    â€œI will be. For what I did. For what I do.”
    â€œYou see,” Garth continued, “I’d been having this trouble with her . . .”
    The trouble concerned church. Apparently, Susan had been until recently a devout girl who attended Mass regularly. On an otherwise ordinary Sunday morning, she started out with her father, dressed in her Sunday best, a picture of purity with her starched cotton dress, old-fashioned pigtails and pretty, unpainted face. They lived within walking distance of the church, and when they turned a corner and came in sight of the spire, Susan stopped. She turned around and began to walk home. Garth asked her what was wrong, had she forgotten something? She said no, she just wanted to go home. Was she sick? No. Further questions yielded no further answers, so Garth wisely let her have her way. They returned home. The following Sunday, she again donned her Sunday dress, and again went out with her father. When they reached the crucial corner and saw the spire of the church, again she stopped.
    This time her father became angry. “Don’t start anything funny with
me,
young lady!” he said. “
You
are going to church!” He took her arm and led her along. She pulled back. “Come
on,”
he ordered. And then she began to weep. But Garth, relentless, continued to drag her along the sidewalk, closer and closer to the church.
    She screamed. “Don’t make me go in there!
Please
,
Daddy, don’t make me go in that place!”
    Garth snarled, “This is just
church!
You’ve been here hundreds of times before! What’s the
matter
with you?”
    Other parishioners, powdered and pressed for Sunday morning Mass, had begun to turn and look, frowning with disapproval at this sullying of the quiet. Garth, self-conscious, released her arm.
    She broke into a run and ran all the way home. “So fast,” in Garth’s words, “I couldn’t catch up with her. I’m not a well man; I can’t run like that.”
    â€œListen, you,” he said, breathless and sweating, after they had gotten into the house, “I’m going to get on that phone and call a taxi. And we’re going to get in that taxi and go to church if I have to hogtie you!”
    â€œI’m not going.”
    Garth hit her. (“You