Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row by Damien Echols Read Free Book Online Page A

move in to extinguish it. The guards, the prisoners, the administration—the energy spirals downward forever, creating a hellish staircase that leads nowhere. The most frightening part is how they’re all too thick to realize what they’re doing. They seem to believe that if they keep digging in the same hole, they’ll eventually reach heaven.
    My exhaustion is beyond bone-deep. It has seeped into my soul, and every day it robs me of a little more of what I once was. Of what I was meant to be. There is no rest here, and there is no life. When I try to look ahead the light seems a little farther away each day. There is despair on my breath and no savior in sight. They say it’s death only if you accept it, but more and more these days I’m feeling like I don’t have a choice. I keep saying to myself, “I will not stop. I will not stop.” If for no other reason than that I will it to be so. If everything else fails, I will keep moving ahead on willpower alone. There has to be some magick in something, somewhere.
    I caught a glimpse of my shadow today. It’s usually so hard to see because it always hides behind me. It’s so much easier to see everyone else’s.
    *  *  *
    M y mother and Jack never did go out on dates more than a handful of times, and it seemed that most of their conversations took place in that cursed parking lot. After church my grandmother would arrive to pick us up, being smart enough to avoid the place herself. My mother, sister, and I would all get in the car, then Jack would come dragging out at the end of the herd and cut a path straight to us. My mother would roll down her window and he would stand there talking to her until every other car had left the lot and our brains were cooking in our heads from the heat of the brutal summer sun. Years later when I heard the teachings on purgatory, that’s what I imagined it to be like—not quite hell, but bad enough to make you curse the bastard hanging on to the window and forcing you to grow old in this desolate place.
    Jack was bald on top, but he practiced the art of the comb-over. He had a ring of hair that grew around his ears, and he would comb it over the top of his head, which was as bald as an egg. Most of his teeth were missing, and the few he had left were yellow and crooked like old tombstones. His skin had been cooked to the texture of leather by the sun, and his stomach was bloated with ulcers. I wondered what appealed to my mother about such a creature, but the answer is quite simple. Jack Echols was the very first man to pay attention to my mother after my father left, and that’s all it took. She was striving for attention, and he gave it to her.
    Jack had forced us to start attending services at a place called The Church of God. It was a real freak show where people spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor screaming when they “had the spirit.” The minister was a morbidly obese man whom you could hear breathing from across the room.
    Twice every Sunday, once in the morning and once at night, he would preach about how the end of the world was at hand. Before leaving he always got out a bottle of olive oil and asked if anyone had any infirmities that needed to be healed. Anyone who stepped forward would have olive oil smeared on their face before being shoved to the ground amid a flurry of shouting while a horde of rabid believers waved their hands in the air and howled at the ceiling.
    This made quite an impression on my young, fourth-grade mind, and I gave quite a bit of thought to all the miracles I could perform if only I had that bottle of magick oil. My sister went up to be “healed” many times, because she had been very hard of hearing since she was a baby and always had to have some sort of tubes inserted into her ears. She never fell on the floor quivering, and never could hear any better.
    My mother’s wedding to Jack was nice enough as far as white-trash shindigs go. The wedding ceremony was in an old