Hallowed (23 page)

Mom and I spent most of the day at Mrs. Wicke and Claudia’s.  Mrs. Wicke cooked spaghetti and meatballs for lunch.

I spent a few hours finishing up homework for Monday, while Claudia surfed the web on her laptop.  It was a beautiful day, so we were out on the patio.  Besides, Mom and Mrs. Wicke didn’t trust us up in Claudia’s room alone.  It was a little embarrassing.

When I told her about my meeting with the Tatum woman, she said, “She’s a psychic, Paul.”

“Did you get this from your research?”

“Of course not. There was hardly anything mentioned about the kidnapping.  Dr. Wenton Joyner, the man who kidnapped her was a physics professor from LSU who was a friend of Gerard Tatum, her father.  He had no previous arrests and was considered a pillar of the academic community.  His colleagues thought that the man just snapped.  That seemed to be the only explanation for something that appeared to be so out of character.”  She showed me a single printed page from the internet.  “Look at all the organizations he belonged to.”

I glanced down the list.  Mostly academic and science oriented clubs.  I was actually looking for some connection to a particular church or religion.  He was a secular humanist, a term with which I was unfamiliar, but which Claudia explained to me was a philosophy which rejected spirituality in exchange for a science and nature-based worldview.  “I find their belief system very comforting,” she commented.

She continued to detail what her research had revealed. “What little I could find talked about the house itself. Apparently, the house had been the location of several other murders, all of them children.”  She snatched the printout from me and flipped to the second page.  “Murder-suicide.  1937, a divorced father murdered his four year old son and then himself.  Then again in 1958, a father, his wife, and his six year old daughter.  Same house.  Different method.  This time the man was caught and taken to a mental institution where he committed suicide twelve years later in 1970.”

Though I knew I would regret asking, I had to know. “How were they killed?”

“The first father cut his own throat open with a straight razor, ala Sweeney Todd, and the second one broke a glass and slit his wrists, both--which by the way, I hear is very difficult.”

“What about the children?”

She glanced up almost apologetically.  “The four year old died by repeated blunt force trauma to his head, probably against a wall.  The wife and daughter were both drowned in a tub.”

I thought about what the woman who claimed to be Tracy Tatum had said to me:

If a person uses an object for great good or great evil, that thing makes an impact on the world, especially if it is imbued with great hate.

I took deep breath and sighed.  “This is the same house?”

“Yes, according to several articles I found, there were more than a few people who cheered the fact that the house had burned down in 1983,” she replied.  “Kids all thought the house was haunted.  I guess there’s one in every neighborhood, but few have the actual atrocities to back up the reputation.”

“So what town was it in?”

“That’s the peculiar thing, Paul.”  She shook her head, confusion on her face.  “I haven’t been able to find out.  I know it sounds a little paranoid, but it’s almost as if, all identifying information has been systematically removed.”

“You believe her?”

“Who? Tatum?”

“Whoever she is! Yeah, I mean, you think she’s really..?” I couldn’t seem to get the words out.

“Psychic?  It might explain a lot: Why she didn’t go to the police initially.  Why she disappeared from the grid to begin with,” Claudia replied, closing her laptop and laying the side of her head atop it.  She stared into the distance over my shoulder and said, “It can’t have been easy for her.  Kidnapped at five.  Seeing visions at some point later, probably around puberty.”

“What makes you say that?”

“From what I’ve read, all this paranormal stuff seems to happen around the onset of puberty.”  Her eyes focused on me then.  “Hey, it happened to you.”

I gave her a snort of dismissal and turned back to the short story I was reading for Honors English.  “It’s not the same at all.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she retorted.  “Are you going to tell your dad about your conversation?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

We spent the rest of that afternoon vegging out in front of the TV.  She grazed and flipped, finally coming to rest on, of all movies, the
Sound of Music
.  I watched without a single snide comment for a good fifteen minutes before I started to feel impatient with all the singing.  The movie had reached the “My Favorite Things” sequence, where Julie Andrews attempts to comfort the Von Trapp children after they’ve been frightened by a thunderstorm.

“This movie isn’t all that bad, y’know,” she commented.

“From Nine Inch Nails to Julie Andrews, huh?”

She gave me a simple nod and turned back to the movie.

Mom and I met Dad at home about four o’clock.  Claudia made me promise to call her if he had any new information, but of course, he was tight-lipped about everything.

All three of us sat around the table, watching Dad eat a sandwich like it was an interesting bit of history that had been captured on newsreel footage.

“So what’s the situation at the church,” I asked.  “Is she still there?”

“She’s free to come and go as she pleases, but we know from ‘round the clock surveillance that she’s never actually left the church grounds,” he answered.  “She did attend regular mass this morning though.”

I was about to ask another question, when he rose and ran a hand across the back of his neck.  “Look, I’ve been at it all day and I really would like to have a shower, okay?”

He rose and gave my mom a peck on the lips.  Just before he started upstairs, he took a final glance back at me, a forced smile on his face.  As I met my father’s eyes, I remembered the words that she had said to me: “Every man is capable of the act of betrayal.”

I felt instant guilt for my own small betrayal of his trust.

I should have known that something was wrong.

Mom and Dad have never gone back on a punishment, but on Monday morning, my father handed me the keys to my car and told me that I could have my car back on a trial basis as long as I came straight home after school.

Without one question, I took the opening and ran.

I’d like to think the reason for this was due to my earlier declaration of independence, but as I found later, the truth was I needed to have access to a vehicle for my own safety.

Word had gotten out by 10am Tuesday morning before they had even called a general assembly in the auditorium just before lunchtime.  Principal Smalls delivered the news at the same podium from which he had told us just last Friday that our varsity football team was going to the quarter finals for the first time in ten years.  His voice shook with emotion and that more than anything else sent all of us the clear message that our world would never be the same again.

The fourth victim’s body was found in a town called Schiller Park, twenty-three miles southeast of Haven.  Further away in distance than the last victim, but closer to me.

It was Bridgette Sullivan.

She was dead.

By two o’clock, the student body of Haven High had been dismissed for the day, and by three, the whole community was in mourning.  Girls were having crying fits in the hallways, and everyone else walked around in a wide-eyed half-awake daze of unreality.  Both Greg and Sonny came over and gave me what felt to me like a pre-planned psychological assessment.  They even asked me if I wanted to hang out with them over at Sonny’s house and play the new football game he got for his game system.  I lied and assured them that everything was fine.

On the way to my car, the reality of it swept over me, and I had to grip my open door to keep from falling to the pavement as a wave of nausea hit me.  I dry-heaved a few times, my stomach knotting up into a tight steel vise.

Why hadn’t my father warned me?  Why had he left me to be blind-sided by this news?  Was he so consumed by doing the right thing for the investigation that he would not consider the pain it might have caused me to find out along with everyone else.

I rested on one knee where I had fallen when an unfamiliar girl came to kneel beside me while I recovered my composure.  She introduced herself as Annie and a sudden rude recollection blindsided me.  It was “Crazy” Annie.

Annie Harnsworth was a shy girl that had moved here in fifth grade and had a total nervous breakdown while attempting to address the student body from the podium during Student Council elections.  She had been so taken with stage fright that one of the senior students (not a teacher, mind you) had gathered her up around the shoulders and walked her off stage.

She was as cool as a cucumber now as she helped me get into my car.  In that moment, it struck me how that act of kindness that she had received from another student had just been reciprocated by helping me in my moment of need.

An act of charity by a single individual, I thought, thinking of Tracy Tatum again.  An act of Creation.  An act of Good.

Feeling embarrassed, I calmly thanked Annie for her concern and made it home without any further incidents.

Bridgette was dead.

For the next two days, the empty reality of it would strike me at odd moments and reverberate through my body like a dark tuning fork sensitive to emotion instead of sound.

As I was taking out the trash.

“I think it’s the end of the world with a capital ‘E.’”

Sitting at the table for dinner.

“It’s safe, Graves. Serial killer free.”

Brushing my teeth.

“Nice save, Graves.”

That memory hurt the most, because it almost seemed to mock me and Claudia’s pathetic efforts.  There were human lives at stake and here we were kicking back in the bleachers during lunch, discussing murders like Monday morning quarterbacks after the big weekend defeat.

After dinner without any discussion, I went outside and began to disassemble my grand display.  Around ten o’clock, after having been at it for a good hour and half, Mom took me around the shoulder and told me, “Your Dad and I can finish this up for you, if you’d like to go on up to bed.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to get this over with tonight.”

She simply nodded and went back into the house.

That night my dream changed.  It wasn’t the House this time, but something much more familiar.

I awaken in the field back behind the school near the agriculture building, the one we use when we don’t have access to the stadium because of football practice.

It is sunset and the sky is that eerie crimson that I remember so well.  I stand and look around.  There are twenty-five mounds of dirt surrounding me, each about a foot and a half by six.  Unmarked graves.  The graves of my fellow band members.

Then I hear a tone.  It starts low like a moaning in the distance, almost like a foghorn.  Then the volume increases and I think it must surely be an ambulance or police siren.  But the sound gets louder still, increasing to a supernatural level until I recognize that it is brass.  It is indeed a trumpet I’m hearing.  The world’s loudest and clearest trumpet.

My body goes cold.

I rise and run toward the school, but already I find it in smoking ruins.  The band hall is a gray skeleton and the cafeteria still clicks and snaps with the dying embers.

I’m too late for them.

How far am I from home?  A good ten miles.

The parking lot is mostly empty and the few cars that remain are rusting piles that look as if they last saw service sometime back in the sixties.  I hear another teeny sound, almost totally obscured by the wailing of the horn.  I find the black 60’s model convertible, the rag top peeled back and warped from heat, but lo and behold, the radio still works.

“Well if she come walkin' over.”
  I draw close to see if what I’m hearing is truly coming from the radio and not my own mind. 
“Now I been waitin' to show her.”

My lips begin to move along with the wavering voices of Tommy James and the Shondells. 
“Crimson and clover.  Over and over.”

The ground moves beneath me and I’m reduced to a child four years old atop my bed, staring wide-eyed down at the shadowy space beneath my bed, afraid that a monster that never quite solidified into any definite form, has finally come for me.

But I’m seventeen now.  I’m an adult.  I’m a man.

Just to prove how hallow those reassurances are, the earth gives me another good shake, and I have to grip the car in front of me to stay on my feet. I feel a sting and draw back my hand with an intake of breath.  A narrow, almost surgical cut goes through my palm, and I realize that I grabbed the edge of glass.  I stare at the crimson light hitting the upright shard of glass and realize that safety glass crumbles and does not shatter like conventional glass.

I wipe my palm across my pants legs and look up into the sky.  Horror overtakes me and my knees go weak.  The moon, a permanent fixture in my world, is shattering and coming apart in the heavens above me.  My world is being destroyed before my eyes and there is nothing I can do about it.  I scream in helplessness as I watch the pieces drift slowly apart.