Hallowed (37 page)

It was daylight when I awoke in the kitchen.  Two paramedics attempted to lift me onto a stretcher but I sat up, looking around and seeing the face of my father.  The paramedics tried to force me down to the stretcher, but I batted their hands away and stood, the world swinging so abruptly around me that I dry-heaved.

“Steady,” my Dad said, grabbing me in a firm embrace and forcing me to look into his eyes.

“Claudia?” I gasped, staring at my Dad in confusion.

“Paul, I need to know what happened.”

“She wanted to contact her mother.”  Dad winced and let me continue.  “There was someone upstairs and someone else attacked me from behind.  He must have an accomplice.”  I looked down and realized for the first time that my clothes were covered in blood.  I looked down and saw a literal pool of blood there.  “Oh God!”

“Paul, you took a pretty good hit to the back of your head,” he told me.  “And you lost a lot of blood.  You need to relax!”

I watched as one of the deputies picked up the gun I’d dropped with a gloved hand.  He ejected the cartridge.  “Full clip, Jack.”

Dad eased me back into the stretcher, and Mom rushed in and threw her arms around me.  “Are you okay?”

“Where’s Claudia,” I demanded.  “He must have used some sort of sedative on her.”  My mother embraced me even tighter.  I pushed her firmly away.  “He’s going home,” I stated in a loud voice.  “The Graham’s house.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Something he said to me on Monday about his mother dying when he was ten.  He said that she was given too much insulin and his father had been suspected of it.”  I leaped from the stretcher, and he caught me by the arms almost defensively.  “It was him.  She was his first.  His own mother.  Don’t you see?  ‘It must end where it began.’  He’s taking Claudia home to kill her.”

Dad nodded and grabbed the radio off his hip, talking into it even as he rushed out of the kitchen and into the garage.  I started to follow but a paramedic forced me firmly back down onto the stretcher.

A half hour later and a thorough search of Graham’s house revealed no changes since the investigator had left only the day before.  No trace of entry and no sign of a struggle.   My theory had been wrong, and now Claudia (the brains of our team) was no longer around to come up with an alternative.

Another APB was put out on Nathan Graham and the missing vehicle that had belonged to his father, though I don’t think anyone harbored the belief that Graham was driving it.  The blood in the kitchen was eventually confirmed to be entirely my own.  Indeed, Claudia had not bled—at least, not while she was with me, I thought grimly.

By twelve noon, the activity around the Wicke house had died down.  All the neighbors had curbed their interest and gone home, leaving only me, the last remnants of the Sheriff’s Department and several Federal agents from the Bureau, with whom I had been required to talk to about what I could remember.  The agent that had questioned me had been interested in whether Claudia had her cell phone on her when she was taken.  He asked for the number and passed a note to another agent.

When I got to the part about the flying game piece, the agent stopped his note taking and just nodded through the rest of our conversation.  I was dismissed after only twenty minutes.

Around that time, I was finally able to catch my father in a brief moment of inactivity and ask him if they’d gotten around to checking upstairs.  He gave me a nod and said, “There was only two sets of footprints in the carpet up there and it matches you and Claudia’s.  The only sign of entry was to Claudia’s bedroom, and you’ve already verified that that was the only room you entered, correct?”

I nodded in confusion.  “There was someone else up there.  I definitely heard them.”

He stared at the bandage on my head with concern and squeezed my shoulder.  “Please go home, son,” my Dad told me.  “You can’t do anything else here.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked him.

“They’ve been doing a fresh search of the Graham house, looking for anything that might point to where he took his victims.  I figured I’d go lend a hand.”

“Then I’m going to go with you.”

“Paul,” he groaned in his not-this-again tone.  “Listen to me…”

“Dad, how can I be expected to sit around doing nothing?  Claudia is gone!”

Dad gave me a bittersweet look and nodded over at the truck he drove.  Mom was behind the steering wheel, reading something in her lap.  “You should see your mother safely home, Paul.”

I fought the desperation back and managed to find reason in his request.

“Take my truck and I’ll catch a ride with BeBe.”  He squeezed my arm and started back up the driveway and into the garage.

As I opened the driver’s side door, Mom looked up almost guiltily from the Bible in her lap and closed it, a single finger marking her place.  “Dad wants us to go home.”  I glanced furtively at the book in her hands.  “Mind if I drive?”

“Mind?” she chortled.  “Are you insane?  You have a concussion!”

I marched dutifully around the other side before she could think to requisition a wheel-chair.  As she pulled the truck out into the street, I felt her probing me with her eyes and I glanced purposefully away from her to look out the window.  “We’re going to find her, Paul,” she stated.  When I turned, I could see her eyes starting to glisten.

“How do you know?”

“I know because I’ve never pictured your future without her,” she replied, matter-of-factly.  “In your life, Claudia Wicke has always been as constant as the rise and fall of the tide.”  She looked at me then with such a sureness of heart that I could almost believe her.  “And you’ve always been the moon that she danced around.”  Then in a sad voice, she added, “Of course, I always thought it would be much later.”

Feeling the full gravity of reality settling around me, I replied, “I’m sure Claudia thought her Mom would be just as permanent a fixture in her life.”

Silence settled over us, and I glanced down at the Bible on the seat between us.  “Would you mind if we go to the church first?”

“Actually, I’d like that a lot,” she admitted.

Uncle Hank stood just inside the church foyer when we arrived, in that calm almost supernatural way he had of expecting us when he couldn’t have known we were coming.  It didn’t take long before I realized that this time it hadn’t been him that had known.  Tracy Tatum sat in the back row of the church just a few feet away.

She rose and gave us both a tight embrace.  “Father Hank picked me up last night at my request.  He told me about Graham’s father.  I felt I had to be here but I didn’t know exactly why until this morning.”  She sat down in the pew, and the rest of us, including Uncle Hank, gathered around her expectantly.

“All the events we’ve experienced lately have felt as though they’ve had a life all their own and as much as we might have tried to stop them, we’re at their mercy.  Believe it or not, this is how my whole life has felt up until now,” she sighed heavily, then continued.  “Claudia asked me why I’m involved and the real answer is, to stop the momentum.  The wheel is slowing down now and I feel that it is about to stop.  Our turn is coming.  We can choose to live in fear or to fight.”  She looked at me now.  “Claudia is alive, Paul.  I feel this as strongly as I feel the moon will rise and set this evening.”

I couldn’t help but note her use of that word again. 
Moon
.

Mom and I glanced at each other and I saw her bring a hand to her face to cover her quivering lips.

“This battle is not against one psychotic human being any longer,” she said, giving each of us a look in turn to make sure we were grasping the facts.  “Paul, I feel you know this better than any of us.  Tell me what you saw last night.”

I took a deep breath and glanced at my mother.  “We were in the Wicke’s house.  We were using that damned board of Claudia’s.”

Uncle Hank made a sound of disappointment down deep in his throat.

“We thought Pat’s mother was speaking with us, but… something wasn’t right.”  Tracy kept nodding, urging me on without words.  “When I challenged its identity, the planchette flew straight at me and then I heard footsteps. There was someone upstairs.”  My face began to quiver with emotion.  “I was trying to protect her but instead I handed her right over to him,” I whispered in shame.

“Let there be no doubt in your mind, Paul,” Tracy said to me.  “Something led him there.  Something is helping him.”

Confusion and surprise filled my mother’s eyes.  “What are we talking about here?”  I gave her a furtive look and her voice strengthened.  “I’m not your father, Paul.  I need you to tell me everything you know.  As crazy as you might think it sounds.”

“I don’t even know where to begin.”  I smiled in spite of the situation and looked at Tracy.

She looked directly at Mom now.  “It’s something ancient and something that was disturbed by your husband and his brother”—she reached out blindly and took Uncle Hank by the hand—“and Pat’s husband thirty-five years ago when they rescued me.  Whatever it is, it’s been using Nathan Graham for its own ends.  Evil is a creature of opportunity, Mrs. Graves.”

Mom nodded and as she brushed the tears from her face almost angrily, I saw for an instant what I must have glimpsed in Claudia, a hidden reserve of strength.  “What about Claudia?  We have to get to her before…”

“Simply finding Claudia won’t be enough in this case.  She’s being kept alive for one reason only, Mrs. Graves,” Tracy explained.  “It wants your family.”

In my mother’s eyes, I saw a terror of the sort that I could not possibly have known.  Some unknown element was stalking her husband and son, the two people in all the world that she felt a biological imperative to protect.  I could see the overwhelming frustration of helplessness chiseled into her expression.

“How do we fight something like that?”

Tracy Tatum looked indecisive for the first time.  “We have to destroy its harbor here in this world and sever its hold forever.”

“Where then?”

“Where it’s always been.”  She looked from Uncle Hank to me.  “The House.”

“It was destroyed,” Uncle Hank managed in a small almost childlike voice.

“No,” Tracy snapped.  “That much I know.  When it was burned back in ’83, its hold here in this world was weakened for a time, but in recent years its presence has been renewed.  I felt it peak in September of 2001 and it’s been bubbling just beneath the surface of things ever since.  It searches for other evil and indifferent men to prey on.  All it needs is the weak and the unbelieving to turn a blind eye while it goes about its work.”

Mom was staring down at her Bible now with a look of contrition.

Tracy rose abruptly and slapped a hand to the back of the pew in front of her.  “We find the House, we find Claudia.”

When I gave Dad a call on my cell, it went straight to voicemail.  I left a message that we were all okay and all over at the church.  Though I knew he would call me the moment he knew anything, I still wanted him to reassure me that he was still trying.

“C’mon,” Uncle Hank said putting his arm around my shoulders roughly.  “Since we’ve got nothing better to do while we’re waiting, what say we go over to the rectory and eat something?”

The refrigerator in the rectory held a cornucopia of Tupperware and casserole containers filled with probably some of the best home cooked food in Haven outside of my own mother’s kitchen.  I say probably because I wasn’t eating with the others.  At that moment, I couldn’t imagine ever eating again.

Uncle Hank said that parishioners often gave him food out of kindness.  “Often there’s an ulterior motive involved, y’know,” he said with a mouthful of Mexican cornbread.  “Mrs. Gonzalez asked me to say a prayer for her husband to find work.  I did, and
he
did.  God did all the work and I got a casserole out of it.”

“Now I’m sure your mother taught you better than to speak with your mouth full,” my mother said with a smirk.  She herself had found the remnants of a Cornish game hen and candied yams.

“Didn’t our boy Jack tell you that he got all the manners in the family?”

“Now that’s a hard sell,” I commented, catching myself smiling, then feeling awful for forgetting for a moment about Claudia.  I stared down at the small dish of untouched macaroni and meatball casserole that my mother had micro-waved for me slowly growing cold.

“Paul, worrying and stressing is not going to bring her back any quicker,” my mother interjected.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the Tatum woman watching me.  It made me uncomfortable to be examined that way.  Moments later, I realized that my mother was studying Tracy Tatum almost as intensely as she had been studying me.  “Ms Tatum…”

“Please. Tracy.”

My mother nodded and just bluntly asked: “So, Tracy, how is it that you were able to cheat death?”

Tracy finished a mouthful of the Hungarian Goulash that she’d found somewhere in the back of the fridge, patted her lips with a napkin, and said, “Mrs. Graves, when I turned sixteen, I began to have vivid nightmares.  I self-medicated.  First alcohol, then wee… marijuana,” she quickly corrected, with a quick glance at my uncle. “But that only made things worse and the volume and detail of the dreams began to increase. So, I tried harder and harder stuff.”  She started to reach for a pack of cigarettes she had placed on the table, but then thought twice.  She drew into her hand the small leather pouch—the one that I had glimpsed before—that hung from the belt loop of her jeans and seemed to take comfort from that instead.

“Eventually, I realized that the visions I was having in my sleep state were connected to what was going on in real life.  I was living in New Orleans at the time when I began having visions involving a taxi cab and single young black women who were staying at the Hotel Monteleone in the Quarter.  All of them had been raped and strangled.  With my help the NOPD was able to identify and apprehend a suspect that eventually turned out to be the one they had begun to call the Quarter Strangler.

“When they began to call on me for other cases, word leaked to the press.  Before long, strangers with lost children and lovers showed up at my door at all hours of the night begging me to help them.  I tried to disappear but they only followed me.  When I asked them to leave me alone, persistence turned to harassment.  Death threats in one case. At one point, I even checked myself into a psychiatric hospital for about six months, thinking that if I isolated myself and got some rest, the visions would just… go away.

“That’s when I started to dream about the House.”

She turned to look at me now.

“For a whole year when I was eighteen, I drove from town to town asking questions during the day and sleeping in my car at night trying to find this house, half thinking that I had hallucinated this whole event from my childhood.”

“Then one day about twenty years ago my car broke down in the middle of nowhere.”  She laughed then and I could see the eighteen year old girl she had been as clearly as if clouds had parted to reveal the sun for an instant.  “Sounds like the beginning of every bad horror movie, right?  But that’s God’s honest truth.  I’m no mechanic and since I didn’t have Triple-A, I started walking and I found it.”

“The House?” Uncle Hank asked, stiffening.  “Where?”

Tracy shook her head helplessly.  “I’ve been trying desperately to remember, but still nothing.”  She looked at Hank then.  “You?”

Hank shook his head.  “I’ve tried so hard, but no.”  He chuckled.  “For a good part of my life, I tried to forget and now that I’m so desperate to remember, everything’s so foggy.  Maybe it’s just old fart syndrome.”

“Maybe something else,” I murmured.  “When did you reconnected with Claudia’s father?”

“Ronnie?” my mother asked in surprise.

“Yeah, we had kept in touch over the years.  The same year that I found the House again, the calls from him began to get more and more frequent.”  She glanced almost guiltily at Mom and lowered her head.  “All we did was talk.  Totally innocent but, still, I knew he was married and I didn’t like the deception of it.  I asked him one time if his wife knew about me.  He said that she was a realist, and he was afraid that she would leave him if she knew”—Tracy looked up at Mom and swallowed awkwardly—“that he was going crazy.”

“Was he?” my mother asked hesitantly.

“If he was, then so was I, but unfortunately, convincing him of that was a battle that I lost.  By that time, he had begun to have dreams as well.  Mostly they involved the House and what had happened to us.  Between the two of us, we tried to piece together what had happened back then but it was no use.

“For a while, the dreams stopped, but then Ronnie talked of hearing voices and that he thought he was being watched in the darkness at night.  I tried to minister to him, as a friend had once done to me, but I just wasn’t… strong enough. In the end, the only way any of us could cope with what we had been through was to try and purge the experience from our minds.”

My uncle lowered his head, his eyes moving away from Tracy.

“The next thing I heard, he had died in that accident.”

“What about the House?  What did you do to it?”

Tracy grew quiet, her eyes turning profoundly sad.  “Ronnie dowsed it with jet fuel that he got through a mechanic friend and we torched it.  I took the opportunity to throw a bunch of personal things of mine inside, including jewelry and a duplicate set of my personal fillings that a dentist friend of mine concocted.”  She scanned the faces of everyone at the table to check for doubt.  “He owed me a favor,” she added before continuing.  “The fire burned so hot that the investigators had to conclude that very little of my remains was left behind.  They pronounced me dead based on my dental records.”

Mom scoffed.  “But then what?  I work at a bank and I know you couldn’t get through life without at least two forms of ID.”

Tracy gave Mom a stern look, almost as if she had just been challenged.  “One of the gentlemen I helped out in New Orleans, a Haitian who had contacts all over the Quarter, got me a birth certificate and social security card.  I owe my life to whoever went by the name of Courtney Noble.”  Her eyes glanced furtively at Uncle Hank.  “I knew it wasn’t a foolproof escape plan and that it would come back to haunt me eventually.”

“Tracy, why did you believe that burning would stop it?” Uncle Hank asked.

“Deuteronomy 17:7.”

Uncle Hank nodded.  “ ‘Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst.’”

“In the original Hebrew it was literally ‘to burn out.’  I had begun to see a repetitive number combination over and over everywhere I turned.  17-2, 17-5, 17-7.  But I didn’t put two and two together until I found the chapter from Deuteronomy online.”

Her eyes glazed over and she began to recite the chapter she’d seared into memory: “ ‘If there is found among you, in any one of the communities which the Lord, your God, gives you, a man or a woman who does evil in the sight of the Lord, your God, and transgresses his covenant by serving other gods…”

“ ‘You shall bring the man who had done the evil deed out to your city gates and stone him to death,’” Uncle Hank finished quickly, frowning.  “It’s the same scripture many capital punishment advocates site as proof that God is for the death penalty.”

“Do you not agree that evil must be punished?”

Uncle Hank removed his spectacles and began to clean them with the corner of his sleeve.  “Of course, my child, but by God’s hand, not ours.  It is within man’s capacity to repent and be forgiven.”

“How far would you extend that compassion, Father?” Tracy Tatum asked curiously, without the slightest bit of challenge in her voice.  “Would you absolve Adolph Hitler of his sins against humanity?”

“Without a contrite heart, forgiveness is useless.”

“What if he confessed his crimes to you in secret and vowed to kill again?”

“As long as we’re quoting Deuteronomy: ‘The testimony of two or three witnesses is required for putting a person to death, no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness.’”

“How about a million witnesses?”

Uncle Hank put his glasses back on with a labored sigh.  “What would you have me say?  I’m a man of the cloth, not an executioner.  Fortunately, it’s a dilemma I’ve never had to face.”

“That could change,” she said bluntly, staring down at the leather bag in her hand.

My cell phone broke through the silence.  Seeing Dad’s ID on the display, I snatched it up.  “Anything?” I asked him hopefully.

His sigh was heavy.  “Not much.  We found more personal effects from the victims in a metal lunchbox in the closet.  There was a picture of his mother in there along with an empty syringe.  Nothing belonging to Claudia.  No blood or signs of a struggle.  Wherever he’s taken her, we’re sure he didn’t take her there first.”

“Were the Feds able to trace her cell?”

“No,” he sighed.  “They think the battery might have been removed.”

He ended the call by saying that he would be around to the church shortly.  It was already past two o’clock in the afternoon and we still had no clue where to start looking for Claudia.

All their eyes were on me when I hung up.  “They haven’t found anything at the Graham house that might lead us to Claudia,” I told them.  “I thought for sure that’s what was meant by, ‘It must end where it began.’  Now I know it must be the House.”

“Paul, I’ve felt all along that you are the key to finding this place.”

Though Mom knew, I shared with Uncle Hank and Tracy the info about the ceramic vampire and the notes found with the body.  About this time, my father called out a “Hello” from the outer office.  Uncle Hank went out to meet him and bring him in.  He must have warned him who was inside, because he didn’t look surprised when he stepped into the rectory.  He gave Mom a kiss and Uncle Hank handed him a clean plate.  Dad found some cold fried chicken in the fridge and took a seat across the room from us, the one that just happened to be farthest from Tracy Tatum.

“Jack, we’ve been talking informally about what our next step is going to be.”

“Broward County has decided that the Feds are best equipped to handle this and we’re going to let them do their jobs,” Dad stated without affect.  For a moment I wasn’t sure I understood.  Defeat was not something I recognized in my father.

“No, Jack,” my mother’s voice said from across the room.  She turned and gave him a look that I’d only seen one other time in my presence.  I think the previous debate had been over a broken washing machine and believe that the actual words she’d used were “unless you want to start doing all the clothes yourself, stop arguing and buy me a machine that works.”

My father is a smart man.  The next day Sears and Roebuck delivered my mother a new washing machine.

“Excuse me?” he grunted, lowering the chicken leg back to the plate.  I said he was a smart man, not that he was a quick learner.

“No one outside of the people in this room have a clue about what this is really about.”

“Kathy!” he started sharply, then caught himself and lowered his volume.  “We’re not going to talk about this here.”

“This is not a decision that we will make as a couple, Jack,” she stated.  “The responsibility belongs to every person present as everyone here might be in danger.  That’s why we told them about… the condition of Mr. Graham’s body.”

“Kathy, that’s privileged information.”

In the crosshairs of Dad’s scowl, my mother stared unblinkingly back at him.

With quiet fascination, I watched this exchange out of the corner of my eye, fearing direct eye contact might result in bodily injury.  He set his plate down on the arm of the reading chair.  “This doesn’t have anything to do with
her
.”  He poked the air violently in Tracy’s direction.