Hallowed (38 page)

“I’m afraid it does.”

Dad turned his glare to his brother.  “Oh, are we going to rehash this X-files bullshit again.  I’ve just spent the last four weeks staring at the results of real evil committed by a real human monster, and you want me to sit here and listen to this crazy woman tell ghost stories.”

“Lower your voice, dear.  You’re in a church.”

Dad grunted and snatched up his plate, which he proceeded to scowl into.

“Now Tracy was just telling us that Paul might be able to help us locate the house where Claudia is being held.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Dad muttered under his breath.  “And there goes a hundred years of investigative procedure out the window.”

Tracy turned and looked at me with a cheerfulness that blindly ignored the tension in the room.  “First, I need you to tell me about these dreams you’ve been having.  You need to give me as many details as you’re able.”

I began then to describe my dreams of the House with no doors or windows, the outside blackened by flames, the forest of dead trees, the cemetery in an open field, the overpowering, pungent smell of apples.  My father stopped nibbling at his chicken and just stared at me.

“I’m a child of maybe five or six trick or treating and I carry a plastic pumpkin bucket full of candy.  It shines with a bright white light.  It fact, it’s so bright, it’s hard to look at directly.  Claudia told me once that the custom of carving pumpkins was initially done to carry a candle inside, before there were lanterns.”

“Do you always have the pumpkin?”

“Once, I looked down and instead of candy, there was a book there.  I think it must have been a Bible.”

Uncle Hank instantly spoke the words: “ ‘Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path.’”

“So in your dream, you are a child,” Tracy continued.  “Besides candy, what did you love as a child?”

“This is ridiculous,” I heard my father grumble.

“Halloween, ghost stories, haunted houses.”

Tracy grabbed a pen and pad from Hank’s desk and began scribbling.  “Go on.”

“I loved video games and magic.”

“Now you see me.  Now you don’t,” Dad muttered with a chuckle.

All of us looked up.  My father was smirking at us, arms folded impetuously.  “See, I can play this game too.  We can go on all night like this, connecting unrelated things.”

“They are connected somehow,” Tracy replied.  “Paul, besides their relation to you, what do all these things have in common?”

“I need a computer.” Hank rose from his seat behind the desk and guided me to his desk computer.

I brought up Google and entered the words “Halloween,” “haunted houses,” “magic,” and “video games.”  I gasped aloud at the first entry that came up.  Uncle Hank glanced over my shoulder at the Wikipedia entry I pulled up on “Robert Folliott.”

“Who is he?”

I turned the monitor around so that everyone else could see.

“Robert Folliott was a video game designer back in the eighties and nineties and used to be one of the wealthiest men in Texas.”

“Oh, that Robert Folliott!”

The four of us glanced at my uncle with interest.  “He used to give these incredible magic shows at his mansion in Austin, but he called it Folliott Manor.  He was a little pretentious but just the same, quite the showman.”

“Yeah, he would turn his entire property into a huge interactive Haunted House every Halloween,” I added, remembering my conversation with Claudia on the way to Eerie’s in Austin.  “He would only give out a certain number of tickets a season and people would camp out for weeks ahead of time just to get a chance to get in.”

Uncle Hank slapped the top of his desk.  “Now you see it.  Now you don’t!  That’s what he used to say every year to close his Magic Show, just before he would pull a disappearing act in front of everyone.”

My father rose from his seat and glanced over my mother’s shoulder at the computer screen.

“Died only last year, too.”

“He’s dead?” I exclaimed as I scanned the entry. “I had no idea.”

“I heard that he committed suicide,” Uncle Hank commented.

“When did this happen?”

“Last year according to this entry,” Mom read.  “It says he was found at his manor house in Austin by a childhood friend and one of his housekeepers in an upper floor library that he used for séances.”  She squinted at the entry.  “Séances?”

I scrolled further down to a section that read “Paranormal Interest.”  “Listen to this,” I said, reading the following entry:  “In 1999, Folliott started researching psychic phenomenon and hauntings, going as far as to wire entire houses with electronic surveillance equipment in an attempt to capture proof of these spiritual occurrences.”  Furtively, I glanced at Uncle Hank, who frowned at the computer screen in confusion.  “In 2002, Folliott began building a second house that he hoped to turn into a paranormal research institute.  Those few insiders that had heard the rumors of his new pet project with seemingly no money-making potential whatsoever had dubbed it Folliott’s Folly.

In an interview for
Wired
magazine in 2001, Folliott is quoted as saying that he specifically chose the site of the future estate because it was ‘an area with a dense concentration of paranormal energy.’”

“What the hell does that mean?” my father snapped.

“Where is this place?” my uncle asked in dread.  He firmly pushed past my father and elbowed me out of the way of the computer.  He brought up Google again and began a new search.  Dad crowded in next to him.

After ten long minutes of searching, we found nothing.  No street address.  No  description.  Not even a city.

“Let me see if I can get some help from the department,” Dad said, dialing up a number as he stepped out of the room.

“This is ridiculous,” Uncle Hank said after another twenty minutes of searching.  “Obviously, his estate has gone to great lengths to keep this place a secret.”

After some coaxing, I took his place in front of the computer and used every search engine I could think of.  I even posted questions to random Folliott fan forums, hoping someone might have heard a simple rumor.  All I got were computer geeks wanting to reminisce about Folliott and his original mansion, no specific information on the location of the new one.

Dad took over the rectory’s front reception desk and went through a whole list of personal contacts from local cops to private businessmen, calling them one by one.  Five o’clock came and went.

With a sigh, Dad came into the room and announced, “Well, I got the address of the mansion in Austin, but as far as the new one goes, that seems to be a heavily guarded secret.”

“Secret?  Are they aware that there are lives at stake?” Uncle Hank snapped.

“Yeah, I got both BeBe and my friend over at the Bureau on this, but since I’m trying to do this outside the bounds of the investigation, things are moving much slower.  They tell me that nothing is going to happen tonight.”  He gave me an apologetic look and sighed.  “There’s nothing more we can do but wait by the phone.”

“And pray,” my uncle added.

“Yes, and pray,” my mother agreed.

My father murmured something under his breath.  “They’ll call as soon as they know something.”

I just sat in front of the computer staring at the same screen I had brought up over three hours ago and realizing that I was getting the exact same unhelpful results, but I couldn’t allow myself to stop.  I couldn’t allow myself to give up.

Mom and Dad were standing now.  “C’mon, Paul.”

I sighed heavily and looked up at Tracy Tatum for some reason.

“I’m the key, right?  I should know.”

No matter how much I had tried to keep it at bay, the tears began to stream down my face.  Tracy tried to reach for me but I rose and started away, rushing past my parents, catching the final glare that my father shot at Tracy Tatum.

“Hey,” I heard my father call after me as I emerged from the rectory into the parking lot.  I stopped and felt his steady hand on my shoulder.  “We’re going to find her, Paul, okay?”

“Not tonight,” I replied.  “Tonight she’s alone and scared and probably hurt.”

My mother grabbed me and held me for a moment.  “We’re going to get through this, Paul.”

It was after dark by the time we got home.  Mom made us all sandwiches but was forced to set mine on the coffee table in front of me, as I had stubbornly refused to stop searching the internet for some clue.  As soon as I got home, I retrieved Claudia’s laptop (feeling that in some artificial way, it attached me to her somehow) and began my search anew.  Dad made a few more phone calls before joining my Mom upstairs.  I could hear them up there whispering for nearly a half hour before the house finally went silent.

I turned on the TV and found Claudia’s favorite true crime program, listening to it in the background as I continued my search.

I fought against sleep despite the fact that I had gotten only a few fitful hours the night before, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I succumbed.

The third time I had caught myself jerking awake, I turned the volume down on the TV, so that I could hear the ticking of the wind-up clock I had brought down from Dad’s office.

Sometime after that, I drifted off into the dream that led us to Claudia.

I am back in the October Country.

I stand in the same field where my dream had begun so many times before.  The House Without Doors sits unchallenged and unchanged.

TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK.

I am aware, yet still dreaming.

I think that I need to get some perspective on the location of the house, but in order to do that, I should get much higher.  The moment the thought enters my head, I begin to rise from the ground, the house and the field sliding down and away from me.

Consciously, I tell myself, “I’m flying,” and at the same time, I assure myself that this is nothing unusual.  I am dreaming after all.  These things are natural in a dream.

In this position, I observe the house for the first time from a bird’s perspective.  I float above the house and confirm that it indeed rests atop a hill.  I see a small cemetery to its right and the forest of dead trees at its entrance.  I glance into the distance, and to the west of the hill, I see a water tower.  I turn to face it, squinting and trying to get a clearer picture.  Suddenly, I glide toward it and see, as I drift closer, a rough circle in faded red paint curling around its side.

TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK.

Water tower.  Red circle.

I hear the faint melody of a familiar song.

When I recognize what it is, reality floods back into my bones and I instantly begin to fall.  The ground rushes toward me and I begin to flail my arms.

Just before I hit, I open my eyes.

I awoke with a start, nearly spilling Claudia’s computer from my lap in the process.  The TV was still on and the clock still ticked beside me.  An orange glow came from the front window.  It was nearly morning and my cell phone lying on the coffee table played the song “Spooky,” the ring tone Claudia herself had programmed exclusively for her incoming calls.

A couple of seconds slid by before I deduced that I was no longer dreaming.  This was really happening.  Now.  I thrust the laptop aside and snatched the phone to my ear.

“Hello? Claudia?”

Silence on the other end.

My entire body stiffened.  I opened my mouth to shout a thousand curses.  Only a whimper emerged.  “Please don’t hurt her.”

With that, the connection was severed.

When I redialed the last number, the call went straight to voicemail, a standard recording that the phone had come with because Claudia had been too lazy to record her own greeting.

As I noticed that I had received a text message, I vaguely registered that someone was knocking persistently on the front door.  I clicked on it and the screen lit up with the following:  “3 must return.”  Below that was the sender’s identification, “Claudia’s Cell” and the time, three forty am, Friday, October 30
th
.

Rushing to the door, I found a disheveled Uncle Hank standing there with a look of manic confusion in his eyes.

“It came to me all at once as I was lying in bed this morning half asleep” he said without any sort of greeting.  “Back in high school.  Why I went to the house to begin with.”

I just stared at him in wide-eyed confusion.

He took a deep breath and collected himself.  “Go get your father, Paul.”

I found my father standing at the far wall of his office, his hair pea-cocked from sleep, staring bleary-eyed at a map of Texas tacked to his wall; four red pins marking the places the bodies had been found, yellow pins marking the victim’s home towns.  On his computer screen was another map, this one more detailed.

“Uncle Hank’s here,” I announced loudly.  “He remembered something.”

“Paul, they got a ping off a cell phone tower late last night just west of Austin near the intersection of state road 71 and 290,” he stated in a flat monotone, without turning.  “After that, nothing.”

I stepped up to his side and held the open cell phone out to him.  He took the phone and gazed down at the screen in confusion.  “What’s this?”

“This is probably what they registered.  I got it at three forty this morning,” I told him, catching his eye to make sure I had his undivided attention, then handed him the phone open to the text message.

He glanced over the message with a blank expression.

“And I just got a call from Claudia’s cell phone a few minutes ago.  Whoever it was, hung up without a single word.  Dad, do you think it was Claudia?”

“If it was, she’s leaving us bread crumbs.”  He handed my cell phone back to me and snatched his own off his desk.  Hitting one of the numbers on speed-dial, he started toward the hall.  “Hey Jeb, this is Jack.  I thought you guys were going to contact us the moment anyone dialed out from the cell number we gave you?  What’s that?  What do you mean?  It was just a few minutes ago.”  He stopped abruptly in the doorway.  Slowly, he turned back, giving me a confused look.  “Just do me a favor, Jeb, double check that for me and give me a call back.”  He snapped the phone closed.  “They say that there was no call from Claudia’s phone this morning, Paul.”

I shook my head in disbelief.  “I heard the phone ring, Dad.  It was her phone.”

“You get any sleep at all last night, pal?”  He gave a look of concerned sympathy and squeezed my shoulder.

I shrugged his hand off in irritation and started downstairs without him.

Minutes later, we joined Uncle Hank in the kitchen, the coffee maker chugging and hissing.  Hank had relaxed enough to start from the beginning of his story.

An odd, nervous smile stole over his face as he took a deep breath and plunged into it.  “I met her in high school at a football game in Parsonsville.  We were playing the Tigers and the game was a regional championship, but when I saw her I forgot the game entirely, y’know.”  My uncle had a dreamy, faraway look on his face that turned him, if only briefly, back into a teenager.

“Well, we talked for over an hour by my watch, though it didn’t seem all that long to me.  We ended up walking right out of the Tigers stadium, through the center of this tiny little town I’d never been to before and into the town square.  There was a big fountain there, and it’s still there today actually.  I know because I’ve been back there; the first time, just to see if I had dreamed the whole thing and the second, to question whether or not I wanted to enter the priesthood.”  He stopped there, his mind returning to where it had been and the weight returning to his shoulders.

My anticipation got the best of me.  “Did you kiss her?”

He nodded without smiling and I saw a look of amused surprise bloom on my father’s face.  “She rushed away from me soon after, and the last thing she said to me was that if I wanted to find her that she lived where the apples thrived.  I remember it now because she had used that distinct word: Thrived.”

“What do you think she meant?”

“I spent the next few days asking everyone I knew where I might find apple orchards, using the excuse that I was doing a research paper for school.  Of all the people I asked, you’ll never guess who it was who pointed me in the right direction.”

“Ronnie Wicke.”

We both looked up at my father, as he set a cup down in front of my uncle and filled it with coffee.  “That was when Pop was working those overnight shifts at the plant, remember?”  Hank gave a nod and settled back in his chair.  “You never missed dinner and when you didn’t come home, I knew you were in some kind of trouble and it couldn’t wait until morning when Pop got home, so I went out looking for you, knocking on doors.  I’m not sure why because we weren’t the least bit friends, but Ronnie was one of the first people I thought to ask.”  My father got this look in his eye as he remembered vividly the moment.  “I saw guilt there as he admitted that he pointed you in the direction of that town.  That town…”  His voice trailed off as he desperately tried to follow the path where his thoughts were leading him.  “I didn’t know about Parsonsville. Was this the same girl you were sweet on?  What was her name?”

“Erin,” my uncle said in a low voice, his eyes staring at a spot high up on the wall, the insincere smile on his face barely masking the enormous pain I sensed beneath.  “No, she came later.  I always thought Erin must have been my fumbling attempt at recapturing what I’d felt at that first kiss.  She never did tell me her name, y’know.”  His eyes refocused and discovered my expression of what could have only been dumbfounded surprise.  “I’d like to think it was love, but at that age, love has the least to do with it,” he admitted in a voice burdened with sadness.

“How come you never told me this story before?” Dad asked him.

“Searching for a pretty stranger somehow seemed a little less altruistic than going in search of a kidnapped girl,” my uncle answered with a wink.  “Besides, there were too many questions and too little privacy.  Everyone demanded to know everything that happened that day, every little memory.  I held onto this one.  This one was mine.  Untainted by the reality of what came after.”

And for a single pained moment, I thought about the bike ride in the dark with Claudia, holding hands.  The ache in my chest seemed to focus me again.

“Did you ever see her again, Uncle Hank?”

He gave a single shake of his head.  “How Ronnie knew there was an orchard up there, I never thought to ask.  The question seemed unimportant after everything else that happened.  Anyway, that’s the story of how I found the House and ultimately, how we found Tracy Tatum,” Uncle Hank concluded.  He leapt to his feet.  “Speaking of which, I need to let her know what’s going on.  Where’s the phone?”

“The house is near an apple orchard,” I heard my father murmur and with a shock. It was then that I remembered the dream of the water tower with a red circle on it.

Apples, I thought.  The aroma of apples had always been so prominent in my dreams.  Was this the reason why?

Rushing into the living room, I opened up the laptop but realized that the battery was dead.  I raced upstairs, flung myself into my father’s chair and brought up a search engine.  Less than a minute later, my father was at my side as I began to plug in the words “apple orchard” and “water tower” and “Texas” into a search engine.

“It should be west of Austin, maybe near the 71 or the 290.”

“Does an apple orchard sound familiar to you, Dad?”

He shuddered instantly.  His eyes glazed over as he attempted to remember.  “Maybe,” I heard him respond.  “Something about that feels right.”

Several locations immediately popped up, and I went through them one by one looking for references to the highways he’d mentioned.  Mom finally joined us--my rush up the stairs no doubt waking her--and stood watching us silently.  Then almost simultaneously, one town name jumped out to both of us.

“Of course,” my father commented, irony in his tone, as he pointed to the web-link to the map of the town.  “Eden, Texas.  Where is it?”

“West of Austin.”  I clicked on the website offering a satellite image.  A moment later, the three of us were looking at a hazy washed out colored grid of quiet pasture lands separated by houses.

Once I showed Dad how he could use the mouse to grab the image with the little white hand icon on the screen and move it, he firmly pushed me out of his chair and began to search the map meticulously.  We had moved due north from what looked like a major highway, possibly 290 or 281, and the winding white tributaries that were roads began to disappear, only to be replaced by the grey ribbons of dirt roads and blankets of green pasture land.

“What’s that?”  He pointed at a dark triangular shape amid an ocean of pasture.  “How do you zoom?”

I took the mouse from him and clicked on the positive button.  The image zoomed, grew hazy, then slowly sharpened again.  It was a water tower.  I pulled closer and the red circular image painted on it became more distinct.

He grabbed the mouse from my hand, zoomed out again.  He used the hand icon to pull the image to the left and open grassland slid across the screen, interrupted by a structure.  “There!” he nearly shouted, his voice reverberating through the small room.

My heart raced as he centered the structure and punched the positive button in an attempt to zoom closer.  The screen suddenly went blank and accompanied by the message: “Sorry but the image requested is not available at this zoom level for this region.”

He grumbled and moved the image slightly to one side and tried once again to zoom closer.  Again the same message popped up.

Finally, he pulled back to the first distant image with which we had started.  The hazy structure sat in the center of a grand patch of green.  His eyes narrowed.

“What do you think, hon?” Mom asked Dad.  “Is that it?”

My father stared at the blurred satellite image drawing slowly closer and closer to the screen, his breathing increasing.  He continued squinting at the image until his brow nearly made contact with the screen.  Finally he dropped back in his chair, continuing to stare at the monitor at a distance as Mom and I drew closer to study the image for the first time.

“It must end where it began,” I heard myself say.

“Eden,” my mother said in an awed tone.  She then looked at me with an almost amused expression.  “You’re kidding me?”

“Apple orchard and all,” I said, shaking my head, a smirk rising to my face unbidden.

But my father’s expression was grim.  He had gone deathly pale.  I sensed a palpable fear emanating from my father, a source from which I had never felt that emotion.  Anger, yes.  Sadness, surely.  But never this.

“It looks like it’s at least a two hour drive, Dad,” I announced, if for nothing else but to hear another voice filling the void.  “Shouldn’t we get going?”

He didn’t say a word, just continued to stare at the screen.

“Jack?”

That was when he broke out of his reverie and peered up at Mom, straightening in his chair.  “Sorry.  Where’s Hank?”

“I’m here,” Uncle Hank replied, striding inside the room.  “I just touched base with Tracy.  She’s on her way over.”  He gave my Dad a look, glanced over at the screen, then back at him.  “Is that it then?”