Hallowed (44 page)

“Okay, okay,” he said, a brief smirk breaking out on his face.  He cast a look in my direction that seemed to say, “Women, huh,” before turning back to Uncle Hank.

Dad held out his arms.  “Let’s go, big brother!  Ally-oop!”

“I think I got this,” my uncle replied, tossing the remainder of the rope and the backpack down to us.  He climbed to the top of the ladder, sat down on the top step, then lowered his legs out of the doorway toward my father.  He grabbed Hank’s legs and guided them to the floor.  Hank let go of the ladder above and straightened up, instantly beginning to sway backwards.  Dad caught him, but it was too late.  Both of them went over into the wall with the portrait with an enormous bang.

They lay there in a pile, laughing like a couple of teenagers.  Tracy got the giggles again and less than a minute later, I lost it as well.  There we were, all erupting in laughter, tears streaming down my uncle’s face, for a brief moment the immediate danger of the situation completely non-existent.

Then the house responded.

The floor rippled like the spine of a humongous animal, casting all of us to one side or the other and causing us to collapse back against the narrow walls of the hallway.  The walls themselves began to vibrate like the engines of earth movers. We all lay where we had fallen, until the tremors subsided.

“What the hell was that?” I murmured.

“A house constructed within a cavern can’t be all that stable,” Dad replied, climbing to his feet and helping me up.  Once Uncle Hank helped Tracy up, we all turned to look down the hallway, which continued on into the darkness past what the light revealed.

Sconces holding the waxy stubs of spent candles lined the walls of the hallway around us.  I pointed out one of the pictures on the wall to Dad.  He took the lantern out of my hand and stepped past me, illuminating a black and white picture of an elderly couple lying side by side in an old-fashioned bed.  The man was dressed in a suit and the woman, a dress that must have been her Sunday’s best.  Coins lay atop their open eyes.

The only reaction from my father was a grunt of disapproval before Tracy stepped up beside us.  She gave my father a glance as if to offer him the opportunity to explain the picture.

Finally, she asked, “You mind if I explain to Paul what the coins mean?”

“Right now we need to keep moving,” he snapped with irritation, taking the lead and starting down the hallway.

Uncle Hank, who had finished winding the rope back up, took up the rear position behind me and Tracy.  “Do you recognize it?” he asked Tracy.

In an almost inaudible whisper, as she started down the hallway, Tracy replied, “As crazy as it sounds, I believe I almost I do.”

My father stopped and waited for Tracy to catch up.  “You couldn’t possibly remember this part of the house,” Dad responded.  “This is all newly constructed by Folliott.”

“What if it wasn’t?” she retorted as she stepped around my father to take the lead, shining the beam of her flashlight into the darkness.

My father’s expression hardened and before he could reply, Uncle Hank stepped beside Tracy as we continued walking down the slowly narrowing hallway.  Even the ceiling had slowly begun to creep closer to the tops of our heads. “Explain what you mean by that.”

We had already passed through several yards of the hallway with not one door breaking the seemingly endless succession of wall sconces and frames, though the photos I noticed had turned into painted portraits, these as somber and dark as the photo I’d seen earlier.  The subjects all unsmiling and grim and emaciated--men with dead souls exposed to the light.

Tracy took a glance back over her shoulder as if uncertain for the first time.  “All of us can recall being
inside
the house the first time, even if we don’t remember the details, but does anyone remember
entering
?”

My uncle and father traded looks and slowly shook their heads.

The House Without Doors, I thought.  Just like in my dreams.  No entrance.  No exit.  Both literally and figuratively.

“What’s your point?”

“Maybe the house that Ronnie and I burned down fourteen years ago was simply a façade,” Tracy stated.  “Y’know, like a set on a Hollywood back-lot.  An empty shell.”

The hallway had narrowed to the extent that Uncle Hank was now forced to follow behind Tracy.  Taking up the rear position, Dad steered me protectively in front of him.

“Based on what we saw when we were topside, this structure must logically be below ground, constructed inside a portion of the cavern we came in through,” Tracy said.

“Claudia told me that this house was the site of several other murders over the years, since the thirties,” I told them.  “So, what you’re saying here is that this house has been sitting undisturbed below ground since the thirties?”

“The façade house that was burned down has been around since that time, but the original house—let’s call it ‘the hub house,’ the house we’re in right now--has been around much longer, I would assume, possibly since before the turn of the century.”

“Dear Lord,” Uncle Hank exclaimed, removing his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose.  “It’s an axis mundi.”  Of all of us, only Tracy nodded in recognition, her own eyes filling with excitement.  Glancing back at Dad, I saw a blank expression that must have matched my own.  “It’s a symbol in both literature and certain faith systems where several points ultimately come together, whether it be four compass points, or where the surface of something gives way to a depth…”

“Or the transition between the living and the dead,” Tracy finished ominously.

“Or even time, if we’re talking dimensional planes here.”  My uncle suddenly had a gleam in his eye that made him look for an instant like any other kid I might have sat next to in Physical Science class at Haven High.  “Fantastic,” he said under his breath, “No wonder Folliott wanted to build an institute here.”

“Research aside, something just doesn’t jive with me,” Dad admitted.  “Why would someone go to all this trouble to
live
in a place like this?”

“Maybe there’s some sort of intangible connection here that we’re missing, Jack.  Maybe the house was originally built here because it was the right spot to serve their religious purposes,” Uncle Hank replied.

“Like a church?  What sort of religion would bury their church in a cavern?”

A look passed between Tracy Tatum and Uncle Hank and he tucked his Bible tighter against his side.  “When this is all over, when we’ve got Claudia safely out of here, we have to destroy this place,” he stated decisively, his eyes regaining their focus.

“I agree,” Tracy replied.

Casting a look over my shoulder, I made eye contact with my father and he nodded.  “I could never get another night’s sleep knowing this place still exists.  That’s why I already arranged something with Sheriff Brannigan to assure that no one ever sets foot in this place again.

“Stop,” Tracy called out.

Looking through the arms of my uncle, I could just make out at the end of the hallway, a stairway tucked away beneath the shadows of the low ceiling, disappearing into the darkness.

“Tracy,” I asked in a hopeful tone.  “Please tell me you remember this part.”

“Okay, I remember this part,” she chirped with a dark chuckle.  “Vaguely.”

“Well,
do
you?” my father snapped impatiently.  Then casting a look at the stairwell, he lowered his voice substantially.  “This maniac may be holding Claudia in the same place you were held.”

“It was thirty-five years ago and I was five,” she responded tensely.  “He was holding me above, but I slipped away from him at one point and got lost in the caverns below.  That’s when you found me.”  She shot Hank a look.  “But before that, there was someone else.  Someone who told me that I was going to be safe and that they would help me.” Her eyes found me.

My eyes snapped up.  I could see within the intense eyes watching me that she knew what I knew, that there was a bond between us going back thirty-five years, to a day before I was even born.  The concept wavered in my mind like a sun devil on a blistering horizon.  In an effort to grasp it, I felt a little dizzy.

Before I could answer, a low moan came from behind us.  We all turned simultaneously to look at the legless torso dragging itself across the empty floor of the hallway, leaving a dark smear in its wake.  The young man wore a military uniform.

Hank made the sign of the cross.  Dad cursed.

I stared in open wonder, moving defensively behind the stairway.

“Hank,” the phantom bellowed.  “Jack! You left me to die there in a foreign country!  You were my brothers!  You were supposed to watch out for me!”  The creature let loose a scream of mortal pain.  “Oh God, my legs!  Where are my legs?”

“Norman?” Dad called plaintively.  He started instinctively forward, but Tracy restrained him from the front and my uncle grabbed him around the waist.  I felt the lantern pushed roughly into my hands.

“No, Jack,” my uncle said in an evenly modulated tone.  Pulling him closer in a rough embrace, Uncle Hank tugged him up the steps of the stairway behind them.  Dad struggled until my uncle threw all his substantial weight against him, dropping him onto the lower step.  My father began to howl then, a sound so horribly sad and so uncharacteristic coming from a man I knew to be so strong, that I felt my eyes fill with tears.

Tracy slipped dexterously past us.  Peering up the shadowy stairway with the flashlight held out before her, she pushed boldly through the darkened opening.  All but her legs disappeared into the next floor, then her open hand extended to me an invitation to join her.

Uncle Hank, still holding my father tightly, gave me a quick nod, all the while murmuring under his breath in a language I didn’t recognize.  His eyelids half-closed then.  He looked almost as if he were in some sort of meditative state.  I realized then that he must be praying in Latin as he comforted my father.  His baby brother.

Taking one look back over my shoulder, I glimpsed the empty hallway again, not even a spot of blood remained as evidence of the apparition we had all collectively witnessed.  Keeping the lantern safely down at my side, I reached blindly up behind me, felt Tracy’s hand enclose around mine and trustingly let her haul me up the steps into the unknown darkness above us.

I emerged from the stairwell into a study.  From the light of my lantern, I could see books covering two of the shelved walls from floor to ceiling.  The beam of Tracy’s flashlight danced over oil paintings, depicting scenes of angels and dark vistas that hung along the other two walls.  A large round table sat in the center, flanked by ornate wooden chairs.  A large oil lantern sat atop it powdered with dust.

Standing in contrast to the rest of the room, modern recording equipment and lights were pushed into several corners.  It all looked completely new, some of it still wore their wrappings and price tags.  Next to all this, I saw a small compact generator that smelt of gasoline.

“I’m assuming this is all part of Folliott’s paranormal research,” Tracy suggested, giving the equipment a cursory examination.  She took a complete circuit of the room, peering in each corner in turn before finally returning to the table.  “There’s no door leading out of here,” she stated with confusion.

“Tracy,” I called in a low voice.  When she turned to face me, I asked, “The little girl in the dark that I comforted earlier?  Was that
you
?”

Tracy studied me, her eyes growing distant and glassy.  Slowly, she nodded.

“I knew it when I first saw you in the rectory that night,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion.

“But it was completely dark.”

“In your flashlight beam, I saw your face for a brief instant before you disappeared.  But I never forgot,” she told me.  “Then when I finally saw you again, I became that child all over, and you were holding me and telling me everything would be okay.  And when you fainted and I caught you and felt your weight in my arms for that one fleeing moment before they took you from me, it was the most bizarre experience.  Like this mythical figure you’ve only dreamed about becoming flesh and blood.”

Listening to her talk about me like that sent cold chills through my gut.  None of this seemed real.  The cavern.  The hallway.  Seeing something that might just as well have been my uncle, a man who died decades before I was born.  It had become overwhelming to me.

“How it is possible?  How could you recall from your childhood something that just happened?”

“The human mind perceives time linearly, right?  I believe that with our Creator, past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously.”  She reached out and took me by the hands, staring at me intensely.  “Perhaps, somehow, down here, we’re allowed to glimpse a little bit of how He perceives reality.”

“Why here?  What makes this place so unique?”

“If this really is the tomb of the Fallen Ones, perhaps it holds a faint echo of the home they abandoned,” she released my hands and seemed to shiver slightly.  “Though just as twisted as they’ve become.”

“I’m not sure I understand, Tracy,” I whispered.

“Try and remember the most wonderful feeling you’ve ever had and magnify that a thousand times.”

Immediately, I thought of Claudia and the feeling I had when I held her.

“Now imagine that you could never experience that feeling again.  Never return to that place.  Eventually, you would come to resent that place so much that an equivalent hate would replace that enormous passion,” she explained.  “I imagine that’s what we’re dealing with here, Paul.  Hate on a level that we’ve never been witness to.”

Dad emerged from the lower floor with Uncle Hank just behind, supporting him.  My uncle stubbed his toe on something on the floor.  Reaching down into the darkness, he retrieved a leather bound book the size of a briefcase and tucked it beneath his arm.

I stooped to get a good look at the electrical generator in the corner.  “If we can get this running, we can turn on the lights.”

“Don’t touch any of that, Paul,” my father snapped, taking the lantern back from me.

Uncle Hank examined some of the paintings.  “Bosch’s ‘Fall of the Rebel Angels’ and Gustave Dore’s engravings of Dante’s Inferno,” he said with surprise, moving from frame to frame along the wall, squinting in the darkness.  “And here’s Dore’s version of Jacob wrestling with the angel… and Rembrandt’s interpretation.  Reproductions, of course, but very good ones.”

Tracy had found the remnants of a long matchstick and managed to light the oil from the lantern.  The oil lamp drove some of the oppressive darkness into the far corners and enabled me to read some of the titles of the books on the shelves.

Many titles were written in foreign languages: Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, such as a large red tome entitled, “Psuedomonarchia Daemonum.”  The ones I could make out had such ominous titles as “Surviving a World of Darkness,” and “Stepping into Eternity: A Caster’s Bible,” and “The Sworn Book of Honorius.”

Tracy took one look at the leather book my uncle held under his arm and gave a short gasp.  Unconsciously crossing himself, Uncle Hank handed the book off to Tracy and turned to the closest shelf.  As he began clicking off the foreign titles, I suddenly recalled that as a Roman Catholic priest he was required to speak several different languages.

Tracy opened the huge leather book she had taken from Uncle Hank atop the table, turning the pages with the tips of her fingers as if afraid she might contract something communicable from mere contact with it.

“What is all this?” my father asked, joining her.

“Grimoires,” Tracy answered, drawing something that looked like a bound tuft of weeds from one of the pockets of her coat.

My father cast a look over his shoulder.  “Could you be a little more specific?”

I found myself answering for her.  “It’s a spell-book.”  Tracy and Hank both shot me a look then.  “I believe Claudia and her friends may have been using something like this in a séance.”

Uncle Hank sighed and turned to me.  “Paul, are you sure of this?”

I asked myself the same question. How
did
I know that?

My heart assured me that Claudia and her friends had used a spell-book similar to the ones on the shelves.  I knew this without evidence to back it up.

I gave a slow but deliberate nod.  “I’m sure.”

Tracy lit the object from her pocket afire with a cigarette lighter and then extinguished it again with a wave.  Smoke began drifting up from it.  The scent of it was very familiar and somehow set my nerves at ease.

We joined her at the table where she opened the book to the section marked by a blood red ribbon.  The title of the chapter was “Summoning Grigori.”

“Grig-gori?”

“Another name for the two hundred fallen angels, who were bound by God to watch over the men of earth,” Tracy explained.  “The Book of Enoch tells how an angel named Samyaza led a group of angels to mate with human women and bear offspring.”

“The book isn’t accepted by most organized religions as part of the traditional canon,” Uncle Hank countered.

Tracy waved the smoking object over the book.  “Yet Enoch is explicitly quoted in the book of Jude.  Also fragments of it were found as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  According to Enoch, it was these Grigori or Watchers that taught the innocent men and women magic and astrology and war.”

She peered down at the book before her.  “There’s a quote here in the introduction: ‘And the Lord said unto Michael: “Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgment and of their consummation, till the judgment that is forever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined forever. And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them to the end of all generations.’”

Uncle Hank shrugged.  “The Book of Enoch is considered by some to be pure biblical fantasy.  A lot like today’s historical fiction.”

“Whoever used this library obviously thought it was more than fantasy.”

“Nathan Graham,” I stated with decisiveness.

All eyes turned to me.  No one opened their mouth to dispute my claim.

Leaning forward to study the book closer, Dad asked, “Was this like some sort of Satanic Bible?”

Tracy shook her head.  “No, this is more of a cookbook.  Most of the books you see were probably used to cast a series of spells, each one intending to feed power to the next spell, increasing their effects in an attempt to bring about the intended result.”

“Which was?” my father asked.

“The end of the world,” Tracy pronounced, “which as legend has it is the pre-appointed time at which the Fallen Angels shall be released from their captivity.”

My father traded a world-weary look with my uncle.  “Great,” he sighed.  “I’m guessing these guys weren’t all that big on the concept of life insurance policies.”

Then it hit me all at once.  The mine cave-in.  The bridge collapse.  The school shootings.  Not to mention the murders committed by Graham.  Was it possible that all those events had been the outside result of what had begun here in this room?

“I think it’s the end of the world with a capital ‘E,’”
I recalled Bridgette Sullivan saying that night.

Random, unconnected events, yet happening one after the other, as they had, it had felt to me like the collapsing of a series of dominoes, each one feeding the next its dark, negative momentum, until the world had begun to seem overwhelmingly grim and until I had wanted to give up on solving the murders.  How many individual’s wills were shaken?

It had taken Claudia’s friendship and love to pull me out.

When Tracy caught me studying the smoking object in her hand, she said,

“It’s called a smudge stick.”

“It smells like… the desert,” I decided.

She smiled at me and held it out to me.  “Good guess, Paul.  That’s because it’s mostly white sage.  It’s used to cleanse and purify an area of negative energies.  Here.”

I held out my hand.  The moment it passed from Tracy’s hand to mine, a low moan almost beneath the threshold of hearing rose from above us.  Uncle Hank spun around and Dad threw open his jacket and went for the gun he had concealed in his shoulder holster.  It was the .40 S&W Glock 22, his weapon of choice in his final years with the Sheriff’s Department.

Tracy, the only one of us that looked nonplussed, took the smudge stick back from me and started across the room, continuing to cast the smoke from it over the book shelves.  The sound slowly increased in volume and frequency until the walls were literally shaking.  Books began to fall from the top shelves behind her, narrowly missing her head.

“Tracy!” I yelled.

She gave me a smirk, a confident gleam in her eye.  “It’s trying to scare us.”

“Why don’t you just..?” Dad began, but Uncle Hank put a firm hand on his arm.

The moans suddenly stopped.

Tracy started back to the table, passing me the incense.  She retrieved the leather bag that I recognized from the day in the hospital.  Her eyes went out of focus as she wrapped the leather cord, which I soon realized was a drawstring, around her hand.  “Have any of you heard of the term Egregore?”  She glanced around at the three blank faces watching her.  Distractedly, she began to knead the bag in her hand. “It’s a term that basically means like a group mind or a collective, not unlike the ways it’s believed that bees communicate.  It’s also the word that is derived from the Greek word ‘egrḗgoroi,’ which means ‘watchers.’”  She tapped the open book on the table.  “If this is what brought Claudia here, perhaps we’ve been brought here as well to deal with it.”

“Listen, Tatum, we’re wasting time talking,” Dad grumbled, turning away from the table and giving the bookshelf in front of him a good firm shake.  “We need to find a way out of this room.”

Tracy lowered her head in exasperation.  Uncle Hank joined her at the table, placing his Bible down.  “What are you trying to say, Tracy?”

“What I’m saying is that we all have our individual strengths that we bring to any conflict, but until we start working together and stop undermining each other”—she shot Dad a look—“we’re only going to be four individuals against a group mind.  We’ll be doomed to fail.”

“Well, I’m not convinced all the stuff we’re seeing isn’t just all some big hallucination,” Dad stated.  He stepped away from the table, walking from wall to book shelf, shoving and pulling like a lunatic.  “Last time they told us there was some sort of gas leak that caused the explosion.  Maybe that’s all this is.”

“Dad?” I attempted in a small voice.

“What, Paul?” he snapped without bothering to turn around.

“Dammit, Dad, stop treating us like children and listen to us!”

Finally, he turned and faced at me.  Standing with my back to the table, my eyes wide with exasperation, I pointed to the place where his doppelganger had first slapped me.  “Do you see this scratch?”

Stepping over to me, he eyed the mark with suspicion.

I lifted my shirt and displayed the reddened whelps on my torso.  “A hallucination did this to me.”