Hallowed (46 page)

Lowering her head, Tracy stared down at the objects she’d taken from her bag and began to hum rhythmically.  It was a low, throaty rumble, not unlike a Gregorian chant.  This went on for ten or fifteen minutes before the hum began to fade in volume.

Suddenly, I felt every exposed hair on my body stand at attention.  A prickly heat like an electrical charge surged through the room.  I could see from the way the rest of them shifted in their seats that they had felt it too.

I knew without looking at my watch that the witching hour had arrived.

All Hallow’s Eve was upon us.

“He asks that we forgive him,” I heard Tracy say under her breath.  “He loved his son.  Only four years old.  He would have taken his own life if
it
had allowed him.”  She slowly lifted her head and looked at Dad, her lips quivering.  “The boy was only four, one year younger than I had been when I first entered this place.”  She sucked in one long breath and her eyes bulged in their sockets.  “He bashed his tiny head against the fireplace bricks until it broke like a porcelain doll.  They had demanded his sacrifice as a tribute to them.”  Tears began to flow freely down her face.

Dad and Uncle Hank both started to rise, but I put a hand on Dad’s arm just as Tracy said aloud, “No, I’m okay.  He needs to say that he loved his son more than anything else in the world.”  Uncle Hank removed a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed Tracy’s cheeks.  She slowly began to smile again, then her smile dropped off.  Her lips tightened.  “He wants to tell us that we should leave here, now, if we’re good Christian souls, that we should flee this place, this place is evil.”

I could hear a dim sliding sound from my right, and I peered over just in time to watch a book drop to the floor from the uppermost shelf of the book case.

Her voice began to quicken as the volume increased.  “There are monsters here.  Devils,” she swallowed awkwardly, then croaked, “They will try and eat your souls.”

Then she snapped her head up.  The chair popped up off the floor and fell back down with a deafening thump.  “You must leave this place!” she bellowed.

Uncle Hank drew his hand back and Tracy gasped in a lungful of breath.  Her eyes seemed to clear again, and she murmured in a tiny voice.  “Water?”

Dad leaped from his seat and rushed around the table with the backpack.  He ripped the plastic bottle from the pack and knelt beside her, pouring a trickle into her open mouth.  She nodded.  He drew back again.  Giving him a look of appreciation, she muttered, “Harder than I thought.  So many just want a chance to be heard.”

My father gave his brother a questioning look, but all of Uncle Hank’s attention was focused on the woman seated beside him.

She closed her eyes then, her head rolling forward on her shoulders.  “He wants to know what we’re doing here.  He wants to know why we’re trespassing on sacred ground.”

“Who?” Uncle Hank asked with defensive briskness.

“He’s a priest and a leader of many men and women… and children,” her voice cracked then and her jaw tensed.  She seemed to be staring across the table at my father’s the empty seat.

So focused was her gaze that I felt the need to glance over.  I started when I saw a figure seated in my father’s place.  The man wore a suit fashioned in the style of the turn of the century, and a thin grey beard hung in a double point from his chin.  I believe they call it a French Fork.  He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table with an air of casual confidence, a hint of a smirk on his thin, almost feminine lips.

“You sick monster.  How dare you call yourself a priest?”  She seemed to pull forward against her bonds in an effort to rise. “They were innocent!  They trusted you!  You were supposed to protect them!” She began to shake from side to side as if invisible hands shook her by the collar of her coat.

“Enough,” Uncle Hank snapped, rising to his feet, and the phantom beside me disappeared before my eyes, dispersing like so much smoke.

Tracy’s shoulders dropped, and her whole body released its tension.  She opened her eyes, bleary and red from tears.  “Whew!” she exhaled, a dark smile on her quivering lips.  “Harder than I imagined it would be.”

“Let’s stop this,” I heard my father suggested in a plaintive tone, still kneeling at her side.  “Please.”

I awaited the pronouncement that enough was enough, that she had given it the old college try; that it was all she could take, and it was time to try a different approach.  Instead, Tracy opened her mouth and barked: “Stop?” With a confused look on her face, she turned and looked at my uncle, who was watching her with a guarded expression, then down at Dad beside her.  In her own voice, but with a completely different cadence, she exclaimed, “Goddammit, Jack, what the hell are you on your knees for?  You beggin’ to go home to your mommy now?”

My father and uncle just stared at her.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.  Tracy wasn’t putting us on.  It wouldn’t have been in her nature even if the circumstances had been different and a girl’s life wasn’t on the line.

Tracy wasn’t just relaying information from the other side in her own voice.  Now, we were in the presence of someone other than Tracy Tatum.

“Who are you?” I heard my uncle ask in a calm, unemotional voice.

“Cut the shit, Henry,” Tracy said with a sly grin that her face was unaccustomed to forming.  She took a glance one way then the other.  “What are you guys doing just sitting around?”

I took the briefest of glances at my father.  His face had turned the color of ash.

“Jack?”  Tracy snapped her fingers a few times.  “You with us, dude?  Jesus Christ, you two shit-stains are acting like you done seen a ghost!”

My father dropped back into a sitting position, his back against Hank’s legs.

Tracy groaned and stared up at the ceiling.  “Why oh why, Lord, did you saddle me with the Graves brothers?”

“Tracy said that she would be communicating with someone,” Uncle Hank interrupted in an authoritative, even tone.  “Not that someone would be speaking through her.”

For the first time, Tracy seemed to realize that she was tied up.  She gave a couple of experimental tugs, then just stared up at Uncle Hank with the hard, suspicious eyes of a teenager, who didn’t like to be confused, who didn’t like to be “put on.”  I could see the furnace burning within.  “Somebody better explain to me what the hell’s going on or so help me..!”

“Tracy?” Uncle Hank called out.

Tracy seemed to stiffen.  Her eyes--
his eyes
—went out of focus for an instant and suddenly her posture changed, softened.  “It’s okay, Father.  You can trust him.  You have to focus him.  Remind him his daughter is in danger.  He’s obviously unaware of the circumstances.”  One moment Tracy was looking at Uncle Hank with pleading eyes, then the next, someone else was there.

“Ronnie?” my uncle asked.

Claudia’s father looked out of Tracy’s eyes, searching Hank Graves’ face.

“What’s going on, Graves?” Ronnie Wicke growled.  “Give it to me straight.”

“You died in a car accident,” Uncle Hank said calmly.  “Do you remember?”

Ronnie’s eyes widened, his eyes went out of focus for a moment, then he suddenly gasped, “Aw, shit!”

It was then that Dad began to chuckle, then laugh uncontrollably.  All three of us just stared down at him.  Finally, Uncle Hank gave him a sharp kick.

“What the hell you laughin’ at, Graves,” Ronnie grumbled through Tracy’s mouth.  “You don’t look too far from a pine box yourself, you compassionate shit!”

“God, Ronnie, it really is you, ain’t it,” my father asked with wide glistening eyes.

“Can we get on with finding my daughter, Graves, or do you want to waste more of our time?”  His eyes rolled over me, seemingly for the first time, and locked on my face.  He cocked his head slightly.

I sat frozen in his presence--Claudia’s father.  Claudia’s dead father—no doubt in my mind he knew how I felt about her.  How much I loved his daughter.  On the heels of that thought, I realized that he must know what we had done that night at the camp as well.

After he silently appraised me for longer that was comfortable, I heard Uncle Hank ask him, “I take it you know what’s going on then?”

Tracy took a deep breath, her face cracked.  She squeezed her eyes shut.  “No-no-no,” he wailed, using Tracy’s lungs and vocal chords.  “That fucking bastard!  He murdered her!  He murdered my Patty!”  Tears began to stream down Tracy’s face.  His eyes opened.  When he remembered that his arms were tied to his sides, he attempted to shake the tears from his cheeks.  His eyes locked on my father.  “Jack, you’re a cop, right!  You got to find this bastard and kill him!  Do you hear me?  Tear a great big hole in his chest and rip his heart out!”

Dad began to nod, his throat clicked audibly, then he began to titter again.  That was when I first started to worry that something was wrong.

“We need your help to find him,” Uncle Hank responded.  “Ronnie, where is he holding Claudia?”

“Upstairs, where he held the little girl before.  It’s some sort of amphitheater.”

“How do we get there from here?”

Dad began to shudder.  I wondered if he was having some sort of seizure.  Uncle Hank noticed and reached down to touch his shoulder.  He drew his hand back with a look of shock.  It had felt cold.  I was sure of it.

“Through the fireplace.  They’re trying to hide it from you.”

Suddenly, Dad rose, reached out and clasped his hands tightly around Tracy’s throat.  Her eyes bulged as she stared up at my father in stark terror.

I leapt out of my seat, grabbing my father’s arms, just as Uncle Hank threw an arm around his brother’s neck.  Without a single glance back, Dad released one of his hands and grabbed Uncle Hank’s arm, slowly prying it loose.

“In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, release her!”

Dad let go of Tracy, and instantly turned on Uncle Hank, an intense look in his eye.

“Jack?”

I threw myself against my father’s back from behind.  He immediately began to reach around for me.

“Paul, no!”  Uncle Hank dropped his Bible to the table and planted a punch to my father’s chin that rocked him back on his heels.  Gripping both his arms, I pulled with all my strength.  My father’s body began to stagger backward.  I grabbed him by the hair, and his hands closed over mine.  They were slabs of cold ice.  The strength behind the hands was incredible.  With enough time, they would break the bones in my hand like cane.

“Hit him again, Hank,” I heard Tracy—Ronnie—yell from behind me.

Uncle Hank gritted his teeth.  “Let him go, Jack.  Let go of your son.”

A low rumbling chuckle rolled from the throat of the thing that wasn’t my father.  It was a hoarse, reedy sound--the same quality I recognized from my earlier contact with Graham--like a rusty engine attempting to turn over for the first time in years.

“
This one is weak in spirit
,” it hissed.

In a flash I saw my uncle retrieve a flask from his pocket, rip the cork stopper off with his teeth and began to slash it through the air back and forth in front of us.  Droplets of water began to strike its face and chest.  “I command you to release him in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ!”

The thing croaked, squeezed its eyes shut and spun me off in one quick motion like I was made of sticks and paper.  I landed in a heap a few yards away from them.  When the stars cleared, I saw my uncle pinning my father’s arms back against the wall with all his strength.  The other seemed to laugh and scream all at once.

I watched in shock as its hand reached inside his jacket to the empty holster.  But the gun still sat on the table out of reach.

“Out,” I heard my uncle cry.  “Get out of my brother you piece of shit!”

The quality and timber of my father’s screams changed, growing weaker and more fragile.  At last, I heard my father give one last long bellow.  By the sound of the last gasp, I knew the raspy groan to belong to my father.  My uncle grabbed his brother by the elbows and lowered him the rest of the way down the wall into a sitting position.

I rushed to his side and grabbed my father’s hand.  “You okay?”

He shuddered and blinked up at me.  His arms reached out and pulled me weakly to his chest.  I hugged him.  He coughed and gave Uncle Hank a glare.  “Dammit, Hank, did you have to hit me so
hard
?”

“Sorry, Jack. You okay?”

“I’ve been better.”  Dad reached out to his brother to pull him up, but Uncle Hank removed his vial of holy water again.  “It’s my fault that this happened.  I had already blessed Tracy back at the church, but never you or Paul.”

“I’m wearing the crucifix you gave me,” I reminded him.  “I know it’s blessed.”

“Good man,” my uncle replied, “but forgive me if I take this extra precaution.”  Whispering words of Latin, he shook out a portion of the holy water from the vial and traced the sign of the cross upon my forehead, lips, and heart, then raised the vial up to Dad, as if to ask permission.

Typically, my father’s reaction would have been one of amusement, but things had changed.  He gave a simple nod, and my uncle blessed him as well.  He then gave Dad a look of remorse and said, “I’m sorry you had to go through that.  I should have looked out for you better.”