Hallowed (47 page)

They locked arms and my uncle pulled him to his feet with a grunt of pain.

“Don’t worry about it, Hank,” he said, squeezing his arm.  He started over to Tracy.  “What were you saying about a fireplace?”

“Don’t you remember?” Tracy asked, but I could tell Claudia’s father remained within.  He looked from Dad to Uncle Hank.  “We climbed down here through a chimney.”  He strained against his bonds then gave up.  “It’s there in the corner.  If I could move my damned arm, I’d show you myself.”

“Good God, you’re right!”  Uncle Hank smiled and rushed over to Tracy, starting to untie her.  “Don’t you remember, Jack?”

My father rushed back around to the other side of the table and put his hand protectively atop his gun.

Tracy shook off the rope and rose from the chair with Uncle Hank’s help.  “It’s okay,” she said in her own voice.

Dad gave the gun a look of distrust then held the weapon out--butt first--to Uncle Hank.  “I shouldn’t keep this gun on me anymore,” he announced.  “Not after what I just tried to do.”

Uncle Hank gave a single amused shake of his head, watching as Tracy reached across the table, grabbed a handful of pages from the open grimoire like the hair of a resting animal, and tossed the massive book across the room toward a conspicuously empty corner, several of the pages ripping off in her hands.

“Take the gun, Hank,” my father said louder.  “You were always the best shot anyway.”

Scowling, Uncle Hank snatched the gun from my father, holding it loosely down by his side.  Glancing over at my uncle at that moment, I retained an image of the man that remained with me for the rest of my life.  I saw Father Henry Graves, standing there against a wall of ancient pagan spell-books, a Bible in his right hand and a gun in his left.  It was quite a different picture of a priest than most people get the opportunity to see.

The holy man as a warrior.

Twisting the loose pages from the grimoire into the shape of a horn, Tracy held it over the oil lamp on the table, catching its edge aflame and carrying it to the discarded book in the empty corner. She cast a look back at Uncle Hank and lit the book on fire.

The flames caught the edge of the grimoire’s pages and began to crackle, then hiss.  The sound grew louder, out of proportion to the tiny fire, until the book seemed to be screaming.

Slowly Tracy backed away, the horn of pages still burning in her hand.

The pages of the open grimoire began to flutter like a hysterical woman’s arms.  Suddenly the entire book began to hop and skip entirely off the floor, flopping about like a beached flounder and finally launching itself completely off the floor, almost a foot in the air.

My father took a protective step in front of me, thought twice, and chose to stand beside me instead.  A quick look of acknowledgement passed between us.

“Tracy, look out!” we heard Uncle Hank yell, emptying his hands of everything he held onto the table.  I caught a glimpse of the flame from the horn she still held in her right hand, crawling like a snake of living fire up her wrist.  Tracy tossed the twisted grimoire pages against the wall.  It exploded like a bag of gasoline, tiny lines of flame trailing down the wall like the remnants of a dragon’s claw mark.

Dad and I swatted the wall with our jackets, just as Uncle Hank strangled the last bit of flame from Tracy’s burning arm.

“You okay?” he asked Tracy.

Staring down at the smoking sleeve of her coat, she actually managed a dark smirk.  “I’ve had worse.”  She pointed at the book, now almost totally consumed by the flames.  The wailing had been reduced to a dim whine now.  The smoking grey mass gave a single last convulsion, like the death throes of a dying beast and collapsed into an ashen pile.  With fascination, we watched as the thick black smoke rose into the corner of the room and completely disappeared into thin air.

“By God, will you look at that?” my father muttered. “Are you seeing this?”

“Yeah, unless we’re having the same hallucination, I’m seeing it too.”

Then in a voice, almost too quiet to hear, I heard my father say: “All this really happened.  I wasn’t crazy.”

I followed my father to the corner of the room and watched as the shadows there seemed to shift and deepen into the grey lines of bricks, like pupils readjusting for night vision.  Suddenly it was there, a massive brick fireplace, so physically imposing that the mere fact that it had managed to elude our sight seemed to mock reality itself.

Dad dropped down to his knees and followed the rising plume of smoke up the chimney.  He duck-walked a few feet into the enormous mouth and held out his hand to me.  I handed him Tracy’s flashlight.  He slowly rose from his squat, all of him above his knees disappearing from view.  He reappeared a few moments later.

“Ladder rungs going straight up,” Uncle Hank announced with certainty.

The two brothers looked at each other.  “You remember?” Dad asked.

“Bits and pieces.”

“How far is this amphitheater?” I asked them.

They traded looks again and Uncle Hank gave an apologetic shrug.  Dad simply shook his head.  “Sorry, son.  I just remember that Ronnie and I were looking for Hank.”

Taking my flashlight back, I ducked under his arms and looked up.  A darkened shaft rose up as far as the flashlight revealed, some sort of rungs built into the wall rising up the sheer surface.  “What is it, Dad?  It’s not really a chimney or else we would have seen some evidence up on the surface.  Besides, it’s obviously meant to be used as a passage.  Why would someone do this?”

He stared back at me with furrowed brow and shrugged.  “Maybe it’s nothing more than a backdoor out.”

“Mr. Wicke?” I called out hopefully.

We all looked at Tracy, staring down at the objects on the table.  After a moment, she shook her head.  “He’s left us,” she said with a labored sigh, gathering up her charms back into the medicine bag.  “Perhaps he’s gone to comfort his daughter now.”

Uncle Hank stepped to her side, touched her shoulder, and looked into her eyes, still glassy from whatever had been in the pill she had taken earlier.  “I’ll be okay.  It hasn’t dulled my senses.”  She gave him a nod then asked, “How are
you
?”

“I’ve been somewhat… illuminated,” my uncle muttered.

“It occurs to me now that he was trying to speak with me for a very long time now,” she told Uncle Hank, “But because of my own doubts, I ignored his voice.”  Her eyes found mine across the room at the table as I pulled the friendship bracelet back down over my wrist.  “Perhaps he found a more open mind in you.”

I recalled then what Graham had said about the voices I had been hearing recently.  Even then, I knew that the voices hadn’t been from the same evil source that had contacted him.

My mind rushed backwards and the twisted banner of unanswered questions began to unfurl their answers.  Now I could hear the voice clearly, the resonating tone of a man in the prime of his life, with a bit of a smoker’s rasp.  In Comeaux’s grocery.  In the cemetery.  At the camp.  It had been Mr. Wicke, right down to “Crimson and Clover,” the song he once shared with his wife, Pat.  “And the dreams,” I heard myself whisper, just before my father yanked me out of my reverie with a tug on my arm.

“I want Tracy following me, then you next, and Hank.”  He hefted the rope over his shoulder and started to lift the backpack when Uncle Hank reached out for it.

“I got that.”  He tucked the Bible into the breast of his jacket, zipped it closed, then hefted the pack onto his back.

Dad simply gave a nod and handed him the holster for the gun.  “Put the flashlight back into the backpack.  You’re going to need both hands up there.”  He took off his belt, strung the belt through the handle of the lantern and strapped the belt back tightly around his waist.  The lantern dangled halfway down his leg.

Uncle Hank fit the gun back into its holster and gave me a furtive look.

Dad climbed back into the hearth, rose, then disappeared from sight, the light of the lantern spilling out down the shaft growing fainter and fainter as he started up.  Tracy cast one look back at me and said, “Be on your guard, Paul,” then started up after him.

I gave my uncle one last look then started for the hearth.

“Wait,” he asked, stepping over to me and placing his hand on my shoulders.  “Do you remember the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel?”

I smiled.  Very distinctly, I remember him teaching me the prayer to St. Michael when I was barely five.  Once I’d learned it, he would ask me to recite the prayer every time he would come to visit, which was often, back in the day.

“Of course, I do.”

“Recite it to me now,” he asked with authority.  “I need to hear it.”

So, I stood and stumbled fitfully through the prayer like a kid giving an oral presentation in front of his teacher, but as rusty as I was, it seemed satisfactory to him.

“Remember it, if you get into trouble.”  Then he began to fasten the holster around me beneath my jacket.  “In this world, it will protect you more than these bullets, Paul.”

I stared at him in confusion.  “Dad specifically gave that to you.”

“Back in the day, I used to be quite the shot with a gun,” he told me, tightening the strap firmly to my chest.  “I’m a different man than I used to be.  My soul belongs to God and I can’t stomach carrying a weapon like this anymore.  Your father… he needs a little more time before he can see his brother for who he is now.”  He gave me one last pat on the shoulder and pushed me firmly forward.  “God walks with you, Paul.”

Working my way into the hearth, I gazed up into the darkness.  The smoky shaft was dimly illuminated by the distant light of Dad’s lantern.  A series of metal rungs, which appeared to be nothing more than hallow pipes embedded into the stone, protruded from the wall of the shaft.  I started up after Dad, already a good twenty yards up the shaft, taking the precious light along with him.

Looking up through the remnants of smoke, I could see Tracy a few yards above and the light from my father’s lantern somewhere beyond her casting a dim light up the shaft.  How far up did it go?  Like the answer to a bad joke, my mind automatically responded, “All the way.”  Only one way out, I told myself.  To get to Claudia, to get back to open air again, you must go up.

I began to march mechanically, concentrating on the rungs, lifting my feet and setting them down, keeping pace with Tracy above me.  As I climbed, I studied the walls surrounding me.  “These walls are chiseled out of stone,” I called up, “like the walls of the cavern below us.  So the house had to have been built around this shaft, right?”

“Possibly,” Tracy answered.

It’s a throat, I thought with a brief spasm of terror.  We’re moving from the belly to the head.

“Hey, Jack, do you remember doors in these walls?” Hank yelled up to Dad.

When he didn’t answer, Hank concluded: “Because I think I remember lots of doors.”

“Maybe they’re here and we simply cannot perceive them,” Tracy told him.

“Like we couldn’t see the fireplace?” Hank murmured, running his hand along the wall next to him experimentally and muttering, “Fascinating,” under his breath.

Suddenly, I felt a cold breeze shoot down the shaft, a gust of icy moisture that seemed to penetrate straight through to my bones like claws.  The light cutting through the hazy darkness above flickered.  I was momentarily disoriented.  My brain told me that I was looking up a shaft, but my mind told me that I was looking down.  The world around me began to tilt to one side, and I could do nothing to stop the sensation.

I froze in place.

Funny, I never realized until that moment that I was claustrophobic.  I flashed back to the elevator car that had taken me down here and how close the walls had been, close as a coffin.  Perhaps at the time, I was too intent on finding Claudia to notice.  Now, I recalled a moment in one of my dreams, when I had first discovered myself inside the House.  The smell of soot and the feeling of being trapped had been prevalent as it was here.  Had that been Mr. Wicke’s way of warning me what to expect?

My hands began to tremble on the rung to which I clung.  I focused on the wall and willed myself to let go, reach up, and grasp the next rung.  I bent my knee to take the next step up, but it refused, returning to its place on the lower rung.

“Everything okay, Paul?”

The words wouldn’t come.  I realized that had no breath to speak.  The last of the smoke that had been barely visible before suddenly appeared to fill the passage and threatened to choke me.

My eyes looked down in response to a touch on my ankle.

The thing looked up at me with red glowing eyes that slid around in their wrinkled sockets, finding me and locking onto my face.  Its mouth opened and exposed dark festering rot.  I could smell the death and decomposition of it.

We have you now,
the creature hissed, a sound like a night breeze through the stripped limbs of a willow tree. 
We who cause the earthquakes and tsunamis, the destruction of Man and that which he produces.  We have taken everyone that you care about.  Even your dear mother is dying a slow death this very moment in the chaos we have released outside at the stroke of midnight.  Your world is no more.  Your souls are ours.

I shut my eyes, consciously rejecting the image, but a vision of a constricted vein entered my mind, a tiny squadron of red blood cells slowing and coming to a deep stop at a narrow bottleneck.  Like the image of the throat I’d had earlier, again I felt this shaft was part of a larger whole, a sort of living system.

“Paul?”  The grip on my ankle tightened.  I found enough breath to scream, the effort bringing stars into the darkness behind my closed eyelids.  I began to feel weak.  My grip on the rungs began to loosen.

“Jack! Tracy! Stop!”

“What’s wrong?” I heard the distant sound of my father call down the shaft.  He sounded a lifetime away.

“Paul?”  I felt my uncle’s hands on my ankles, and I focused intently on my memory of his face.

“I think I might be having some sort of a panic attack,” I managed.

“Okay, I want you to take a deep breath,” my uncle told me.  “From your gut.  Ready?  Breathe.”

I sucked air in slowly through my mouth, filling my lungs, opening my eyes experimentally and seeing the feet of Tracy taking a step down to the rung just above the one I held onto.  When I peered further up, I saw Tracy and beyond her, a clogged space filled with dark winged figures, staring down at me with hungry glowing eyes.

Gregori.

I had to shut my eyes again.

“Uncle Hank?” I called.

“Yes, Paul,” his reassuring voice returned.

“Tell me that my fear is irrational,” I suggested.  “Tell me that there’s nothing in the shaft except for you and Dad and Tracy.”

There was a moment of hesitation, followed by: “Nothing but us, Paul, I assure you.”

It was at that moment that I saw the doors.  An endless litany of doors of all shapes and materials, interspersed as far as the light revealed.  I could see open passages as well, directionless darkness leading deeper into the cavern, some as small as rabbit holes.  These were the ones that haunted me, as there seemed to be a dim blue light glowing from somewhere deep within each one of them.

Consciously, I squeezed my eyes shut against the sight.  My fingers from my left hand inched across the cold metal of the rung until it found the threads of the friendship bracelet.

Claudia.

I opened my eyes and forced myself to look down.  Uncle Hank blinked up in the semi-darkness, the swinging light of the lantern above having a momentarily dizzying effect on me.  I looked back up and found Tracy and beyond her the silhouette of my father.

Unfortunately, the doors were still there.

“Uncle Hank,” I said with a wavering voice.  “I see them.   I see the doors.  Am I hallucinating?”

“No,” his voice came back somberly.  “I see them too now.”

“The doors?” Tracy asked, running her hand over a wooden gate-like door immediately before her.  It was painted solid red with a glistening gold knob.  “Do you think there’s a different room behind every one?”

Appearing above her again, Dad shot out and grabbed Tracy’ s hand defensively.  He gave a warning shake of his head.  “We don’t need to know,” I heard him murmur.

Tracy took a deep breath and nodded, slowly withdrawing her hand.

“Paul, you okay?” my father called down.

“Okay, Dad,” I tried to sound reassuring.  “Just a little dizzy there.”  A thought occurred to me and I asked, “What time do we all have?”

“Quarter past… two?” I heard my Uncle’s voice say with confusion.

“Same here,” my father called down.

Tracy nodded.  “Why did you ask?”

“There was… an event,” I attempted to explain.  “Like the other few times I felt disoriented, time seemed to speed up.  The two seemed to be connected somehow.”

“A spiritual attack,” Uncle Hank suggested.  He began the murmuring under his breath again that I recognized as a Latin.

“Do you need more time, Paul?” Dad asked. “We can wait.”

Taking a deep breath, I managed, “I’m ready now,” demonstrating with a step up the next rung.  “Let’s go.”

Dad turned his attention ahead and started slowly up again.  Tracy gave me a brief look of appraisal then followed him.

Less than five minutes later, Tracy stopped.  “What is it?”

“Some sort of entrance,” I heard my father answer.

Uncle Hank stepped up beside me and held a rung with one hand while he used the other to shine the flashlight he’d fastened to the belt around his waist up into the darkness.  Just above Tracy, I could see an opening along the right side of the wall.  I watched as Dad stepped into the opening, taking the light from his lantern with him, casting the rest of us in near darkness.

Tracy continued up, stopping a few rungs above it in order to allow us to come up and all look through the opening together.  It seemed to be carved out of the rock face.  The stone steps, revealed by the lantern in my father’s hand, led up around the corner and into the darkness.

He squatted down at the edge of the opening and looked down at us, the lantern lighting him from below, the shadows creating a momentary caricature of my father.   “My instinct tells me to keep going up the way we’re going.  Logically, that’s where the surface has to be and I was ready to suggest that… until I found this.”  Opening his hand, he revealed a silver charm in the shape of a bat lying in his palm.

I felt my heart thumping in my throat as he reached out and laid it in my awaiting palm.  “Is it Claudia’s?”

I nodded.

My father took a deep breath and gazed into the darkness behind him as he slid the lantern off his belt loop.  “Graham is trying to lead us this way.”  He glanced at Tracy, but she seemed to be staring off into the space in front of her.  “I’m thinking I should go on up a-ways just to get an idea if it’s the right move for all of us.  If there’s some sort of trap, I figure I’ll see it first.”

“That would be a mistake,” my uncle stated.  “Don’t you remember?  This is where Ronnie separated from us before, Jack.”

My father stared at him, his eyes slowly widening from confusion to clarity.

“I wanted to go that way, because I was sure Tracy was in there and you didn’t want to come.  We fought about it for a while, and by the time we made up our minds, Ronnie had already gone on ahead of us.  We had no choice but to go after him.”  Hank glanced at Paul.  “Just like Paul did.”

Interesting, I thought.  Ronnie Wicke and I had at least one thing in common after all.

After a moment, my father gave a sort of distant nod.

“Tracy, what do you think?” I asked her.  “Does any of this ring a bell?”

At first, she didn’t seem to hear me.  Then the light of the lantern struck her face.  Her eyes were wide and frightened as she stared at the open hole in the wall opposite her.  “All paths lead to the Fallen,” she muttered flatly, her voice emotionless.  “There is no hope. No escape.”  Then she began to scream and strike her head against the wall.

At the same moment I heard a scream come from a distance.  I knew the source of that sound as clearly as I knew my own heart.

“Claudia!”

Hank rushed up and pulled Tracy protectively against his chest.  She fell limply against him.  With Dad’s help, the three of us managed to get her down onto the stone floor of the large open passage.

The moment she was down, Tracy began to thrash about like a patient receiving shock therapy, blood streaming down her temple from where she’d struck the wall.  The screaming began again.  Hank held her shoulders down and began to pray over her.  She responded instantly, the shrieks turning to moans.

“The scream.  That was Claudia,” I snapped, rising to face the dark passage lying before me.  Turning back, I reached for my father’s lantern.  “We have to go!  Now!”

Recognizing the steely determination in my voice, my father gave a single nod and started past me into the shadows, lantern in hand.  I was on his heels until I heard my uncle’s sharp call at my back.

“Paul, wait!”

I turned back to my uncle, preparing myself for an argument.  Instead, I was met with his beloved Bible, held out to me.  I gingerly took the book into my hands and before I could protest, he said, “Give your Dad the backpack.  I just need this.” He removed a small red bag marking “First Aid” from the unzipped pack and thrust the backpack into my arms.  “Now go!”

Pulling the straps of the pack over my arms, I spun back down the passage after my father, realizing for the first time that the ceiling stood only five feet high.

“God walks with you,” my uncle’s voice trailed behind me.

The corner took a sharp turn and the light from my father’s lantern momentarily disappeared.  A dim voice called back: “Hurry! I’m losing him!”  Before I could interpret what the cryptic statement might mean, I realized that it wasn’t my father’s voice… or it was, but higher in pitch, as if it had been sped up somehow.

The dim light of Dad’s lantern sent a grey glow down the steps as they leveled to a straight run of about ten feet.  There was a sharp oily smell in the air now.  “Dad,” I called up.  “Where are you now?”

I could hear his heavy breathing.  “Here!” he gave a labored call.  I heard an odd metallic echo that didn’t suit the acoustics of a cavern.  Somewhere in the distance, I heard a rumble and the passage shook around me.

That couldn’t be good!

I pushed myself as hard as I could, my legs growing warm and achy.  The steady slap-slap-slapping sound of my shoes on the rock steps transformed into a clang-clang-clanging.  Looking down at my feet, the dim light revealed that the steps had at some point changed from stone to metal.  I appeared to be in a stairwell now more suited to an office building than a cave.

Reaching the next landing, I was so distracted I nearly collided with my father.  I barely slowed, taking the steps two at a time now, the oily smell now so strong it was overpowering.  “Claudia!” I yelled.  In the distance, I thought I heard an explosion.