Hallowed (12 page)

Dad wasn’t home when I got in.  Mom told me that they had convinced him that “man-hours” would be better utilized if he were to come into the station.  The way they explained it to him was that time would be wasted if they had to spend time gathering information, photocopying it, and sending a man down with it, not to mention the potential of paperwork getting misplaced and as a result, leaking certain information to the press.

Dad made the decision to go down to the station after all.

I could tell by the way Mom was banging around in the kitchen that she did not agree with his decision in the least.  For the time being, I decided the best tact would be to avoid her.

After a half hour of looking over some of the books Claudia had given me on serial killers, a general indifference began to settle over me at the graphic descriptions of dismembered bodies and horrific murders.  The names were meaningless to me.  At some point they had become like fictional characters in books.  It made my soul heavy to think that these individuals--many with full profitable lives--had been reduced to faceless victims of celebrated monsters.  When human lives began to become simple marks on a scorecard, something was horribly wrong.

I tossed the books into a stack on my floor and went downstairs to be with another human being.  Mom told me that Dad called to tell her that he would be home late, and I suggested going into town for burgers and a movie rental.

“You’re still punished,” she informed me.

“C’mon, no one would have to know.”

“You’d know.  That’s enough.  Part of raising a good son like you, Paul, is following through with promises.  That includes punishment.”

We had all the ingredients for a pizza, so we ended up making one.  As she pressed out the dough on the flour-covered counter, she asked if Claudia had been at the library.  I told her that she had.

“You two have been seeing a lot of each other lately.”

Knowing how sensitive Mom was about the two murders, I gave her a calculated answer: “She’s been tutoring me.”

“Claudia?”  She gave me a look of incredulity.  “Seeing as how she started in the middle of a semester, how can she have already caught up enough?”

“She’s sharper than everyone gives her credit for,” I said a little more defensively than I’d meant.

Mom sensed the mine field and wisely decided to step back.  “Well, I’m just happy to see that you two are getting along.  You used to fight like cats and dogs when you were little.”

I pretended that I didn’t remember just to hear her interpretation of a couple of episodes.

Mom recalled one of those incidents on the Fourth of July at Sea Rim State Park when I was nine.  If I remember correctly, it was Claudia’s idea to go collect seashells.  At one point I held a fiddler crab shell up to my ear.  Claudia informed me that a classmate had lost his hearing from a crab that had crawled into his eardrum while trying a similar seemingly innocent maneuver.

It was five years before I held another shell up to my ear.

Later on that same day, we both got a “timeout’ for straying so far from the rest of the group and had to spend the rest of the afternoon under a shade tree making faces at each other.  She told me that I should stop crossing my eyes at her.  Why, I asked.

“There are little hooks on the back-sides of our eyeballs.  And one of these days if the hooks catch, your eyes could lock like that forever.”

To this day, I have never crossed my eyes again.

I could remember a few occasions that I had attempted bodily injury to Claudia.  More often than not, I would just end up locking her out of my room in frustration.

“Even back then, she thought the world of you, y’know,” Mom commented with a certain tone of resignation.

“Yeah, well now I’m lucky if I can just get respectful tolerance.”

She laughed.  “Teenage girls are enigmas, Paul.  Don’t think you have got them all figured out.  At her age, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next until I did it.”

We ended up watching the classic 1940 Howard Hawks comedy “His Girl Friday” with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.  I’d never seen the movie all the way through and thought it was pretty good for a movie that didn’t have one explosion.  Mom recalled hearing that because the dialogue was so quick that audiences back in the day thought that director Hawks had actually speeded up the film.

As much as I enjoyed it, I kept thinking about Claudia.  Wondering if she would have liked the movie.  Wondering if she had made any progress on the case.

After the film was over, I was about to go upstairs when that mysterious melody entered my head again.  “By the way, do you happen to know what song this is?”  I hummed what I could remember.

Mom’s face lit up.  “Oh, that’s ‘Crimson and Clover.’  It was really popular back when your father and I were going to high school.”  Her eyes lost focus for a moment and she smiled.  “Why do you want to know?”

“Does it have a positive or a negative connotation?”

“Well, for me, positive, but that’s pretty subjective.”  She wrinkled her brow.  “Now that I think of it, the song always seemed a little dangerous to me.  It wasn’t… I don’t know… innocent.”  Then she gave an uncharacteristic chuckle and started clearing the coffee table of cups and plates.

“Is it connected to any event culturally?  Y’know, Woodstock or something?”

“I don’t think so, though it was big in ’69.  What are you doing research on oldies or something?”  She gave me an exaggerated expression of seriousness as she started into the kitchen.

“Actually, I’ve been humming it and I couldn’t figure where I might have heard it.  Do you guys have that album or something?”

“No, not that I know of.  Maybe your father had the radio in the garage tuned to an oldies station or something.”

Of course, that must have been it.  That made more sense than hearing it for the first time in a dream.

“It’s nice to hear that you’re listening to the classics.  They don’t make them like they did back when your father and I were growing up.”

By the time I told her goodnight, I think Mom had forgiven Dad’s stubbornness at going down to the station and that I had played a part in that.

I went upstairs to look up the song on the internet.  Now that I knew what to look for, I found references to it everywhere.  I could even download the actual recording.  I pressed the earphones connected to my computer to my ear and listened to the familiar song.  Though I’d heard it before, probably on oldies stations chosen by my parents, from the backseat of my parent’s car, it felt like I was hearing it for the first time.  The experience was a little surreal, reminding me a little of the first time I’d ever seen a live baseball game in a real park after watching it on TV for so many years.

I went to another website, found the lyrics, written by Tommy James and Peter Lucia of Tommy James and the Shondells, and read the words of the song as I listened:

“Now I don't hardly know her

But I think I could love her

Crimson and clover

Well if she come walkin' over

Now I been waitin' to show her

Crimson and clover

Over and over”

I was so absorbed in the song that I didn’t hear my mother calling me until she was standing right beside me.  Her shadowy figure seemed to appear out of nowhere.  That combined with the sound of my name made me leap out of my seat.  I fumbled the earphones off and stared at her with wide eyes.

She threw a hand over her mouth and tried not to laugh.  “Your father called and he told us not to wait up for him.  He’ll probably be home late.”  She ruffled my hair.  “It’s past ten, Paul.  You have school tomorrow.”

I nodded and tossed the earphones back onto the desk.  I must have looked as white as a sheet because Mom laid a hand on my shoulder.  “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I was just really into what I was reading.  I guess I kinda zoned out there.”

Mom glanced at the computer suspiciously, perhaps thinking that she had caught me on a racy website, or worse yet, a serial killer one.  She gave my shoulder one last squeeze, pecked me on the cheek, and told me goodnight.

“I enjoyed spending time with you tonight, Paul.  The older you get, the less time I get with you.”

I gave her a nod and a half-hearted shrug.  I responded, “Yeah.”  It was the biggest insight I could manage at that point.  My peace had been momentarily shattered, my heart rate just beginning to slow to normal.

She stopped in the doorway and stood with her back to me.  After an apparent inner debate, she turned back to me one last time.  “Pat would never tell you this, Paul, but she’s worried about Claudia, because she’s manic depressive like her father.”

I let go of the mouse in my hand.  She had my full attention now.  “Depressed?  I’ve never seen her..,” then before I could finish my thought, I remembered the poem I’d caught her writing.

All alone I am.

“Of course you haven’t, Paul, because she’s on medication now,” my mother told me.  “Pat tells me that it’s a cyclical thing.  She was in almost a constant state of depression for three months before her doctor found the right balance of meds.  She’s only recently turned a corner, but Pat’s worried with all the excitement about the disappearances that she might go to the other extreme.”

Now that I thought of it, Claudia did tend toward being obsessive, but of course, I’d chalked it up to her personality.  This new revelation made me wonder if I wasn’t helping to contribute to this mania of hers.

“I just felt I needed to tell you that,” she concluded, lowering her head and shutting the door behind her.

After she left me alone, I copied the lyrics onto my word processing program and saved them for later.  Claudia might be interested.

Damn, I thought.  Maybe Mom’s right and I should just play all this down.

But then again, why should I treat her any different just because of this?  It wasn’t like she was disabled or something.  Perhaps her enthusiasm was simply the healthy interest of anyone who’s doing the one thing they enjoy most.

An image of her face in the cemetery crept into my head unbidden.  The way the moonlight highlighted the peaks and valleys of her face like a sculpture.  Again I felt a pain similar to the one I experienced earlier, that sensation that felt like hunger but wasn’t.  It was confusing the hell out of me.

Enough!

I leapt into bed, determined to surrender to sleep and let nature ease the knots out of my conflicted mind.  Unfortunately, my subconscious had other business to discuss with me first.

I stand on the porch, the blistering heat singeing my back.  I turn to look over my shoulder and with that surreal sort of blind acceptance of dreams I take in the fact that my shoulders are broader, too muscular for a child of five.  Holding up my hands, I see that I am no longer a child but seventeen again, but the pumpkin bucket remains faithfully in my right hand.

Just over the railing, the forest of dead trees that I had seen before is now an inferno too bright to look into directly.  It devours the hillside like a starved carnivore, sucking up the air around me like a drowning man emerging suddenly from the depths.  The loud pops and squeals coming from the forest sound disturbingly human.

The blazing forest calls to me in a voice like glass raked across concrete.

Paul!

I look down and with confusion see that the candy in the bucket has turned into a book with a black leather cover.

Then the scream.   I turn back to the wall of the black house.  Through the featureless wall, I hear her scream.  It is Claudia!

Out of sheer instinct, I drop the bucket and throw myself at the blackened wood and immediately bounce off again.  I hear the hiss and whine of a tree limb succumbing to the flames.  I hear mocking laughter but ignore it, focusing instead on the sound behind the wall.

Claudia.  Is someone hurting her?

I know that there is a way inside.  It has opened for me once before when it attempted to make a snack of my ear.  Ever-so-slowly, I turn my ear to the wall and draw millimeter by millimeter closer to the blackened face of the house.  The boards of the house groan and part.  From the slot between the two planks wafts the putrid odor of decay, spat at me like from the cancerous throat of a dying man.

“Paul.”  The flames lick at my heels.  I can see the smoke rising through the floorboards of the porch around the discarded pumpkin bucket and notice with wonder that the contents of the bucket glow with a glorious white light.

Then through the crack in the boards, I hear Claudia cry my name, loud and clear.  “Paul help me!”

It was then that I awoke from the dream with a lung-rattling gasp of air.  Clawing at empty space, I sat up, the blankets in my lap.  Taking a look around and realizing that I was no longer in any mortal danger, I put my hands to my face and just listened to myself breathe.  In-out.  In-out.  The feel of my hands on my face relaxed me and my heart rate began to recede, but parts of me--whole muscle-groups it seemed--were still shaking.

The clock on my nightstand read three-fifteen in the morning.

Opening my window, I leaned out and sucked the night air into my lungs.

Dear Lord! I’d never experienced a dream so intense.

I had an almost overpowering need to see Claudia just to know that she was safe; that nothing that I had just seen had come to pass in reality.

Ignoring all the warnings, I dialed the Wickes number and waited to hear one of two possible voices.  If it was her mother, I would hang up.  If nothing else, it would succeed in at least getting her up to check on her daughter.

On the other hand, if it was Claudia…

“Hello?” her sleepy voice answered.

I closed my eyes and realized that I had been holding my breath.

Before I could stop myself, I had dropped the phone back into its cradle.

My muscles stopped quivering.  The ground beneath me felt solid again.

I fell back to sleep in record time.