Hallowed (36 page)

Just before we turned in for the night, Dad called me up to his office.  He pulled a metal box down out of the storage closet and unlocked it.  He took out his prized 9mm SIG P210 semi-automatic pistol, cleared and visually checked the chamber.  Because of its compact size, it was easier for me to handle.  He knew it had been my favorite to practice with on the range.

He visually showed me a fully loaded 15 round clip before he snapped it in.  “When this is all over, I want us to start going to the range again.  Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of time.”

He handed it to me butt first.  It was the substantial weight in the palm of my hand more than anything else that spoke to me of the heavy burden of responsibility which came with this weapon.

For my thirteenth birthday, I’d asked for a hunting rifle.  Instead, what I got was a lesson in firearms.  That was the year he first started taking me to a gun range.  We had gone once every few months for about a year.  Somewhere along the line I had just lost interest.  In retrospect, I believe the youthful romanticism of guns wore off and the reality of the responsibility set in.  I filed away my interest like a once loved toy is put into storage.

“In the meantime, I want you to remember everything I taught you.”

Just for a moment that childish sense of wonder seized me, and I had to fight the urge to hold the gun out and make “bang bang” sounds at an old dusty pair of buck antlers hanging in the corner of the room.

“Paul?”

I snapped back to reality and peered up at him, feeling at least a foot shorter and my eyes as wide and innocent as the day I had first managed to keep my bike upright without training wheels.

“I know I’ve taught you
not
to keep it loaded, but you should get used to the idea of having to use it at a moment’s notice.  You got me?”

I nodded to my father, realizing with a numb feeling that he was giving me permission to fire on another human being.

To kill if necessary.

I am standing in the grey field of the October Country.  It isn’t night this time but just before sunset.  The horizon is a lighter shade of grey.

There is a steady TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK coming from somewhere just over my head, and suddenly I am aware that I am dreaming.

I recall that Claudia had given me a wind-up clock to orient myself once I was asleep.  She had convinced me that I needed to give the lucid dreaming thing one more shot before Nathan Graham killed again.

Now that I am fully aware that I am in the midst of a dream, I look down and discover that I am once again standing atop a coffin lid. About three by six feet, it is essentially a door that sets flush with the surface of the ground.  Taking a quick glance around and seeing nothing but the House in the distance, I go to one knee and place my palm over the surface of the door.  It is cold wood and devoid of any handle
or knob.  Hoping to find an opening or latch, I run my fingers around the edges starting with the side closest to the House and sliding my hands slowly clockwise.  When I reach the right hand side, my fingers sink beneath the edge, and I hear the echo of dirt showering down into a shaft of some depth.

I clear an area wide enough to get both hands beneath and brace my muscles for what I expect to be a great weight, but the door falls open with no effort.  I look down and gasp in horror.  Half-buried human skulls are exposed in grey dirt, but it is the sight of Claudia’s still-flush face half-buried amid the bones that leave me gasping for breath like the recipient of a kick in the chest.

Then she opens her eyes.

I awoke shivering from the dream to the sight of Claudia sitting beside me with concern in her eyes.  The first thing I noticed was that she was no longer in her nightgown but in jeans and a t-shirt.  She put an arm around the back of my neck and helped me sit up.

“You’re okay now,” she kept repeating to me.  “Relax.”

I sipped from the glass of water Claudia offered me and glanced around the room.  The door to the office was open.  I could hear the snores of my father from down the hallway.  “Did I call out loud?”

“No, your folks are sound asleep,” she replied.  “What did you see?”

I told her everything, including the part about seeing her face in what I perceived to be a mass grave.  She didn’t react quite the way I would have suspected.  She simply nodded and began to nibble her lip.

“Are you sure it wasn’t my mother’s face you saw?  That would explain why her face might be emerging from the grave,” she said excitedly.  “That would make sense.”

I shook my head emphatically.  “No, Claudia.  It was your face I saw.”

She stood then, and I could see passion rising in her wide eyes.  “Now, I’ve got this suggestion and I want you to keep an open mind and hear me out.”  This raised my hackles a bit.  “Remember how I told you about the origins of All Hallow’s Eve and the belief of the Celts that on Samhain or the Celtic New Year that the veil between the living and the dead was the thinnest.  Well, people often asked the deceased to divine the future or to answer questions.”  She paused here and seemed to attempt to read my expression, but I remained a blank slate.  “Paul, we don’t have much time here and until we find Nathan Graham, he could take more innocent lives.  There was only two days between the car accident and his father’s murder which means he’s speeding up.  Now that his identity is known, he’s got nothing to lose.”  She stopped again and stood watching me.  Finally, she knelt on the bed at my side.  “Say something.”

“Are you asking for my opinion?”

“No, I’m only asking you if you’ll come with me.”

It was all I could do to contain my slowly mounting anger.  “To do what exactly?”

“Ask my mother to help us locate Graham… using the Psychic Eye.”

“Isn’t that..?”

“Still over at my house? Yes.”

With the discovery in the bathroom, we had, of course, abandoned all the stuff we had packed.

I broke eye contact.  “Out of the question,” I stated.

“Fine, you don’t have to come with me but I’m not going to sit around here waiting for this bastard to kill again,” she snapped, bolting from the bed and starting for the door.

I rushed after her and grabbed her by the arm.  “Wait!”

She turned on me with an impatient glare, pulling her arm out of my grip.

“Claudia, I have to be honest.  You’ve got me a little worried,” I hissed at her, trying to keep my emotions under control before I woke the rest of the house up.  “You just lost your mother on Sunday and now you want to try to contact her spirit.  Do you know how crazy that might sound to anyone but me, and to me, it sounds pretty damn crazy!”  I took a deep breath when I realized that Claudia was actually listening to me for a change.  I could see it in her face.  “Remember what my father told us.  Act out of logic, not emotion.”

Claudia’s lip began to tremble.  I could see a corner of the wall she’d worked so hard to erect around her heart began to crumble.  Tears began to stream down her cheeks but her expression never changed.  It was a little creepy actually.

“Don’t you think I know she’s…”  She swallowed then and I could see that she was fighting a fierce battle to stay in control.

“It’s okay to cry, Claudia.  After all, your mother is dead.”

Her hand was so fast that I never saw the slap coming.

Then she was gone, rushing up the hallway and down the stairs.

Of course, I followed her.

As I lifted the yellow plastic tape away from the back door, I thought back to the day before when I had almost expected to see the house adorned like a crime scene.

Now, here it was.

I held my hand out to Claudia and unlocked the door.  She started to reach for the knob but I firmly pushed her back.

“Like we talked about,” I growled.

She simply nodded.

I reached into the waist of my jeans and rested my hand on the grip of my father’s SIG.  We entered as a single unit and shut the door quietly behind.  I held up a hand and we remained standing in place for a good two minutes.  I glanced at Claudia, and she gave a single shake of her head.

We moved on through the kitchen and into the living room.  I stopped her again.  We listened in the quiet darkness of the once vibrant home.  It was as still as death or at least what my perception of death had always been.  (Of course, Claudia was banking on a different interpretation of the hereafter.)

We continued upstairs.  There was tape covering the closed door of the hall bathroom and two long strips laid across the door of Claudia’s room.  I stood listening at the door for another few minutes, noticing a thin film of dust over the knob where they had searched for a fingerprint that didn’t belong, then finally opened it and stepped inside.

Everything looked to be in the exact same position we had left it only the day before.  On the bed, there were the suitcases and the Psychic Eye lying next to it.  I snatched the box, handed it to her, and stepped back out into the hallway.  Shutting the door behind us, we crept like thieves down the stairway and into the kitchen.

I reached for the door to the garage and realized that Claudia was unpacking the Psychic Eye board onto the table.  I shook my head vigorously.

She was ignoring me.  I grabbed her wrist and she gave me such a look that my grip loosened without conscious thought.

“This was not what we agreed,” I hissed at her.

“So go then,” she responded in a harsh whisper.

She took a seat at the table and put two fingers on the planchette, giving me a single accusatory look.  I ground my teeth in frustration, locked the door leading to the garage and stepped up to the table.  Retrieving the gun from my jeans, I placed it on the table and took the seat across from her.

Without another word, I put a single finger on the planchette.   Claudia closed her eyes and after a moment, so did I.

“Mom?  Are you here?” she whispered.

It’s true that I didn’t believe in the board’s power.  As Uncle Hank had once told me, it was more a testament to the power of capitalism than man’s faith in supernatural forces that so many people believed in divination and fortune telling, but even
he
was unwilling to call it complete nonsense.

Despite my skepticism, I poured all my will into calling Mrs. Wicke just as strongly and passionately as Claudia was doing, trying to cast out the doubt that was the center of my soul.  I wanted this to work for Claudia just as much as I feared it never would.

We continued to concentrate and Claudia would punctuate the silence with the occasional, “Mom?” until the sound of her voice became the eerie call of a mother cat to her kittens.

Almost a half hour later, I felt the planchette move beneath my fingers.  It startled me so much, that I nearly let go out of simple human instinct.  After all, there was an inanimate object moving beneath my fingers that I was neither pushing nor pulling.

The moment I twitched and opened my eyes, the planchette came to a dead stop.  Glancing to my right, I searched the darkness of the kitchen for the source of the movement I sensed out of the corner of my eye.  I saw nothing.

“Are you here?” Claudia called again hopefully, opening her eyes as well.

Five minutes later, it moved again.  It traveled up to the top of the board until the little transparent window rested totally and without a doubt over the word “Yes” inscribed into a symbol of a blazing sun on the right side of the board.

The grey digital window on the top of the planchette displayed the word “Yes” in upper case black letters.

Fancy schmancy, I thought.  Claudia had indeed spared no expense in choosing a communicator with the dead.  Former spiritualist and radio inventor Marconi himself would have just pinched himself… had he any flesh left.

I checked myself from giving a nervous giggle, seriously breaching séance etiquette, and turned my attention back to the board.

“Mom is that you?”

Again the planchette moved away from the fiery “yes” and back, causing the word to pop up once again on the display.

Claudia began to blink at the board.  I was sure she was going to cry, but she regained her composure.  Giving me a quick look and adjusting her shoulders, she asked, “Paul is here with me.  Is it..?”  Before she could even get the next sentence out the planchette was on the move, sliding smoothly over the letters in the center of the board.  The deliberateness of its movement was mechanical and creepy, like gazing into the empty, open eyes of a sleepwalker.

“Hello Paul,” the display read.

Instantly, the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees for me.

Claudia looked up, her eyes prompting me to speak.

I swallowed the rock in my throat and heard my raspy voice say, “Hi.”

“Is it okay if we ask some questions?”

The planchette moved to “Yes.”

“Was the car accident on Sunday really an accident?”

The planchette moved to the moon shaped word “no” on the upper left side of the board.

“Do you know who was responsible?”

The planchette whisked across the board, barely touching a letter before jumping to the next.  “You know him.”

“Is it Nathan Graham?”

Again the answer was “yes.”

Claudia took a deep breath and looked up at me.  I wasn’t sure what might have been going through her mind and decided she was simply drawing a little strength from my presence before she continued.

“We need to find him to stop what happened to you from happening again,” Claudia said, squeezing her eyes shut and allowing a single tear to leave a track down her cheek, unwilling to take her fingers off the planchette.  “Do you know where they can find him?”

The planchette busily slid across the alphabet, a plank on a mission.  Finally, it stopped and displayed its answer: “It must end where it began.”

I looked up at Claudia with confusion.  She gave me back an identical expression.  “Do you know where that is?”

Both of us waited.  The planchette remained completely still.

Claudia craned her neck over the window on the planchette and gave a little gasp.

Without having moved an inch, the display read: “Paul knows.”

“Claudia?”  She looked up at me, and I mouthed the words, “Something’s not right here.”  Her eyes returned to the board, at a loss for words for one of the first times I could remember.

I asked: “Mrs. Wicke, what was your favorite toy as a child?”

Claudia swallowed awkwardly and gave me a panicky look.

Suddenly, the planchette rose and dropped.  I heard a very distinct voice in my ear saying, “Watch out!”  I yanked my hand back just before the planchette sailed toward me, completely off the board and into the door over my shoulder, just missing my head.  Pieces of plastic rained down to the floor.  Claudia continued to sit with hands frozen out in front of her, her mouth forming a perfectly round caricature of wonder.

Directly above us, I heard the sound of a heavy figure running across the second floor.

I grabbed the gun off the table in one hand and her arm in the other and pulled her out of her chair.  With my foot, I swept the remains of the planchette out of the way, flung open the door leading to the garage, and shoved her outside.  The last word I said to her was “Run” before I shut the door between us.

I sank to one knee beside the table in the darkness of the kitchen and trained my Dad’s gun on the doorway leading to the living room.  The footfalls above faded.  I strained my ears to hear him on the stairs, struggling to steady the vibrating gun in my quivering hands.

He must have stopped on the landing, patiently listening for me just as I was for him.

“Stay where right you are, Nathan,” I attempted to yell in an authoritative voice that was ultimately creaky and scared.  “The Sheriff’s Department is outside.”

There was no movement upstairs.  No creaking of floorboards.  No footfalls.

I reached back and turned the door knob, but there was resistance.

My last thought was “That’s funny.”

The door flew open.  I lost my balance and went over backwards, falling on my ass, the gun sliding out of reach.

Standing in the doorway was Nathan Graham.  In one hand he held a rag, an overpowering acrid smell that I couldn’t identify wafting off of it.  In the other, he held a tire iron.  I could just make out Claudia beyond him, lying on the floor of the garage.  She wasn’t moving.

I spun and dove for the gun.

Pain burst through my skull and shooting stars obscured my vision.

Darkness closed in on all sides and enveloped me.