Hallowed (41 page)

I jogged across the bridge, pausing to look through the wooden gazebo, before deciding that there was nothing of interest there, then just as I was turning away the sun caught and reflected against something metallic.  There on the railing, set about chest high, was a large black key.  I snatched it up and studied it.

It was one of those old-fashioned intricately cast iron numbers, heavy and substantial, one that seemed to promise by its mere appearance to open something important.  Two waves wove around the shaft like twin tendrils of black smoke.

I pocketed it and rushed across the next bridge.

Standing at the foot of the hill, I could clearly see a set of tire tracks threading their way up the stone ledge.  From my perspective, the trail meandered and I didn’t have the time to waste.  I turned then to the alternate choice of mounting the hill.

Steps had been carved into the reddish rock of the hill.  Though steeply set, a wooden railing had been provided for safety.  Yellow caution tape had been wrapped several layers thick around the base of the railing in an obvious attempt to dissuade anyone from using it.  Folliott might have wanted to scare his prospective guests but he hadn’t wanted a lawsuit on his hands.

Yanking the yellow tape off, I tested the railing, which seemed sturdy enough.  To free up both my hands for climbing, I secured the emergency road kit by a plastic clip on its side to one of my belt loops.  Though the weight of the kit threw off my balance slightly, it was the best I could do under the circumstances.

With a deep breath, I started up the steps, resting my weight on the railing and pulling myself from step to step with my arms.  Almost immediately, the railing began creaking—no, scratch that; it began “wailing” in protest.

I wondered how long ago an actual person had used these steps.  Okay, fine, I told myself, I can manage this without the railing.  I just have to be a little more careful.

I started slowly up the stone steps, resting my palms over the railing for balance but resisting the urge to rest my weight against it.  Don’t test it unless you really need to, I told myself.  The steps were perfectly able to support me, if I took my time.

Halfway up, feeling confident, I found a firm enough handhold in the rocky face of the hill and glanced back over my shoulder.  From my vantage point, I could clearly see the valley below.  The orchard was massive and covered probably ten to fifteen acres when all was said and done.

This is what I had seen in my dream, I realized with sudden and surreal clarity.  This is the exact same perspective that I viewed the forest of dead trees for the first time.

I turned back to the stone steps, loosening my grip on the handhold, just in time to see a bird out of the corner of my eye as it dove at my face.

Instinctively, I grabbed for the railing to stabilize myself, unavoidably yanking at the rickety structure.  There was an enormous wrenching sound and a shower of dust rained down into my face.  I cursed and shook my head, blinking back the sharp stinging in my eyes.  I was momentarily blind.

I felt a hard thump against my temple, reminding me of a pitch I took while at bat back in Little League.  The ball had struck me so hard, my ears rung until the end of the game.  This time the dull thud had been accompanied by a sharper pain and I realized that in the bird’s second attack, it had actually ripped hair from my head.

“Son of a bitch!” I heard myself bellow.  The sound gave me a sudden burst of adrenaline.  I opened my eyes to see a huge dark bird—was it a hawk, I wondered?—swinging around and diving back toward me again.

Finding the handhold in the hill face again, I held myself steady and grabbed the towel from my shoulder, swinging it in the air like a surrender flag.  The bird swooped down and with horror I realized it was the biggest winged creature I had ever seen this close before.  The beast had at least a five foot wingspan as it dove at my face, its enormous talons raking the air in front of me.

Still the bird made no sound.  To say it was unnatural would be an understatement.  Its single-minded actions were more like a machine than a warm-blooded animal.

As its wings blocked out the sun and cast me in shadow, I recognized that its feathers were a flat, dull black, a matte black so completely dark, so all-consuming for one disorienting moment I lost my equilibrium and felt as if I was falling into it.

I realized in alarm that it was the color of burnt wood.  The color of the House.

Its claws snagged the towel in my hand and pulled up, actually lifting me off my feet for a brief second, before letting go and soaring up and out of sight over the edge of the hill above.

Wrapping the towel around my fist, I stood there clutching the rock face, breathing raggedly in and out.  I peered up and prepared for another attack that never materialized.

“Another creature of opportunity,” I grumbled, with an off-kilter chuckle, trying to ignore the truth of how close I had come to falling thirty feet.

Finally, I started back up the stone stairs, a lingering pain in my eyes and a tattered towel, the only evidence of the bizarre event that had just occurred to me.

The natural stairway ended about twenty yards further up.  I gripped the last few feet of the railing, collapsed chest-first into a grassy clearing and came face to face with what I had expected to be the second image from my dreams.

The House Without Doors.

I crawled a few feet away from the stone stairway and rose to my feet, staring dumbfounded into the clearing.  The fear I thought I would feel at this moment, facing the object of my serial nightmares, had been replaced by utter confusion.

The frame of an enormous structure was about hundred yards away and set in the center of a smaller group of apple trees that were more mature than the ones at the base of the hill.  Islands of lumber and altars of bricks surrounded its humongous grey slab, its naked foundation.  It stood like the skeletal remains of a dinosaur, the silence of the hill punctuated by the snapping of loose plastic coverings that waved in the October breeze.  To the right of all this, as if to drive home the metaphor in my head, sat a graveyard.

“What the hell?” I heard myself utter in the dead silence.

I walked slowly around the parameter of the site, getting a wide angle view of the whole picture before I started closer.  There was no movement except the branches of the trees and the inflating and deflating of the plastic wrapped construction materials, which looked disturbingly like the chests of living animals, inhaling and exhaling.

Folliott’s Folly.

Abandoned.  Dead.

My first emotion was utter despair.  This is the wrong place, I thought.  I’m wasting time in the wrong place, and Claudia is still missing.

Then a second thought atop that one.

I’m missing something here.  Something vital.

Something suddenly struck me as odd.  How did all this construction material get here in the first place?  Where was the road that a truck would use to deliver all this?  The tiny hillside path might have been sufficient for a golf cart or four-wheeler but definitely not wide enough for trucks hauling construction materials.

I took a complete circuit of the proposed house and saw a dirt fire-road, leading off through another grove of apple trees with several more of the big crates scattered about here and there.  I sucked in a breath of wounded surprise.

A road led right up to the house.  From where, I had no idea.

Checking my cell phone one last time with the intent of warning my father, I found without surprise that there was still no service available.

Yet somehow, Graham had managed to call me, I thought.

I stepped up to the concrete slab of the mansion and scanned it.  The foundation of some of the rooms had been fully completed, but others had been abandoned halfway through, leaving nothing but a sea of grey like the lid of a crypt.

The lid of a crypt, I considered.

It was then that I remembered the dream I’d had of lifting the coffin lid and seeing Claudia’s face.

I turned and looked again at the small graveyard.  There were simple tombstones, a few above ground crypts (like the kind you might expect in New Orleans), and a single elaborate marble construct at its center complete with sculptures.

Was this a real cemetery, I asked myself.  After a quick glance at some of the names on the tombstones, I realized that these were simple props.  But more than that, the builder seemed to have real contempt for the mere concept of religion.

The first one that caught my eye was one that read, “Bill Gates, Welcome to the Ultimate Big Blue Screen of Death,” and just below those words, the following quote from him:  “Religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

“Steve Jobs,” another read, with the following quote: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

The magicians Doug Henning and David Copperfield were there, along with some of the Twentieth Century’s greatest artists that had worked in the horror genre, George Romero, John Carpenter, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, William Peter Blatty, H. P. Lovecraft.  Edgar Allen Poe’s tombstone read:
“
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

But my attention was drawn to the crypt in the center of the cemetery, the back side displaying the unfamiliar name of Ehrich Weiss.  It was an enormous mini-building with Roman columns and full-sized angelic figures guarding each side.  One held a flaming sword, the other cradled a pair of doves.

There was a quote chiseled into every side.  One side read: “The greatest escape I ever made was when I left Appleton, Wisconsin.” Another read: “What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.”  And: “Magic is the sole science not accepted by scientists, because they can’t understand it.”

Finally, I reached the front of the crypt as evidenced by a black wrought iron gate set into its face.  Above a marble bust of Ehrich Weiss--the man the world knew as Harry Houdini--displayed the quote: “The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.”

I gave a dark chuckle at that one… that is, until I realized that I could very well meet the qualifications of the subject of that quote, instantly draining any humor from it.

A set of three steps led up to the iron gate.  Warily, I gazed around the small cemetery and mounted these steps, peering through the bars of the gate door.  There in the confining four by six foot space I could see another iron gate in the floor propped open against the interior wall of the crypt and a set of four steps leading down into a darkened hole in the floor.

I stepped back unconsciously, feeling an almost overwhelming compulsion to walk away, my eyes dropping to the keyhole on the wrought iron door, about the size of the key I had in my pocket, I would wager.

He wants me to come in, I thought.  He’s done everything but roll out the welcome mat.

Then on the heels of this thought, another one:  Not he.  It.  His master.

I took out the iron key and stared down at it.  What I had first thought were just simple wavy designs along the shaft, I now realized were wings.  Black wings.

As I slipped the key into the hole, a thin hope swelled up within me that it wouldn’t work.  That it would be the wrong key.  When I turned it, there was momentary resistance, followed by a rusty clack inside the door as the lock turned over.  The door drifted open on protesting hinges.

I stood there at least five minutes thinking about my options, and every one of them seemed to end with me going inside.  Again I checked my phone.  No service.

Suddenly, I hatched upon an idea.  Returning to the apple trees scattered around the front of the house, I made a pouch with the bottom edge of my shirt and collected as many apples as I could.  I dumped them on the ground in front of the crypt and returned to the trees for another two loads.   When I was done, I arranged the apples in a six foot long two foot wide crimson arrow pointing at the door of the crypt.  Just to make sure they wouldn’t roll away, I used my heels to force them halfway down into the soft dirt.

The four apples I had left over, I set aside in my emergency kit.

Next, I tied the torn beach towel to the one of the Roman columns above the door, the wind just stiff enough to give it an occasional flutter.  Hopefully, it would be enough to get their attention.

I faced the door and tried to prepare myself.  My hands shook.  When I tried to think up another good reason why I shouldn’t go down there, the only one I kept coming up with was that I wouldn’t be competent enough.  After all, my father was an officer of the law.  I could get Claudia killed.

But that “if” was countered by the immediate surety that if I did nothing, I couldn’t live with the burden that my hesitation might have contributed to her death.

Leaving the key behind in the lock, I whispered a quick prayer, turned on my flashlight, and started down the steps.  I grasped the handrail along the wall securely and probed the darkness with my light.  After the initial four steps, I could see another four more steps at a ninety degree angle to the first four.  These ended at another wrought iron door, this one folded like an accordion.  Once I stood before it, I realized that I was looking into the car of an elevator.

Shoving the door to one side, I shined my dim light within the car, only six by two and two feet deep, scarcely large enough for two riders (or maybe three really ambitious ones).

The flashlight beam caught something sparkly on the floor of the car.  I kneeled and saw that it was the ghost charm from Claudia’s bracelet.

Rage flowed through me like steam through a pipe as I pocketed it with its companion.  I took a moment and got myself back under control.

She is still alive, I told myself.  Go to her.

As I climbed into the elevator car, I wondered if there could possibly be electricity to power it.  Hadn’t this project been abandoned since last year when he committed suicide?  Surely his estate wasn’t still paying the utility bills.

The panel inside the car only had one button.  It was labeled appropriately with the word “Descend” in ominous gothic script.  What unsettled me was the fact that there was no opposing button.  There was however a keyhole.  I surmised that only the right key would allow this car to go back up.

Taking a moment to consider that concept, I was forced to ask myself why someone would need to control what came up, but not down?

Something they didn’t want to reach the surface, a voice within answered.

This revelation did nothing to increase my enthusiasm for going down.

Why didn’t I have the presence of mind to bring rope?

With a sense of predestination, I reached out and slid the metal door shut.  I pushed the button, and the light beneath it sprung to life.  It was the first evidence of electrical power I had seen.

The inner door rolled laboriously closed, sealing me in the claustrophobically close walls.  For a moment, there was no movement and no sound indicating that the car might be preparing to move.  My heart began to quicken.  I considered the possibility that I was indeed trapped here in this confined space.

Then I heard the click of a lock release, and I felt a draft on the back of my neck.  I spun to find a narrow crack on one side of the wall behind me.  I grasped the edge and pushed.  It smoothly slid across the rollers it was seated on and opened into a long subterranean corridor of grey stone walls.

Something was altogether wrong about it, I sensed.  First of all, the quality of sound was all wrong.  I should be able to hear the sort of echoes that a large chamber naturally produced.  Instead, it sounded muffled.  Second, there was no breeze from the mouth of the corridor.

I stepped forward and realized a moment too late that the perspective of the corridor remained the same, then the floor dropped out from under me.  My heart leaped into my throat and a second later, I realized that I was resting safely two feet below where I had started.  I could still see the realistically painted image of the subterranean corridor on the wall just above me.  This was the real elevator.  The other had been merely another theatrical prop.

Damn Folliott!  I shook my head in frustration.  On any other day, I might have appreciated this sort of scare, but today it was just going to exasperate me.

It was then that the floor began to sink roughly into the ground, shuddering and shaking.  I was moving swiftly down a shaft painted purposely blurry to give the effect of traveling at a high rate of speed, but now that my bullshit detector had been activated, I was able to see behind the magician’s cape.

Ten seconds later, the floor shuddered then gave an upward hop to simulate a sudden drop.  I turned and cast my dim light around the cold stone walls around me, looking for a break in the seamless congruity.  On one wall, the following words had been chiseled into the stone: “Brick by brick, I seal his doom.”  I recognized it from Mrs. Hebert’s English.  It was from Poe’s “The
Cask of Amontillado,” obviously meant to conjure images of being buried alive, but I wasn’t falling for it this time.

I put my hands on the etched wall and gave it a push.

There was a click and the stony wall popped backwards an inch.  A hallow whistling sound of a quality that was almost human called through the narrow dark seam.  I pushed it open to reveal a subterranean passage.  This time it felt real.  The sound quality, the breeze, the drop in temperature all told me that I was in one of the many cave systems that made up the Texas hill country.

I set foot into the large, open chamber, the nearly overpowering ammonia odor of bat guano flooding my sinuses.  The fading light in my hands could now only reveal several yards at a time.  As I stepped from of the elevator, I took one glance back at the car and realized that it had been built into the wall of the cave.

It must have taken a great deal of work--more than the surface might indicate--to hallow out the space within the wall and run the equipment that it would take to install an elevator.  And why?  Why had Folliott wanted so badly to get to the cavern?

My thoughts were interrupted by an electrical buzzing sound, as the floor of the elevator began to rise back up.  Instinctively, I rushed forward and grabbed the outer edge of the floor as it rose to chest level.  I threw all my weight into an effort to stop its progress but the car continued upward with no hesitation.  I peered up at the stony crags of the wall face approaching.