Hallowed (43 page)

“Hello!” I screamed back.

“…you okay?” I could hear the dim voice call up.

“Yes!” I yelled back.

“We’re coming, Paul!”  This sounded like my uncle.

Relief rushed over me and I began to shiver uncontrollably, now that the moment of high tension had passed.  I touched the side of my face where the doppelganger of my father had first struck me.  This was the blow that had hurt far more than the others, when I had thought that my father had been disappointed in me.

Fighting off the fear, I forced myself to rise to my feet.  I had no concept of how far away they actually were, but I would not meet my father cowering in the dust.

“You’re all going to die down here.”

I spun around in an attempt to face the source of the voice.  Fear was replaced by anger.  This time I knew who was standing behind me.

I rushed forward a few steps.  I heard the other shuffle back.

“Don’t bother,” Nathan Graham said with amusement.  It was completely dark again, and though I still could not see a thing, I could hear a sneering quality in his voice.  “I can see you clearly by the way.  The night-vision goggles are worth every dollar I paid for them.”

“Tell me where she is?” I demanded between clenched teeth.

“She’s safe,” he replied.  “For now.  Just as long as the others are coming.”

“Why do you want them?”

“They told me to bring them here.  All three of them.  Nothing about you, though,” he told me.  “I think what happens to you will be up to my discretion.  Maybe I should leave you to consider what you’ve done to them for the rest of your life.”

Ignoring the threat, I asked, “What’s going to happen to them?”

“Their business.  Not mine,” he dismissed with a sniff.

“Is that going to be your defense, Graham?” I asked him, my hate transparent.  “You and you alone conceived and carried out four separate murders.  You and no one else!”

“Six,” he countered.  “Did you forget my old man Cyril and dear Patricia?  By the way, did they pull the plug on that brain dead cop yet?  That would make it a lucky seven.”

Having pinpointed the source of the voice, I rushed him, but he skipped aside.  I fell to my knees.

“Don’t do that again, Paul.  I don’t want to have to end this conversation with the gun I’m holding.”  I heard a sound then that could have been his palm slapping against a gun.  “Y’know, they’ll probably pin all of your deaths on me as well.  That would make an even ten.  Now that’s a substantial figure, isn’t it?”  In the darkness, I could hear the smack of lips, almost as if he were savoring something.  “Though, if asked, I’d never take credit for anything but the first four.  You were right about that, at least.  Those were truly my own.”

I slowly turned my head hoping to detect some light source or some flickering LED readout from the night-vision goggles, but I could see nothing.  After a moment’s consideration, I concluded that there would probably be no evidence left from a piece of equipment that’s sole purpose would be to avoid detection in the dark.

“What do you want?  Why are you doing this?”

“I did it because I was bored, man,” he snorted contemptuously.  “Got to live every day as if it was the last, right, and I tried everything else.  Skydiving, base-jumping.  You name it.”  His voice dropped an octave as he said, “But nothing approached killing.  Nothing came close to the rush I felt when her heart stopped beating in my hands.  I didn’t even know it would work, y’know, giving her that extra dose of insulin, but it did.”

I realized then that he was talking about his mother.  His first victim.  I recalled now that he had told me that he was only ten years old at the time.  What kind of child took the life of the one who had given him his own?

“You can probably dig that, right Paul?  Both you and Claudia have a couple of big craniums in those fragile eggshells skulls of yours,” he continued, his words picking up a momentum now like an eighteen wheeler on an incline.  “I figured for the longest time that you two were getting close to me.  I could see the way she would look at me in the hallway.  Saw her connecting the dots.  I knew it wouldn’t be long before she remembered me in that stupid Halloween store.”  He paused and took a deep breath.  “That was when I started having the dreams.”

I felt a sudden coldness over my right shoulder and resisted the urge to turn.

“At first I thought I must have finally cracked, and then I decided that it didn’t really matter.  After all, life is perception, isn’t it?  And if this is the way I perceive it, then that’s the way it really is,” he continued, a passionate edge to his voice like a researcher trying to explain to a layperson his amazing discovery.  “But I wasn’t crazy, was I?  They told me that they had been talking to you as well.”

“That’s a lie,” I heard myself snap angrily.

“Said that they were using you as a piper to get the other three here.”

Somewhere in the distance below me, I could hear my father’s voice calling my name.  He might as well have been miles away.

Graham chuckled, feeding on my burst of emotion.  “But you weren’t working nearly fast enough, so they gave me the words to put down in the note.  They told me where and when to find dear Patricia and suggested that I get rid of my father.  I’d outgrown him anyway,” he murmured under his breath.  “They even told me when to take Claudia.  Imagine my surprise, when you handed her to me.”

The tear that rolled down my cheek surprised me, until I realized that the emotion I was feeling wasn’t sadness but incredible frustration.

“Maybe you heard those voices too, eh,” he continued, “and wanted to give her to me.”

“I was protecting her,” I responded.  “But you wouldn’t get that concept.  Protecting the ones you love.”

He began to laugh.  “Love?” he croaked bitterly.  It was then that I heard it once more, that wispy voice, like the bristles of a broom through cremated ashes.  The one I’d heard over the phone at the barn, but this time much louder.  “Is that what you call what you did in the shadows out at the camp?”

I began to shiver uncontrollably then.

“I love her,” I affirmed.  “And I love my family.  You’re not going to hurt any of them!”

Again, the voice whispered in the shadows.  “Deny your father,” Graham proposed.  “And I will give her to you right now.  Right here.”

In the distance, I heard both Dad and Uncle Hank call for me in almost a single voice.

“It’s only a few words,” he said in a soothing tone.  “What is that in exchange for a life?”

“I love my father.”

“Take
it
off and cast it over the edge of the abyss.”

Every muscle in my body stiffened then.  This voice did not belong to Graham.  It was as if someone had found a way to form human speech with compressed steam.

Before I was conscious of it, my fingers had grasped the crucifix at my neck.

“You defile our home with
it
,” the voice rasped at me.  “Take it off!”

“You can’t touch me, can you?”

Then I heard a jumble of strange voices of different pitches and tones, all talking over each other, each one cursing and wailing.  Over these, I heard Graham exclaim, “Do not ask the reason for the season.  I am, was, and will always be here.”

There was an icy sensation at my ear again, this time on my left.  It was more than I could resist.  I spun around this time, hearing the taunting laughter of invisible children ringing in my ears.  The tinny tinkling voices increased to a frenzied speed until it became the sound of jackals tearing at each other to get at a fresh kill.  Suddenly, it dropped in pitch until it was something warped, something unnatural.

“There is no Allah.  No Great Spirit or Yahweh.”  Graham’s voice now seemed to change and deepen before my ears.  “There is only LEGION.”

A bitter absence of warmth surrounded my neck now.  I bent forward and tried to duck from its grasp, but it was like a cloak of moist frost running across my shoulders and down the muscles of my arms, dripping through the small of my back.  Clutching my crucifix, I went to my knees, penitence the furthest thing from my mind.  Self-preservation was the only thing I prayed for.

Lord, what does it want from me, my mind screamed?

The voice that spoke next was no longer the voice of Nathan Graham.  It was no longer even human.  “What do we want from you?  We want you to feel what we have felt for the generations we have been left to languish here in this pit of darkness!  It was entirely your fault!  You men!  You women!  Because of you, we are unable to return from wince we came!  Yet you have the audacity to ask us, what we want?  We want you to suffer as we have, for as long as we have!”

I peered up from the floor of the cave, wondering if there was still sunlight somewhere in the world outside this hole in the ground and whether I would ever set eyes on it again.  What hell had I set foot willingly inside?  Had I ever made a conscious choice or had I been manipulated all along?  Was this all the calculated act of a malicious foe seeking retribution?

How could I have been so egotistical to think I could face this alone?

“WE-WANT-YOUR-SOULS!”

The voice deepened and warped until the words were no longer audible within the normal human auditory range and I could only feel the vibration within my bones and deep, deep within the white hot core of my screaming mammalian brain.  In that moment, I felt I was what Darwin had always said humankind was.  An accident.  Random freak quantum spittle and whatever had set its teeth in me was the true homo superior.  I felt like a whining cur cowering in the dust at the foot of my master, waiting for the foot on the back of my neck, listening for the crack and splinter and the sudden flash of brightness followed by nothingness… nothingness…

Upon awakening, the first sensation that returned to me was a sense of weight and the sting of aching muscles.

Claudia!

I sat upright and began to call her name.

Hands restrained me gently.  “Relax, Paul.  You’ve been hurt.”

And for the first time I could pinpoint the source of the ache I felt.  The ringing pain of the blows I had sustained to my arms and ribs defending myself against my father.

My eyes finally adjusted to the flickering light of a kerosene lantern that sat nearby and hovering over me with bared teeth was the same man who had hit me.  Instinctively, I recoiled.

“Easy there!  Easy!” the voice attempted to soothe.

I felt another hand, this one cool and smooth, began to stroke my forehead.  I glanced up and behind.  Another familiar face.  Female.

“Mom?” I murmured.

The feminine voice chuckled in response.  “No, you’ll have to make do with me.”

“We left your mother safely behind,” I heard my father say.  I glanced again into his face and could see that his teeth weren’t bore in anger, but in elation.  It’s not often that I was treated to a full-toothed smile from my father.  He blinked rapidly and touched my face once before glancing back over his shoulder.  “He’s coming around finally.”

“Thank God.”  There was no mistaking my Uncle Hank’s voice.

I glanced over my father’s shoulder and saw the figure of my uncle wearing a backpack over one shoulder.  Beyond that, I could see little else but shadows and walls.

We were inside a room.

“Claudia?” I managed.  “Not dead?”

My uncle glanced at Tracy, who gave me a nod.  “I’m certain she’s alive.”

“What happened to you?” Uncle Hank asked.

“Hallucinating in the cave,” I croaked.  I could see a look pass between my uncle and father.  I felt the rim of a bottle at my lips and I sucked like a starving babe.  After a few gulps, it was taken away from me.

“Rest your voice,” my father said.  “Thanks for leaving us a trail.  We found the chain back at the gate and followed your apples down here.”

“Finally located you after you lit the flare,” Uncle Hank added.

“What flare?” I croaked.  Then I remembered the emergency roadside kit, its contents scattered across the cave floor somewhere in the darkness.  Had I found the flare and lit it?

There was a moment of silent confusion.  I could see the dim reflections of eyes looking from one to the other.  I saw Uncle Hank hand my dad what looked like a candle.  He stared down at it in contemplation then simply set it aside atop an apple crate.

“Where are we?” I managed.

“Looks like a storm cellar.  The cave path dead-ended at a stone staircase that led here.”

I used my father’s arm as leverage to sit up.  I could feel Tracy’s guiding hands on my shoulders, holding me protectively like something fragile.

The light from Dad’s lantern revealed a tight and narrow space.  Wooden crates and cardboard boxes had been stacked so high that the top ones nearly touched the low wooden beams of the ceiling.  I could just make out something dangling in the shadows a short distance away.

For the first time I realized that both my father and uncle were nearly doubled over to compensate for the height of the ceiling.  Tracy knelt beside the boxes where I lay atop a stack of what appeared to be fire blankets.

“What’s the last thing you remember, Paul?” Tracy asked.

My uncle stepped closer and I saw for the first time that he was holding a Bible at his side.  “We heard raised voices.”

“My flashlight went out and Nathan Graham attacked me.”

“He was here?” my father asked incredulously.  “What did he say to you?”

“He kept making references to a ‘they’ and a ‘them.’  Kept saying that they wanted you three, and Claudia and I were only used to get you all here.”

They were using you as a piper to get the other three here.

“He tried to make me take off my crucifix,” I explained, giving Uncle Hank a look.  Not “he,” an inner voice corrected.  I knew now it hadn’t been Nathan Graham that had spoken to me then.  “I heard a voice raving about being trapped in a pit of darkness for generations because of humans.”

Tracy had taken a step back from me, her eyes glazed and distant.  “ ‘When men began to multiply on earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of Heaven saw how beautiful the daughters of men were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose.’”

Uncle Hank shook his head, his eyes trained away from Tracy.  “You speak of the sons of Seth, who disobeyed God when they took the daughters of Cain and produced wicked offspring against His will.”

“Watchers,” Tracy murmured under her breath.

Uncle Hank grunted and shook his head again, this time emphatically.

Tracy finally turned to Hank with a look of challenge in her eyes.  “ ‘The angels, too, who did not keep to their own domain but deserted their proper dwelling, He has kept in eternal chains, in gloom, for the judgment of the great day.’”  She was using my uncle’s favorite game against him.  Answering questions with scripture.

“Do you quote apocrypha now?”

“Not Enoch.  That’s from Jude 1:6.  New testament.”

Hank glanced up at her then.  “That argument has never had any basis in fact.  Angels have no corporeal form, no flesh, so says our Lord.”

“Wasn’t Jacob said to have wrestled with one until daybreak,” Tracy challenged.

“There are wildly varied interpretations of that incident.”

“Jesus was speaking of the angels who ‘kept not their first estate.’  Who can say what they became after they chose to defy His will.”

“Ok somebody better start talking to me in King’s English,” my father snapped, his patience stretched to its limits at last.

“Here’s what it boils down to, Jack.  This Graham character is a devotee of an ancient Biblical legend, whether or not it actually exists is not the point.”

Tracy gave a sharp shake of her head.  “That’s a very dangerous attitude to take under the present circumstances, Father.”

Ignoring the voices that pleaded with me to warn them what they were up against--what I myself faced below in the cavern--I distracted myself with righteous indignation.  “Does any of this help us find Claudia?” I asked loudly.

“It might give us some insight into the way his mind works,” Uncle Hank murmured.

“Okay that’s something that might help us,” Dad responded.  “We can’t lose focus here.  We have to stay on point if we’re going to get out of here safe.”

Another thought occurred to me then.  “What time is it?”

“Nearly nine PM.”

“The last time I looked at my watch,” I exclaimed in wonder, “it was only three-thirty.”  I turned to Tracy.  “Remember what you told me in the confessional about time moving differently here?”

“Yes, we’ve all experienced it,” she stated, looking up at my father.  A look passed between them, and I surmised that I had just lent support to one side of an argument that had been brewing since they’d first entered the cavern.

“I saw things out there…”  My words failed me.  I looked pleadingly at Tracy.  She returned my look and gave me a reassuring smile.  “I know,” the look seemed to say.

“How long ago did this business with Graham happen?”

“That’s the problem,” I explained.  “When I passed out it was probably around three-thirty.”

“Let me see your watch.”  He drew his arm up to mine and checked the difference between them.  There was only a few minutes difference.  “Let’s all agree on a time, right now.  Set it for nine o’clock exactly.”

Both Hank and Tracy adjusted their watches accordingly.

After I had set my own, I reached into my pocket and was comforted that Claudia’s charms hadn’t been something I had imagined.  I took them out, displaying them in my palm.

“Are you sure they’re hers?”

“Without a doubt.  There was one left in the old barn you passed and one in the elevator car.”

Dad grunted and stepped deeper into the cellar/attic with the lantern. He came to a stop directly beneath a cord dangling from the ceiling.  Standing clear, he pulled it down.  With a groaning protest of springs, a door in the ceiling opened, revealing a folded ladder atop.  “Looks like an attic door.”  Handing the lantern to Tracy, he cautiously opened it as wide as it would allow and unfolded the segmented wooden ladder with Uncle Hank’s help.

Uncle Hank shined a flashlight up into the dark rectangle of the next room beyond.  “Appears to be a hallway.”

“Now why would anyone want an entrance to a cellar smack dab in the middle of a hallway where someone might fall through?”  Dad started up the ladder, a short space of maybe four feet.  I heard him say, “That’s strange,” just before he seemed to fall from the ladder.  There was a loud tumble and crash and Uncle Hank started up after him.  “Wait!” he yelled back.

“What happened!” I started up behind Uncle Hank, but Tracy restrained me.

“I’m okay,” I heard Dad yell back.  “What kind of maniac designed this place?”

Another optical illusion, I surmised.

“Send Paul next,” I heard Dad say.  Giving me a look of paternal concern, Uncle Hank carefully guided me up the ladder.  “Stop!  Hank, grab his belt and hold him until he can get his bearings.”

Get my bearings, I wondered?

“Tracy, can you shine the flashlight up here for me?”

I got to the top of the ladder and looked up through the hole in the ceiling into the hallway partially lit by flashlight and was instantly confused.  My father stood on the adjacent wall reaching up towards me.  Adding to my consternation, I could clearly see a framed portrait on the ceiling of the hallway above me.

Folliott had gone all out this time to decorate the room to give the appearance that the entrance from the cellar/attic was on the wall of the hallway instead of in the floor as it should be.

Then I looked at my father.

Why was he standing on the adjacent wall?  That was impossible.

I reached through to my father and felt my center of gravity begin to pull me down toward him against every instinct in my body.  I was climbing up on a ladder and suddenly down was no longer
down
but directly in front of me.

Before I could stop myself, I tumbled headfirst toward him.  Instinctively, I began to pinwheel my arms.  “Go limp, Paul!” he shouted.

He grabbed me around the waist and turned my body ninety degrees, setting my backside onto the floor.

I looked around at what I could see of the hallway.  The framed portrait that I had initially seen on the ceiling was now on the wall, but the door that I knew led from the hallway into the cellar was now about six feet up on the wall.

My head began to spin and I started to wobble to one side.  Dad caught me and held me steady.  “Easy now.”

“Dad, this is impossible,” I whispered to him in awe.  “Folliott might have been a genius at designing video games but he couldn’t alter the laws of gravity.”

With a stony expression my father stepped back to the hole in the wall leading to the cellar.  I heard Uncle Hank curse aloud and call out with confused amusement, “You’re standing on a damned wall, Jack!”

“Just send the backpack down.”

Moments later, I saw the end of a rope emerge from the cellar opening high up on the wall like a stiff pole.  Then suddenly mid-way through thin air, it did the impossible and appeared to go off an invisible ledge, falling at a forty-five degree angle down toward me and Dad.  He grabbed the end of the rope and tossed it to me in frustration.  “Hold this taunt.”

I pulled and the kink in the center of the rope straightened out with a little resistance, like a pressurized garden hose.

“Hand me the lantern, Hank, bottom first,” he snapped back.  “And tilt it about forty-five degrees.”

I watched in amazement as Uncle Hank handed the lantern up and through the door in the wall.  Dad slowly guided the base of the lantern towards him, almost vertical at first, then into a horizontal position as he pulled it toward his chest.

He turned to me, my mouth hanging open.  “Here, keep this out of the way,” he ordered with irritation, thrusting the lantern into my hands.  “Send her down next, Hank.”

He helped Tracy down next, her hands and legs wrapped around the stiffened rope I held, Uncle Hank guiding her from below (or above, depending on your perspective).  When she first broke the plain, her eyes grew big and she clutched first at the rope, then when she got close enough my father’s neck, like a child who couldn’t swim suddenly finding herself in the deep end of the pool.  “Ease up,” he commanded her.  “Go limp.”

He pulled her completely out of the doorway, her legs swinging out into empty space.  She gave a single scream and squeezed her eyes shut, before Dad set her feet on the ground again.  She opened her eyes, looked around in alarm, and broke into giggles.  Despite Dad’s attempts to remove both her arms locked around him, she held tight, unable to contain her tension-filled laughter.