Hallowed (9 page)

I worked until five o’clock on Saturday at Comeaux’s then spent a good part of the rest of the day putting the finishing touches on my display.  I made myself a monster sandwich and devoured it in front of the TV with the volume turned low.  Mom and Dad were asleep.  I must have caught only about fifteen minutes of Saturday Night Live before sliding effortless into my all too familiar dream of the Apocalypse.

Again I am five and, as always, the House sits unchanged on its hill, but the surrounding countryside is altered.  Perhaps, I am just seeing it more clearly this time.  A vague trail winds through crabgrass and wild growing weeds up a hill that grows steeper with each step until it seems that I am climbing vertically up the wall of a cliff.  I scramble and claw the last few yards and drop onto the front yard of the house.

A fierce heat sears the hairs on the back of my neck.  I turn to face a valley in flames.  So clear is the image that I can vividly see the wreathing bodies of those unfortunate souls left behind.  Explosions compete to overpower the screams of the citizens of Haven.

I turn my back and see the fleeting silhouette of a figure standing in the shadows of the porch.  I leap forward, but the figure is gone.

I hear the distant sound of music.  Turning my ear to the blank wall where you would ordinarily expect a door, I listen.  There it is, yet distant still.  I place the flat of my hand against the black wall and realize for the first time that the wooden structure isn’t painted black after all.  From the way the surface flakes away at the pressure of my hand, I know it has been burned, though it is cool to my touch. I know that it wasn’t a victim of the fires that burn my town below.

But as I look down from the railing of the porch, I can no longer see the town as I have in past dreams.  Instead, there is a valley below the face of the house filled with what appear to be a forest of dead trees, great stick-man like monstrosities that probe the sky like the long-nailed fingers of emaciated old men.  With a shudder, I get the immediate impression that they are all straining to reach me.

Before I can investigate further, I feel a rough vibration beneath my feet, as if a gigantic sleeping monstrosity alerted to my presence has just rolled lazily onto its side.  I put my hand back to the wall.

The candy in my faithful pumpkin bucket glows once again and for a moment I feel peaceful and protected.

Assured of my safety, I turn my ear toward the scorched surface and ever-so gently press the fleshy shell of my ear against it.  I immediately hear the music.  Clear and familiar.  I hum it and close my eyes in an attempt to commit the tune to memory.

That’s when the wall splits open at the border of two boards and snaps closed on my ear.

I awoke from the dream with a jump, startling the girl standing over me.  It took me almost five seconds before I realized that Claudia wasn’t part of my dream.  She was standing in front of me in the living room of my home.

“Geez, Claudia, what..?”

Once the color returned to her face, I realized that it was glistening with the memory of recent tears.  Her eyes were puffy.

I leapt to my feet and took a step toward her.  She instinctively started to fold toward me then almost instantaneously, stiffened, and turned away from me.

“I saw the TV was on.  You didn’t answer.”

“What happened?  You okay?”

She started toward the door.  “Outside. I don’t want to wake anyone.”

We stepped down from the porch and away from the house, past a rusty red Schwinn lying on its side in the yard, a bike I remember from over ten years ago.  Why had she ridden a bike here instead of walking as she normally did?

“Is your Mom okay?” I asked.

Claudia gave me a blank look.  “Well… yeah.  Last time I checked.  She’s a real deep sleeper.”

I glanced at my bare wrist.

“It’s just after two,” Claudia offered.

I took a seat on the edge of the porch as Claudia began to pace.

“We tried to contact my father tonight.”

That statement raised so many questions that I didn’t know where to begin, but Claudia continued uninterrupted.

“My friends from DFW… took me to a pre-Halloween séance.”

It was pretty much the way I’d have predicted.  She thought she could somehow speak to her dead father.

The look on my face must have told her all she needed to know without my having to say a word, and she turned away from me.  I shook my head in frustration.

With her back to me, she continued.  “I know what you’re thinking, but it
did
work.  We contacted someone.  He spoke to us.”

A sharp chill traveled through me.  “What are you saying?”

She rushed over to me, her eyes widening with excitement.  “Our medium, Raj, attempted to contact his spirit guide, but…”

“Wait-wait. Explain medium. Explain spirit guide.”

“A medium is the one who communicates with a spirit guide and a spirit guide is just anything that communicates information from the other side to the medium.  It might be a spirit, an animal, an angel.”

I raised my eyebrows.  Were we talking angels now?  “Before you go on, Claudia, just answer this.  Are you feeling okay?  Should we be talking to my dad or Uncle Jack right now?”

Claudia rushed over to me and grabbed a handful of my sleeve in her fist.  “No, no, Paul.  This is between you and me.  I’m serious.  You have to promise me not to tell anyone about this.”

“Ignoring for a moment the fact that you lied to me about the movie.”

Claudia seared me with her eyes then nodded almost sheepishly.  “Look, I’m sorry about that, okay?  I just didn’t want to put you in the awkward position of having to lie for me if Mom started asking questions.”

After a moment’s consideration, I gave her a cursory nod.  “Start from the very beginning then and tell me everything.”

She hung her head.  “I promise I’ll tell you everything that happened tonight, but first, I have to go see my father.”  She started toward the bike.

I leapt off the porch and grabbed the bike.  “Hold on.  Why can’t we do this tomorrow?”

“We opened a door tonight.  I know it.”  Her eyes seemed to blaze for a moment in the half-crescent moonlight.  “We have to go
tonight
.”  She gave the bike a tug, but I held tight.

“Dammit, Claudia!  You’re not giving me much of a choice here.”  I shot a glance up at the second story window.  Luckily, my parents’ room was on the backside of the house, otherwise they might have heard us a long time ago.  “How about you let me drive us?”

“No, we have to do this a certain way.  We can’t just motor up there, making noise and spewing exhaust and still hope to communicate on a mystical plane of existence.”

I threw my head up to the sky in frustration.

Claudia stopped struggling against the firm grip I had on the frame of her Schwinn.  “I know you don’t believe in any of this stuff.  I don’t expect you to come with me.  Just please extend to me some of that tolerance we talked about.”  She finally looked up, fixing those dark unreadable eyes on mine.  “This is something I have to do.”

My grip loosened.  I breathed deeply and slowly released it.  My eyes instinctively took another look upstairs then over at the front door.  Finally, my eyes settled on hers.  My shoulders released the tension they’d been holding and noticeably slumped.

I didn’t have to say a word.  She knew.  A smile burst from her like a ray of sunshine, and she took the bike out of my unresisting fingers.  After a few moments of total silence, I heard her say in a voice I barely recognized as hers, “Thank you, Paul.”

The bike I took out of our shed was at least ten-years-old and had last seen an actual rider about four years ago.  My old purple and green machine—just like the color of my favorite superhero growing up, the Incredible Hulk—had added the additional color of rust.  In fact, I’d always called it “Bruce” after the Hulk’s alter-ego.

“Claudia, I’m not sure old Bruce is road-worthy.”

“I think the back tire might need a little air,” she reported.

That was putting it lightly.  The tire of the Schwinn was
flat
in the fullest expression of that word.  The chain was rusty.  The rubber handlebar grips were cracked and falling apart.

Draped over the seat of Claudia’s Schwinn was a huge black cloak, a hooded monster that looked like something out of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.  She whisked it around her shoulders dramatically, pulled a backpack on over it, and took a hand pump out of the basket on the front of the bike.

“It’ll be fine once we get the tire aired up.”

“It’s flat.  There’s a reason for that.  It probably needs to be patched.  How far is the cemetery from here?”

“I don’t know.  Takes about thirty minutes on the bike.”

I snatched up the pump and began to air the tire up.  Once the tire tightened with air, I rested my weight atop it and rode it up the driveway.  It seemed to hold, but just in case, I dropped the pump into the metal basket mounted to the back of Claudia’s bike.

In only the second hour of the morning, the night felt like a heavy blanket that muffled both light and sound.  Together we rode up Ash Avenue, not a headlight or porch light in sight, only a half-crescent moon as our guide and crickets as company.

“Talk to me before I fall asleep and roll off into a ditch.  Tell me exactly what happened.”

Claudia explained how they all met at the movie theater in the nearest town with a movie theater, a town north of Haven called Cuvier, named after the French farmer who owned most of the property in the 1800’s.  Once everyone had arrived, they all took the roomiest car, belonging to a girl named Ana Lucia.  Everyone called her Lucid, because she claimed to control her own dreams.

“She had a Buick Skylark.  I’m pretty sure the shocks were shot, because I was sitting in the back and the ride was so bouncy that I nearly tossed my cookies.”

“Okay, wrong details.  Where did you go?”

“Well, we drove about fifteen or twenty minutes to an old abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.”

A whistling breeze blew my hair back into my eyes and the bike wobbled beneath me, before I regained control.  I felt the hairs on my neck prickle, not unlike the sensation of having them singed off by a particularly fierce fire.

“We walked around the back of the house and got in through a hole in the fire place.  I felt like friggin’ Santa Claus,” she chuckled.  She glanced over at me.  I must have had a really grim look on my face, because she asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah, keep going.”

“So, we set up on the floor in the center of the main room.  Maybe it was a living room or a dining room.  There was a really old winding staircase like in those old black and white Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee flicks.”

“Hammer.”

“That’s it.  Anyway it was a really cool old house.  You’d have really appreciated it.”

We had just passed the Fonteneaux’s two-story ranch house and followed the barbed wire fence that marked the boundaries of their cow pasture.  Once we left the border of their property, the residential area ended and wilderness took its place.  There was nothing but road, a long drainage ditch, and trees as far as our limited visibility went.

“So, we sat around the Ouija board in a circle, Raj, Lucid, Franklin, Steff, and me.  We touched the planchette and Raj tried to…”

“Plant-what?”

“Planchette.  That’s what the pointy-piece is called.  Anyway, Raj tried to contact the spirit guide he said a friend of his had had some success with before.  They don’t know the spirit’s name, so they call him the Caretaker.”

“Why, because the Crypt Keeper was already taken?” I murmured low enough for her to ignore.

“When he was alive, he used to look after the gardens of a large estate or something like that.  Franklin kept calling him Groundskeeper Willie, after the guy from the Simpsons, y’know.  But after Steff made a crack about Captain Howdy, y’know, from the
Exorcist
, Raj snapped at them both and told them to stop playing around.  Said it was disrespectful and the spirits wouldn’t communicate with us if it sensed we weren’t taking it seriously.”

I peddled slightly faster, hoping to get to where we were going as quickly as possible and get back home again.  A surrealistic quality had settled over me and I wondered, not for the first time, if I was awake or sleeping and having a variation of the apocalyptic dream, only this time Claudia was along for the ride.

“We concentrated on calling this Caretaker for a good ten minutes before there was any movement.  Raj asked if we were in the presence of the Caretaker and the planchette pointed to ‘yes.’ He asked if it would like to join our group.  It said ‘yes.’”

The night was overcast and occasionally the moon would slip beneath a cloudbank, rendering the road in front of us virtually invisible.

“I told them earlier of my theory of a serial killer, and we all agreed that, given the opportunity, we should ask if Grace Fischer’s death was an accident.  Immediately, it pointed to ‘no.’” In the darkness, I could still feel Claudia’s eyes on me.  “We asked if she died a violent death.  The answer was ‘yes.’”

Yup, straight from the mouth of a dead gardener.  “What else?”

“When Raj began to narrow down the questions to the identity of the killer, the planchette stopped moving altogether.  He apologized to the spirit guide and asked if he had offended him.  There was no answer.”

As the road curved to the west and narrowed, the pines had begun to close in around us.  We had a couple of miles left to go before we hit Old Town Road where the graveyard was located.  I had never been out this way without headlights and the trees had a more ominous feeling this time of night.

“After about five minutes of waiting, Raj just shrugged and looked like he was about to give up.  Before I could stop myself, I asked the spirit guide if he had any information about Ronald Wicke for his daughter, Claudia, and the planchette began to move again.”

From the bike beside me, Claudia cast an excited look over at me, her eyes catching a beam of moonlight and seemed to sparkle.  “Yes.  It pointed to ‘yes.’”  She slowed down and I glanced back to see her drag the heel of her hand across her eyes with aggravation.  I slowed to let her catch up with me.  “When I asked if we could speak to my father, the planchette pointed to four letters, one after the other, before it stopped completely.  Those letters were S, O, another O, and N.”  Claudia peddled along, her breath coming in bursts now from the excitement and the effort of her legs.  “Do you see, Paul?  ‘Soon.’  The spirit guide was saying that my father would contact me soon.”

The deeper down the street we rode, the more the trees obscured the moonlight above, until all I could see was the occasional patch of stars and here the clouds were hiding even that.  It was one of those moments of visceral, unreasonable fear that could take hold of you like the jaws of a tiny animal.  I pulled my bike to a complete stop and looked back over my shoulder at the way I had come.

Claudia braked ahead of me.  “What’s up?”

“I just can’t see a damn thing and the road curves up ahead a few times.  I don’t want to end up in a ditch filled with water and water moccasins.” Hell, if it wasn’t for the light cast by the stars at our backs, I couldn’t even see Claudia, and even that light would be lost after we took that first curve.

“Look, just stick close to me.  I’ve ridden this road at night before.”  And she rode off without another word.  “C’mon,” her confident voice urged.

I cast one more last look over my shoulder in an attempt to keep myself oriented then started after Claudia into the inky darkness out of sheer spite.  There was no way I was going to show my fear in front of her.

“So, how come you’re so familiar with this road at night?”

“I’ve been out here once or twice since we’ve been back.  Usually when I can’t sleep.”

“Alone?  Why?”

She was quiet for a long time.  Finally, with an indecisive quality to her voice she replied, “Evidence?”

I rode next to Claudia for a few yards, wobbling unsteadily like the first time I had set foot on a bike.  It’s a terrible thing not knowing what’s ahead of you and it affected all of my senses.

“Trust me, Paul.”

Trust her.  How could I fully trust someone who had just admitted to me that she was going to a graveyard to contact her dead father on the word of the spirit of a dead gardener?  I was seriously beginning to doubt her judgment at this point.

The tree line curved ahead of us.  I knew in a moment we would take that first turn and be in complete darkness in a virtual tunnel of trees.  My heart raced.  Fear leapt onto my back and sank its fingers into my shoulders.  Then suddenly I felt the warmth of Claudia’s hand as she reached out and grasped mine.  I don’t know how she found it, but she took it as if it were broad daylight.  She didn’t say a word and neither did I.  We just continued on and took that blind turn into the pitch dark, together, hand-in-hand.  It was one of those defining moments that all true friends have when language disappears and you communicate on a deeper level.

Then her voice came to me out of the emptiness and filled my head as if she were lying beside me, her head next to mine.  As if she and I were two people alone on an island to ourselves.  “Paul, I know you don’t believe in any of this, but I wouldn’t ever do anything that I thought would put you in danger. If nothing else, you’ve got to believe that much.”

And I did.  I don’t know what finally convinced me, the touch of her hand or the sincerity of her voice, but I suddenly trusted this girl.  Trusted her with my life.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” she exhaled.  And suddenly it was.  It was terrifying, but exhilarating.  Together we rode, hand-in-hand, into the darkness that awaited us.