Hallowed Page 17

  Before I had even made a conscious decision, I made the turn down Ash Avenue and was heading for Claudia’s house.

  I thought briefly of Bridgette Sullivan and waited to feel some sense of loss of the prospect of being with her at the dance tonight. But there was nothing.

  After I pulled into the Wicke’s driveway and started for the front door, I heard a radio coming distantly in the backyard. I found her lying spread-eagled in the center of the trampoline, in almost the exact same spot I’d left her in the night before. She was even wearing the same black cloak, though I was a little disappointed that she wasn’t wearing the gown tonight.

  “What are you doing, you freak?” I called out in greeting.

  A portable stereo, perched on the trampoline beside her, was tuned to a talk radio show. The host talked about--of all things—lucid dreaming and prophetic visions.

  “Did you ever actually go inside last night?”

  She shushed me. “This is interesting.”

  “Why are you in the dark?”

  “Mosquitoes,” she replied as if it were the most rationale explanation in the world and I was the crazy one for asking. She shushed me again, this accompanied by—what appeared in the darkness to be--a glare.

  I folded my arms on the surface of the trampoline and waited patiently for a caller named “Frink” to explain how in a dream he was able to transform himself into a tree and fight off a logger wielding a chainsaw.

  When the break finally arrived, Claudia turned the volume down and held an arm out over her head and behind her. I gripped it and helped myself up beside her. Letting my legs dangle over the edge, I lay back until my head was just beside hers, our feet pointing in opposite directions.

  “Haven’t you ever listened to Overnight America? I spent many a sleepless night listening to this guy. It’s pretty bizarre sometimes, especially when the UFO loonies start calling in on the Area 51 line.” She turned her head to face me. “So, what are you doing here?”

  “Well, I’m supposed to be at the Homecoming dance right now.”

  “You know that my mother is chaperoning, right?”

  Damn! “I’ll cross that bridge if it doesn’t collapse on me.”

  “So why aren’t you there?” She challenged me with her eyes.

  “Because I’m here.”

  Seemingly satisfied with my answer, she whisked off her cloak and tossed it into a pillow beneath her head. She then propped the radio on her stomach and fiddled with the tuning until she found a classic rock station for me.

  Together we stared in silence up through the tree limbs into the starry night sky. The moon was waxing, just over half full.

  “Look at that. We might just have a harvest moon by the end of the month. Wouldn’t that be cool!” She looked up into the sky with a carefree smile, and I think I caught a glimpse of the little girl she had been before she’d begun trying on masks.

  She glanced over at me, caught my steady eyes on her, and immediately turned her eyes back to the sky self-consciously.

  “So you got the car back? What did you have to do for that?”

  “I bargained with my Mom.” I displayed my new cell phone as proof. “My early birthday gift.”

  “Welcome to the twentieth century, Graves. Ok, tell me about this bargain you made.”

  “She wanted me to go to the homecoming dance.”

  “And now you’re here.” She smiled up at the sky and put on an over-the-top exaggeration of my Mom’s voice. “Paul Graves, you’ve been spending far too much time with that Wicke girl.”

  “Probably thinks you’re going to get me killed or something.”

  “Always that possibility,” she murmured dryly.

  During a moment of silence between us, a question occurred to me that seemed so relevant that it completely overwhelmed my typical self-consciousness.

  “All these murders have got me thinking,” I began with uncharacteristic directness, “about what happens to us after we die. What do you think? I mean, since you don’t believe in God and all.”

  “I never said I didn’t believe in a God,” she sighed. “I don’t know what I believe, but I’m not arrogant enough yet to think I know there is or isn’t.” She snuck a glance back at me. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you’re arrogant. I mean, I think it’s cool that you have strong convictions, but I don’t understand how anyone can claim to know for sure. There’s so much uncertainty in this world.”

  “Yeah, there is,” I replied. “But I’ve never had any doubt about that part.”

  “How?” she asked with the skeptical tone of a child.

  “I used to think my heart spoke louder than my brain,” I tried to explain, “but then I started to realize that if you can look at the smallest thing like the flapping of a hummingbird’s wings to the vast expanse of space and think that it was all a random accident of Mother Nature, you’ve got to have much more faith in Father Science than the Pope has in a universal Creator.”

  Together we stared up into the night sky, the distant sound of crickets chanting their unearthly yet steady rhythms, and watched the moon peek in and out from behind clouds, the stars still intense little dots despite the brightness of its big sister.

  “I mean, why does it have to be one or the other? For all we know maybe God used evolution to get to where we are now.”

  I could sense her staring at me now. When I turned to look at her, I thought she would look away, but this time she didn’t.

  Suddenly, I slid down from the trampoline and held out my hand to her.

  She gazed down at me with a confused frown.

  “C’mon, it’s your turn to trust me.”

  The classic rock station played a song from Van Morrison. Not “Moondance” or “Brown-Eyed Girl,” but one I’d never heard before, yet clearly one of his. The lyrics--just as distinctive as his voice—were about coming back in the Celtic New Year. Standing together in the moonlit October night, the song seemed created just for us, two awkward young kids fumbling our way through life, all our hopes and fears lying just beneath the protective surface yet straining to reveal their presence to another compassionate soul.

  “Want to dance?” The invitation just rose out of me like the words of a ventriloquist controlling my mouth with a string. The words seemed very foreign to me. I don’t dance. Ever. But I wanted to dance with Claudia.

  “Geez, Paul.” She made a face and rolled her eyes at me.

  It occurred to me in that moment that until then we had done little actual touching. Sure there was the occasional thump to the ear or punch to the arm, but this was a completely different animal. I suppose that was what was so shocking about the kiss, the fact that it had come out of nowhere, with no foundation preceding it. Both of us had been curious for some time, and now it was just a matter of trying it on to see if it fit.

  When she eventually realized that I was serious and I wasn’t going to leave her alone until she resigned to it, she tossed her hands in the air limply and gave me a patronizing look beneath her heavy brows. I reached out to her, and finally, she set the radio aside and rolled to the ground, her bare feet dropping into the grass.

  “Don’t you dare step on my toes, Paul Graves.”

  Shifting her weight toward me, we came together awkwardly, her arms settling around my neck, just as mine found the small of her back.

  When we came together that first time, somewhere deep inside me I felt some tension within me release, something that had been wound tightly for so long that I had gotten used to carrying it around. The feel of her body against mine felt as natural as two pieces of a puzzle fitting snugly into place. It was feeling somehow ancient, so much so that for a moment I felt small and childlike in comparison. I felt that fear a child feels in the presence of an authority figure for the first time. It took me a moment to adjust to that feeling of being out of sync with the boy I was to the man I was becoming.

  We just swayed there in the darkness of her backyard in the spotlight of the h
alf moon and held each other, for a moment becoming something that was more than the sum of our individual parts.

  Whole.

  I pulled away just enough to look into her eyes. Those ink pools. Suddenly I wanted to bathe in them and before I knew what was happening my lips were pulling my entire body along after them, and she was moving to meet me.

  It was a shy and anxious moment, a feverish awkwardness that sucked us up behind it in a wake of its own frenzied teenaged momentum. A prickly heat rose up between us and threatened to devour us both if we continued a moment longer.

  It was then that Morrison withdrew his voice, and the intrusive voice of a DJ broke the spell that had so briefly enveloped us. She stepped away from me, and I felt a disorientation that was horrible and strange.

  “I think that’s enough dancing for one night,” she said. “I want to go for a ride.”

  The words sounded so foreign that for a moment, it was like a completely different language, but for now, the kiss had been just enough to call off the dogs that were madly leaping and nipping at my tingling mid-section.

  She retrieved a pair of worn down sneakers from the spot she had left them on the sidewalk beside the door to the garage and slipped them onto her bare feet, wet from the grass. I followed her around to my car without a word, feeling somehow energized despite the abrupt interruption of contact with her.

  When I shut the door and sat there in the driver’s seat for a moment, neither of us seemed willing to move or even break the silence.

  I glanced over at her and she was deep in thought again. Miles away.

  With a heavy sigh, I cranked the engine and started down Ash Avenue, not bothering to ask where we might be going. I knew the drive was simple subterfuge to whatever might be coming next.

  “What’s the real reason you called me the other night?”

  The question just hung there in the silence like a word balloon from a comic strip panel.

  “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “Then we’ll be speaking the same language for once. Try me.”

  I sighed and just came right out and said, “I’m been having these dreams.”

  “Dreams are the unconscious mind trying to work out a problem that the conscious mind is struggling with, y’know.”

  I gave her a brief frown as I continued, “I’ve been having them long before any of this began. Years. It’s just that lately, they’ve been more frequent. More vivid. And when you described that house the other day--the one you had the séance in--it sounded just like the place from my dream.”

  “Okay, tell me about it.”

  The words poured out of me. I had been aching to relieve myself of the pressure of this secret for so long that telling another soul was almost enough to bring tears to my eyes. Claudia listened attentively, nodding and encouraging me when I couldn’t find the right words. I explained how I am on the porch of a scorched house high on a hill, and how as the flames close in behind me, I hear voices on the other side of the wall.

  “Can you describe this house?”

  “Two or three stories. On the top of a hill. Blackened. Scorched, like the outside of a steak that’s been flash-fried.”

  “The house we went to was white and it wasn’t on a hill.”

  “Mine is in the middle of an overgrown field surrounded by thick woods,” I stated resolutely.

  “You talk like you know it’s a real place.”

  “It is,” I replied. “I just don’t how I’m going to find it.”

  Though she didn’t respond, her shiver told me more than enough. “I have this friend, who believes that dreams are windows through which relatives who have passed into the next world communicate with the living,” she offered. “Maybe you have been given those visions because you’re meant to find this place for some reason.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t even try.

  She asked for my phone.

  “Why?”

  “I need to call someone to get directions to the house where we had the séance.”

  I gave her a look and she responded, “Trust me. We’ll be back before your midnight curfew.”

  Famous last words.

  We sat in silence for most of the way. The single time that I glanced at Claudia, she was gazing out the window, fingertips to her lips, seeming to trace a pattern.

  Finally, Claudia said, “Paul, Ulee’s Junction is less than ten miles away from Haven.”

  “He’s in our kitchen,” I murmured.

  Claudia looked at me with an amused expression. “You are so damn odd sometimes.”

  “Claudia, I’m not buying into this communication with the dead stuff.”

  “That is Halloween at its core.”

  I gave her a skeptic grunt. “What are you talking about?”

  “October 31st lies exactly between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice, ancient Celts believed that it was a very spiritual time and the festival of Samhain was celebrated at sundown on this night. It was the end of the year on their calendar and marked the end of the summer and harvest season, which they associated with life, and the beginning of the dark winter season, which was associated with death.”

  “Ok, that part makes sense, but...”

  She continued unabated. “They felt that this was the time when the veil between the human and spirit world was at its thinnest, a significant time to communicate with loved ones who had passed away. Divination was commonly practiced on this day by their priests, the Druids. It was common to leave food outside the door of the house or set a place at their table on October 31st for their returning kin.”

  “Trick or treat,” I surmised.

  “Exactly. Celtic beliefs are at the heart of everything we do at Halloween. A lot of those concepts managed to survive for two thousand years, so there must be some grain of universal truth to it all, wouldn’t you say?”

  I grumbled.

  “Just keep your mind open, Paul. That’s all I ask.”

  We reached the small town of Griffinbourg, about 35 miles northeast of Haven. It was isolated, hilly country, and we parked the car on the road a couple of hundred yards from the house, a dark shape rising from within a few acres of land overgrown with weeds and the remnants of an orange grove. I knew almost at once, even from this distance, that it was not the right house.

  With no light between us but my dim cell phone display, we started side-by-side down the short gravel road which led into the front yard, and by the time we had passed the first orange tree, Claudia was clutching my arm like a vise.

  I attempted to change the subject, not realizing that the new subject would be just as unnerving. “I was talking to my mom the other night about how my dad and my uncle had gone into a house with your dad to save a little girl. You know about that?”

  After a few moments of silence, she nodded. “Oh yeah, but that’s about all I know. Mom doesn’t like to talk about it. The only information I’ve been able to get about that night was some article from the Austin American Statesmen from thirty-five years ago.”

  “I got the same treatment,” I responded. “What do you think that’s all about?”

  “Something bad happened there, Paul. What does your Uncle say about it?”

  I shrugged. “I never got around to asking him.”

  The house standing before us was an old two story number that had once been painted white, but between being washed out by the sun and simply rotting from age, it now looked almost gray in the moonlight. We walked up to the old wooden porch. The steps leading up to it had completely collapsed. The front door, and the single window to its right, was obscured by boards nailed across the front. Painted graffiti from gang signs to declarations of love were sprayed across the front of it in defiance of its stately appearance.

  “This must have been beautiful once,” I stated.

  Claudia gave a nod of satisfaction. “See, I knew you would appreciate it. C’mon, we got in this way the other night.” She started to
tug my arm.

  I refused to move. “None of this looks familiar to me,” I told her.

  “We’ve come all this way. What would it hurt to check it out?”

  “If I don’t recognize it from the front, why would the inside stir anything,” I explained. “I’ve never dreamed about the inside.”

  She sighed and couldn’t seem to muster the energy for a fight.

  “No telling how many people have been using this place as their own personal hideout,” I continued. “Crackheads. Transients. Kids looking for a place to make-out. It just feels disrespectful. This was someone’s home once.”

  Claudia gave a single nod and started back the way we’d come. “Let’s go then.”

  I followed along behind her. After a few minutes, she slowed enough for me to catch up with her. For the second time in the course of a week, her hand found mine in the darkness. The difference this time, though, was that now she was deferring to me and letting me take the lead. Whereas before I had sought comfort from her, now she wanted me to protect her. It was a good feeling, validating everything that was masculine about me. In that moment, a thought occurred to me.

  I would die for her.

  Would you, Paul?

  I spun around, jerking Claudia to a stop. It had been the sound wind makes rushing through the branches of a tree. Almost a hiss. But I had distinctly heard words.

  “What is it?”

  Thinking quickly, I turned back to her with a smirk. “Just kidding.”

  Claudia gave me a punch to the arm and started forward again. “I don’t know if you realize what time it is, but we’ve got exactly thirty minutes to get home. If I’m not there when the Counsinner gets home, there’ll be all kinds of questions.”

  With renewed determination, I started up the path.

  We made record time back to Haven, risking life, limb, and speeding tickets, but I got Claudia back to her house at exactly five ‘til midnight. No pumpkin for her!

  When I pulled to a stop, Claudia shoved her door open and started out, but I reached across and touched her arm. “Wait!”