Hallowed Page 2

  After my initial shock of seeing Claudia again, Mrs. Wicke and my mom had several hours of conversation over coffee. I don’t recall hearing that much laughter in our house in years.

  Before she left, she asked me if I wouldn’t mind saying “hello” to Claudia in the school hallways once in a while. “She was into a lot of negative things in the city. Fighting and hanging out with friends with dark ideas,” she told us. “Unfortunately, being the daughter of a counselor seems to mean that your mother is the only one you can’t talk to.”

  Next Monday I decided to finish lunch early and make a pass by the bleachers before practice. On the way down Junior Hall, I happened to see a small group of senior girls giggling around one of the lockers. After they went their separate ways, I realized that they’d been standing in front of Claudia’s locker door.

  I knew this only because of the graffiti written across the front: “HALLOW,” it read in large letters of bright red lipstick.

  When I reached the bleachers, Claudia was already there, wearing a shapeless black blouse and jeans, almost identical in color, and scrutinizing a worn notebook in her lap. A plastic baggy filled with what looked like Crunch Berries cereal and a can of Coke sat with reach. An empty brown bag sat atop a black backpack upon which was drawn a spiked ball and chain in silver. Some unidentifiable distortion leaked through the buds in her ears. Wires led to her breast pocket, where I surmised the player must be hidden.

  After a minute or two of my staring, she finally lifted her head. Jet black sunglasses covered her pale, unmade-up face. Taking the eye contact as a sign of acknowledgment, I approached. She seemed to stiffen and grow smaller at the same time, like a cat preparing for flight.

  “Stay back,” her body language screamed. “I bite.”

  She sighed heavily and made no attempt to remove the buds wedged into her ears. “Yeah?’

  “What are you doing up here?”

  She must have deduced that I wasn’t the threat she had first perceived and lowered her pen back to her notebook. Settling with a jingle around her wrist was a charm bracelet, upon which a silver ghost, a skull, a bat, a crescent moon, and what looked like a tiny haunted house lay there sparkling in the sunlight in contrast to the stark white paper.

  “You with the thought patrol or something?”

  That one had staggered me a little. Didn’t she recognize me? I figured I’d spur her memory a little.

  “Y’know, your mom came by our house Sunday.”

  That ought to be enough of a hint.

  Her eyes never wavered from the notebook. “So what.”

  As I languished in the hot Texas sun for a few moments, I considered how much less awkward this had seemed when I had played it out in my mind.

  “So, your mom looked happy. It was good to see her, y’know.”

  “What are you doing here, Paul?” she asked in a condescending tone as she pushed the pause button on the tiny device in her pocket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Other than skipping class?”

  Heavy sigh. She turned back to her notebook.

  Okay, I’d had my daily limit of abuse and was just about to leave, when I recognized the shape of stanzas. Thought I’d take one last shot. “You into poetry?”

  Claudia grimaced and looked up at me through those jet black lenses covering her eyes. “Yeah, like you’d even recognize a poem if you saw one.” Claudia ripped the page she was working on out of the notebook, wadded the page, and tossed it back over her shoulder. “Okay, what is this? Did the ‘counsinner’ send you over here to talk to me? Draw me out? Is that what this is about?”

  I studied her in astonishment. I wasn’t used to open hostility from strangers, and especially not from strangers who I’d once known. I could only stare at this slight wisp of a girl who wrapped herself in a cloak of oppressive darkness so overpowering it was like a physical presence that seemed to weigh even on me.

  She removed her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose. Finally, she looked up with a great pronounced sigh that Atlas himself with the weight of the world on his shoulders would have had problems reproducing. Dark circles exaggerated the intensity of her eyes, the deepest, darkest eyes I have ever seen. Eyes of obsidian glass. Pools of crude oil they were, which seemed to catch fire as she realized I wouldn’t leave peacefully.

  Had her eyes always been that color? I couldn’t remember.

  I met her fiery stare and countered with one of sympathy. I’d never lost anyone I loved, much less a parent, so I had no idea how it might affect me. “Look, I just wanted to tell you that what you did yesterday outside senior hall...” She glanced up. “That was impressive work.”

  She just gave me an undecipherable blank look.

  “By the way,” I mentioned as I started away. “They wrote on your locker door.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She gave me a shrug that seemed to say, “It’s beyond my ability to care,” before returning to her work.

  My time sufficiently wasted, I went back to the band hall, where I waited for practice to start along with the decent humans. During practice, a funny thing happened to me. My mind kept wandering to the wadded page Claudia had tossed over her shoulder, and after rehearsal, I did something that I hadn’t planned on. I went under the bleachers and wandered among the trash and mud and found that ball of paper. I felt weird doing it, like I had just copped a look through the door of the girl’s locker room or something. Nonetheless, I unraveled the paper and read the hideous scrawl that was her handwriting.

  “Death is a door window,

  Which we Where I stand on at the edge.

  All alone I am.”

  She had written the last line twice. The second one left an impression on the page more heavily than the first, and a long scraggly line had been drawn under the word “alone” all the way down to the bottom of the page, where the pen stroke had ripped through the page.

  The words sent an actual chill through me. I wasn’t much on poetry, but I knew healthy artistic expression didn’t look like this.

  I wadded up the page and tossed it into the garbage under the stands where the girl who had thrown it there had meant for it to stay. I couldn’t help feeling that I had glimpsed a part of Claudia that she had never meant for me to see.

  As I started back to the building, I decided that maybe her writing was the sort of dark exercise that people did sometimes when they were alone. Perhaps, it was a way of purging her soul by putting those darkest fears down on paper then discarding them.

  But I was wrong.

  I would soon discover that Death wasn’t a fear for Claudia Anne Wicke.

  It was an obsession.

  Chapter 2 (Thursday, September 24th)

  Last summer I started work as a “bagger” for Comeaux’s Grocery. I quickly moved up to “stocker,” which suited me just fine, as I didn’t have to deal with customers who said asinine things like:

  “Young man, please don’t put those cans on top of my carton of eggs.”

  Thanks for reminding me, old woman. I was just about to do that.

  Although I was supposed to quit the job when school started, I was able to convince Mom and Dad to let me work Saturdays (and some nights on Thursdays, the day the new shipments came in) as long as my grades didn’t suffer. So, with the addition of the varsity football games where the band played on Friday nights, I was pretty busy at the beginning of my junior year.

  The cool thing about working for Comeaux’s was that I was able to get discounts on books and magazines and (best yet) stuff for Halloween.

  The last weekend in September, I was stocking the canned vegetables on a Thursday night when I heard a familiar voice say, “Hey, Graves, your Halloween selection sucks.”

  I looked up and saw a shadowy figure gliding down the aisle past me.

  “Yeah well, what do you expect? This isn’t Eerie’s.”

  She stopped in the middle of the aisle, he
r back to me. The only sign that I’d intrigued her. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a Halloween warehouse store in Austin.”

  Of course, the selection at Comeaux’s Grocery was typical of a store its size. I figured I’d pick up a few of the essentials there—candy, glow sticks, black lights, maybe a cheap-looking paper skeleton. But I saved my money for the trip into Austin, which was around an hour away, where I would stock up on the unique, harder to get necessities.

  Claudia turned and I saw that she was actually wearing sunglasses inside the store. It was killing me not to take the shot, but I didn’t want to extinguish the possibility of an interesting conversation. (It had been a long night so far.)

  “Mom doesn’t let us decorate,” Claudia admitted.

  “Why not?”

  Giving a shrug, she replied, “We haven’t since my father died.”

  She stood there and might have been looking in my direction, though I couldn’t actually see her eyes through the shades. So, I went back to stamping the cans of French-cut green beans with price stickers.

  She sighed and folded her arms. “So when are you going to this Eerie’s place?”

  “Sunday morning. You want to come with? I have my own car, y’know.”

  Claudia gave me a patronizing look. “And me without my box of cookies.”

  I turned back to the green bean cans, before my face started to redden. “Listen, I don’t care what you do. I’m pretty much going anyway.”

  “What, like I want to spend a whole weekend stuck at home with my mother.” She put an icy lilt to the last word like it had a bitter taste. “Look, I better get back to the car before she starts thinking I made good on my threat to hitchhike back to DFW. Guess I’ll seeya on Sunday then.”

  I gave her a nod and a “seeya.”

  After she’d disappeared, I assessed how I felt about this. I was actually excited. I figured it must have something to do with sharing something you loved with someone you felt might appreciate it the way you do.

  Growing up, I simply loved the whole season. I love how after a long hot humid summer, the weather takes a change for the better and the breeze takes on that special snap that balances out the warmth of the blazing Texas sun. I wait expectantly for that sudden transformation of color the natural world undergoes, those reds and browns and the oranges. And then there’s the smells in the October air, of pumpkin pies and harvest bonfires and latex monster masks. I loved the spectacle and magic that produces that intangible quality just one step back from the sacred, like the dark interior of a magician’s top hat.

  Halloween had commanded my attention the very first time I saw a simple spider web covered skeleton displayed within an old wooden coffin outside an old T G & Y store in Austin--y’know, the ones that don’t exist anymore--back before every display vibrated, made sounds and emitted smoke.

  It was only a year later when a Great Aunt on my mother’s side passed away—Mom’s side of the family was the one with the long life genes, while Dad’s had the bad heart genes--and I realized that the Halloween display I saw outside the TG & Y was, in fact, my first introduction to the concept of Death. That skeleton, something tucked away within every last one of us, is a reminder of our own mortality, of the hands of our internal clocks slowly ticking away toward our own personal expiration date.

  Though at the time, I didn’t understand my own fascination with Halloween, it dawned on me that perhaps the holiday was nothing more than the way we human beings cope with the Unknown--that dark inviting corridor due south of the end of our long walk through Life.

  A terrifying carnival-like journey with candy at the end.

  Halloween had been my favorite holiday since that first Batman costume I wore when I was eight and tore it on a bush leaping from the Bradley’s porch when their Pit bull got loose. I could remember every costume I’d ever worn, every character I’d ever become, every memorable night from my youth that I spent trick-or-treating door-to-door.

  When I was nine, I was a werewolf and diligently rehearsed my transformation in the weeks leading up to the night until I learned that Halloween night did not land on a full moon that year. (Surely, that must be why I didn’t change as I had been led to believe I would.)

  With the vivid recollections of an introverted child, I can clearly remember the year I became Torr the Avenger, the super-powered robot from “Manheim’s Machine,” a Saturday morning TV series that was popular the year I was ten.

  More than the costume I wore, my memories of my first encounter with injustice and the talk with my father are what return to me when I think back to that night.

  Me, Greg, and Sonny were trick or treating under the watchful eyes of my mother in a neighborhood not far from my own. My mother had stopped to talk to Mrs. Gordon and with the impatience of boys missing out on free candy, we begged to go ahead without her to finish off the last two houses on the block. After she’d agreed, I rushed down to the next house and was so happy with the top-notch chocolate bar I got that I didn’t notice that Sonny and Greg weren’t with me until I started down the steps.

  I ran through the yard guessing that they had gone on ahead to the next house when they appeared in front of me on the sidewalk. About ten yards away, Sonny and Greg stood facing a pair of kids that looked to be at least three years older. One of them got in Sonny’s face, while the other snatched his Batman Halloween sack away from him. When they demanded Greg’s candy, he ran past me back the way we’d come.

  Then they turned to me.

  The one who was holding Sonny’s bag of candy snarled, “Get over here and gimme your candy, shrimp!”

  Instead, I just kept my ten yards distance and watched as the bigger kid laid his hand over Sonny’s face and shoved him backward to the pavement, laughing with the confidence of an experienced bully.

  With no argument from me, they started away with the entirety of Sonny’s hard earned candy.

  Only then did I go to Sonny’s aid.

  Lying there on the sidewalk crying, Sonny refused when I tried to help him up. Moments later, my mom arrived with Greg and announced that trick or treating was officially over. Despite the fact that my pumpkin was nearly filled to the brim, I screamed and demanded to know why I was being cheated out of more free candy, ultimately having to be literally dragged home.

  That night, my father sat with me in the living room on the old leather couch. The silence was a physical presence, a stranger in our normally animated home. Dad—a man who, by that time, had already risen to the position of Sheriff within our county, and practiced at the art of speechmaking--contemplated the words he would utter for a good thirty seconds before he even opened his mouth. By his first breath, I knew that in his eyes what I had done that night had been a serious offense, though I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. After all, it wasn’t me who had hurt Sonny.

  “Do you know what you did wrong tonight?”

  “But I didn’t do anything!” I exclaimed.

  “Exactly, you didn’t do anything. Your mother told me what happened,” he stated, fixing me with the sternest expression in his arsenal. “The worst thing you can do in the face of injustice is absolutely nothing.”

  Many years later, my uncle would express the same thought to me, just in different words. “Paul, the only thing necessary for evil to get a foothold in this world is for good men to do nothing.”

  Now, under the hard gaze of my father, I lowered my head and allowed the shame that had been nagging at me to finally take hold. “I didn’t know what to do,” I admitted, my lips starting to quiver.

  “Here’s what you never do. Never back down from a bully, no matter how overmatched you might feel. You stare them in the eye and if it comes to it, you fight back, especially in defense of a friend. Do you hear me, Paul? Always stand your ground!”

  Suddenly, it struck me that life wasn’t all fun and games anymore and I damn sure wasn’t Torr the Avenger. From my new position, the world looked a whole lot messier than
when the night had begun. My eyes glazed over and I stared at the string of framed pictures on the wall. All those Graves’ relatives, Great Uncle Philip & John, and Grandpa Milton, seemed to be giving me a look of assessment. They all knew what I had done tonight and were disappointed in the next generation of the Graves family my Dad had produced.

  Dad and I had made a special trip to Sonny’s house so that I could give him half of everything I had collected that night from my stash of candy. Despite that gesture, the events of that Halloween when I was ten affected the way I was to view the world from that day forward.

  The child in me had begun to evolve and the fascination of treat or tricking for me lasted only one more precious year. Suddenly, at twelve, none of my friends wanted to don the capes anymore. My best friend Jimmy Barton told me he thought it was “stupid kid stuff.” Randy Theriot went one step further and simply decided the whole concept of Halloween was “gay.” (That sentiment had almost brought me and Randy to blows that day after school.)

  That was one of the worst Octobers of my life, wondering if I’d turned a corner and forever lost a part of that magic of being young, being a child.

  It was a teacher in my final year of middle school, Mrs. Fielding, who had made me realize that Halloween wasn’t only for children, when she had the whole class of Honors English participate in decorating the hallways a few weeks before the annual Fall Harvest Festival. The act of pasting those pumpkins and dangling those spiders had re-ignited the pilot light in me. My creative energy had been so strong, that I had even volunteered to draw the poster that would be stretched astride one side of the field at the varsity Homecoming game so that the football team could burst through it at the beginning of the game to the cheers of the hometown crowd.