Hallowed Page 20

  Mom guided me by the base of my neck toward the door. “Honey, I think you should go home and get a decent night’s rest.”

  “Yeah, maybe get a few more hours worth before the next…” He stopped just short of saying it, but I could feel that frustration and bitterness in his voice.

  I glanced up at my mother again and she looked on the verge of tears. To cover it up, she grabbed her purse by its strap off of the back of the chair. “C’mon, Paul.” She stepped over to Dad’s side and waited patiently for him. Finally, he turned and gave her a kiss. She leaned over and whispered something in his ear. He looked at her then, and I saw something flash between their eyes that I’d never seen before that morning, the passion of a couple half their age.

  He kissed her again then, but this time he meant it.

  Eleven o’clock mass was nearly at capacity. At first, I surmised that something had leaked out about the suspect taking refuge there, but then I noticed the overwhelming amount of crying babies and deduced that there must be a baptism following the mass.

  I joined my mom about ten rows down from the front on the left hand side facing the altar. After saying a quick prayer for Dad, I rose from my kneeling position on the pew and sat back. Someone was leaning forward just behind and to my left, murmuring a prayer under their breath. It’s always bugged me a little when I sit back like that and someone is still praying. I’m not sure if it’s an issue of my personal space or that I feel that I’m intruding on an intimate act, but I’ve never felt comfortable in that position.

  Whoever it was, their lips were inches from my ear, because I began to detect words and feel their heated breath. I was just about to lean forward out of the way, when I heard a woman say, “Don’t turn around, Paul.”

  I glanced over to my right. It wasn’t my mother, she was busy talking to one of her friends from her monthly book club. They were busy debating the substance of the latest book Oprah had “discovered.”

  “Who..?”

  “I’m the old friend of your father’s.” I started to turn, but a hard placed “no” stopped me in mid-swivel. “If you turn around, I’m walking away, and you’ll be left with all those unanswered questions you’ve been dying to ask.”

  I simply nodded.

  “Do you want to ask me those questions, Paul?”

  I nodded again.

  “I want you to go into the last confessional on the left side of the church just after the gospel reading.”

  With that, the organist started his intro and the parishioners began to rise around me. I rose and glanced back behind me, catching a glimpse of a woman as she was excusing herself out into the aisle. Her long white hair was held together by a clip and she wore the same outfit I remember seeing last night, including the long sleeves and gloves.

  At the same moment, the incense from one of the censers swept over me, and for one unsettling moment, I felt like this was all just an extension of the dream I’d had the night before. Was it possible that I was still trapped inside the House?

  But when I saw Bishop Boudreaux walking up the aisle followed by Uncle Hank, my anxiety subsided.

  Just after the gospel reading as everyone was sitting down, I touched my mother on the arm and murmured, “I’m going to the restroom.”

  She nodded indifferently.

  I marched down the left hand side about three-fourths the length of the church. When I reached the door leading to the foyer, I glanced to my right to the confessional booth, and saw it open just a crack. She was there already. As I stepped out into the foyer, the daylight from the large glass windows flooded my eyes. Several suited men gathered over on the other side, preparing the donation baskets. I hesitated a few moments there and made a show of going through my pockets, pretending that I had forgotten something before I opened the door into the church again.

  The last confessional booth was well behind the last row. The Bishop had just begun his homily and everyone’s eyes were trained on him. I was sure that the shadows were dark enough here that he wouldn’t be able to see me.

  I edged over to the confessional, grasped the knob in my hand and scurried into the darkness of the booth.

  I gently pulled the door closed and took a seat on the hard wooden bench. The tiny coffin-shaped room smelled musky and old. The opening at the top allowed the light of the church inside, so it wasn’t completely dark.

  The slot in front of me slid open and through the cross-shaped grating, I saw half a face staring back at me. The smell of nicotine wafted through. “Paul,” the woman whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “My name is Tracy. Tracy Tatum.”

  I hesitated as I considered my response. Finally, I just said what was foremost on my mind anyway. “How do you expect us to believe you?”

  “You’ll have to just trust me until you see the evidence for yourself.”

  I gave a snort. “With all due respect, you’re a total stranger asking me to trust you.”

  “It’s your choice, but you agreed to meet me for a reason. If you don’t believe I am who I’ve said, why are you here?”

  “Curiosity. Why are you here?”

  “I wanted to meet you,” she answered. “Just as you want to see the face of the person your father saved thirty-five years ago, I want to see the son of that man. I knew your mother would never allow us to talk openly out there.”

  “She thinks you’re dangerous.”

  She sighed. “Good mother. Better than mine ever was.” She paused and made a noise that might have been a clearing of the throat. “But we’re not here to talk about that part of my life. You have questions. I’ll try and answer them.”

  “Do you know who’s committing the murders?”

  “No. I wish I could give your father a name in repayment for what he did for me, but that’s beyond my ability.” Through the cross-shaped screen a single eye appraised me. “One of your uncles gave his life in a time of war to save others.”

  It was not a question and I wondered how she could possibly know that.

  She continued: “Would you willingly sacrifice your life to save someone you love?”

  “Yes,” I answered without hesitation, asking myself a moment after if it was true. Could I step in front of a bullet or car, knowing that it meant the end of the road for me? After all, it was one thing to claim that you would, but quite another to actually do it--not only because it’s honorable but also because it is somehow romantic to imagine that you can value something beyond yourself.

  I could see her through the screen now, watching me with a hungry sort of interest, almost as if she could hear the conflict going on within me. Clearing my throat, I continued my questions: “If you don’t know the identity of the killer, why did you come to my uncle’s church?”

  “You and your family… you’re all in danger, Paul, but I can’t ex... I can see things sometimes, things that are imminent, especially since the last victim.” Then, in an abrupt almost stream of consciousness shift, she asked me, “Have you ever known your father to be afraid?”

  “Not my father,” I answered with no hesitation.

  “Every man is capable of fear. Do you think he’d ever willingly avoid a confrontation out of fear?”

  I hesitated at the audacity of the question. “How can I answer something like that?”

  “Every man is capable of the act of betrayal. I just wanted to know if you’d ever suspected it in your father.”

  “No,” I snapped empathetically. “Why do you think we’re in danger? What do you know?”

  “I haven’t seen that part yet. It’s only an overall feeling.”

  While I was trying to choose one of the many questions I wanted to ask her next, she threw out another left-fielder. “He never touched me, by the way—the one who kidnapped me--accept to feed me. He fed me cold cuts and cheddar cheese. Once he gave me fried chicken. He always came in and blindfolded me before he fed me.” She paused and gave an apologetic smile. “The memories are still very vivid to me. I was
in the house for three weeks, but that never seemed right to me. Time… had a funny way of slipping past in the darkness.”

  “The House? Does it still exist?”

  There was a moment of silence, and I could hear a rumble of laughter, perhaps a response to a joke the Bishop told, but I could see her lips twist into an uncomfortable smile. The flash of teeth she displayed to me looked yellowed and aged, tobacco-stained.

  “Exists? Well, it’s interesting how you phrased that. If something existed once, can you ever really say when it’s gone that it leaves nothing behind? If you remove a rock from the grass, does it not leave an imprint? Even the most seemingly insignificant person leaves a sort of after-image on the world around him in a lifetime of interacting with others.

  “If a person uses an object for great good or great evil, that thing makes an impact on the world, especially if it is imbued with great hate. It has always seemed to me that the capacity for an individual to do Evil has always been easier than for a person to do an act of Good,” she said to me. “Doing a good deed is an act of creation, and it has always been easier to destroy.”

  She leaned forward again, her voice becoming more animated, like a priest wrapping up his sermon. “I think that House still exists, though in a different form than we would recognize.”

  “Tell me where it used to be and…”

  “I don’t know anymore,” she snapped almost plaintively, as a child might.

  I heard the Bishop go quiet outside and the parishioners rising from the pews. I saw her glance to her right and start to move. I had to ask it now, the most important question, or I’d never get another chance.

  I leaned forward toward the screen and hissed urgently, “What’s my connection to all this?” Then after a pause, I threw two more at her: “How do you know that song? Why did you want me in the room yesterday?”

  Her face turned back to me. She was mere inches from me now, as intimate as a lover. She gave the awkward smile of someone unpracticed in everyday human niceties. The sigh that followed carried with it a burden I would never understand. The smell of nicotine had somehow disappeared and her breath smelled of freshly turned earth. It was somehow comforting.

  “I don’t know what the song means, but you will,” she responded. “You know the where and the when. Soon you will know who.”

  In my mind, I could hear Claudia spelling out the letters on the Ouija board.

  S-O-O-N. Do you see, Paul? Soon.

  “Which ‘who’? Are you saying it’s going to be Dad… my father? He’s going to stop the serial killer?”

  “I believe he’ll play a part in it, but you… You’re going to have to learn to lead. He’s going to have to learn to follow.”

  She tilted her head and nailed me with a single piercing eye. “Samhain.” The words came out the correct way. Sow-In. “The murders. You want them to stop. Your father wants them to stop. But I need them to stop for different reasons.” She pulled back from the screen, and I could see her clearly for an instant, gripping a curl of platinum white hair and curling it around a gloved finger like a nervous teenager. “I need this to end, just like Dr. Joyner’s life was ended thirty-five years ago. I need to silence the voices again.”

  With that, light flooded through the small slot and I felt a breeze rush through, chilling my eyes pressed close to the opening. She was gone.

  Mom and I spent most of the day at Mrs. Wicke and Claudia’s. Mrs. Wicke cooked spaghetti and meatballs for lunch.

  I spent a few hours finishing up homework for Monday, while Claudia surfed the web on her laptop. It was a beautiful day, so we were out on the patio. Besides, Mom and Mrs. Wicke didn’t trust us up in Claudia’s room alone. It was a little embarrassing.

  When I told her about my meeting with the Tatum woman, she said, “She’s a psychic, Paul.”

  “Did you get this from your research?”

  “Of course not. There was hardly anything mentioned about the kidnapping. Dr. Wenton Joyner, the man who kidnapped her was a physics professor from LSU who was a friend of Gerard Tatum, her father. He had no previous arrests and was considered a pillar of the academic community. His colleagues thought that the man just snapped. That seemed to be the only explanation for something that appeared to be so out of character.” She showed me a single printed page from the internet. “Look at all the organizations he belonged to.”

  I glanced down the list. Mostly academic and science oriented clubs. I was actually looking for some connection to a particular church or religion. He was a secular humanist, a term with which I was unfamiliar, but which Claudia explained to me was a philosophy which rejected spirituality in exchange for a science and nature-based worldview. “I find their belief system very comforting,” she commented.

  She continued to detail what her research had revealed. “What little I could find talked about the house itself. Apparently, the house had been the location of several other murders, all of them children.” She snatched the printout from me and flipped to the second page. “Murder-suicide. 1937, a divorced father murdered his four year old son and then himself. Then again in 1958, a father, his wife, and his six year old daughter. Same house. Different method. This time the man was caught and taken to a mental institution where he committed suicide twelve years later in 1970.”

  Though I knew I would regret asking, I had to know. “How were they killed?”

  “The first father cut his own throat open with a straight razor, ala Sweeney Todd, and the second one broke a glass and slit his wrists, both--which by the way, I hear is very difficult.”

  “What about the children?”

  She glanced up almost apologetically. “The four year old died by repeated blunt force trauma to his head, probably against a wall. The wife and daughter were both drowned in a tub.”

  I thought about what the woman who claimed to be Tracy Tatum had said to me:

  If a person uses an object for great good or great evil, that thing makes an impact on the world, especially if it is imbued with great hate.

  I took deep breath and sighed. “This is the same house?”

  “Yes, according to several articles I found, there were more than a few people who cheered the fact that the house had burned down in 1983,” she replied. “Kids all thought the house was haunted. I guess there’s one in every neighborhood, but few have the actual atrocities to back up the reputation.”

  “So what town was it in?”

  “That’s the peculiar thing, Paul.” She shook her head, confusion on her face. “I haven’t been able to find out. I know it sounds a little paranoid, but it’s almost as if, all identifying information has been systematically removed.”

  “You believe her?”

  “Who? Tatum?”

  “Whoever she is! Yeah, I mean, you think she’s really..?” I couldn’t seem to get the words out.

  “Psychic? It might explain a lot: Why she didn’t go to the police initially. Why she disappeared from the grid to begin with,” Claudia replied, closing her laptop and laying the side of her head atop it. She stared into the distance over my shoulder and said, “It can’t have been easy for her. Kidnapped at five. Seeing visions at some point later, probably around puberty.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “From what I’ve read, all this paranormal stuff seems to happen around the onset of puberty.” Her eyes focused on me then. “Hey, it happened to you.”

  I gave her a snort of dismissal and turned back to the short story I was reading for Honors English. “It’s not the same at all.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” she retorted. “Are you going to tell your dad about your conversation?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  We spent the rest of that afternoon vegging out in front of the TV. She grazed and flipped, finally coming to rest on, of all movies, the Sound of Music. I watched without a single snide comment for a good fifteen minutes before I started to feel impatient with all the singing. The movie had reached t
he “My Favorite Things” sequence, where Julie Andrews attempts to comfort the Von Trapp children after they’ve been frightened by a thunderstorm.

  “This movie isn’t all that bad, y’know,” she commented.

  “From Nine Inch Nails to Julie Andrews, huh?”

  She gave me a simple nod and turned back to the movie.

  Mom and I met Dad at home about four o’clock. Claudia made me promise to call her if he had any new information, but of course, he was tight-lipped about everything.

  All three of us sat around the table, watching Dad eat a sandwich like it was an interesting bit of history that had been captured on newsreel footage.

  “So what’s the situation at the church,” I asked. “Is she still there?”

  “She’s free to come and go as she pleases, but we know from ‘round the clock surveillance that she’s never actually left the church grounds,” he answered. “She did attend regular mass this morning though.”

  I was about to ask another question, when he rose and ran a hand across the back of his neck. “Look, I’ve been at it all day and I really would like to have a shower, okay?”

  He rose and gave my mom a peck on the lips. Just before he started upstairs, he took a final glance back at me, a forced smile on his face. As I met my father’s eyes, I remembered the words that she had said to me: “Every man is capable of the act of betrayal.”

  I felt instant guilt for my own small betrayal of his trust.

  Chapter 20 (Monday-Tuesday, October 19-20th)

  I should have known that something was wrong.

  Mom and Dad have never gone back on a punishment, but on Monday morning, my father handed me the keys to my car and told me that I could have my car back on a trial basis as long as I came straight home after school.

  Without one question, I took the opening and ran.

  I’d like to think the reason for this was due to my earlier declaration of independence, but as I found later, the truth was I needed to have access to a vehicle for my own safety.