Hallowed Read online

  Claudia began to blink at the board. I was sure she was going to cry, but she regained her composure. Giving me a quick look and adjusting her shoulders, she asked, “Paul is here with me. Is it..?” Before she could even get the next sentence out the planchette was on the move, sliding smoothly over the letters in the center of the board. The deliberateness of its movement was mechanical and creepy, like gazing into the empty, open eyes of a sleepwalker.

  “Hello Paul,” the display read.

  Instantly, the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees for me.

  Claudia looked up, her eyes prompting me to speak.

  I swallowed the rock in my throat and heard my raspy voice say, “Hi.”

  “Is it okay if we ask some questions?”

  The planchette moved to “Yes.”

  “Was the car accident on Sunday really an accident?”

  The planchette moved to the moon shaped word “no” on the upper left side of the board.

  “Do you know who was responsible?”

  The planchette whisked across the board, barely touching a letter before jumping to the next. “You know him.”

  “Is it Nathan Graham?”

  Again the answer was “yes.”

  Claudia took a deep breath and looked up at me. I wasn’t sure what might have been going through her mind and decided she was simply drawing a little strength from my presence before she continued.

  “We need to find him to stop what happened to you from happening again,” Claudia said, squeezing her eyes shut and allowing a single tear to leave a track down her cheek, unwilling to take her fingers off the planchette. “Do you know where they can find him?”

  The planchette busily slid across the alphabet, a plank on a mission. Finally, it stopped and displayed its answer: “It must end where it began.”

  I looked up at Claudia with confusion. She gave me back an identical expression. “Do you know where that is?”

  Both of us waited. The planchette remained completely still.

  Claudia craned her neck over the window on the planchette and gave a little gasp.

  Without having moved an inch, the display read: “Paul knows.”

  “Claudia?” She looked up at me, and I mouthed the words, “Something’s not right here.” Her eyes returned to the board, at a loss for words for one of the first times I could remember.

  I asked: “Mrs. Wicke, what was your favorite toy as a child?”

  Claudia swallowed awkwardly and gave me a panicky look.

  Suddenly, the planchette rose and dropped. I heard a very distinct voice in my ear saying, “Watch out!” I yanked my hand back just before the planchette sailed toward me, completely off the board and into the door over my shoulder, just missing my head. Pieces of plastic rained down to the floor. Claudia continued to sit with hands frozen out in front of her, her mouth forming a perfectly round caricature of wonder.

  Directly above us, I heard the sound of a heavy figure running across the second floor.

  I grabbed the gun off the table in one hand and her arm in the other and pulled her out of her chair. With my foot, I swept the remains of the planchette out of the way, flung open the door leading to the garage, and shoved her outside. The last word I said to her was “Run” before I shut the door between us.

  I sank to one knee beside the table in the darkness of the kitchen and trained my Dad’s gun on the doorway leading to the living room. The footfalls above faded. I strained my ears to hear him on the stairs, struggling to steady the vibrating gun in my quivering hands.

  He must have stopped on the landing, patiently listening for me just as I was for him.

  “Stay where right you are, Nathan,” I attempted to yell in an authoritative voice that was ultimately creaky and scared. “The Sheriff’s Department is outside.”

  There was no movement upstairs. No creaking of floorboards. No footfalls.

  I reached back and turned the door knob, but there was resistance.

  My last thought was “That’s funny.”

  The door flew open. I lost my balance and went over backwards, falling on my ass, the gun sliding out of reach.

  Standing in the doorway was Nathan Graham. In one hand he held a rag, an overpowering acrid smell that I couldn’t identify wafting off of it. In the other, he held a tire iron. I could just make out Claudia beyond him, lying on the floor of the garage. She wasn’t moving.

  I spun and dove for the gun.

  Pain burst through my skull and shooting stars obscured my vision.

  Darkness closed in on all sides and enveloped me.

  It was daylight when I awoke in the kitchen. Two paramedics attempted to lift me onto a stretcher but I sat up, looking around and seeing the face of my father. The paramedics tried to force me down to the stretcher, but I batted their hands away and stood, the world swinging so abruptly around me that I dry-heaved.

  “Steady,” my Dad said, grabbing me in a firm embrace and forcing me to look into his eyes.

  “Claudia?” I gasped, staring at my Dad in confusion.

  “Paul, I need to know what happened.”

  “She wanted to contact her mother.” Dad winced and let me continue. “There was someone upstairs and someone else attacked me from behind. He must have an accomplice.” I looked down and realized for the first time that my clothes were covered in blood. I looked down and saw a literal pool of blood there. “Oh God!”

  “Paul, you took a pretty good hit to the back of your head,” he told me. “And you lost a lot of blood. You need to relax!”

  I watched as one of the deputies picked up the gun I’d dropped with a gloved hand. He ejected the cartridge. “Full clip, Jack.”

  Dad eased me back into the stretcher, and Mom rushed in and threw her arms around me. “Are you okay?”

  “Where’s Claudia,” I demanded. “He must have used some sort of sedative on her.” My mother embraced me even tighter. I pushed her firmly away. “He’s going home,” I stated in a loud voice. “The Graham’s house.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Something he said to me on Monday about his mother dying when he was ten. He said that she was given too much insulin and his father had been suspected of it.” I leaped from the stretcher, and he caught me by the arms almost defensively. “It was him. She was his first. His own mother. Don’t you see? ‘It must end where it began.’ He’s taking Claudia home to kill her.”

  Dad nodded and grabbed the radio off his hip, talking into it even as he rushed out of the kitchen and into the garage. I started to follow but a paramedic forced me firmly back down onto the stretcher.

  A half hour later and a thorough search of Graham’s house revealed no changes since the investigator had left only the day before. No trace of entry and no sign of a struggle. My theory had been wrong, and now Claudia (the brains of our team) was no longer around to come up with an alternative.

  Another APB was put out on Nathan Graham and the missing vehicle that had belonged to his father, though I don’t think anyone harbored the belief that Graham was driving it. The blood in the kitchen was eventually confirmed to be entirely my own. Indeed, Claudia had not bled—at least, not while she was with me, I thought grimly.

  By twelve noon, the activity around the Wicke house had died down. All the neighbors had curbed their interest and gone home, leaving only me, the last remnants of the Sheriff’s Department and several Federal agents from the Bureau, with whom I had been required to talk to about what I could remember. The agent that had questioned me had been interested in whether Claudia had her cell phone on her when she was taken. He asked for the number and passed a note to another agent.

  When I got to the part about the flying game piece, the agent stopped his note taking and just nodded through the rest of our conversation. I was dismissed after only twenty minutes.

  Around that time, I was finally able to catch my father in a brief moment of inactivity and ask him if they’d gotten around to checking upstairs. He gav
e me a nod and said, “There was only two sets of footprints in the carpet up there and it matches you and Claudia’s. The only sign of entry was to Claudia’s bedroom, and you’ve already verified that that was the only room you entered, correct?”

  I nodded in confusion. “There was someone else up there. I definitely heard them.”

  He stared at the bandage on my head with concern and squeezed my shoulder. “Please go home, son,” my Dad told me. “You can’t do anything else here.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “They’ve been doing a fresh search of the Graham house, looking for anything that might point to where he took his victims. I figured I’d go lend a hand.”

  “Then I’m going to go with you.”

  “Paul,” he groaned in his not-this-again tone. “Listen to me…”

  “Dad, how can I be expected to sit around doing nothing? Claudia is gone!”

  Dad gave me a bittersweet look and nodded over at the truck he drove. Mom was behind the steering wheel, reading something in her lap. “You should see your mother safely home, Paul.”

  I fought the desperation back and managed to find reason in his request.

  “Take my truck and I’ll catch a ride with BeBe.” He squeezed my arm and started back up the driveway and into the garage.

  As I opened the driver’s side door, Mom looked up almost guiltily from the Bible in her lap and closed it, a single finger marking her place. “Dad wants us to go home.” I glanced furtively at the book in her hands. “Mind if I drive?”

  “Mind?” she chortled. “Are you insane? You have a concussion!”

  I marched dutifully around the other side before she could think to requisition a wheel-chair. As she pulled the truck out into the street, I felt her probing me with her eyes and I glanced purposefully away from her to look out the window. “We’re going to find her, Paul,” she stated. When I turned, I could see her eyes starting to glisten.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because I’ve never pictured your future without her,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “In your life, Claudia Wicke has always been as constant as the rise and fall of the tide.” She looked at me then with such a sureness of heart that I could almost believe her. “And you’ve always been the moon that she danced around.” Then in a sad voice, she added, “Of course, I always thought it would be much later.”

  Feeling the full gravity of reality settling around me, I replied, “I’m sure Claudia thought her Mom would be just as permanent a fixture in her life.”

  Silence settled over us, and I glanced down at the Bible on the seat between us. “Would you mind if we go to the church first?”

  “Actually, I’d like that a lot,” she admitted.

  Uncle Hank stood just inside the church foyer when we arrived, in that calm almost supernatural way he had of expecting us when he couldn’t have known we were coming. It didn’t take long before I realized that this time it hadn’t been him that had known. Tracy Tatum sat in the back row of the church just a few feet away.

  She rose and gave us both a tight embrace. “Father Hank picked me up last night at my request. He told me about Graham’s father. I felt I had to be here but I didn’t know exactly why until this morning.” She sat down in the pew, and the rest of us, including Uncle Hank, gathered around her expectantly.

  “All the events we’ve experienced lately have felt as though they’ve had a life all their own and as much as we might have tried to stop them, we’re at their mercy. Believe it or not, this is how my whole life has felt up until now,” she sighed heavily, then continued. “Claudia asked me why I’m involved and the real answer is, to stop the momentum. The wheel is slowing down now and I feel that it is about to stop. Our turn is coming. We can choose to live in fear or to fight.” She looked at me now. “Claudia is alive, Paul. I feel this as strongly as I feel the moon will rise and set this evening.”

  I couldn’t help but note her use of that word again. Moon.

  Mom and I glanced at each other and I saw her bring a hand to her face to cover her quivering lips.

  “This battle is not against one psychotic human being any longer,” she said, giving each of us a look in turn to make sure we were grasping the facts. “Paul, I feel you know this better than any of us. Tell me what you saw last night.”

  I took a deep breath and glanced at my mother. “We were in the Wicke’s house. We were using that damned board of Claudia’s.”

  Uncle Hank made a sound of disappointment down deep in his throat.

  “We thought Pat’s mother was speaking with us, but… something wasn’t right.” Tracy kept nodding, urging me on without words. “When I challenged its identity, the planchette flew straight at me and then I heard footsteps. There was someone upstairs.” My face began to quiver with emotion. “I was trying to protect her but instead I handed her right over to him,” I whispered in shame.

  “Let there be no doubt in your mind, Paul,” Tracy said to me. “Something led him there. Something is helping him.”

  Confusion and surprise filled my mother’s eyes. “What are we talking about here?” I gave her a furtive look and her voice strengthened. “I’m not your father, Paul. I need you to tell me everything you know. As crazy as you might think it sounds.”

  “I don’t even know where to begin.” I smiled in spite of the situation and looked at Tracy.

  She looked directly at Mom now. “It’s something ancient and something that was disturbed by your husband and his brother”—she reached out blindly and took Uncle Hank by the hand—“and Pat’s husband thirty-five years ago when they rescued me. Whatever it is, it’s been using Nathan Graham for its own ends. Evil is a creature of opportunity, Mrs. Graves.”

  Mom nodded and as she brushed the tears from her face almost angrily, I saw for an instant what I must have glimpsed in Claudia, a hidden reserve of strength. “What about Claudia? We have to get to her before…”

  “Simply finding Claudia won’t be enough in this case. She’s being kept alive for one reason only, Mrs. Graves,” Tracy explained. “It wants your family.”

  In my mother’s eyes, I saw a terror of the sort that I could not possibly have known. Some unknown element was stalking her husband and son, the two people in all the world that she felt a biological imperative to protect. I could see the overwhelming frustration of helplessness chiseled into her expression.

  “How do we fight something like that?”

  Tracy Tatum looked indecisive for the first time. “We have to destroy its harbor here in this world and sever its hold forever.”

  “Where then?”

  “Where it’s always been.” She looked from Uncle Hank to me. “The House.”

  “It was destroyed,” Uncle Hank managed in a small almost childlike voice.

  “No,” Tracy snapped. “That much I know. When it was burned back in ’83, its hold here in this world was weakened for a time, but in recent years its presence has been renewed. I felt it peak in September of 2001 and it’s been bubbling just beneath the surface of things ever since. It searches for other evil and indifferent men to prey on. All it needs is the weak and the unbelieving to turn a blind eye while it goes about its work.”

  Mom was staring down at her Bible now with a look of contrition.

  Tracy rose abruptly and slapped a hand to the back of the pew in front of her. “We find the House, we find Claudia.”

  When I gave Dad a call on my cell, it went straight to voicemail. I left a message that we were all okay and all over at the church. Though I knew he would call me the moment he knew anything, I still wanted him to reassure me that he was still trying.

  “C’mon,” Uncle Hank said putting his arm around my shoulders roughly. “Since we’ve got nothing better to do while we’re waiting, what say we go over to the rectory and eat something?”

  The refrigerator in the rectory held a cornucopia of Tupperware and casserole containers filled with probably some of the best home c
ooked food in Haven outside of my own mother’s kitchen. I say probably because I wasn’t eating with the others. At that moment, I couldn’t imagine ever eating again.

  Uncle Hank said that parishioners often gave him food out of kindness. “Often there’s an ulterior motive involved, y’know,” he said with a mouthful of Mexican cornbread. “Mrs. Gonzalez asked me to say a prayer for her husband to find work. I did, and he did. God did all the work and I got a casserole out of it.”

  “Now I’m sure your mother taught you better than to speak with your mouth full,” my mother said with a smirk. She herself had found the remnants of a Cornish game hen and candied yams.

  “Didn’t our boy Jack tell you that he got all the manners in the family?”

  “Now that’s a hard sell,” I commented, catching myself smiling, then feeling awful for forgetting for a moment about Claudia. I stared down at the small dish of untouched macaroni and meatball casserole that my mother had micro-waved for me slowly growing cold.

  “Paul, worrying and stressing is not going to bring her back any quicker,” my mother interjected.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the Tatum woman watching me. It made me uncomfortable to be examined that way. Moments later, I realized that my mother was studying Tracy Tatum almost as intensely as she had been studying me. “Ms Tatum…”

  “Please. Tracy.”

  My mother nodded and just bluntly asked: “So, Tracy, how is it that you were able to cheat death?”

  Tracy finished a mouthful of the Hungarian Goulash that she’d found somewhere in the back of the fridge, patted her lips with a napkin, and said, “Mrs. Graves, when I turned sixteen, I began to have vivid nightmares. I self-medicated. First alcohol, then wee… marijuana,” she quickly corrected, with a quick glance at my uncle. “But that only made things worse and the volume and detail of the dreams began to increase. So, I tried harder and harder stuff.” She started to reach for a pack of cigarettes she had placed on the table, but then thought twice. She drew into her hand the small leather pouch—the one that I had glimpsed before—that hung from the belt loop of her jeans and seemed to take comfort from that instead.