Hallowed Page 33

  “Eventually, I realized that the visions I was having in my sleep state were connected to what was going on in real life. I was living in New Orleans at the time when I began having visions involving a taxi cab and single young black women who were staying at the Hotel Monteleone in the Quarter. All of them had been raped and strangled. With my help the NOPD was able to identify and apprehend a suspect that eventually turned out to be the one they had begun to call the Quarter Strangler.

  “When they began to call on me for other cases, word leaked to the press. Before long, strangers with lost children and lovers showed up at my door at all hours of the night begging me to help them. I tried to disappear but they only followed me. When I asked them to leave me alone, persistence turned to harassment. Death threats in one case. At one point, I even checked myself into a psychiatric hospital for about six months, thinking that if I isolated myself and got some rest, the visions would just… go away.

  “That’s when I started to dream about the House.”

  She turned to look at me now.

  “For a whole year when I was eighteen, I drove from town to town asking questions during the day and sleeping in my car at night trying to find this house, half thinking that I had hallucinated this whole event from my childhood.”

  “Then one day about twenty years ago my car broke down in the middle of nowhere.” She laughed then and I could see the eighteen year old girl she had been as clearly as if clouds had parted to reveal the sun for an instant. “Sounds like the beginning of every bad horror movie, right? But that’s God’s honest truth. I’m no mechanic and since I didn’t have Triple-A, I started walking and I found it.”

  “The House?” Uncle Hank asked, stiffening. “Where?”

  Tracy shook her head helplessly. “I’ve been trying desperately to remember, but still nothing.” She looked at Hank then. “You?”

  Hank shook his head. “I’ve tried so hard, but no.” He chuckled. “For a good part of my life, I tried to forget and now that I’m so desperate to remember, everything’s so foggy. Maybe it’s just old fart syndrome.”

  “Maybe something else,” I murmured. “When did you reconnected with Claudia’s father?”

  “Ronnie?” my mother asked in surprise.

  “Yeah, we had kept in touch over the years. The same year that I found the House again, the calls from him began to get more and more frequent.” She glanced almost guiltily at Mom and lowered her head. “All we did was talk. Totally innocent but, still, I knew he was married and I didn’t like the deception of it. I asked him one time if his wife knew about me. He said that she was a realist, and he was afraid that she would leave him if she knew”—Tracy looked up at Mom and swallowed awkwardly—“that he was going crazy.”

  “Was he?” my mother asked hesitantly.

  “If he was, then so was I, but unfortunately, convincing him of that was a battle that I lost. By that time, he had begun to have dreams as well. Mostly they involved the House and what had happened to us. Between the two of us, we tried to piece together what had happened back then but it was no use.

  “For a while, the dreams stopped, but then Ronnie talked of hearing voices and that he thought he was being watched in the darkness at night. I tried to minister to him, as a friend had once done to me, but I just wasn’t… strong enough. In the end, the only way any of us could cope with what we had been through was to try and purge the experience from our minds.”

  My uncle lowered his head, his eyes moving away from Tracy.

  “The next thing I heard, he had died in that accident.”

  “What about the House? What did you do to it?”

  Tracy grew quiet, her eyes turning profoundly sad. “Ronnie dowsed it with jet fuel that he got through a mechanic friend and we torched it. I took the opportunity to throw a bunch of personal things of mine inside, including jewelry and a duplicate set of my personal fillings that a dentist friend of mine concocted.” She scanned the faces of everyone at the table to check for doubt. “He owed me a favor,” she added before continuing. “The fire burned so hot that the investigators had to conclude that very little of my remains was left behind. They pronounced me dead based on my dental records.”

  Mom scoffed. “But then what? I work at a bank and I know you couldn’t get through life without at least two forms of ID.”

  Tracy gave Mom a stern look, almost as if she had just been challenged. “One of the gentlemen I helped out in New Orleans, a Haitian who had contacts all over the Quarter, got me a birth certificate and social security card. I owe my life to whoever went by the name of Courtney Noble.” Her eyes glanced furtively at Uncle Hank. “I knew it wasn’t a foolproof escape plan and that it would come back to haunt me eventually.”

  “Tracy, why did you believe that burning would stop it?” Uncle Hank asked.

  “Deuteronomy 17:7.”

  Uncle Hank nodded. “ ‘Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst.’”

  “In the original Hebrew it was literally ‘to burn out.’ I had begun to see a repetitive number combination over and over everywhere I turned. 17-2, 17-5, 17-7. But I didn’t put two and two together until I found the chapter from Deuteronomy online.”

  Her eyes glazed over and she began to recite the chapter she’d seared into memory: “ ‘If there is found among you, in any one of the communities which the Lord, your God, gives you, a man or a woman who does evil in the sight of the Lord, your God, and transgresses his covenant by serving other gods…”

  “ ‘You shall bring the man who had done the evil deed out to your city gates and stone him to death,’” Uncle Hank finished quickly, frowning. “It’s the same scripture many capital punishment advocates site as proof that God is for the death penalty.”

  “Do you not agree that evil must be punished?”

  Uncle Hank removed his spectacles and began to clean them with the corner of his sleeve. “Of course, my child, but by God’s hand, not ours. It is within man’s capacity to repent and be forgiven.”

  “How far would you extend that compassion, Father?” Tracy Tatum asked curiously, without the slightest bit of challenge in her voice. “Would you absolve Adolph Hitler of his sins against humanity?”

  “Without a contrite heart, forgiveness is useless.”

  “What if he confessed his crimes to you in secret and vowed to kill again?”

  “As long as we’re quoting Deuteronomy: ‘The testimony of two or three witnesses is required for putting a person to death, no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness.’”

  “How about a million witnesses?”

  Uncle Hank put his glasses back on with a labored sigh. “What would you have me say? I’m a man of the cloth, not an executioner. Fortunately, it’s a dilemma I’ve never had to face.”

  “That could change,” she said bluntly, staring down at the leather bag in her hand.

  My cell phone broke through the silence. Seeing Dad’s ID on the display, I snatched it up. “Anything?” I asked him hopefully.

  His sigh was heavy. “Not much. We found more personal effects from the victims in a metal lunchbox in the closet. There was a picture of his mother in there along with an empty syringe. Nothing belonging to Claudia. No blood or signs of a struggle. Wherever he’s taken her, we’re sure he didn’t take her there first.”

  “Were the Feds able to trace her cell?”

  “No,” he sighed. “They think the battery might have been removed.”

  He ended the call by saying that he would be around to the church shortly. It was already past two o’clock in the afternoon and we still had no clue where to start looking for Claudia.

  All their eyes were on me when I hung up. “They haven’t found anything at the Graham house that might lead us to Claudia,” I told them. “I thought for sure that’s what was meant by, ‘It must end where it began.’ Now I know it must be the House.”

  “Paul, I’ve felt all along that you are the key to finding this place.”

>   Though Mom knew, I shared with Uncle Hank and Tracy the info about the ceramic vampire and the notes found with the body. About this time, my father called out a “Hello” from the outer office. Uncle Hank went out to meet him and bring him in. He must have warned him who was inside, because he didn’t look surprised when he stepped into the rectory. He gave Mom a kiss and Uncle Hank handed him a clean plate. Dad found some cold fried chicken in the fridge and took a seat across the room from us, the one that just happened to be farthest from Tracy Tatum.

  “Jack, we’ve been talking informally about what our next step is going to be.”

  “Broward County has decided that the Feds are best equipped to handle this and we’re going to let them do their jobs,” Dad stated without affect. For a moment I wasn’t sure I understood. Defeat was not something I recognized in my father.

  “No, Jack,” my mother’s voice said from across the room. She turned and gave him a look that I’d only seen one other time in my presence. I think the previous debate had been over a broken washing machine and believe that the actual words she’d used were “unless you want to start doing all the clothes yourself, stop arguing and buy me a machine that works.”

  My father is a smart man. The next day Sears and Roebuck delivered my mother a new washing machine.

  “Excuse me?” he grunted, lowering the chicken leg back to the plate. I said he was a smart man, not that he was a quick learner.

  “No one outside of the people in this room have a clue about what this is really about.”

  “Kathy!” he started sharply, then caught himself and lowered his volume. “We’re not going to talk about this here.”

  “This is not a decision that we will make as a couple, Jack,” she stated. “The responsibility belongs to every person present as everyone here might be in danger. That’s why we told them about… the condition of Mr. Graham’s body.”

  “Kathy, that’s privileged information.”

  In the crosshairs of Dad’s scowl, my mother stared unblinkingly back at him.

  With quiet fascination, I watched this exchange out of the corner of my eye, fearing direct eye contact might result in bodily injury. He set his plate down on the arm of the reading chair. “This doesn’t have anything to do with her.” He poked the air violently in Tracy’s direction.

  “I’m afraid it does.”

  Dad turned his glare to his brother. “Oh, are we going to rehash this X-files bullshit again. I’ve just spent the last four weeks staring at the results of real evil committed by a real human monster, and you want me to sit here and listen to this crazy woman tell ghost stories.”

  “Lower your voice, dear. You’re in a church.”

  Dad grunted and snatched up his plate, which he proceeded to scowl into.

  “Now Tracy was just telling us that Paul might be able to help us locate the house where Claudia is being held.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” Dad muttered under his breath. “And there goes a hundred years of investigative procedure out the window.”

  Tracy turned and looked at me with a cheerfulness that blindly ignored the tension in the room. “First, I need you to tell me about these dreams you’ve been having. You need to give me as many details as you’re able.”

  I began then to describe my dreams of the House with no doors or windows, the outside blackened by flames, the forest of dead trees, the cemetery in an open field, the overpowering, pungent smell of apples. My father stopped nibbling at his chicken and just stared at me.

  “I’m a child of maybe five or six trick or treating and I carry a plastic pumpkin bucket full of candy. It shines with a bright white light. It fact, it’s so bright, it’s hard to look at directly. Claudia told me once that the custom of carving pumpkins was initially done to carry a candle inside, before there were lanterns.”

  “Do you always have the pumpkin?”

  “Once, I looked down and instead of candy, there was a book there. I think it must have been a Bible.”

  Uncle Hank instantly spoke the words: “ ‘Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path.’”

  “So in your dream, you are a child,” Tracy continued. “Besides candy, what did you love as a child?”

  “This is ridiculous,” I heard my father grumble.

  “Halloween, ghost stories, haunted houses.”

  Tracy grabbed a pen and pad from Hank’s desk and began scribbling. “Go on.”

  “I loved video games and magic.”

  “Now you see me. Now you don’t,” Dad muttered with a chuckle.

  All of us looked up. My father was smirking at us, arms folded impetuously. “See, I can play this game too. We can go on all night like this, connecting unrelated things.”

  “They are connected somehow,” Tracy replied. “Paul, besides their relation to you, what do all these things have in common?”

  “I need a computer.” Hank rose from his seat behind the desk and guided me to his desk computer.

  I brought up Google and entered the words “Halloween,” “haunted houses,” “magic,” and “video games.” I gasped aloud at the first entry that came up. Uncle Hank glanced over my shoulder at the Wikipedia entry I pulled up on “Robert Folliott.”

  “Who is he?”

  I turned the monitor around so that everyone else could see.

  “Robert Folliott was a video game designer back in the eighties and nineties and used to be one of the wealthiest men in Texas.”

  “Oh, that Robert Folliott!”

  The four of us glanced at my uncle with interest. “He used to give these incredible magic shows at his mansion in Austin, but he called it Folliott Manor. He was a little pretentious but just the same, quite the showman.”

  “Yeah, he would turn his entire property into a huge interactive Haunted House every Halloween,” I added, remembering my conversation with Claudia on the way to Eerie’s in Austin. “He would only give out a certain number of tickets a season and people would camp out for weeks ahead of time just to get a chance to get in.”

  Uncle Hank slapped the top of his desk. “Now you see it. Now you don’t! That’s what he used to say every year to close his Magic Show, just before he would pull a disappearing act in front of everyone.”

  My father rose from his seat and glanced over my mother’s shoulder at the computer screen.

  “Died only last year, too.”

  “He’s dead?” I exclaimed as I scanned the entry. “I had no idea.”

  “I heard that he committed suicide,” Uncle Hank commented.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last year according to this entry,” Mom read. “It says he was found at his manor house in Austin by a childhood friend and one of his housekeepers in an upper floor library that he used for séances.” She squinted at the entry. “Séances?”

  I scrolled further down to a section that read “Paranormal Interest.” “Listen to this,” I said, reading the following entry: “In 1999, Folliott started researching psychic phenomenon and hauntings, going as far as to wire entire houses with electronic surveillance equipment in an attempt to capture proof of these spiritual occurrences.” Furtively, I glanced at Uncle Hank, who frowned at the computer screen in confusion. “In 2002, Folliott began building a second house that he hoped to turn into a paranormal research institute. Those few insiders that had heard the rumors of his new pet project with seemingly no money-making potential whatsoever had dubbed it Folliott’s Folly.

  In an interview for Wired magazine in 2001, Folliott is quoted as saying that he specifically chose the site of the future estate because it was ‘an area with a dense concentration of paranormal energy.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?” my father snapped.

  “Where is this place?” my uncle asked in dread. He firmly pushed past my father and elbowed me out of the way of the computer. He brought up Google again and began a new search. Dad crowded in next to him.

  After ten long minutes of searching, we found
nothing. No street address. No description. Not even a city.

  “Let me see if I can get some help from the department,” Dad said, dialing up a number as he stepped out of the room.

  “This is ridiculous,” Uncle Hank said after another twenty minutes of searching. “Obviously, his estate has gone to great lengths to keep this place a secret.”

  After some coaxing, I took his place in front of the computer and used every search engine I could think of. I even posted questions to random Folliott fan forums, hoping someone might have heard a simple rumor. All I got were computer geeks wanting to reminisce about Folliott and his original mansion, no specific information on the location of the new one.

  Dad took over the rectory’s front reception desk and went through a whole list of personal contacts from local cops to private businessmen, calling them one by one. Five o’clock came and went.

  With a sigh, Dad came into the room and announced, “Well, I got the address of the mansion in Austin, but as far as the new one goes, that seems to be a heavily guarded secret.”

  “Secret? Are they aware that there are lives at stake?” Uncle Hank snapped.

  “Yeah, I got both BeBe and my friend over at the Bureau on this, but since I’m trying to do this outside the bounds of the investigation, things are moving much slower. They tell me that nothing is going to happen tonight.” He gave me an apologetic look and sighed. “There’s nothing more we can do but wait by the phone.”

  “And pray,” my uncle added.

  “Yes, and pray,” my mother agreed.

  My father murmured something under his breath. “They’ll call as soon as they know something.”

  I just sat in front of the computer staring at the same screen I had brought up over three hours ago and realizing that I was getting the exact same unhelpful results, but I couldn’t allow myself to stop. I couldn’t allow myself to give up.

  Mom and Dad were standing now. “C’mon, Paul.”

  I sighed heavily and looked up at Tracy Tatum for some reason.