Hallowed Read online

  “I’m the key, right? I should know.”

  No matter how much I had tried to keep it at bay, the tears began to stream down my face. Tracy tried to reach for me but I rose and started away, rushing past my parents, catching the final glare that my father shot at Tracy Tatum.

  “Hey,” I heard my father call after me as I emerged from the rectory into the parking lot. I stopped and felt his steady hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to find her, Paul, okay?”

  “Not tonight,” I replied. “Tonight she’s alone and scared and probably hurt.”

  My mother grabbed me and held me for a moment. “We’re going to get through this, Paul.”

  It was after dark by the time we got home. Mom made us all sandwiches but was forced to set mine on the coffee table in front of me, as I had stubbornly refused to stop searching the internet for some clue. As soon as I got home, I retrieved Claudia’s laptop (feeling that in some artificial way, it attached me to her somehow) and began my search anew. Dad made a few more phone calls before joining my Mom upstairs. I could hear them up there whispering for nearly a half hour before the house finally went silent.

  I turned on the TV and found Claudia’s favorite true crime program, listening to it in the background as I continued my search.

  I fought against sleep despite the fact that I had gotten only a few fitful hours the night before, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I succumbed.

  The third time I had caught myself jerking awake, I turned the volume down on the TV, so that I could hear the ticking of the wind-up clock I had brought down from Dad’s office.

  Sometime after that, I drifted off into the dream that led us to Claudia.

  Chapter 30 Friday, (October 30th, 6:15am)

  I am back in the October Country.

  I stand in the same field where my dream had begun so many times before. The House Without Doors sits unchallenged and unchanged.

  TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK.

  I am aware, yet still dreaming.

  I think that I need to get some perspective on the location of the house, but in order to do that, I should get much higher. The moment the thought enters my head, I begin to rise from the ground, the house and the field sliding down and away from me.

  Consciously, I tell myself, “I’m flying,” and at the same time, I assure myself that this is nothing unusual. I am dreaming after all. These things are natural in a dream.

  In this position, I observe the house for the first time from a bird’s perspective. I float above the house and confirm that it indeed rests atop a hill. I see a small cemetery to its right and the forest of dead trees at its entrance. I glance into the distance, and to the west of the hill, I see a water tower. I turn to face it, squinting and trying to get a clearer picture. Suddenly, I glide toward it and see, as I drift closer, a rough circle in faded red paint curling around its side.

  TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK, TICK-TICK.

  Water tower. Red circle.

  I hear the faint melody of a familiar song.

  When I recognize what it is, reality floods back into my bones and I instantly begin to fall. The ground rushes toward me and I begin to flail my arms.

  Just before I hit, I open my eyes.

  I awoke with a start, nearly spilling Claudia’s computer from my lap in the process. The TV was still on and the clock still ticked beside me. An orange glow came from the front window. It was nearly morning and my cell phone lying on the coffee table played the song “Spooky,” the ring tone Claudia herself had programmed exclusively for her incoming calls.

  A couple of seconds slid by before I deduced that I was no longer dreaming. This was really happening. Now. I thrust the laptop aside and snatched the phone to my ear.

  “Hello? Claudia?”

  Silence on the other end.

  My entire body stiffened. I opened my mouth to shout a thousand curses. Only a whimper emerged. “Please don’t hurt her.”

  With that, the connection was severed.

  When I redialed the last number, the call went straight to voicemail, a standard recording that the phone had come with because Claudia had been too lazy to record her own greeting.

  As I noticed that I had received a text message, I vaguely registered that someone was knocking persistently on the front door. I clicked on it and the screen lit up with the following: “3 must return.” Below that was the sender’s identification, “Claudia’s Cell” and the time, three forty am, Friday, October 30th.

  Rushing to the door, I found a disheveled Uncle Hank standing there with a look of manic confusion in his eyes.

  “It came to me all at once as I was lying in bed this morning half asleep” he said without any sort of greeting. “Back in high school. Why I went to the house to begin with.”

  I just stared at him in wide-eyed confusion.

  He took a deep breath and collected himself. “Go get your father, Paul.”

  I found my father standing at the far wall of his office, his hair pea-cocked from sleep, staring bleary-eyed at a map of Texas tacked to his wall; four red pins marking the places the bodies had been found, yellow pins marking the victim’s home towns. On his computer screen was another map, this one more detailed.

  “Uncle Hank’s here,” I announced loudly. “He remembered something.”

  “Paul, they got a ping off a cell phone tower late last night just west of Austin near the intersection of state road 71 and 290,” he stated in a flat monotone, without turning. “After that, nothing.”

  I stepped up to his side and held the open cell phone out to him. He took the phone and gazed down at the screen in confusion. “What’s this?”

  “This is probably what they registered. I got it at three forty this morning,” I told him, catching his eye to make sure I had his undivided attention, then handed him the phone open to the text message.

  He glanced over the message with a blank expression.

  “And I just got a call from Claudia’s cell phone a few minutes ago. Whoever it was, hung up without a single word. Dad, do you think it was Claudia?”

  “If it was, she’s leaving us bread crumbs.” He handed my cell phone back to me and snatched his own off his desk. Hitting one of the numbers on speed-dial, he started toward the hall. “Hey Jeb, this is Jack. I thought you guys were going to contact us the moment anyone dialed out from the cell number we gave you? What’s that? What do you mean? It was just a few minutes ago.” He stopped abruptly in the doorway. Slowly, he turned back, giving me a confused look. “Just do me a favor, Jeb, double check that for me and give me a call back.” He snapped the phone closed. “They say that there was no call from Claudia’s phone this morning, Paul.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “I heard the phone ring, Dad. It was her phone.”

  “You get any sleep at all last night, pal?” He gave a look of concerned sympathy and squeezed my shoulder.

  I shrugged his hand off in irritation and started downstairs without him.

  Minutes later, we joined Uncle Hank in the kitchen, the coffee maker chugging and hissing. Hank had relaxed enough to start from the beginning of his story.

  An odd, nervous smile stole over his face as he took a deep breath and plunged into it. “I met her in high school at a football game in Parsonsville. We were playing the Tigers and the game was a regional championship, but when I saw her I forgot the game entirely, y’know.” My uncle had a dreamy, faraway look on his face that turned him, if only briefly, back into a teenager.

  “Well, we talked for over an hour by my watch, though it didn’t seem all that long to me. We ended up walking right out of the Tigers stadium, through the center of this tiny little town I’d never been to before and into the town square. There was a big fountain there, and it’s still there today actually. I know because I’ve been back there; the first time, just to see if I had dreamed the whole thing and the second, to question whether or not I wanted to enter the priesthood.” He stopped there, his mind returning to where it ha
d been and the weight returning to his shoulders.

  My anticipation got the best of me. “Did you kiss her?”

  He nodded without smiling and I saw a look of amused surprise bloom on my father’s face. “She rushed away from me soon after, and the last thing she said to me was that if I wanted to find her that she lived where the apples thrived. I remember it now because she had used that distinct word: Thrived.”

  “What do you think she meant?”

  “I spent the next few days asking everyone I knew where I might find apple orchards, using the excuse that I was doing a research paper for school. Of all the people I asked, you’ll never guess who it was who pointed me in the right direction.”

  “Ronnie Wicke.”

  We both looked up at my father, as he set a cup down in front of my uncle and filled it with coffee. “That was when Pop was working those overnight shifts at the plant, remember?” Hank gave a nod and settled back in his chair. “You never missed dinner and when you didn’t come home, I knew you were in some kind of trouble and it couldn’t wait until morning when Pop got home, so I went out looking for you, knocking on doors. I’m not sure why because we weren’t the least bit friends, but Ronnie was one of the first people I thought to ask.” My father got this look in his eye as he remembered vividly the moment. “I saw guilt there as he admitted that he pointed you in the direction of that town. That town…” His voice trailed off as he desperately tried to follow the path where his thoughts were leading him. “I didn’t know about Parsonsville. Was this the same girl you were sweet on? What was her name?”

  “Erin,” my uncle said in a low voice, his eyes staring at a spot high up on the wall, the insincere smile on his face barely masking the enormous pain I sensed beneath. “No, she came later. I always thought Erin must have been my fumbling attempt at recapturing what I’d felt at that first kiss. She never did tell me her name, y’know.” His eyes refocused and discovered my expression of what could have only been dumbfounded surprise. “I’d like to think it was love, but at that age, love has the least to do with it,” he admitted in a voice burdened with sadness.

  “How come you never told me this story before?” Dad asked him.

  “Searching for a pretty stranger somehow seemed a little less altruistic than going in search of a kidnapped girl,” my uncle answered with a wink. “Besides, there were too many questions and too little privacy. Everyone demanded to know everything that happened that day, every little memory. I held onto this one. This one was mine. Untainted by the reality of what came after.”

  And for a single pained moment, I thought about the bike ride in the dark with Claudia, holding hands. The ache in my chest seemed to focus me again.

  “Did you ever see her again, Uncle Hank?”

  He gave a single shake of his head. “How Ronnie knew there was an orchard up there, I never thought to ask. The question seemed unimportant after everything else that happened. Anyway, that’s the story of how I found the House and ultimately, how we found Tracy Tatum,” Uncle Hank concluded. He leapt to his feet. “Speaking of which, I need to let her know what’s going on. Where’s the phone?”

  “The house is near an apple orchard,” I heard my father murmur and with a shock. It was then that I remembered the dream of the water tower with a red circle on it.

  Apples, I thought. The aroma of apples had always been so prominent in my dreams. Was this the reason why?

  Rushing into the living room, I opened up the laptop but realized that the battery was dead. I raced upstairs, flung myself into my father’s chair and brought up a search engine. Less than a minute later, my father was at my side as I began to plug in the words “apple orchard” and “water tower” and “Texas” into a search engine.

  “It should be west of Austin, maybe near the 71 or the 290.”

  “Does an apple orchard sound familiar to you, Dad?”

  He shuddered instantly. His eyes glazed over as he attempted to remember. “Maybe,” I heard him respond. “Something about that feels right.”

  Several locations immediately popped up, and I went through them one by one looking for references to the highways he’d mentioned. Mom finally joined us--my rush up the stairs no doubt waking her--and stood watching us silently. Then almost simultaneously, one town name jumped out to both of us.

  “Of course,” my father commented, irony in his tone, as he pointed to the web-link to the map of the town. “Eden, Texas. Where is it?”

  “West of Austin.” I clicked on the website offering a satellite image. A moment later, the three of us were looking at a hazy washed out colored grid of quiet pasture lands separated by houses.

  Once I showed Dad how he could use the mouse to grab the image with the little white hand icon on the screen and move it, he firmly pushed me out of his chair and began to search the map meticulously. We had moved due north from what looked like a major highway, possibly 290 or 281, and the winding white tributaries that were roads began to disappear, only to be replaced by the grey ribbons of dirt roads and blankets of green pasture land.

  “What’s that?” He pointed at a dark triangular shape amid an ocean of pasture. “How do you zoom?”

  I took the mouse from him and clicked on the positive button. The image zoomed, grew hazy, then slowly sharpened again. It was a water tower. I pulled closer and the red circular image painted on it became more distinct.

  He grabbed the mouse from my hand, zoomed out again. He used the hand icon to pull the image to the left and open grassland slid across the screen, interrupted by a structure. “There!” he nearly shouted, his voice reverberating through the small room.

  My heart raced as he centered the structure and punched the positive button in an attempt to zoom closer. The screen suddenly went blank and accompanied by the message: “Sorry but the image requested is not available at this zoom level for this region.”

  He grumbled and moved the image slightly to one side and tried once again to zoom closer. Again the same message popped up.

  Finally, he pulled back to the first distant image with which we had started. The hazy structure sat in the center of a grand patch of green. His eyes narrowed.

  “What do you think, hon?” Mom asked Dad. “Is that it?”

  My father stared at the blurred satellite image drawing slowly closer and closer to the screen, his breathing increasing. He continued squinting at the image until his brow nearly made contact with the screen. Finally he dropped back in his chair, continuing to stare at the monitor at a distance as Mom and I drew closer to study the image for the first time.

  “It must end where it began,” I heard myself say.

  “Eden,” my mother said in an awed tone. She then looked at me with an almost amused expression. “You’re kidding me?”

  “Apple orchard and all,” I said, shaking my head, a smirk rising to my face unbidden.

  But my father’s expression was grim. He had gone deathly pale. I sensed a palpable fear emanating from my father, a source from which I had never felt that emotion. Anger, yes. Sadness, surely. But never this.

  “It looks like it’s at least a two hour drive, Dad,” I announced, if for nothing else but to hear another voice filling the void. “Shouldn’t we get going?”

  He didn’t say a word, just continued to stare at the screen.

  “Jack?”

  That was when he broke out of his reverie and peered up at Mom, straightening in his chair. “Sorry. Where’s Hank?”

  “I’m here,” Uncle Hank replied, striding inside the room. “I just touched base with Tracy. She’s on her way over.” He gave my Dad a look, glanced over at the screen, then back at him. “Is that it then?”

  My father simply gave him a nod.

  The two of them stood there staring at the computer screen like an open coffin at a funeral.

  “There’s one other thing, Uncle Hank,” I said, handing him my cell phone, displaying the text message that I had been sent. “It was sent from Claudia’s cell phone at t
hree-forty this morning.”

  Uncle Hank’s lips moved. His face was pale when he handed the cell phone back to me.

  Less than ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door. As I watched Mom open the front door of our house and found Tracy Tatum standing there, I couldn’t help but appreciate the long strange road that had led my family to this moment. Upstairs was a man, my only uncle, who had entered our house for the first time in over five years, while here was a woman who my father had rescued thirty-five years ago and for all intents and purposes was dead, entering the personal space of the our family for the very first time.

  “Come in, Tracy,” my mother said holding the door open for her.

  Hesitantly, Tracy Tatum entered studying the foyer and living room with the practiced eye of someone whose survival might depend on knowing every angle. “You have a beautiful home, Mrs. Graves.”

  Mom closed the door behind her, shutting her in protectively with the rest of our family.

  “Do you want an iced tea or water, Tracy?” It must have been the first time I had called her by her first name. I could see from the way her brows moved at the word that she indeed noticed.

  She smiled appreciatively. “Water would be great, Paul. Thank you.”

  My mother started upstairs, inviting Tracy to follow. As she reached for the banister, the ever-present leather bag dangled from her open palm by its strings.

  After Mom had disappeared upstairs, I called out to Tracy. “If you don’t mind me asking, what is that in the bag?”

  Tracy turned and smiled warmly. “I always pictured it would be Claudia who asked instead of you,” she replied with a smile. “It’s called a gris-gris bag. It was given to me by a very dear shaman friend of mine from New Orleans. It’s my talisman. When I feel afraid, I imagine I can hear a voice in the darkness telling me not to worry.” She reached out and took my hand. “C’mon, we better get upstairs. Never mind the water. Claudia needs us.”

  On the way up, I showed Tracy the text message. She gave a nod and swallowed audibly, passing the phone back to me. “Well, there is it, then,” was her only response.