Hallowed Read online

  “Do you quote apocrypha now?”

  “Not Enoch. That’s from Jude 1:6. New testament.”

  Hank glanced up at her then. “That argument has never had any basis in fact. Angels have no corporeal form, no flesh, so says our Lord.”

  “Wasn’t Jacob said to have wrestled with one until daybreak,” Tracy challenged.

  “There are wildly varied interpretations of that incident.”

  “Jesus was speaking of the angels who ‘kept not their first estate.’ Who can say what they became after they chose to defy His will.”

  “Ok somebody better start talking to me in King’s English,” my father snapped, his patience stretched to its limits at last.

  “Here’s what it boils down to, Jack. This Graham character is a devotee of an ancient Biblical legend, whether or not it actually exists is not the point.”

  Tracy gave a sharp shake of her head. “That’s a very dangerous attitude to take under the present circumstances, Father.”

  Ignoring the voices that pleaded with me to warn them what they were up against--what I myself faced below in the cavern--I distracted myself with righteous indignation. “Does any of this help us find Claudia?” I asked loudly.

  “It might give us some insight into the way his mind works,” Uncle Hank murmured.

  “Okay that’s something that might help us,” Dad responded. “We can’t lose focus here. We have to stay on point if we’re going to get out of here safe.”

  Another thought occurred to me then. “What time is it?”

  “Nearly nine PM.”

  “The last time I looked at my watch,” I exclaimed in wonder, “it was only three-thirty.” I turned to Tracy. “Remember what you told me in the confessional about time moving differently here?”

  “Yes, we’ve all experienced it,” she stated, looking up at my father. A look passed between them, and I surmised that I had just lent support to one side of an argument that had been brewing since they’d first entered the cavern.

  “I saw things out there…” My words failed me. I looked pleadingly at Tracy. She returned my look and gave me a reassuring smile. “I know,” the look seemed to say.

  “How long ago did this business with Graham happen?”

  “That’s the problem,” I explained. “When I passed out it was probably around three-thirty.”

  “Let me see your watch.” He drew his arm up to mine and checked the difference between them. There was only a few minutes difference. “Let’s all agree on a time, right now. Set it for nine o’clock exactly.”

  Both Hank and Tracy adjusted their watches accordingly.

  After I had set my own, I reached into my pocket and was comforted that Claudia’s charms hadn’t been something I had imagined. I took them out, displaying them in my palm.

  “Are you sure they’re hers?”

  “Without a doubt. There was one left in the old barn you passed and one in the elevator car.”

  Dad grunted and stepped deeper into the cellar/attic with the lantern. He came to a stop directly beneath a cord dangling from the ceiling. Standing clear, he pulled it down. With a groaning protest of springs, a door in the ceiling opened, revealing a folded ladder atop. “Looks like an attic door.” Handing the lantern to Tracy, he cautiously opened it as wide as it would allow and unfolded the segmented wooden ladder with Uncle Hank’s help.

  Uncle Hank shined a flashlight up into the dark rectangle of the next room beyond. “Appears to be a hallway.”

  “Now why would anyone want an entrance to a cellar smack dab in the middle of a hallway where someone might fall through?” Dad started up the ladder, a short space of maybe four feet. I heard him say, “That’s strange,” just before he seemed to fall from the ladder. There was a loud tumble and crash and Uncle Hank started up after him. “Wait!” he yelled back.

  “What happened!” I started up behind Uncle Hank, but Tracy restrained me.

  “I’m okay,” I heard Dad yell back. “What kind of maniac designed this place?”

  Another optical illusion, I surmised.

  “Send Paul next,” I heard Dad say. Giving me a look of paternal concern, Uncle Hank carefully guided me up the ladder. “Stop! Hank, grab his belt and hold him until he can get his bearings.”

  Get my bearings, I wondered?

  “Tracy, can you shine the flashlight up here for me?”

  I got to the top of the ladder and looked up through the hole in the ceiling into the hallway partially lit by flashlight and was instantly confused. My father stood on the adjacent wall reaching up towards me. Adding to my consternation, I could clearly see a framed portrait on the ceiling of the hallway above me.

  Folliott had gone all out this time to decorate the room to give the appearance that the entrance from the cellar/attic was on the wall of the hallway instead of in the floor as it should be.

  Then I looked at my father.

  Why was he standing on the adjacent wall? That was impossible.

  I reached through to my father and felt my center of gravity begin to pull me down toward him against every instinct in my body. I was climbing up on a ladder and suddenly down was no longer down but directly in front of me.

  Before I could stop myself, I tumbled headfirst toward him. Instinctively, I began to pinwheel my arms. “Go limp, Paul!” he shouted.

  He grabbed me around the waist and turned my body ninety degrees, setting my backside onto the floor.

  I looked around at what I could see of the hallway. The framed portrait that I had initially seen on the ceiling was now on the wall, but the door that I knew led from the hallway into the cellar was now about six feet up on the wall.

  My head began to spin and I started to wobble to one side. Dad caught me and held me steady. “Easy now.”

  “Dad, this is impossible,” I whispered to him in awe. “Folliott might have been a genius at designing video games but he couldn’t alter the laws of gravity.”

  With a stony expression my father stepped back to the hole in the wall leading to the cellar. I heard Uncle Hank curse aloud and call out with confused amusement, “You’re standing on a damned wall, Jack!”

  “Just send the backpack down.”

  Moments later, I saw the end of a rope emerge from the cellar opening high up on the wall like a stiff pole. Then suddenly mid-way through thin air, it did the impossible and appeared to go off an invisible ledge, falling at a forty-five degree angle down toward me and Dad. He grabbed the end of the rope and tossed it to me in frustration. “Hold this taunt.”

  I pulled and the kink in the center of the rope straightened out with a little resistance, like a pressurized garden hose.

  “Hand me the lantern, Hank, bottom first,” he snapped back. “And tilt it about forty-five degrees.”

  I watched in amazement as Uncle Hank handed the lantern up and through the door in the wall. Dad slowly guided the base of the lantern towards him, almost vertical at first, then into a horizontal position as he pulled it toward his chest.

  He turned to me, my mouth hanging open. “Here, keep this out of the way,” he ordered with irritation, thrusting the lantern into my hands. “Send her down next, Hank.”

  He helped Tracy down next, her hands and legs wrapped around the stiffened rope I held, Uncle Hank guiding her from below (or above, depending on your perspective). When she first broke the plain, her eyes grew big and she clutched first at the rope, then when she got close enough my father’s neck, like a child who couldn’t swim suddenly finding herself in the deep end of the pool. “Ease up,” he commanded her. “Go limp.”

  He pulled her completely out of the doorway, her legs swinging out into empty space. She gave a single scream and squeezed her eyes shut, before Dad set her feet on the ground again. She opened her eyes, looked around in alarm, and broke into giggles. Despite Dad’s attempts to remove both her arms locked around him, she held tight, unable to contain her tension-filled laughter.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, a brief smirk
breaking out on his face. He cast a look in my direction that seemed to say, “Women, huh,” before turning back to Uncle Hank.

  Dad held out his arms. “Let’s go, big brother! Ally-oop!”

  “I think I got this,” my uncle replied, tossing the remainder of the rope and the backpack down to us. He climbed to the top of the ladder, sat down on the top step, then lowered his legs out of the doorway toward my father. He grabbed Hank’s legs and guided them to the floor. Hank let go of the ladder above and straightened up, instantly beginning to sway backwards. Dad caught him, but it was too late. Both of them went over into the wall with the portrait with an enormous bang.

  They lay there in a pile, laughing like a couple of teenagers. Tracy got the giggles again and less than a minute later, I lost it as well. There we were, all erupting in laughter, tears streaming down my uncle’s face, for a brief moment the immediate danger of the situation completely non-existent.

  Then the house responded.

  The floor rippled like the spine of a humongous animal, casting all of us to one side or the other and causing us to collapse back against the narrow walls of the hallway. The walls themselves began to vibrate like the engines of earth movers. We all lay where we had fallen, until the tremors subsided.

  “What the hell was that?” I murmured.

  “A house constructed within a cavern can’t be all that stable,” Dad replied, climbing to his feet and helping me up. Once Uncle Hank helped Tracy up, we all turned to look down the hallway, which continued on into the darkness past what the light revealed.

  Sconces holding the waxy stubs of spent candles lined the walls of the hallway around us. I pointed out one of the pictures on the wall to Dad. He took the lantern out of my hand and stepped past me, illuminating a black and white picture of an elderly couple lying side by side in an old-fashioned bed. The man was dressed in a suit and the woman, a dress that must have been her Sunday’s best. Coins lay atop their open eyes.

  The only reaction from my father was a grunt of disapproval before Tracy stepped up beside us. She gave my father a glance as if to offer him the opportunity to explain the picture.

  Finally, she asked, “You mind if I explain to Paul what the coins mean?”

  “Right now we need to keep moving,” he snapped with irritation, taking the lead and starting down the hallway.

  Uncle Hank, who had finished winding the rope back up, took up the rear position behind me and Tracy. “Do you recognize it?” he asked Tracy.

  In an almost inaudible whisper, as she started down the hallway, Tracy replied, “As crazy as it sounds, I believe I almost I do.”

  My father stopped and waited for Tracy to catch up. “You couldn’t possibly remember this part of the house,” Dad responded. “This is all newly constructed by Folliott.”

  “What if it wasn’t?” she retorted as she stepped around my father to take the lead, shining the beam of her flashlight into the darkness.

  My father’s expression hardened and before he could reply, Uncle Hank stepped beside Tracy as we continued walking down the slowly narrowing hallway. Even the ceiling had slowly begun to creep closer to the tops of our heads. “Explain what you mean by that.”

  We had already passed through several yards of the hallway with not one door breaking the seemingly endless succession of wall sconces and frames, though the photos I noticed had turned into painted portraits, these as somber and dark as the photo I’d seen earlier. The subjects all unsmiling and grim and emaciated--men with dead souls exposed to the light.

  Tracy took a glance back over her shoulder as if uncertain for the first time. “All of us can recall being inside the house the first time, even if we don’t remember the details, but does anyone remember entering?”

  My uncle and father traded looks and slowly shook their heads.

  The House Without Doors, I thought. Just like in my dreams. No entrance. No exit. Both literally and figuratively.

  “What’s your point?”

  “Maybe the house that Ronnie and I burned down fourteen years ago was simply a façade,” Tracy stated. “Y’know, like a set on a Hollywood back-lot. An empty shell.”

  The hallway had narrowed to the extent that Uncle Hank was now forced to follow behind Tracy. Taking up the rear position, Dad steered me protectively in front of him.

  “Based on what we saw when we were topside, this structure must logically be below ground, constructed inside a portion of the cavern we came in through,” Tracy said.

  “Claudia told me that this house was the site of several other murders over the years, since the thirties,” I told them. “So, what you’re saying here is that this house has been sitting undisturbed below ground since the thirties?”

  “The façade house that was burned down has been around since that time, but the original house—let’s call it ‘the hub house,’ the house we’re in right now--has been around much longer, I would assume, possibly since before the turn of the century.”

  “Dear Lord,” Uncle Hank exclaimed, removing his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose. “It’s an axis mundi.” Of all of us, only Tracy nodded in recognition, her own eyes filling with excitement. Glancing back at Dad, I saw a blank expression that must have matched my own. “It’s a symbol in both literature and certain faith systems where several points ultimately come together, whether it be four compass points, or where the surface of something gives way to a depth…”

  “Or the transition between the living and the dead,” Tracy finished ominously.

  “Or even time, if we’re talking dimensional planes here.” My uncle suddenly had a gleam in his eye that made him look for an instant like any other kid I might have sat next to in Physical Science class at Haven High. “Fantastic,” he said under his breath, “No wonder Folliott wanted to build an institute here.”

  “Research aside, something just doesn’t jive with me,” Dad admitted. “Why would someone go to all this trouble to live in a place like this?”

  “Maybe there’s some sort of intangible connection here that we’re missing, Jack. Maybe the house was originally built here because it was the right spot to serve their religious purposes,” Uncle Hank replied.

  “Like a church? What sort of religion would bury their church in a cavern?”

  A look passed between Tracy Tatum and Uncle Hank and he tucked his Bible tighter against his side. “When this is all over, when we’ve got Claudia safely out of here, we have to destroy this place,” he stated decisively, his eyes regaining their focus.

  “I agree,” Tracy replied.

  Casting a look over my shoulder, I made eye contact with my father and he nodded. “I could never get another night’s sleep knowing this place still exists. That’s why I already arranged something with Sheriff Brannigan to assure that no one ever sets foot in this place again.

  “Stop,” Tracy called out.

  Looking through the arms of my uncle, I could just make out at the end of the hallway, a stairway tucked away beneath the shadows of the low ceiling, disappearing into the darkness.

  “Tracy,” I asked in a hopeful tone. “Please tell me you remember this part.”

  “Okay, I remember this part,” she chirped with a dark chuckle. “Vaguely.”

  “Well, do you?” my father snapped impatiently. Then casting a look at the stairwell, he lowered his voice substantially. “This maniac may be holding Claudia in the same place you were held.”

  “It was thirty-five years ago and I was five,” she responded tensely. “He was holding me above, but I slipped away from him at one point and got lost in the caverns below. That’s when you found me.” She shot Hank a look. “But before that, there was someone else. Someone who told me that I was going to be safe and that they would help me.” Her eyes found me.

  My eyes snapped up. I could see within the intense eyes watching me that she knew what I knew, that there was a bond between us going back thirty-five years, to a day before I was even born. The concept wavered in my mind
like a sun devil on a blistering horizon. In an effort to grasp it, I felt a little dizzy.

  Before I could answer, a low moan came from behind us. We all turned simultaneously to look at the legless torso dragging itself across the empty floor of the hallway, leaving a dark smear in its wake. The young man wore a military uniform.

  Hank made the sign of the cross. Dad cursed.

  I stared in open wonder, moving defensively behind the stairway.

  “Hank,” the phantom bellowed. “Jack! You left me to die there in a foreign country! You were my brothers! You were supposed to watch out for me!” The creature let loose a scream of mortal pain. “Oh God, my legs! Where are my legs?”

  “Norman?” Dad called plaintively. He started instinctively forward, but Tracy restrained him from the front and my uncle grabbed him around the waist. I felt the lantern pushed roughly into my hands.

  “No, Jack,” my uncle said in an evenly modulated tone. Pulling him closer in a rough embrace, Uncle Hank tugged him up the steps of the stairway behind them. Dad struggled until my uncle threw all his substantial weight against him, dropping him onto the lower step. My father began to howl then, a sound so horribly sad and so uncharacteristic coming from a man I knew to be so strong, that I felt my eyes fill with tears.

  Tracy slipped dexterously past us. Peering up the shadowy stairway with the flashlight held out before her, she pushed boldly through the darkened opening. All but her legs disappeared into the next floor, then her open hand extended to me an invitation to join her.

  Uncle Hank, still holding my father tightly, gave me a quick nod, all the while murmuring under his breath in a language I didn’t recognize. His eyelids half-closed then. He looked almost as if he were in some sort of meditative state. I realized then that he must be praying in Latin as he comforted my father. His baby brother.

  Taking one look back over my shoulder, I glimpsed the empty hallway again, not even a spot of blood remained as evidence of the apparition we had all collectively witnessed. Keeping the lantern safely down at my side, I reached blindly up behind me, felt Tracy’s hand enclose around mine and trustingly let her haul me up the steps into the unknown darkness above us.