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  Chapter 35 Friday, October 30th, (10:48 pm)

  I emerged from the stairwell into a study. From the light of my lantern, I could see books covering two of the shelved walls from floor to ceiling. The beam of Tracy’s flashlight danced over oil paintings, depicting scenes of angels and dark vistas that hung along the other two walls. A large round table sat in the center, flanked by ornate wooden chairs. A large oil lantern sat atop it powdered with dust.

  Standing in contrast to the rest of the room, modern recording equipment and lights were pushed into several corners. It all looked completely new, some of it still wore their wrappings and price tags. Next to all this, I saw a small compact generator that smelt of gasoline.

  “I’m assuming this is all part of Folliott’s paranormal research,” Tracy suggested, giving the equipment a cursory examination. She took a complete circuit of the room, peering in each corner in turn before finally returning to the table. “There’s no door leading out of here,” she stated with confusion.

  “Tracy,” I called in a low voice. When she turned to face me, I asked, “The little girl in the dark that I comforted earlier? Was that you?”

  Tracy studied me, her eyes growing distant and glassy. Slowly, she nodded.

  “I knew it when I first saw you in the rectory that night,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion.

  “But it was completely dark.”

  “In your flashlight beam, I saw your face for a brief instant before you disappeared. But I never forgot,” she told me. “Then when I finally saw you again, I became that child all over, and you were holding me and telling me everything would be okay. And when you fainted and I caught you and felt your weight in my arms for that one fleeing moment before they took you from me, it was the most bizarre experience. Like this mythical figure you’ve only dreamed about becoming flesh and blood.”

  Listening to her talk about me like that sent cold chills through my gut. None of this seemed real. The cavern. The hallway. Seeing something that might just as well have been my uncle, a man who died decades before I was born. It had become overwhelming to me.

  “How it is possible? How could you recall from your childhood something that just happened?”

  “The human mind perceives time linearly, right? I believe that with our Creator, past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously.” She reached out and took me by the hands, staring at me intensely. “Perhaps, somehow, down here, we’re allowed to glimpse a little bit of how He perceives reality.”

  “Why here? What makes this place so unique?”

  “If this really is the tomb of the Fallen Ones, perhaps it holds a faint echo of the home they abandoned,” she released my hands and seemed to shiver slightly. “Though just as twisted as they’ve become.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, Tracy,” I whispered.

  “Try and remember the most wonderful feeling you’ve ever had and magnify that a thousand times.”

  Immediately, I thought of Claudia and the feeling I had when I held her.

  “Now imagine that you could never experience that feeling again. Never return to that place. Eventually, you would come to resent that place so much that an equivalent hate would replace that enormous passion,” she explained. “I imagine that’s what we’re dealing with here, Paul. Hate on a level that we’ve never been witness to.”

  Dad emerged from the lower floor with Uncle Hank just behind, supporting him. My uncle stubbed his toe on something on the floor. Reaching down into the darkness, he retrieved a leather bound book the size of a briefcase and tucked it beneath his arm.

  I stooped to get a good look at the electrical generator in the corner. “If we can get this running, we can turn on the lights.”

  “Don’t touch any of that, Paul,” my father snapped, taking the lantern back from me.

  Uncle Hank examined some of the paintings. “Bosch’s ‘Fall of the Rebel Angels’ and Gustave Dore’s engravings of Dante’s Inferno,” he said with surprise, moving from frame to frame along the wall, squinting in the darkness. “And here’s Dore’s version of Jacob wrestling with the angel… and Rembrandt’s interpretation. Reproductions, of course, but very good ones.”

  Tracy had found the remnants of a long matchstick and managed to light the oil from the lantern. The oil lamp drove some of the oppressive darkness into the far corners and enabled me to read some of the titles of the books on the shelves.

  Many titles were written in foreign languages: Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, such as a large red tome entitled, “Psuedomonarchia Daemonum.” The ones I could make out had such ominous titles as “Surviving a World of Darkness,” and “Stepping into Eternity: A Caster’s Bible,” and “The Sworn Book of Honorius.”

  Tracy took one look at the leather book my uncle held under his arm and gave a short gasp. Unconsciously crossing himself, Uncle Hank handed the book off to Tracy and turned to the closest shelf. As he began clicking off the foreign titles, I suddenly recalled that as a Roman Catholic priest he was required to speak several different languages.

  Tracy opened the huge leather book she had taken from Uncle Hank atop the table, turning the pages with the tips of her fingers as if afraid she might contract something communicable from mere contact with it.

  “What is all this?” my father asked, joining her.

  “Grimoires,” Tracy answered, drawing something that looked like a bound tuft of weeds from one of the pockets of her coat.

  My father cast a look over his shoulder. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  I found myself answering for her. “It’s a spell-book.” Tracy and Hank both shot me a look then. “I believe Claudia and her friends may have been using something like this in a séance.”

  Uncle Hank sighed and turned to me. “Paul, are you sure of this?”

  I asked myself the same question. How did I know that?

  My heart assured me that Claudia and her friends had used a spell-book similar to the ones on the shelves. I knew this without evidence to back it up.

  I gave a slow but deliberate nod. “I’m sure.”

  Tracy lit the object from her pocket afire with a cigarette lighter and then extinguished it again with a wave. Smoke began drifting up from it. The scent of it was very familiar and somehow set my nerves at ease.

  We joined her at the table where she opened the book to the section marked by a blood red ribbon. The title of the chapter was “Summoning Grigori.”

  “Grig-gori?”

  “Another name for the two hundred fallen angels, who were bound by God to watch over the men of earth,” Tracy explained. “The Book of Enoch tells how an angel named Samyaza led a group of angels to mate with human women and bear offspring.”

  “The book isn’t accepted by most organized religions as part of the traditional canon,” Uncle Hank countered.

  Tracy waved the smoking object over the book. “Yet Enoch is explicitly quoted in the book of Jude. Also fragments of it were found as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to Enoch, it was these Grigori or Watchers that taught the innocent men and women magic and astrology and war.”

  She peered down at the book before her. “There’s a quote here in the introduction: ‘And the Lord said unto Michael: “Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgment and of their consummation, till the judgment that is forever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined forever. And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them to the end of all generations.’”

  Uncle Hank shrugged. “The Book of Enoch is considered by some to be pure biblical fantasy. A lot like today’s historical
fiction.”

  “Whoever used this library obviously thought it was more than fantasy.”

  “Nathan Graham,” I stated with decisiveness.

  All eyes turned to me. No one opened their mouth to dispute my claim.

  Leaning forward to study the book closer, Dad asked, “Was this like some sort of Satanic Bible?”

  Tracy shook her head. “No, this is more of a cookbook. Most of the books you see were probably used to cast a series of spells, each one intending to feed power to the next spell, increasing their effects in an attempt to bring about the intended result.”

  “Which was?” my father asked.

  “The end of the world,” Tracy pronounced, “which as legend has it is the pre-appointed time at which the Fallen Angels shall be released from their captivity.”

  My father traded a world-weary look with my uncle. “Great,” he sighed. “I’m guessing these guys weren’t all that big on the concept of life insurance policies.”

  Then it hit me all at once. The mine cave-in. The bridge collapse. The school shootings. Not to mention the murders committed by Graham. Was it possible that all those events had been the outside result of what had begun here in this room?

  “I think it’s the end of the world with a capital ‘E,’” I recalled Bridgette Sullivan saying that night.

  Random, unconnected events, yet happening one after the other, as they had, it had felt to me like the collapsing of a series of dominoes, each one feeding the next its dark, negative momentum, until the world had begun to seem overwhelmingly grim and until I had wanted to give up on solving the murders. How many individual’s wills were shaken?

  It had taken Claudia’s friendship and love to pull me out.

  When Tracy caught me studying the smoking object in her hand, she said,

  “It’s called a smudge stick.”

  “It smells like… the desert,” I decided.

  She smiled at me and held it out to me. “Good guess, Paul. That’s because it’s mostly white sage. It’s used to cleanse and purify an area of negative energies. Here.”

  I held out my hand. The moment it passed from Tracy’s hand to mine, a low moan almost beneath the threshold of hearing rose from above us. Uncle Hank spun around and Dad threw open his jacket and went for the gun he had concealed in his shoulder holster. It was the .40 S&W Glock 22, his weapon of choice in his final years with the Sheriff’s Department.

  Tracy, the only one of us that looked nonplussed, took the smudge stick back from me and started across the room, continuing to cast the smoke from it over the book shelves. The sound slowly increased in volume and frequency until the walls were literally shaking. Books began to fall from the top shelves behind her, narrowly missing her head.

  “Tracy!” I yelled.

  She gave me a smirk, a confident gleam in her eye. “It’s trying to scare us.”

  “Why don’t you just..?” Dad began, but Uncle Hank put a firm hand on his arm.

  The moans suddenly stopped.

  Tracy started back to the table, passing me the incense. She retrieved the leather bag that I recognized from the day in the hospital. Her eyes went out of focus as she wrapped the leather cord, which I soon realized was a drawstring, around her hand. “Have any of you heard of the term Egregore?” She glanced around at the three blank faces watching her. Distractedly, she began to knead the bag in her hand. “It’s a term that basically means like a group mind or a collective, not unlike the ways it’s believed that bees communicate. It’s also the word that is derived from the Greek word ‘egrḗgoroi,’ which means ‘watchers.’” She tapped the open book on the table. “If this is what brought Claudia here, perhaps we’ve been brought here as well to deal with it.”

  “Listen, Tatum, we’re wasting time talking,” Dad grumbled, turning away from the table and giving the bookshelf in front of him a good firm shake. “We need to find a way out of this room.”

  Tracy lowered her head in exasperation. Uncle Hank joined her at the table, placing his Bible down. “What are you trying to say, Tracy?”

  “What I’m saying is that we all have our individual strengths that we bring to any conflict, but until we start working together and stop undermining each other”—she shot Dad a look—“we’re only going to be four individuals against a group mind. We’ll be doomed to fail.”

  “Well, I’m not convinced all the stuff we’re seeing isn’t just all some big hallucination,” Dad stated. He stepped away from the table, walking from wall to book shelf, shoving and pulling like a lunatic. “Last time they told us there was some sort of gas leak that caused the explosion. Maybe that’s all this is.”

  “Dad?” I attempted in a small voice.

  “What, Paul?” he snapped without bothering to turn around.

  “Dammit, Dad, stop treating us like children and listen to us!”

  Finally, he turned and faced at me. Standing with my back to the table, my eyes wide with exasperation, I pointed to the place where his doppelganger had first slapped me. “Do you see this scratch?”

  Stepping over to me, he eyed the mark with suspicion.

  I lifted my shirt and displayed the reddened whelps on my torso. “A hallucination did this to me.”

  He squinted at the slowly darkening wounds, confusion written across his face. I could see him struggling for a reply, but there was nothing he could say really without calling me a liar.

  “We have to do this,” I pleaded. “It could mean the difference between Claudia living and dying tonight.”

  “Paul,” he finally responded, using his let’s-be-reasonable tone.

  “Please, Dad. Just listen to her for a minute.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped up to the table, setting his Glock on the table with a loud clump. He gripped the back of the chair tightly and clamped his lips shut so tightly the blood drained from them.

  I stepped up to the table now, glancing around at the faces of my family—for I now trusted Tracy that much to include her in this intimate circle of protection from the hostile world we had found ourselves.

  “What do we do, Tracy?” I asked.

  “We have to believe in each other,” she said looking from me to Hank and finally to my father. “We have to trust the other’s instincts. Jack”—my father’s head snapped up—“you know how it is when you’re entering a situation that might endanger the life of your partner. You have to trust that the other has your back, right?”

  He simply sighed.

  She set the leather bag on the table in front of her and asked, “Why do you hate me so much, Mr. Graves?”

  He stiffened.

  “Do you think I resent you because of what happened in ’83?”

  “I don’t have to defend myself to you.”

  “Just so you know, I don’t think it would have gone any differently had either of you been there that day.” Her eyes slid from Dad to Uncle Hank. My uncle shrunk slightly beneath her gaze. “Now that that’s out of the way, what’s with this negative energy between us? Is it me personally… or what I represent?”

  “What would that be?” Dad responded with a scoff. “Enlighten me.”

  “The unseen world. One you can’t control.” She glanced at Hank. “I sense the same resentment toward your own brother.”

  “That’s out of line,” he grunted between clinched teeth.

  “She’s right, Jack.”

  My father straightened and turned away from the table.

  “Let’s please cut the shit, Jack,” Hank said in a barely controlled tone. “We haven’t had the same relationship since I entered the priesthood and you know it.”

  My father’s shoulder slumped. He ran a hand through his hair. “Your perception, Hank.”

  “It’s the truth and I don’t expect you to admit it. I just want you to be my little brother again. I want you to be that same guy who used to trust his big brother’s instincts and take what he believed at face value.”

  When he turned back to us, m
y father’s eyes were different. The hard edges had been smoothed over and he looked worn down. He nodded then and said in as subdued a voice as I’ve ever heard from my father. “I’ll try, Hank.”

  “There’s too many walls between us,” I heard myself say aloud, surprised at myself for stating the obvious at such an emotionally charged moment. At some point, I had reached into the collar of my shirt and retrieved the crucifix around my neck.

  Dad turned his hard eyes to me and seemed just about to respond, but thought twice about it and shut his mouth again.

  “In that case, I’d like to make a radical suggestion here,” Hank said, leaning forward with a posture of a man about to propose a business transaction. “One way we can eliminate the barriers between us is by opening up and admitting something difficult to each other. Look at it as a form of spiritual cleansing.”

  My father gave his brother a suspicious glare. “You want us to go to confession?”

  Tracy smiled over at me, kneading the bag in her hand. “It’s not a bad idea actually.”

  “Since it was my suggestion, it’s only fair that I go first,” Hank said, glancing first at me then my father. He cleared his throat a few times, searching for a way to begin.

  Before he could, my father began to speak instead. “The reason I couldn’t pass that psych evaluation… the reason why they wouldn’t let me back on the job after I shot that man, was that I refused to be hypnotized,” my father confided, his eyes reddening.

  “Why?” I asked him in a subdued tone.

  “They knew that the guy was raving mad on meth and screaming nonsense. That part was in my report, but somehow they knew I was leaving something out,” he told us, staring down at his Glock lying on the table. “What I couldn’t tell them is that the man—a total stranger to me--asked me why I had let Tracy and Ronnie die alone! That… man told me that there was a special place in the Master’s Kingdom—that I remember, those exact words, the Master’s Kingdom--reserved for cowards and that he would be there to personally welcome me.” My father looked up at me, his eyes glassy and red. “Then this guy smiled and drew a gun.” He shook his head and looked away from me, consciously holding the tears at bay. “I swear, I thought I was going crazy, Paul. So, I told that shrink point blank that I would never allow them to put me under and they forced me to retire.”