Hallowed Page 42

  “Who are you?” I heard my uncle ask in a calm, unemotional voice.

  “Cut the shit, Henry,” Tracy said with a sly grin that her face was unaccustomed to forming. She took a glance one way then the other. “What are you guys doing just sitting around?”

  I took the briefest of glances at my father. His face had turned the color of ash.

  “Jack?” Tracy snapped her fingers a few times. “You with us, dude? Jesus Christ, you two shit-stains are acting like you done seen a ghost!”

  My father dropped back into a sitting position, his back against Hank’s legs.

  Tracy groaned and stared up at the ceiling. “Why oh why, Lord, did you saddle me with the Graves brothers?”

  “Tracy said that she would be communicating with someone,” Uncle Hank interrupted in an authoritative, even tone. “Not that someone would be speaking through her.”

  For the first time, Tracy seemed to realize that she was tied up. She gave a couple of experimental tugs, then just stared up at Uncle Hank with the hard, suspicious eyes of a teenager, who didn’t like to be confused, who didn’t like to be “put on.” I could see the furnace burning within. “Somebody better explain to me what the hell’s going on or so help me..!”

  “Tracy?” Uncle Hank called out.

  Tracy seemed to stiffen. Her eyes--his eyes—went out of focus for an instant and suddenly her posture changed, softened. “It’s okay, Father. You can trust him. You have to focus him. Remind him his daughter is in danger. He’s obviously unaware of the circumstances.” One moment Tracy was looking at Uncle Hank with pleading eyes, then the next, someone else was there.

  “Ronnie?” my uncle asked.

  Claudia’s father looked out of Tracy’s eyes, searching Hank Graves’ face.

  “What’s going on, Graves?” Ronnie Wicke growled. “Give it to me straight.”

  “You died in a car accident,” Uncle Hank said calmly. “Do you remember?”

  Ronnie’s eyes widened, his eyes went out of focus for a moment, then he suddenly gasped, “Aw, shit!”

  It was then that Dad began to chuckle, then laugh uncontrollably. All three of us just stared down at him. Finally, Uncle Hank gave him a sharp kick.

  “What the hell you laughin’ at, Graves,” Ronnie grumbled through Tracy’s mouth. “You don’t look too far from a pine box yourself, you compassionate shit!”

  “God, Ronnie, it really is you, ain’t it,” my father asked with wide glistening eyes.

  “Can we get on with finding my daughter, Graves, or do you want to waste more of our time?” His eyes rolled over me, seemingly for the first time, and locked on my face. He cocked his head slightly.

  I sat frozen in his presence--Claudia’s father. Claudia’s dead father—no doubt in my mind he knew how I felt about her. How much I loved his daughter. On the heels of that thought, I realized that he must know what we had done that night at the camp as well.

  After he silently appraised me for longer that was comfortable, I heard Uncle Hank ask him, “I take it you know what’s going on then?”

  Tracy took a deep breath, her face cracked. She squeezed her eyes shut. “No-no-no,” he wailed, using Tracy’s lungs and vocal chords. “That fucking bastard! He murdered her! He murdered my Patty!” Tears began to stream down Tracy’s face. His eyes opened. When he remembered that his arms were tied to his sides, he attempted to shake the tears from his cheeks. His eyes locked on my father. “Jack, you’re a cop, right! You got to find this bastard and kill him! Do you hear me? Tear a great big hole in his chest and rip his heart out!”

  Dad began to nod, his throat clicked audibly, then he began to titter again. That was when I first started to worry that something was wrong.

  “We need your help to find him,” Uncle Hank responded. “Ronnie, where is he holding Claudia?”

  “Upstairs, where he held the little girl before. It’s some sort of amphitheater.”

  “How do we get there from here?”

  Dad began to shudder. I wondered if he was having some sort of seizure. Uncle Hank noticed and reached down to touch his shoulder. He drew his hand back with a look of shock. It had felt cold. I was sure of it.

  “Through the fireplace. They’re trying to hide it from you.”

  Suddenly, Dad rose, reached out and clasped his hands tightly around Tracy’s throat. Her eyes bulged as she stared up at my father in stark terror.

  I leapt out of my seat, grabbing my father’s arms, just as Uncle Hank threw an arm around his brother’s neck. Without a single glance back, Dad released one of his hands and grabbed Uncle Hank’s arm, slowly prying it loose.

  “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, release her!”

  Dad let go of Tracy, and instantly turned on Uncle Hank, an intense look in his eye.

  “Jack?”

  I threw myself against my father’s back from behind. He immediately began to reach around for me.

  “Paul, no!” Uncle Hank dropped his Bible to the table and planted a punch to my father’s chin that rocked him back on his heels. Gripping both his arms, I pulled with all my strength. My father’s body began to stagger backward. I grabbed him by the hair, and his hands closed over mine. They were slabs of cold ice. The strength behind the hands was incredible. With enough time, they would break the bones in my hand like cane.

  “Hit him again, Hank,” I heard Tracy—Ronnie—yell from behind me.

  Uncle Hank gritted his teeth. “Let him go, Jack. Let go of your son.”

  A low rumbling chuckle rolled from the throat of the thing that wasn’t my father. It was a hoarse, reedy sound--the same quality I recognized from my earlier contact with Graham--like a rusty engine attempting to turn over for the first time in years.

  “This one is weak in spirit,” it hissed.

  In a flash I saw my uncle retrieve a flask from his pocket, rip the cork stopper off with his teeth and began to slash it through the air back and forth in front of us. Droplets of water began to strike its face and chest. “I command you to release him in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ!”

  The thing croaked, squeezed its eyes shut and spun me off in one quick motion like I was made of sticks and paper. I landed in a heap a few yards away from them. When the stars cleared, I saw my uncle pinning my father’s arms back against the wall with all his strength. The other seemed to laugh and scream all at once.

  I watched in shock as its hand reached inside his jacket to the empty holster. But the gun still sat on the table out of reach.

  “Out,” I heard my uncle cry. “Get out of my brother you piece of shit!”

  The quality and timber of my father’s screams changed, growing weaker and more fragile. At last, I heard my father give one last long bellow. By the sound of the last gasp, I knew the raspy groan to belong to my father. My uncle grabbed his brother by the elbows and lowered him the rest of the way down the wall into a sitting position.

  I rushed to his side and grabbed my father’s hand. “You okay?”

  He shuddered and blinked up at me. His arms reached out and pulled me weakly to his chest. I hugged him. He coughed and gave Uncle Hank a glare. “Dammit, Hank, did you have to hit me so hard?”

  “Sorry, Jack. You okay?”

  “I’ve been better.” Dad reached out to his brother to pull him up, but Uncle Hank removed his vial of holy water again. “It’s my fault that this happened. I had already blessed Tracy back at the church, but never you or Paul.”

  “I’m wearing the crucifix you gave me,” I reminded him. “I know it’s blessed.”

  “Good man,” my uncle replied, “but forgive me if I take this extra precaution.” Whispering words of Latin, he shook out a portion of the holy water from the vial and traced the sign of the cross upon my forehead, lips, and heart, then raised the vial up to Dad, as if to ask permission.

  Typically, my father’s reaction would have been one of amusement, but things had changed. He gave a simple nod, and my uncle blessed him as well. He then gave Dad a look o
f remorse and said, “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I should have looked out for you better.”

  They locked arms and my uncle pulled him to his feet with a grunt of pain.

  “Don’t worry about it, Hank,” he said, squeezing his arm. He started over to Tracy. “What were you saying about a fireplace?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Tracy asked, but I could tell Claudia’s father remained within. He looked from Dad to Uncle Hank. “We climbed down here through a chimney.” He strained against his bonds then gave up. “It’s there in the corner. If I could move my damned arm, I’d show you myself.”

  “Good God, you’re right!” Uncle Hank smiled and rushed over to Tracy, starting to untie her. “Don’t you remember, Jack?”

  My father rushed back around to the other side of the table and put his hand protectively atop his gun.

  Tracy shook off the rope and rose from the chair with Uncle Hank’s help. “It’s okay,” she said in her own voice.

  Dad gave the gun a look of distrust then held the weapon out--butt first--to Uncle Hank. “I shouldn’t keep this gun on me anymore,” he announced. “Not after what I just tried to do.”

  Uncle Hank gave a single amused shake of his head, watching as Tracy reached across the table, grabbed a handful of pages from the open grimoire like the hair of a resting animal, and tossed the massive book across the room toward a conspicuously empty corner, several of the pages ripping off in her hands.

  “Take the gun, Hank,” my father said louder. “You were always the best shot anyway.”

  Scowling, Uncle Hank snatched the gun from my father, holding it loosely down by his side. Glancing over at my uncle at that moment, I retained an image of the man that remained with me for the rest of my life. I saw Father Henry Graves, standing there against a wall of ancient pagan spell-books, a Bible in his right hand and a gun in his left. It was quite a different picture of a priest than most people get the opportunity to see.

  The holy man as a warrior.

  Twisting the loose pages from the grimoire into the shape of a horn, Tracy held it over the oil lamp on the table, catching its edge aflame and carrying it to the discarded book in the empty corner. She cast a look back at Uncle Hank and lit the book on fire.

  The flames caught the edge of the grimoire’s pages and began to crackle, then hiss. The sound grew louder, out of proportion to the tiny fire, until the book seemed to be screaming.

  Slowly Tracy backed away, the horn of pages still burning in her hand.

  The pages of the open grimoire began to flutter like a hysterical woman’s arms. Suddenly the entire book began to hop and skip entirely off the floor, flopping about like a beached flounder and finally launching itself completely off the floor, almost a foot in the air.

  My father took a protective step in front of me, thought twice, and chose to stand beside me instead. A quick look of acknowledgement passed between us.

  “Tracy, look out!” we heard Uncle Hank yell, emptying his hands of everything he held onto the table. I caught a glimpse of the flame from the horn she still held in her right hand, crawling like a snake of living fire up her wrist. Tracy tossed the twisted grimoire pages against the wall. It exploded like a bag of gasoline, tiny lines of flame trailing down the wall like the remnants of a dragon’s claw mark.

  Dad and I swatted the wall with our jackets, just as Uncle Hank strangled the last bit of flame from Tracy’s burning arm.

  “You okay?” he asked Tracy.

  Staring down at the smoking sleeve of her coat, she actually managed a dark smirk. “I’ve had worse.” She pointed at the book, now almost totally consumed by the flames. The wailing had been reduced to a dim whine now. The smoking grey mass gave a single last convulsion, like the death throes of a dying beast and collapsed into an ashen pile. With fascination, we watched as the thick black smoke rose into the corner of the room and completely disappeared into thin air.

  “By God, will you look at that?” my father muttered. “Are you seeing this?”

  “Yeah, unless we’re having the same hallucination, I’m seeing it too.”

  Then in a voice, almost too quiet to hear, I heard my father say: “All this really happened. I wasn’t crazy.”

  I followed my father to the corner of the room and watched as the shadows there seemed to shift and deepen into the grey lines of bricks, like pupils readjusting for night vision. Suddenly it was there, a massive brick fireplace, so physically imposing that the mere fact that it had managed to elude our sight seemed to mock reality itself.

  Dad dropped down to his knees and followed the rising plume of smoke up the chimney. He duck-walked a few feet into the enormous mouth and held out his hand to me. I handed him Tracy’s flashlight. He slowly rose from his squat, all of him above his knees disappearing from view. He reappeared a few moments later.

  “Ladder rungs going straight up,” Uncle Hank announced with certainty.

  The two brothers looked at each other. “You remember?” Dad asked.

  “Bits and pieces.”

  “How far is this amphitheater?” I asked them.

  They traded looks again and Uncle Hank gave an apologetic shrug. Dad simply shook his head. “Sorry, son. I just remember that Ronnie and I were looking for Hank.”

  Taking my flashlight back, I ducked under his arms and looked up. A darkened shaft rose up as far as the flashlight revealed, some sort of rungs built into the wall rising up the sheer surface. “What is it, Dad? It’s not really a chimney or else we would have seen some evidence up on the surface. Besides, it’s obviously meant to be used as a passage. Why would someone do this?”

  He stared back at me with furrowed brow and shrugged. “Maybe it’s nothing more than a backdoor out.”

  “Mr. Wicke?” I called out hopefully.

  We all looked at Tracy, staring down at the objects on the table. After a moment, she shook her head. “He’s left us,” she said with a labored sigh, gathering up her charms back into the medicine bag. “Perhaps he’s gone to comfort his daughter now.”

  Uncle Hank stepped to her side, touched her shoulder, and looked into her eyes, still glassy from whatever had been in the pill she had taken earlier. “I’ll be okay. It hasn’t dulled my senses.” She gave him a nod then asked, “How are you?”

  “I’ve been somewhat… illuminated,” my uncle muttered.

  “It occurs to me now that he was trying to speak with me for a very long time now,” she told Uncle Hank, “But because of my own doubts, I ignored his voice.” Her eyes found mine across the room at the table as I pulled the friendship bracelet back down over my wrist. “Perhaps he found a more open mind in you.”

  I recalled then what Graham had said about the voices I had been hearing recently. Even then, I knew that the voices hadn’t been from the same evil source that had contacted him.

  My mind rushed backwards and the twisted banner of unanswered questions began to unfurl their answers. Now I could hear the voice clearly, the resonating tone of a man in the prime of his life, with a bit of a smoker’s rasp. In Comeaux’s grocery. In the cemetery. At the camp. It had been Mr. Wicke, right down to “Crimson and Clover,” the song he once shared with his wife, Pat. “And the dreams,” I heard myself whisper, just before my father yanked me out of my reverie with a tug on my arm.

  “I want Tracy following me, then you next, and Hank.” He hefted the rope over his shoulder and started to lift the backpack when Uncle Hank reached out for it.

  “I got that.” He tucked the Bible into the breast of his jacket, zipped it closed, then hefted the pack onto his back.

  Dad simply gave a nod and handed him the holster for the gun. “Put the flashlight back into the backpack. You’re going to need both hands up there.” He took off his belt, strung the belt through the handle of the lantern and strapped the belt back tightly around his waist. The lantern dangled halfway down his leg.

  Uncle Hank fit the gun back into its holster and gave me a furtive look.

  D
ad climbed back into the hearth, rose, then disappeared from sight, the light of the lantern spilling out down the shaft growing fainter and fainter as he started up. Tracy cast one look back at me and said, “Be on your guard, Paul,” then started up after him.

  I gave my uncle one last look then started for the hearth.

  “Wait,” he asked, stepping over to me and placing his hand on my shoulders. “Do you remember the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel?”

  I smiled. Very distinctly, I remember him teaching me the prayer to St. Michael when I was barely five. Once I’d learned it, he would ask me to recite the prayer every time he would come to visit, which was often, back in the day.

  “Of course, I do.”

  “Recite it to me now,” he asked with authority. “I need to hear it.”

  So, I stood and stumbled fitfully through the prayer like a kid giving an oral presentation in front of his teacher, but as rusty as I was, it seemed satisfactory to him.

  “Remember it, if you get into trouble.” Then he began to fasten the holster around me beneath my jacket. “In this world, it will protect you more than these bullets, Paul.”

  I stared at him in confusion. “Dad specifically gave that to you.”

  “Back in the day, I used to be quite the shot with a gun,” he told me, tightening the strap firmly to my chest. “I’m a different man than I used to be. My soul belongs to God and I can’t stomach carrying a weapon like this anymore. Your father… he needs a little more time before he can see his brother for who he is now.” He gave me one last pat on the shoulder and pushed me firmly forward. “God walks with you, Paul.”

  Working my way into the hearth, I gazed up into the darkness. The smoky shaft was dimly illuminated by the distant light of Dad’s lantern. A series of metal rungs, which appeared to be nothing more than hallow pipes embedded into the stone, protruded from the wall of the shaft. I started up after Dad, already a good twenty yards up the shaft, taking the precious light along with him.

  Chapter 38 Saturday, October 31st, (12:45am)