Hallowed Page 44

  I realized with amazement that I was witnessing a 1969 version of Ronnie Wicke facing off against a man I only knew from Claudia’s research to be an LSU physics professor named Dr. Wenton Joyner.

  The girl in his arms was a five year old Tracy Tatum.

  But was I simply viewing this or somehow physically present at this event?

  Glancing down at Ronnie’s feet, I saw for the first time that he was standing on a gigantic circle of black obsidian glass, unrecognizable symbols etched around the edge. An irrational fear gripped me at the sight of the circle. I didn’t know its purpose or what the symbols meant, but my soul cried out that it was unnatural. Wrong.

  “This doesn’t concern you, boy,” the familiar voice hissed. “Only the daughter of Gerard will be taken as a tribute for her father’s obligation to us.”

  “No,” Ronnie simply stated. “If you don’t let her go right now, a friend of mine, a kid who was named the junior regional sharp-shooting champion two years running, is going to put a hole the size of a Buick into your fat smug face.”

  Suddenly, I knew that he was talking about Hank. That’s when I realized that Ronnie was waiting in vain for two brothers that I knew were fighting at this very moment about which direction they should go.

  “Leave now, Ronald, son of Vincent, and we will allow you to survive this day.”

  I watched as the seventeen year old boy swallowed back his fear and uttered the words: “I guess I never should have been here today, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave you to kill that little girl!”

  Before I could measure the consequences of my actions, I drew my father’s gun from the shoulder holster and fired once into the air.

  When Dr. Joyner flinched, Ronnie swung the crowbar, catching him on the side of the head and driving him to his knees. Young Tracy dropped awkwardly to the floor, tumbling across the cavern a safe distance away. She opened her eyes and blinked in disbelief, the look on her face clearly reading, I’m alive!

  I jumped at the loud voice that came from behind me and stepped to one side defensively, feeling a brief tingling sensation as someone brushed past me. I glanced up to see two teenagers-- one heavy-set holding a gun out before him and another lanky but muscular in a baseball cap wielding a bat--stepped out onto the top rows of what appeared to be where an audience might have been seated.

  “You have all sealed your fates,” the monster, which had once been a man named Dr. Wenton Joyner, screeched as he rose slowly from his crouch.

  Suddenly, my vision got hazy, my stomach gave a lurch and I thought I might puke my guts up right there in the cavern. I fell to my knees, my hands slapping to the stone floor. I found the face of my watch and before my eyes, the minute hand began to move forward in a steady fluid motion. I turned my head and could see the transparent figures before me rush and jerk from place to place like an old home movie. My mind spun and the floor seemed to rush up at me like an attacking predator. The torchlight from the walls faded, and finally, all light disappeared but a single lantern.

  Suddenly, when I thought I could take it no longer, I heard two voices.

  “You move and I will slice straight through her throat with this knife!” The voice came from just beside me, not more than a yard or two away. I recognized the muffled voice as belonging to Graham and knew that he must still be wearing the night-vision goggles.

  Then from behind me from the entrance to the amphitheater, I heard my father’s voice. “Claudia, call out! Let me hear you!”

  There was a weak and distant sound from the darkness beside me. The world around me came into sharp focus, and I felt the gun still gripped tightly in my hand. I realized then that Graham had yet to see me. Somehow, I had snuck in here under his radar and now I lay here in the darkness like a coiled snake at his heel.

  You entered the cavern in 1969, a voice told me.

  As confused as I felt, I realized something with crystal clarity: Someone or something was helping me. It had been no coincidence that I had found myself in the right place at the right time, both now and thirty-five years ago.

  In the darkness where I laid, I heard a foot shuffle forward a step and that was all I needed to pinpoint his location. In one quick movement, I stretched out my arm until it met resistance. It was a boot. I knew that Claudia didn’t wear boots.

  I pulled the trigger. A blast of sound exploded through the cavern.

  Nathan Graham howled in pain and dropped like dead weight onto the stone floor, releasing the figure in his arms. The knife he had held to her throat clattered loudly to the ground along with some other small object.

  The next moment, I felt Claudia’s body in my arms and heard a flurry of footsteps rushing inside that could only have been my father. In the seconds that followed, John Simon Graves swooped down on Graham like the wrath of God itself, ripping the goggles off and delivering blow after blow to his face. I heard shouts of anger and cries of pain.

  Ignoring the sounds of violence only a few feet away, I held Claudia quietly against me in the darkness, absorbing the warmth of her, feeling the steady beat of her heart beneath her clothing, thanking God over and over again. There in the dim light of Dad’s lantern sitting on the cavern floor, I found myself looking down at a sight I feared that I would never see again, Claudia Wicke’s face.

  Disoriented, Claudia stared glassily up at me, blinking in the light but never quite focusing. I gazed down at her dirty, but otherwise untouched, face and grinned like an idiot. “Hi,” I managed.

  “Paul, you okay?” my father called. “There was a gunshot.”

  “It was me,” I told him. “Uncle Hank gave me your gun.”

  Dad rose, dropping Graham roughly to the floor and kicking the knife that he’d held at Claudia’s throat across the cave floor into the impenetrable darkness. He scooped up the cell phone that he had dropped. Even from a distance, I could tell from the multitude of obnoxious stickers that it was Claudia’s. Retrieving two broad yellow zip ties from his belt, he knelt behind the teenager and forced Graham’s wrists behind him.

  “Nathan Graham, you are under arrest for the murders of Grace Fischer, Sadie Newhart, Kalim Al-Sahim…”

  A whimpering sort of chuckle started low in Graham’s chest. Blood had begun to soak through the entire lower leg of his pants and pool around him where I’d shot him.

  Dad tightened the zip ties around his wrists with a single brutal tug, jerking him physically off the ground. “…Bridgette Sullivan, Patricia Wicke, and your own god-forsaken father.”

  “What punishment will you inflict upon us that we haven’t already endured? Where will you put us that could be darker than where we’ve been?” Graham growled, stretching his neck to lean closer to my father as if he were about to steal a kiss.

  “Save it for your lawyer,” Dad snapped, tossing him roughly onto the floor, which for the first time I noticed was that same circle of black obsidian glass I’d seen before.

  Suddenly, Claudia’s hand clamped down on mine. Fear flooded my heart as her eyes rolled back into her head and her body began to spasm.

  “Something’s wrong!”

  My father appeared beside me, slipped a hand beneath the back of her head. “Give me your jacket.”

  I stripped my jacket off, the holster swinging out and revealing itself to my father. His face darkened briefly, and he seemed to bite back a comment. Snatching the jacket out of my hand, Dad rolled it into a ball, and set it on the floor behind Claudia. He lowered her gently to the stone floor. Her lips were blue.

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “She’s having a seizure.”

  “She is becoming one with the Body,” Graham croaked. “Soon she will lie in eternal wait along with my brothers.”

  My father shot a glare in Graham’s direction. He reached over, ripped something from my back pocket and slapped it into my hand. It was an oily red rag, the one that I had taken from the trunk of my car. “Shut him up,” he growled at me.

  Remembering
that I had not only put the rag in my pocket at the car but the roll of electrical tape as well, I dug it from my pocket and swept across the room. Graham twisted his head around and stared at me with enraged eyes, his lips rolling back to reveal his teeth. “Try it, Graves,” he spat, snapping them together threateningly in my direction a couple of times.

  Graham seemed covered in blood. Some ran from his nose where my father had struck him and his legs lay in a slowly spreading dark pool, a gaping hole in his left boot where his toes should rightfully have been.

  That’s where I got him, I thought, feeling an unsettling moment of what could only be called pride.

  Grabbing his broken nose in one hand, I gave it a sharp yank up. He loosened his jaw and screamed. I seized his chin, pulled down and jammed the rag roughly down into his mouth with my thumbs as he bellowed in frustration, then wrapped a couple of loops of tape around his mouth and back of the head.

  Beyond him, I became aware for the first time that recording and lighting equipment had been stockpiled all around the chamber, more than we had seen in the study below. Folliott must have had big plans for this room, more than simple research. Perhaps a feature documentary. Possibly an entire series for the Discovery channel, I thought sardonically.

  As I turned away, I remembered Claudia and rushed to my father. He looked up at me and gave a strained smile. “She’s fine.”

  Dad rose and peered around the cavern. “We need to get her out of here and to an ER as soon as possible. You take her.” He looked over at Graham watching us with calculating eyes. “I’ll deal with him.”

  Setting the Bible down next to my jacket, I knelt beside Claudia, flipping her dangling arm over my shoulder and slowly rose from my crouch. She wasn’t as light as she looked.

  “Can you handle her?” I heard my father ask, and felt an instant of resentment. After everything we’d been through, he was still treating me like a child.

  “I got it,” I snapped, a little too forcefully, just before the screaming began. The first burst of sound caught me directly in my left ear--where Claudia lay across my shoulder--and I went deaf on one side, my equilibrium suddenly off. I lost my balance and tried to compensate by scrambling forward in order to regain control of her weight, but Claudia had begun to kick and scratch at my back as if trying to break free of an assault.

  I heard my father yell a warning a scant moment before something struck me against the backs of my legs. We went down in a pile several yards from where we had started.

  I sat up on one elbow and looked around, disoriented. On one side of us, smiling grimly, Graham lie in a ready crouch, like a wild animal assuming a position of defense; Dad stood on the opposite side, his eyes wide.

  Claudia and I lay on the circle of obsidian glass. Tiny lines zipped and zagged through the glass all around us, a queer sizzling sound rising from it.

  “The glass,” I heard Dad yell.

  I grabbed Claudia and shoved her as hard as I could toward my father, but the force of the push sent the equal amount in the opposite direction. Claudia collapsed into my father’s arms just before the glass shattered beneath me. There was a loud screech like the sound of a car braking just before an inevitable crash, and the next moment my legs were falling through a jagged hole, slicing through my jeans and the skin beneath.

  Dad moved with practiced precision. He released Claudia and dropped down at the edge of the circle, grabbing frantically for a handhold on any part of me and finding the collar of my shirt. The shirt began to rip open in the center of my back. His hands found a firmer grip underneath my arms.

  For an instant, I believed I saw a flickering blue light deep down in the pit, like an electrical storm passing across cloud formations. Then a black geyser burst from the hole, obscuring my father for a moment, and I felt a hailstorm of tiny, furry bodies strike me in a thousand places across my body. When I saw black wings and light reflecting off tiny eyes, I realized then that they were bats, hundreds of them, pouring out of the pit below me and flying straight up into the unfathomable vastness of the cavern ceiling above our heads.

  Graham rose awkwardly to his feet, a wide-eyed look of wonder on the bruised flesh of his face. He made a sound of excitement from behind the rag in his mouth.

  In the midst of the swarm, Dad lost his grip, and I slid through his arms. We reached for each other simultaneously grabbing each other’s hands like a couple of acrobats.

  Dad dug the toes of his boots into the craggy floor behind him and meticulously began to haul himself slowly away from the edge of the hole. I tossed one leg over the side and rolled away from the edge, lying on my back and sucking in breath after breath, not quite fully believing that I hadn’t fallen.

  Eying Graham, Dad backpedaled away from the open pit, reaching instinctively for the gun that was no longer there. “Paul, take Claudia and get back,” Dad barked.

  Finding motor control again, I grabbed her by the arm, tugging her out of the way of the furry flood of bats. I glanced at my father. He was clutching his arm, his eyes squeezed shut in pain, yet there was no blood.

  “Dad?”

  He gave a single stern shake of his head. It knew then what it was. The infamously unreliable Graves’ ticker had decided to test its faithful owner at the most inopportune time.

  Graham simply stood at the edge of the pit, watching us with a glassy-eyed fascination from bleary yellow eyes as if curious what we would do next.

  “Gun,” Dad whispered, holding out a single wavering hand to me. Suddenly, my father was no longer the pillar of strength that I had always known. He looked fragile and old.

  Holding Claudia securely in my lap, I drew my father’s gun from its holster but made no move to hand it over as the reality of the situation struck me then. The responsibility had fallen to me to protect us all.

  “What are you going to do with that, Graves?” the thin wispy sound emerged from Claudia’s throat. I gurgled in horror and nearly kicked her out of my lap. Though her eyes remained closed, a low chuckle rolled from deep within her. “Are you going to shoot me? Do you have it in you to kill another human being?”

  “Paul. The gun,” my father hissed. “Give me the gun, son.”

  I looked down and saw Uncle Hank’s Bible between me and Dad, lying beside my jacket, but I held firm to the gun. I chambered a round and swallowed awkwardly.

  “I know you’ve been struggling with a decision,” I heard my father say to me. “You don’t have to be a carbon copy of me or your uncle, son. You’re your own man.”

  Keeping the gun trained on Graham, I reached out and picked up the Bible in my other hand. The sneer disappeared from Graham’s face, and he fixed his yellow eyes on the hand holding the Bible.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “I was told to lead you to the home of my fathers to die,” Claudia announced in a tone which was nothing in the neighborhood of her natural one. “And here you are.”

  “Who are you and who are the fathers?”

  “Tracy, daughter of Gerard, spoke true. I was once of the Nephilim. The Old Ones are my fathers, held captive in Gehenna until the Day of Judgment.”

  “For what purpose have you brought us here?”

  At this, Nathan Graham’s eyes seem to widen gleefully. “They knew you would not come willingly.”

  “What do you want from us?”

  “They demand the sacrifice of your father and his children in tribute to them.”

  “Why Claudia?”

  The yellow orbs in his head rolled around to target Claudia. “As you, Paul, are son of John, so is Claudia, daughter of John.”

  There was a rumble somewhere in the distance of the great cavern, but I heard only the amused tittering coming from the throat of the girl I held in my arms.

  “What?” my father snapped, rolling to his knees. “What the hell did that thing just say?”

  “Speak only truth, worm!” I shouted, thrusting the Bible out before me.

  Graham seemed to cringe an
d his eyes found my father. “Do you deny then that you took for yourself Patricia daughter of Esther?”

  “Before I met Kathy, we were… friends.”

  “You knew her, John, son of Franklin! That is no lie.” Graham turned and locked his eyes on me. “Your son knows this betrayal to be true.”

  Feeling the warmth of Claudia’s body next to me, I stared at my father, waiting for a response. The single word seemed to fall from his mouth like some distasteful piece of refuse: “Once.” He looked at me then and instantly looked away again.

  Graham’s head turned and stared straight at Dad.

  “Did you kiss her goodbye?” Claudia asked. “Did you kiss Kathy one last time?”

  Dad bared his teeth, rose, and lunged toward Graham.

  “Dad! No!”

  For one brief instant his body dangling over the open pit between them, then just as he was about to plunge into darkness, he jerked himself backwards. Again I watched in quiet fascination as a cloud flickered electric-blue somewhere in the black gulf below.

  PAUL, I heard from somewhere deep below. We will let them go. We just want you. Just you.

  “Enough!” I snapped, rising to my feet and advancing on Graham. Dropping the gun to my side and wielding the Bible before me, the words bubbling up from the core of my body from a source I’ve never tapped before, I commanded: “I order you out! Now! Leave us alone in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ!”

  Claudia threw back her head and made a sound that I would have thought a girl her size incapable of making, the sound of an injured animal cornered. Her chest convulsed, her eyes bulged, and she leaned forward, her gut rolling. A thick, black ooze sprayed from her mouth, and instead of splattering across the stone floor, it turned to smoke and fled into the open pit before Graham.