Hallowed Read online

  After the game, I stopped by Comeaux’s Grocery to pick up my paycheck. The other guys were putting in a late night as the weekly stock that usually came in on Thursday morning had come in early Friday morning and they hadn’t been able to get much of the stock out during the day in between dealing with customers. The storage area had been packed with boxes, and Mr. Comeaux was paying overtime to those who had been willing to stay after closing and get all the boxed stock out onto the shelves. It was a quarter to midnight by the time I got there and only a few of the guys were still around putting up the last of the stock, including Don-Tom.

  Donald St. Thomas had been unlucky enough to be born to parents with an odd sense of humor. Mr. and Mrs. St. Thomas had three sons of which Donald was the youngest. His two older brothers, legendary hell-raisers in Haven, notorious for their rambunctious high school years, for which stories were still swapped around the locker room, were named Thomas and Jonathan respectively. With names like that, begging for creative shortening, friends had taken to calling them, of course, Tom-Tom and Jon-Tom. After years of fighting his legacy and denying that he was anything like his party-animal brothers, Donald had ultimately come to terms with the name with which he had been destined to be burdened: Don-Tom.

  He and Rob Wallace were nearly finished and his portable radio was cranked up to the classic radio station out of Austin. Dark Side of the Moon’s “Brain Damage” had just begun and Roger Waters had announced that a lunatic was on the grass.

  Don-Tom was a senior at Haven High. When I’d first met him, he seemed a little distant. Almost clueless. He was a hard guy to engage in conversation, but when things got quiet and the work got monotonous, Don-Tom began to open up.

  Once we’d gotten into a conversation about life after high school, while we were knocking out the breakfast food aisle. When I had asked him what he planned to do after he graduated, he replied, “Not a clue, but one thing’s for sure. If I don’t take another class as long as I live, it’ll be too soon.”

  Judging from his brothers, I figured he was just another beer-drinking, truck-driving type, living for the day when he could move out of his parents’ house so he could start living the life of abandon. But, of course, I didn’t really know him.

  “What are you interested enough in doing that you’d do it voluntarily for the rest of your life?” he asked me.

  I hadn’t reached that age yet where the question of my future plans would get irritating, and I would definitely never have it phrased in quite the same unique manner. Instead, I found the subject intriguing. It was the first time I recall actually verbalizing my interests in terms of whether or not they were marketable dreams or just potential money pits.

  “Well, my mom expects me to go to college,” I replied. “But I think Dad’s always expected me to follow in his footsteps and become a cop.”

  “Yeah, that may be what they want, but what do you want?”

  No one had ever asked me that before. “Y’know, I’m not real sure. Lately, I’ve been interested in the concept of justice.”

  Don-Tom had glanced away from his work on the cereal shelf for the first time. His flipped his long black hair out of his eyes. “Justice, huh? Are you talking about moral or legal justice?”

  “I guess, I don’t know. What’s the difference?”

  “The judge is the difference. Do you answer to man or God?”

  I distinctly remember feeling that question sink into my bones and make my head swim with the implications. I’d never considered that there might be such thing as judgment beyond this material world. The concept staggered my teenage brain.

  I gave a shrug as I continued my stocking. “Both, I guess. Y’know, I’ve been going to my uncle’s church a lot lately.”

  “Now there’s something they can’t teach you at the university. Hell, they hardly even teach ethics anymore,” he scoffed. “Giving tens of thousands of dollars to educators whose knowledge is subjective seems a little foolish to me. Real knowledge can’t be purchased.” This seemed to amuse him so much that he began to chuckle to himself and shake his head.

  “So I take it you’re just going to get a full-time job after you graduate?”

  Don-Tom again turned to me. He gazed through me, past the store entrance, and somewhere into the distant future. “I think I’d like to travel the world.”

  He then turned back to his work. “There are so many things we can’t imagine because we’ve got such a limited perspective. Take religion for instance.” He gave me a look, then seemed to think twice about what he had been about to say.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m not very religious, y’know.” He shrugged. “I’m spiritual.”

  Of course, I’ve heard people say this before, but I’d never been completely sure what they had meant. I figured Don-Tom was as good a sounding board as anyone, so I asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Organized religion is…” He gave me another look. “I know your uncle’s a priest and all that, so I don’t mean any offense to him, but… all the rituals and rules, y’know, like tithing and fasting, it just feels to me like those tests they used to give us in first grade. Y’know, the ones that felt like busy work and all the time you felt like you could be doing something more constructive.”

  I found myself nodding more at my recognition at classes like this, though not completely sure how it applied to my uncle’s religion; then I realized that this was how I still thought of it. “My uncle’s religion.” Not my parents’ religion, nor my own, but my uncle’s.

  “You’re a smart guy, Paul,” Don-Tom continued. “Here’s what I think, it’s a just balm for the masses. It’s a governor motor to keep those capable of chaos from going off the deep end and taking somebody with them. I can follow the rules of society without any help from a book, thank you.”

  “If they don’t come from a book, where do they come from?”

  He never stopped stocking as he answered, “Me. They come from inside me.”

  “So you came up with these rules on your own?”

  I was honestly interested, not attempting to challenge him in any way, yet the look he gave me was one of disoriented confusion; a look that said, “Come again, pal?”

  St. Thomas had completely abandoned his work and was wiping his hands on his uniform as if he were about to wrestle something and didn’t want to lose his grip. “Look, Paul, hundreds of thousands of lives were taken over the rules in the Bible.”

  “But doesn’t that make the interpreter wrong and not the text? Do all those Islamic terrorists make the Koran wrong?”

  He turned to me as if about to rebut my answer then just glazed over. “Huh!” was the only word he uttered. “I gotta say, that’s a pretty honest question?” He silently began breaking down the boxes we had emptied, seemingly mulling over the conversation we’d just had. “Y’know what I like about you, Graves? You don’t get offended like most people I talk to about this stuff.”

  “Hell, I like talking about these things. Helps me clarify my understanding better.”

  Remembering this conversation now, I stopped over to say hello as he finished up stocking the last of the canned tomato section.

  “Hey, Don-Tom.”

  He took one glance at my navy-blue pants with the bright gold stripe up the side and said, “What did I tell you about coming here in your nightclubbing attire, Graves?”

  “Just got back from the Lockhart game. We lost. 21 to 10.”

  “Yeah, Lockhart’s got some big boys, don’t they?”

  “And fast. They just about broke Randy in half out there.”

  Don-Tom rose and worked the kinks out of his back.

  “Don-Tom, you ever hear of Spiritualism?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Y’know, séances, Oujia boards, talking to the dead.”

  He shrugged. “Y’know that kind of stuff…” He shook his head. “There are some things I’m not curious about because common sense tells me that no one really knows th
e answer. Not having an answer sometimes is worse than never having asked the question to begin with, y’dig?”

  I nodded, pretending to understand, but I didn’t have a clue. Instead I told him that I was going to the restroom.

  “Hey, while you’re back there, can you make sure we got all the stock out?”

  I stepped into the back, the sound of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” fading away as I entered the darkness of the storeroom. Mr. Comeaux must have shut the breakers off in preparation for closing because the ordinarily dim fluorescents were dead. The frigid air from the refrigerated cases on the other side of the wall to my right was just cold enough to make my breath visible.

  The light from the store leaked across the floor but barely touched the fifteen foot high ceiling above. I peered into the darkness and tried to detect any boxes they may have overlooked. A few crates of milk sat just beside the dairy section. I set to work putting them away, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness enough, that I could see further back into the storeroom. Sure enough, my eyes seemed to detect one lone box pushed up against the left-hand wall about five yards away. I started forward into the almost complete darkness, feeling my way toward the box.

  From the other side of the wall, I could dimly hear Neil Peart go into his blistering drum solo when I heard a whisper in the black depths of the storeroom.

  That stopped me cold.

  “Hello?” I barked.

  No response.

  It was late and now, I found myself aggravated with Comeaux for turning the lights out before everyone was out. He was always trying to conserve electricity and save a few bucks. Someday someone was going to hurt themselves tripping around in the darkness and he’d lose the store in a lawsuit.

  Then I heard it again.

  Paul.

  All the blood drained from my legs and I stood frozen in place.

  “Yeah?” The voice that emerged from my lips seemed to come from a five-year-old.

  Then it struck me. I hadn’t seen Rob Wallace around. “Starship” Wallace was infamous for pulling pranks that only he could appreciate. That freaking idiot was probably goofing on me right now.

  The blood that had so recently abandoned my legs flooded my face. Anger fueled the last ten steps as I charged into the darkness, seized the box in both my arms, and lifted it atop my shoulders. I stood there a few seconds longer and peered into the impenetrable darkness of the bowels of the storeroom, daring whoever had spoken to try it again. The box on my shoulders was light, probably toilet paper or towels, but the corner would hurt just as much coming down on the head of some wiseass.

  There was no movement that I could detect. The only sound I could hear was the drip drop of a slow leak, probably one of the compressors from the refrigerated cases slowly giving up the ghost.

  “Paul?”

  I swung around and came very close to pitching the box at my boss.

  Comeaux gave me a look of understanding and snatched the box out of my hands. “You here for your paycheck?” he snapped, attempting to hide the blooming smirk on his face. “Tell Wallace and St. Thomas to get punched out. Those guys are gonna suck me dry with this overtime.”

  After I picked up my paycheck from Comeaux’s office, I met “Starship,” coming out of the staff break room, as he pulled on his jacket and hefted his canvas backpack to his shoulder. “See you on the other side of midnight.” Rob was kind of a techno-geek and took every opportunity to lord his knowledge over the rest of those of us.

  “Nice job, man, setting that last box all the way on the other side of the storeroom,” I said to him. “I nearly killed myself stumbling around in there.”

  He gave me a blank look, shrugged, and started past me. “Whatever, man.”

  “Next time you try and scare someone, try to be a little more creative, okay?”

  “Fascinating, Captain.” He glanced back and lifted his brow at me in Spock-like fashion. “I’ve been here in the break room for the last fifteen minutes, talking to my girlfriend on the cell phone.”

  On the way out, I passed by the storeroom one more time and took a glance back into the darkness. Between the apocalyptic dreams and now the voices, I was wondering if I had finally lost my mind.

  Chapter 10 (Saturday, October 10th)

  I worked until five o’clock on Saturday at Comeaux’s then spent a good part of the rest of the day putting the finishing touches on my display. I made myself a monster sandwich and devoured it in front of the TV with the volume turned low. Mom and Dad were asleep. I must have caught only about fifteen minutes of Saturday Night Live before sliding effortless into my all too familiar dream of the Apocalypse.

  Again I am five and, as always, the House sits unchanged on its hill, but the surrounding countryside is altered. Perhaps, I am just seeing it more clearly this time. A vague trail winds through crabgrass and wild growing weeds up a hill that grows steeper with each step until it seems that I am climbing vertically up the wall of a cliff. I scramble and claw the last few yards and drop onto the front yard of the house.

  A fierce heat sears the hairs on the back of my neck. I turn to face a valley in flames. So clear is the image that I can vividly see the wreathing bodies of those unfortunate souls left behind. Explosions compete to overpower the screams of the citizens of Haven.

  I turn my back and see the fleeting silhouette of a figure standing in the shadows of the porch. I leap forward, but the figure is gone.

  I hear the distant sound of music. Turning my ear to the blank wall where you would ordinarily expect a door, I listen. There it is, yet distant still. I place the flat of my hand against the black wall and realize for the first time that the wooden structure isn’t painted black after all. From the way the surface flakes away at the pressure of my hand, I know it has been burned, though it is cool to my touch. I know that it wasn’t a victim of the fires that burn my town below.

  But as I look down from the railing of the porch, I can no longer see the town as I have in past dreams. Instead, there is a valley below the face of the house filled with what appear to be a forest of dead trees, great stick-man like monstrosities that probe the sky like the long-nailed fingers of emaciated old men. With a shudder, I get the immediate impression that they are all straining to reach me.

  Before I can investigate further, I feel a rough vibration beneath my feet, as if a gigantic sleeping monstrosity alerted to my presence has just rolled lazily onto its side. I put my hand back to the wall.

  The candy in my faithful pumpkin bucket glows once again and for a moment I feel peaceful and protected.

  Assured of my safety, I turn my ear toward the scorched surface and ever-so gently press the fleshy shell of my ear against it. I immediately hear the music. Clear and familiar. I hum it and close my eyes in an attempt to commit the tune to memory.

  That’s when the wall splits open at the border of two boards and snaps closed on my ear.

  I awoke from the dream with a jump, startling the girl standing over me. It took me almost five seconds before I realized that Claudia wasn’t part of my dream. She was standing in front of me in the living room of my home.

  “Geez, Claudia, what..?”

  Once the color returned to her face, I realized that it was glistening with the memory of recent tears. Her eyes were puffy.

  I leapt to my feet and took a step toward her. She instinctively started to fold toward me then almost instantaneously, stiffened, and turned away from me.

  “I saw the TV was on. You didn’t answer.”

  “What happened? You okay?”

  She started toward the door. “Outside. I don’t want to wake anyone.”

  We stepped down from the porch and away from the house, past a rusty red Schwinn lying on its side in the yard, a bike I remember from over ten years ago. Why had she ridden a bike here instead of walking as she normally did?

  “Is your Mom okay?” I asked.

  Claudia gave me a blank look. “Well… yeah. Last time I checked. She’s a real deep sleep
er.”

  I glanced at my bare wrist.

  “It’s just after two,” Claudia offered.

  I took a seat on the edge of the porch as Claudia began to pace.

  “We tried to contact my father tonight.”

  That statement raised so many questions that I didn’t know where to begin, but Claudia continued uninterrupted.

  “My friends from DFW… took me to a pre-Halloween séance.”

  It was pretty much the way I’d have predicted. She thought she could somehow speak to her dead father.

  The look on my face must have told her all she needed to know without my having to say a word, and she turned away from me. I shook my head in frustration.

  With her back to me, she continued. “I know what you’re thinking, but it did work. We contacted someone. He spoke to us.”

  A sharp chill traveled through me. “What are you saying?”

  She rushed over to me, her eyes widening with excitement. “Our medium, Raj, attempted to contact his spirit guide, but…”

  “Wait-wait. Explain medium. Explain spirit guide.”

  “A medium is the one who communicates with a spirit guide and a spirit guide is just anything that communicates information from the other side to the medium. It might be a spirit, an animal, an angel.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Were we talking angels now? “Before you go on, Claudia, just answer this. Are you feeling okay? Should we be talking to my dad or Uncle Jack right now?”

  Claudia rushed over to me and grabbed a handful of my sleeve in her fist. “No, no, Paul. This is between you and me. I’m serious. You have to promise me not to tell anyone about this.”

  “Ignoring for a moment the fact that you lied to me about the movie.”

  Claudia seared me with her eyes then nodded almost sheepishly. “Look, I’m sorry about that, okay? I just didn’t want to put you in the awkward position of having to lie for me if Mom started asking questions.”

  After a moment’s consideration, I gave her a cursory nod. “Start from the very beginning then and tell me everything.”