Hallowed Page 9

  She hung her head. “I promise I’ll tell you everything that happened tonight, but first, I have to go see my father.” She started toward the bike.

  I leapt off the porch and grabbed the bike. “Hold on. Why can’t we do this tomorrow?”

  “We opened a door tonight. I know it.” Her eyes seemed to blaze for a moment in the half-crescent moonlight. “We have to go tonight.” She gave the bike a tug, but I held tight.

  “Dammit, Claudia! You’re not giving me much of a choice here.” I shot a glance up at the second story window. Luckily, my parents’ room was on the backside of the house, otherwise they might have heard us a long time ago. “How about you let me drive us?”

  “No, we have to do this a certain way. We can’t just motor up there, making noise and spewing exhaust and still hope to communicate on a mystical plane of existence.”

  I threw my head up to the sky in frustration.

  Claudia stopped struggling against the firm grip I had on the frame of her Schwinn. “I know you don’t believe in any of this stuff. I don’t expect you to come with me. Just please extend to me some of that tolerance we talked about.” She finally looked up, fixing those dark unreadable eyes on mine. “This is something I have to do.”

  My grip loosened. I breathed deeply and slowly released it. My eyes instinctively took another look upstairs then over at the front door. Finally, my eyes settled on hers. My shoulders released the tension they’d been holding and noticeably slumped.

  I didn’t have to say a word. She knew. A smile burst from her like a ray of sunshine, and she took the bike out of my unresisting fingers. After a few moments of total silence, I heard her say in a voice I barely recognized as hers, “Thank you, Paul.”

  Chapter 11 (early Sunday morning, October 11th)

  The bike I took out of our shed was at least ten-years-old and had last seen an actual rider about four years ago. My old purple and green machine—just like the color of my favorite superhero growing up, the Incredible Hulk—had added the additional color of rust. In fact, I’d always called it “Bruce” after the Hulk’s alter-ego.

  “Claudia, I’m not sure old Bruce is road-worthy.”

  “I think the back tire might need a little air,” she reported.

  That was putting it lightly. The tire of the Schwinn was flat in the fullest expression of that word. The chain was rusty. The rubber handlebar grips were cracked and falling apart.

  Draped over the seat of Claudia’s Schwinn was a huge black cloak, a hooded monster that looked like something out of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. She whisked it around her shoulders dramatically, pulled a backpack on over it, and took a hand pump out of the basket on the front of the bike.

  “It’ll be fine once we get the tire aired up.”

  “It’s flat. There’s a reason for that. It probably needs to be patched. How far is the cemetery from here?”

  “I don’t know. Takes about thirty minutes on the bike.”

  I snatched up the pump and began to air the tire up. Once the tire tightened with air, I rested my weight atop it and rode it up the driveway. It seemed to hold, but just in case, I dropped the pump into the metal basket mounted to the back of Claudia’s bike.

  In only the second hour of the morning, the night felt like a heavy blanket that muffled both light and sound. Together we rode up Ash Avenue, not a headlight or porch light in sight, only a half-crescent moon as our guide and crickets as company.

  “Talk to me before I fall asleep and roll off into a ditch. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  Claudia explained how they all met at the movie theater in the nearest town with a movie theater, a town north of Haven called Cuvier, named after the French farmer who owned most of the property in the 1800’s. Once everyone had arrived, they all took the roomiest car, belonging to a girl named Ana Lucia. Everyone called her Lucid, because she claimed to control her own dreams.

  “She had a Buick Skylark. I’m pretty sure the shocks were shot, because I was sitting in the back and the ride was so bouncy that I nearly tossed my cookies.”

  “Okay, wrong details. Where did you go?”

  “Well, we drove about fifteen or twenty minutes to an old abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.”

  A whistling breeze blew my hair back into my eyes and the bike wobbled beneath me, before I regained control. I felt the hairs on my neck prickle, not unlike the sensation of having them singed off by a particularly fierce fire.

  “We walked around the back of the house and got in through a hole in the fire place. I felt like friggin’ Santa Claus,” she chuckled. She glanced over at me. I must have had a really grim look on my face, because she asked, “You okay?”

  “Yeah, keep going.”

  “So, we set up on the floor in the center of the main room. Maybe it was a living room or a dining room. There was a really old winding staircase like in those old black and white Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee flicks.”

  “Hammer.”

  “That’s it. Anyway it was a really cool old house. You’d have really appreciated it.”

  We had just passed the Fonteneaux’s two-story ranch house and followed the barbed wire fence that marked the boundaries of their cow pasture. Once we left the border of their property, the residential area ended and wilderness took its place. There was nothing but road, a long drainage ditch, and trees as far as our limited visibility went.

  “So, we sat around the Ouija board in a circle, Raj, Lucid, Franklin, Steff, and me. We touched the planchette and Raj tried to…”

  “Plant-what?”

  “Planchette. That’s what the pointy-piece is called. Anyway, Raj tried to contact the spirit guide he said a friend of his had had some success with before. They don’t know the spirit’s name, so they call him the Caretaker.”

  “Why, because the Crypt Keeper was already taken?” I murmured low enough for her to ignore.

  “When he was alive, he used to look after the gardens of a large estate or something like that. Franklin kept calling him Groundskeeper Willie, after the guy from the Simpsons, y’know. But after Steff made a crack about Captain Howdy, y’know, from the Exorcist, Raj snapped at them both and told them to stop playing around. Said it was disrespectful and the spirits wouldn’t communicate with us if it sensed we weren’t taking it seriously.”

  I peddled slightly faster, hoping to get to where we were going as quickly as possible and get back home again. A surrealistic quality had settled over me and I wondered, not for the first time, if I was awake or sleeping and having a variation of the apocalyptic dream, only this time Claudia was along for the ride.

  “We concentrated on calling this Caretaker for a good ten minutes before there was any movement. Raj asked if we were in the presence of the Caretaker and the planchette pointed to ‘yes.’ He asked if it would like to join our group. It said ‘yes.’”

  The night was overcast and occasionally the moon would slip beneath a cloudbank, rendering the road in front of us virtually invisible.

  “I told them earlier of my theory of a serial killer, and we all agreed that, given the opportunity, we should ask if Grace Fischer’s death was an accident. Immediately, it pointed to ‘no.’” In the darkness, I could still feel Claudia’s eyes on me. “We asked if she died a violent death. The answer was ‘yes.’”

  Yup, straight from the mouth of a dead gardener. “What else?”

  “When Raj began to narrow down the questions to the identity of the killer, the planchette stopped moving altogether. He apologized to the spirit guide and asked if he had offended him. There was no answer.”

  As the road curved to the west and narrowed, the pines had begun to close in around us. We had a couple of miles left to go before we hit Old Town Road where the graveyard was located. I had never been out this way without headlights and the trees had a more ominous feeling this time of night.

  “After about five minutes of waiting, Raj just shrugged and looked like he was about to give up. Before I could sto
p myself, I asked the spirit guide if he had any information about Ronald Wicke for his daughter, Claudia, and the planchette began to move again.”

  From the bike beside me, Claudia cast an excited look over at me, her eyes catching a beam of moonlight and seemed to sparkle. “Yes. It pointed to ‘yes.’” She slowed down and I glanced back to see her drag the heel of her hand across her eyes with aggravation. I slowed to let her catch up with me. “When I asked if we could speak to my father, the planchette pointed to four letters, one after the other, before it stopped completely. Those letters were S, O, another O, and N.” Claudia peddled along, her breath coming in bursts now from the excitement and the effort of her legs. “Do you see, Paul? ‘Soon.’ The spirit guide was saying that my father would contact me soon.”

  The deeper down the street we rode, the more the trees obscured the moonlight above, until all I could see was the occasional patch of stars and here the clouds were hiding even that. It was one of those moments of visceral, unreasonable fear that could take hold of you like the jaws of a tiny animal. I pulled my bike to a complete stop and looked back over my shoulder at the way I had come.

  Claudia braked ahead of me. “What’s up?”

  “I just can’t see a damn thing and the road curves up ahead a few times. I don’t want to end up in a ditch filled with water and water moccasins.” Hell, if it wasn’t for the light cast by the stars at our backs, I couldn’t even see Claudia, and even that light would be lost after we took that first curve.

  “Look, just stick close to me. I’ve ridden this road at night before.” And she rode off without another word. “C’mon,” her confident voice urged.

  I cast one more last look over my shoulder in an attempt to keep myself oriented then started after Claudia into the inky darkness out of sheer spite. There was no way I was going to show my fear in front of her.

  “So, how come you’re so familiar with this road at night?”

  “I’ve been out here once or twice since we’ve been back. Usually when I can’t sleep.”

  “Alone? Why?”

  She was quiet for a long time. Finally, with an indecisive quality to her voice she replied, “Evidence?”

  I rode next to Claudia for a few yards, wobbling unsteadily like the first time I had set foot on a bike. It’s a terrible thing not knowing what’s ahead of you and it affected all of my senses.

  “Trust me, Paul.”

  Trust her. How could I fully trust someone who had just admitted to me that she was going to a graveyard to contact her dead father on the word of the spirit of a dead gardener? I was seriously beginning to doubt her judgment at this point.

  The tree line curved ahead of us. I knew in a moment we would take that first turn and be in complete darkness in a virtual tunnel of trees. My heart raced. Fear leapt onto my back and sank its fingers into my shoulders. Then suddenly I felt the warmth of Claudia’s hand as she reached out and grasped mine. I don’t know how she found it, but she took it as if it were broad daylight. She didn’t say a word and neither did I. We just continued on and took that blind turn into the pitch dark, together, hand-in-hand. It was one of those defining moments that all true friends have when language disappears and you communicate on a deeper level.

  Then her voice came to me out of the emptiness and filled my head as if she were lying beside me, her head next to mine. As if she and I were two people alone on an island to ourselves. “Paul, I know you don’t believe in any of this, but I wouldn’t ever do anything that I thought would put you in danger. If nothing else, you’ve got to believe that much.”

  And I did. I don’t know what finally convinced me, the touch of her hand or the sincerity of her voice, but I suddenly trusted this girl. Trusted her with my life.

  “Wonderful, isn’t it?” she exhaled. And suddenly it was. It was terrifying, but exhilarating. Together we rode, hand-in-hand, into the darkness that awaited us.

  When we finally reached the cemetery it was just after three in the morning. Claudia led us to a tree just outside the barbed wire fence line and leaned her bike up against it. She rested her shoe on the middle wire and pushed it down, while lifting the top wire with her hand. “C’mon.”

  I ducked my head, squeezed through the gap, yet still managing to clip my shoulder on one of the prongs. Once inside, I held the wires apart for her.

  Removing her backpack and tossing it over, she slid through the wires like a practiced expert, scooped up the pack and kept moving without a look back.

  “Hey, wait for me,” I hissed, whispering as if there were a possibility that I might wake someone.

  We walked together through the staggered rows of tombstones, the moonlight giving the stones a blue glow. I had a disturbing image of the gardens that my father sometimes planted. The way the rows were laid out was similar. It was like a garden of the dead.

  “The harvest is coming.”

  Though the voice came from my own throat, I barely recognized it as my own. My initial thought was that it had come from my immediate left, which, of course, caused an instinctively reaction to leap right, plowing into Claudia and eliciting a single sharp shriek of which I didn’t know she was capable.

  She threw one hand to her mouth and began slapping me with the other. I leaped away, defensively throwing up my hands.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Claudia studied my face. “What would make you say such a bizarre thing, Paul Andrew Graves?”

  It was the first time I recall any girl outside of my own mother using my full name. The familiarity of it was startling yet comforting at the same time. It created within me a strange dynamic between wanting to hide myself out of a sort of indefinable shame and wanting to show my one true face to someone all at the same time; a feeling perhaps as ancient as the first garden.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Why the hell did you jump?”

  In that moment, I suddenly wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to tell her about the dreams. About the damned tune I kept humming. The voice in the storeroom. But when I opened my mouth to say the words, these desires to come clean were somehow trumped by another overwhelming desire that confused me so much that I was speechless.

  The moonlight was hitting her face at an angle, this perfect angle, and giving her pale skin such an amazing internal glow that she looked like some kind of Renaissance cherub on a painted canvas of pure light. It was breathtaking. On the heels of this came another strange desire that took hold and wiped all the former thoughts of dreams and voices from my mind.

  She immediately looked away. “C’mon,” she growled, squirming out of her backpack even as she started away from me.

  I found her at Mr. Wicke’s grave, shivering from the cold. Her coat was thrown over another tombstone. I immediately snatched it up and apologized profusely to whoever happened to be down there.

  From her backpack, she removed a board that unfolded from quarters into one of those Ouija boards, but not the run of the mill wooden one you see hidden away on the dusty top shelf of closets. This one was a special mail-order variety, a colorful feast for the eyes, created for artists by artists. It didn’t just have the letters and numbers, but a blazing sun for “yes,” and a full moon for “no.”

  It was called the “Psychic Eye,” probably because it had a big pyramid with an eye on the back. What made this one different was how much more serious it was about what most people who dabbled in it considered an interesting party game. The alphabet took up most of the board, but in addition to that all the zodiac signs were there along with tarot images like the ones on the cards. Y’know, the Lovers, Death, Colonel Mustard. It even came with this instructional booklet that was as big as any Stephen King novel.

  Claudia laid the board on the ground and sat Indian style in front of it. “C’mon,” she said, removing the planchette. She looked up at me with impatience. “Well? Sit down.”

  “I’m not going to touch
that thing.”

  “Do you know who believed in the power of the séance, Paul? President Abraham Lincoln, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Graham Bell, and Marconi, the inventor of telegraph and radio.”

  “Well, I was on the edge until you mentioned Marconi. Now I’m really on-board!” My sarcasm seemed to be lost on her.

  “Even the inventor of the television supposedly contacted the spirit of Thomas Edison.”

  “What did Edison tell him? Stop screwing around and invent something else?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Paul, I know you don’t believe in it…”

  “I do know one thing. Harry Houdini’s wife Bess, conducted a séance in his honor every year on Halloween for ten years after his death because of a pact they made.” I’d read about it just the other day when the subject of séances had first come up.

  She sighed laboriously. “Yes, I know all about that. They had a secret code that only she knew.”

  “He went around the world debunking psychics and their séances for years, but was so open to the possibility of the dead contacting the living that he told his own wife that after his death if he could, he would contact her from the other side.” These were all facts I figured that she already knew as well, but facts of which she needed to be reminded. “In one part of the world or another, a séance has been conducted for him every year on Halloween and, Claudia, Houdini has never contacted the living. What does that tell you?”

  “Houdini was a skeptic. Just like you.”

  “According to your friend, this won’t work unless I believe.”

  “Paul, just give me the benefit of the doubt.”

  I sat down opposite Claudia, holding her cloak in my lap. She gave me a self-satisfied nod and placed her hands on the planchette. “Put your fingers on the other side. Light pressure. Don’t push on it. Let it move on its own.”

  Instead of following her instructions, I reached down and took her hands in mine. They were as cold as ice. She looked up with wide eyes.

  “I came out here because I knew you’d come anyway and I didn’t try and stop you, even though I don’t believe what you believe,” I told her. “Why don’t you try to respect my beliefs?”