While the three of us watched in frozen amazement, Graham rose and, defying his own injuries, scurried across the chamber into the shadows, knocking over a large industrial camera tri-pod in his path.
Without thinking, I rushed after him, skidding to a halt only after I realized that complete darkness lay ahead. For a moment, I considered pursuing the mass murderer, my need for revenge momentarily overpowering my sense of reason, then I felt a firm hand on my shoulder, restraining me. “No, Paul. Let him go.”
I held my position until he physically forced my chin around to face him. The childish gesture of discipline only enraged me further. What right did this man have to call himself my father after betraying my mother?
“As far as Claudia goes,” my father told me, shaking his head emphatically, “What that thing implied couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“Did it happen after you met Mom?” I asked, knowing the truth.
He nodded slowly. “Your mother and I had just started dating. What happened between Pat and I was a mistake,” he told me. “That’s all you need to know.”
“No, I want to know the truth now,” I shouted at him. “Stop hiding secrets from me like I’m still a child you can protect!”
The glare he wore began to dissolve. Finally he gave a nod, and in his eyes, I saw a mixture of anger and pain of such a complex nature that I couldn’t tell if he would cry or strike out at me. “Your mother went off with an old boyfriend, planned to leave town with him. We were both so mad at Kathy. It was more out of anger than anything else.”
I felt blood rush through every vessel in my face.
He looked me in the eye. “We dealt with it a long, long time ago, Paul. Your mother forgave us, just as we forgave her.”
I shook my head in disbelief. How could they all remain friends after something like that? How could they forgive such betrayals?
In my mind I heard Tracy asking that question in the confessional: “Every man is capable of the act of betrayal. I just wanted to know if you’d ever suspected it in your father.”
My reaction had been one of offended belligerence. After all, my parents were incapable of such indiscretions, such mistakes. In my eyes, the two of them had been above reproach, beyond the taint of selfishness and evil of this life.
Grabbing my shoulders, a man named Jack Graves looked me in the eye and said: “Paul, Kathy and I aren’t incapable of mistakes. I’m just a man and she’s just a woman. We’re as flawed as any other person in this world.”
Paul.
I turned back and looked into the darkness, believing for a brief moment that I was back in Comeaux’s Grocery. It was still early October. Claudia had not yet been taken. Mrs. Wicke and Bridgette had not yet been murdered. All the childlike blinders to which I’d grown accustomed had not yet been lifted. This nightmare night had yet to begin.
Come to us and everything will be just as it was before.
Lies, I thought. There had been nothing but lies since I’d entered the House. The real truth was the love of the family and friends that surrounded me.
“Go to your girlfriend now, Paul,” Dad said to me. “She needs you.”
The tension eased out of me. His role reaffirmed, my father gave his son a firm push toward Claudia. She lay on the cold stone floor in disoriented confusion, blinking around at the dim lantern-lit cavern, until her eyes found mine.
I went to her then. She collapsed against me, sobbing plaintively, abandoning all her strength to me. I pressed her face against my chest, feeling her tears sink through the fabric of my shirt and into my skin.
“You’re safe,” I reassured her. “It’s okay now.”
It was then that I heard the cavern rumble, though it had been happening for some time. In the distance, I heard the crack and collapse of a wall.
“Paul,” my father said, hefting the backpack onto his shoulders and sparing a glance at Claudia. “We need a direction.”
After I struggled back into my jacket, I took her chin gently in both my hands and got her full attention. “Do you remember how he brought you down here?”
She shook her head. “He drugged me.”
“In the absence of any other ideas, we’re going back up the shaft,” Dad snapped.
Gathering Claudia between us, I watched as a rock the size of a bass drum rolled down a nearby wall. “We’ve got to go! Now!” my father shouted, pressing his lantern into my hands and pulling us firmly toward the exit from the chamber.
Chapter 40 Saturday, October 31st, (4:53 am)
Dad dug a bottle of water from his pack and handed it back to Claudia, as we rushed down the passage. A few screeching bats darted around us back toward the cavern. The rumbling of the cave collapse was just an echo in the distance behind us now.
“Dad, wait!” I called, slowing to a stop. Claudia leaned her weight against me as she began to gulp the water down. She was, of course, dehydrated. I cursed myself for not having the presence of mind to save one apple from the supply that had been depleted along the cavern path.
“Okay, I think we’ll be okay here for a while,” my father replied, going to one knee and rummaging through the backpack. He retrieved a small zip-lock baggie filled with trail mix and handed it to me, along with the flashlight Uncle Hank had put away.
A look passed between me and my father. Would he always be one step ahead of me, I wondered?
He looked away from me, attempting to hide the expression on his face. The pain in his chest hadn’t gone away. Now that we had Claudia back, I focused my concern on my father.
“You okay?” I asked him.
He gave me one of the disarming Graves’ smiles that had won the woman that had become my mother so many years ago. “I’m thinking I should go on ahead to the main chamber and get Hank and Tracy. Okay?”
When I hesitated in my response, he rose, swung the pack over one shoulder, and started down the chamber, not awaiting an answer. I started to call after him but thought twice about it. To forestall the moment afforded it too much gravity. My father had always been a man of action. Anything less and I would have been concerned.
Turning back to Claudia, I handed her the open baggie. “How are you doing?”
“Better,” she answered, through a mouthful of trail mix. She looked back down the stairwell toward the amphitheater.
“What is it?”
She simply stared at me without response. “I hear a voice.”
I shuddered involuntarily. “You should ignore it,” I replied.
Behind us, the squeaks and chirps of the bats had grown increasingly louder until it was a virtual symphony of noise, only amplified by the shape of the tunnel.
“You don’t understand. I’ve been hearing this voice calling out since I’ve been down here. I thought it must surely be my imagination, but now I’m not so sure.”
Claudia turned to me and I realized that for the first time since that tragic day in her mother’s kitchen, we were alone. She reached out and touched my face with trembling fingers. “Is all this real? Was I kidnapped? Did you come after me?”
I smiled uncertainly, a bit too much concern in my eyes. “Yeah. We all did.”
“It’s just that I’ve been hallucinating…” Her eyes went hazy, and she shook her head. “I guess it’s hard for me to accept anything at face value just now.”
She went on touching my face with a wonderstruck expression until I couldn’t bare the distance between us any longer. I pulled her against me. We kissed there in that dark, hope-deprived place, and for an instant, the world around us seemed to grow reverently silent and bright with the warmth that passed between us.
Suddenly, as if a gate had opened, a flood of winged vermin filled the passage around us. Claudia screamed and ducked against me. I fell over her, covering her with my body. I attempted to see my father through the mass of flying creatures but it was impossible. I could no longer even see the lantern’s light.
“C’mon, we have to go,” I bellowed at the top of m
y lungs, above the horrible high frequency screeching, like a hundred rusty crypt doors opening and closing. I turned my back to the bats and began to tug her after me, feeling every little thump and flutter of each tiny winged body.
And then as if a faucet suddenly tightened, the flow of bats just stopped.
“Dad!” I yelled, shining my light up the empty passage.
No answer.
I glanced at my watch in disbelief.
“Paul? What is it?”
“C’mon, I’ll explain on the way,” I told her as I rushed up the passage, her hand in mine. “Dad!”
“Mr. Graves,” Claudia attempted.
The only answer was the echo of our own voices.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“If you had to guess, how long would you say you’ve been down here?”
She shook her head as she struggled to keep pace with me. “You’ve got to understand, I’ve been in and out of consciousness. I’ve been off my meds for a while now and… well, I just don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore. Are you trying to tell me that it’s been longer than a day?”
“For you, yes, but shorter for the rest of us,” I tried to explain. “Time has been playing games with us.”
She gave a long hitching sigh, searched my face beside her, and gave a nod of complete recognition. “So, it wasn’t just me?”
“It’s been an extended psychotic episode for all of us.”
Suddenly, the passage came to an end at a stone wall. Claudia watched in confusion as I slapped my palm against the cold stone in front of us. “I distinctly remember an opening here before.”
Both of us cast a glance around us, Claudia to her left and I to my right, then at the same moment, we looked directly above us and spotted what any high school student would have immediately recognized as a fixture from the world of a teenager. Set into the ceiling above was a simple scuffed-up grey locker door not more than five feet high and a foot and a half wide, two little squares of vent set at the top and bottom of it.
Written on the door in bright red lipstick was the word: “Hallow.”
“Paul, am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” Claudia murmured under her breath.
“Well, I see your locker door from school,” I said dryly, passing her my flashlight. “If you see more than that, we might have a problem.”
As I reached for the metal lever set in the center, Claudia placed a restraining hand over mine. “There’s going to be something really bad on the other side of this, isn’t there?”
No chance I could sell her a strategically placed lie at this point.
“I would almost guarantee,” I answered her.
As I stretched forward--unwilling to stand directly beneath the phantom door--and craned my neck, the crucifix around my neck drifted out from inside my shirt and hung there exposed between me and Claudia.
“Believe it or not, I’ve been praying every conscious moment I’ve been down here,” I heard Claudia say beside me. I took a quick glance at her. She stared down at the crucifix with a serious look on her face. “If we get out of here alive, I just might have to rethink my stance on monotheism.”
My hand closed around the latch and I pulled. The door drifted open a crack with the disgruntled creek of world-weary hinges yet didn’t drop outward as gravity might have suggested it should. Floating impossibly above me on the other side of the doorway was the waxy glow of a hallway floor lit by dim morning sunlight.
Retrieving the flashlight from Claudia, I set it gingerly lens-side down along what for me looked like the wall of the next room. I let go of it and watched in amusement as the flashlight remained standing above me at a ninety degree angle to my position.
“No way,” I heard Claudia mutter below me.
I reached through, grabbed the outside edge of the doorway and pulled myself through, instantly feeling gravity grip me around the shoulders like a vise and pull me toward the floor which, I dutifully accepted on faith, was “down.”
Chapter 41 Saturday, October 31st, (6:54am)
Stepping out of the locker, I snatched up the flashlight and shined the beam one way then the other. Instantly, I recognized the empty freshman hallway of Haven High, our school. All the overhead fixtures were dark, though I could tell it was still very early from the weak light coming through the doors at the end of the hallway.
The clock on the wall above the door to Mr. Ernstead’s lab read just after eight o’clock, but when I looked down at my watch, I saw that the hands were running backwards from approximately seven am.
I turned and looked back at the single open door of a bank of identical grey lockers. Inside, I could see a dim light reflecting off two tiny wide eyes in the darkness.
Putting the flashlight aside, I set my feet on both sides of the locker frame for leverage. Reaching through the dark opening, I felt her grip my hands.
“Ready?”
“I think so.”
I pulled her through. She fell into my arms with a gasp, causing me to stagger back a few yards and nearly collide with the lockers behind me. She gave me a look of amazement. “That was bad ass!”
“Yeah, we’re thinking of selling the concept to Six Flags.”
Wrinkling her nose, she took a step away from me and looked around. “Wait? Is this..?”
“I doubt it,” I responded, snatching up the flashlight and shining its beam up the corridor.
Suddenly, the period bell clanged high up on the wall directly above us, causing both of us to jump, then lapse into a tension-releasing bout of laughter.
“I’m going to assume the exit is still this way.”
She grabbed my hand and together we started toward the building’s rear exit. We turned the corner and skidded to a stop, narrowly missing the bullet-riddled body of Rob “Starship” Willis lying on the floor, his lifeless eyes wide with shock and surprise.
Claudia threw her hands over her mouth and staggered back.
I shined my light across the floor. The bodies of people we had both known littered the hallway before us. Martin Fischer lay against his locker, apparently shot in the back as he was collecting his books. Greta Ventnor lay huddled in a corner next to the open door of the Chemistry lab with Donald St. Thomas, who looked, even in death, like he was still trying to protect her. Finally, there was Trudy Simmons, the perennial student counsel and cheerleading captain, ending her reign with a slack-jawed expression, on her knees as if she had been in the process of begging for mercy.
A piercing scream rang from somewhere inside one of the many rooms and a single gunshot followed, so deafening in the empty building that it sounded like a civil war cannon.
Claudia started to turn back the way we’d come, but I tugged her forward. “C’mon,” I told her, as I started around the body of Martin. “It’s trying to keep us from going this way.”
“Pretty effective.”
“Remember the interactive spook house we talked about on that trip to Eerie’s?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice as conversational as possible. “That’s all this is. It’s smoke and mirrors. Virtual reality.”
Around the next corner, there were more bodies. Directly in the center of the hall was the formerly imposing figure of Principal Smalls, covered with so many bullet wounds, even the crime scene photography veteran Claudia averted her eyes.
We reached the door to detention, “D-Hall” as it was known to the student body, and it was these two words that had been written in dribbling red letters on the door, only the letter A had been replaced with an E. Two figures scurried from inside, nearly colliding with us. It was Greg and Sonny. One arm of Sonny’s shirt was splattered with red.
“You got to get out of here. Before they find you,” Greg shrieked, rushing past us and slamming the door behind him. They promptly disappeared around the corner.
“There it is,” I hissed, pulling her toward the double door at the end of the hall. “The exit out of this place.”
Claudia turned to
face the door to detention. “She’s in here!” she stated emphatically into my ear. “In D-Hall.”
“Who!”
“Whoever’s been calling to me.”
A silhouette appeared in the frosted glass of the doorway of D-Hall. It was a large, broad-shouldered figure holding what could only be a rifle in his hands. He stopped and turned his head toward the doorway as if to listen.
I grabbed Claudia’s arm and pulled her silently toward the exit immediately in front of us. We rushed the bars of the door simultaneously and exploded through into the foggy mist of early morning, tripping and falling into the dewy grass that should never have been there.
Slowly, I rose to one knee and took in the fog-restricted view.
We were lying just outside the foundation of the House just as I remembered it. The sun was a grey shadow high on the horizon. The air around us was thick with vapor.
“Where..?” Claudia started to ask, but cut herself short with a gasp of surprise. Beside us lying a few yards away were one of those big apple crates turned on its side. I could see a large stone-lined opening in the ground—yet another entrance to the cavern—and realized that this had been the opening we had just come through. A set of stone steps leading down into the earth was clearly visible, though there was no evidence that anyone else had made it out yet.
“Dad must have gone back in for us,” I deduced, going to my knees and shining the flashlight into the darkness. Its beam bounced off something and reflected the light back at me. “Dad,” I yelled down the hole, but my voice sounded muffled, as if I were facing a wall.
“Wait!” Claudia grabbed my arm firmly and fixed me with a look of fear. “Something’s wrong here, Paul. Can you feel it?”
I glanced back to the stone steps. Before my eyes, black ooze had begun to bubble from its depths, slowly filling the passage, and obscuring the steps one by one. “What the hell is this?”
Claudia sighed with exasperation and looked back over her shoulder. I felt her clamp down on my arm and she began to quiver.
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