I pulled it open further still, allowing as much light as possible to pour in. Except for the truck, it was completely empty. I crept around the side and glanced through the passenger side window. The cab was empty.
I started to open the door to examine the interior more thoroughly, when my eyes were drawn to the covered bed. I asked myself if I really thought the victims shared the cab with him.
You need to look back there, I told myself.
I stepped around to the rear and set the kit I held on the bumper. My eyes were drawn to the ground below and I noticed a small set of tire tracks disappearing beneath the truck. When Graham had arrived, there had been a smaller vehicle here and he’d taken it. Judging from the size of the tracks, it was a single man four wheeler. I looked back over my shoulder and realized that I had missed twin depressions in the high grass leading out from the barn.
Turning back to the bed cover, I ignored my fear and lifted the heavy aluminum cover. Sunlight exposed an empty interior. Spotlessly clean.
Had I expected blood? Torn clothing? What else had I expected from someone as meticulous as Nathan Graham had turned out to be?
I was just about to turn away when a slight change in my position caused the sunlight to reflect off something metallic, something shiny, in the center of the plastic bed liner. I lowered the tailgate and hopped up into the interior of the bed where I was well aware that four unconscious—almost assuredly dead--human beings had all too recently lain.
Five, a voice inside me corrected. Five unconscious, almost assuredly dead human beings. No, she’s alive, I countered. But once I had crawled forward on my hands and knees into the bed and recognized the object laying there, my heart sank. I felt doubt for the first time.
It was a single tiny skull. A charm from Claudia’s bracelet.
I snatched it up greedily and spun around expecting an attack that never arrived.
“What did you do with her?” I growled and the sound of my own voice in the confined space sent my heart into triple time.
Suddenly, the cell phone in my pocket began to vibrate and a second later, I heard the tune I most associated with Claudia. I thrust myself out of the truck bed and yanked the phone from my pocket, praying in vain to hear her voice.
“Hello, Paul.”
“Tell me where she is, Nathan?” I asked in as measured a voice as I could muster, as my white-knuckled fist clutched the charm. I heard in some TV crime show that you were supposed to use proper names when dealing with people like Graham. Proper names were supposed to elicit feeling of identification with the other by implying a relationship.
“Relax, Paul. Claudia’s being a real good girl for me,” the familiar voice replied sardonically. “I could have finished both of you there in Patricia’s kitchen, but I didn’t.”
“Why not?” I growled, my patience reaching its limits. “I was unconscious. Why didn’t you kill me?”
There was silence on the other end, and for a moment, I thought I detected another voice, a hissing sort of whisper, like a breeze through a field of reeds. Then Graham’s voice, spoke up again. “Are the other three with you?”
A thousand responses came into my head simultaneously. Should I try and deceive him? Could the discovery then endanger Claudia’s life? I couldn’t take any chances.
“I’m alone.”
“I know that already, but I’m glad we’ve decided to be honest with each other. It’ll make things much easier that way.”
“Now that I’m here, will you let her go?” I asked him, the pleading tone in my voice impossible to hide.
Again, I distinctly heard that disembodied whisper, like gas escaping from a leaky pipe, then Graham responded in a flattened monotone, “You’re not the one they want.”
The phone’s display went black.
I tried to redial. No signal.
Dropping the useless phone back into my pocket with the charm, I snatched the kit from the bumper and rushed out of the barn.
I followed the four-wheeler tire tracks up a path that led past the barn and continued through the apple orchard with no end in sight. Up ahead, there were a line of four-by-four foot wooden crates on the path, spaced evenly about every ten yards or so.
The bats had become more numerous now, most of them darting in the same general direction I was headed. This only added to the unnaturalness I felt all around me. Though I was in a huge living orchard, surrounded by fruit-producing trees, something felt artificial and wrong. There was an overwhelming feeling of having trespassed. It was more than a feeling. Several times I glanced into the tree line, thinking that I was in the presence of another. This compulsion only grew stronger as I got closer and closer to my destination.
Then suddenly, I came through the orchard and found myself at a quaint wooden bridge—one of a pair—that spanned a narrow man-made pond of which the water lay still and stagnant. Connecting the two bridges, a gazebo stood on a small island in the center of the pond.
Another craggy stone hill rose just in front of me with a set of steps leading upwards about fifty feet up a sheer rock face. From this distance, I could also see a thin ledge winding its way steadily up and around the rocky exterior like an ancient wheelchair ramp. It looked just wide enough to support a four wheeled vehicle.
I marveled at the lengths Robert Folliott had gone to keep the public at a distance. I had read that he was something of a recluse, which would explain the lack of a road connecting to the house—rumor was that he got around his other estate in Austin via golf carts and other motorized vehicles--but what it didn’t explain was why he used to give extravagant parties there.
I stepped up to the foot of the pond and looked down. As murky as a swamp, the black water was a virtual mosquito breeding ground. The wide dead eye of a coy fish stared at me from where it lay atop the stagnant surface.
I jogged across the bridge, pausing to look through the wooden gazebo, before deciding that there was nothing of interest there, then just as I was turning away the sun caught and reflected against something metallic. There on the railing, set about chest high, was a large black key. I snatched it up and studied it.
It was one of those old-fashioned intricately cast iron numbers, heavy and substantial, one that seemed to promise by its mere appearance to open something important. Two waves wove around the shaft like twin tendrils of black smoke.
I pocketed it and rushed across the next bridge.
Standing at the foot of the hill, I could clearly see a set of tire tracks threading their way up the stone ledge. From my perspective, the trail meandered and I didn’t have the time to waste. I turned then to the alternate choice of mounting the hill.
Steps had been carved into the reddish rock of the hill. Though steeply set, a wooden railing had been provided for safety. Yellow caution tape had been wrapped several layers thick around the base of the railing in an obvious attempt to dissuade anyone from using it. Folliott might have wanted to scare his prospective guests but he hadn’t wanted a lawsuit on his hands.
Yanking the yellow tape off, I tested the railing, which seemed sturdy enough. To free up both my hands for climbing, I secured the emergency road kit by a plastic clip on its side to one of my belt loops. Though the weight of the kit threw off my balance slightly, it was the best I could do under the circumstances.
With a deep breath, I started up the steps, resting my weight on the railing and pulling myself from step to step with my arms. Almost immediately, the railing began creaking—no, scratch that; it began “wailing” in protest.
I wondered how long ago an actual person had used these steps. Okay, fine, I told myself, I can manage this without the railing. I just have to be a little more careful.
I started slowly up the stone steps, resting my palms over the railing for balance but resisting the urge to rest my weight against it. Don’t test it unless you really need to, I told myself. The steps were perfectly able to support me, if I took my time.
Halfway up, feeling confident, I
found a firm enough handhold in the rocky face of the hill and glanced back over my shoulder. From my vantage point, I could clearly see the valley below. The orchard was massive and covered probably ten to fifteen acres when all was said and done.
This is what I had seen in my dream, I realized with sudden and surreal clarity. This is the exact same perspective that I viewed the forest of dead trees for the first time.
I turned back to the stone steps, loosening my grip on the handhold, just in time to see a bird out of the corner of my eye as it dove at my face.
Instinctively, I grabbed for the railing to stabilize myself, unavoidably yanking at the rickety structure. There was an enormous wrenching sound and a shower of dust rained down into my face. I cursed and shook my head, blinking back the sharp stinging in my eyes. I was momentarily blind.
I felt a hard thump against my temple, reminding me of a pitch I took while at bat back in Little League. The ball had struck me so hard, my ears rung until the end of the game. This time the dull thud had been accompanied by a sharper pain and I realized that in the bird’s second attack, it had actually ripped hair from my head.
“Son of a bitch!” I heard myself bellow. The sound gave me a sudden burst of adrenaline. I opened my eyes to see a huge dark bird—was it a hawk, I wondered?—swinging around and diving back toward me again.
Finding the handhold in the hill face again, I held myself steady and grabbed the towel from my shoulder, swinging it in the air like a surrender flag. The bird swooped down and with horror I realized it was the biggest winged creature I had ever seen this close before. The beast had at least a five foot wingspan as it dove at my face, its enormous talons raking the air in front of me.
Still the bird made no sound. To say it was unnatural would be an understatement. Its single-minded actions were more like a machine than a warm-blooded animal.
As its wings blocked out the sun and cast me in shadow, I recognized that its feathers were a flat, dull black, a matte black so completely dark, so all-consuming for one disorienting moment I lost my equilibrium and felt as if I was falling into it.
I realized in alarm that it was the color of burnt wood. The color of the House.
Its claws snagged the towel in my hand and pulled up, actually lifting me off my feet for a brief second, before letting go and soaring up and out of sight over the edge of the hill above.
Wrapping the towel around my fist, I stood there clutching the rock face, breathing raggedly in and out. I peered up and prepared for another attack that never materialized.
“Another creature of opportunity,” I grumbled, with an off-kilter chuckle, trying to ignore the truth of how close I had come to falling thirty feet.
Finally, I started back up the stone stairs, a lingering pain in my eyes and a tattered towel, the only evidence of the bizarre event that had just occurred to me.
The natural stairway ended about twenty yards further up. I gripped the last few feet of the railing, collapsed chest-first into a grassy clearing and came face to face with what I had expected to be the second image from my dreams.
The House Without Doors.
Chapter 32 Friday, October 30th, (12:52pm)
I crawled a few feet away from the stone stairway and rose to my feet, staring dumbfounded into the clearing. The fear I thought I would feel at this moment, facing the object of my serial nightmares, had been replaced by utter confusion.
The frame of an enormous structure was about hundred yards away and set in the center of a smaller group of apple trees that were more mature than the ones at the base of the hill. Islands of lumber and altars of bricks surrounded its humongous grey slab, its naked foundation. It stood like the skeletal remains of a dinosaur, the silence of the hill punctuated by the snapping of loose plastic coverings that waved in the October breeze. To the right of all this, as if to drive home the metaphor in my head, sat a graveyard.
“What the hell?” I heard myself utter in the dead silence.
I walked slowly around the parameter of the site, getting a wide angle view of the whole picture before I started closer. There was no movement except the branches of the trees and the inflating and deflating of the plastic wrapped construction materials, which looked disturbingly like the chests of living animals, inhaling and exhaling.
Folliott’s Folly.
Abandoned. Dead.
My first emotion was utter despair. This is the wrong place, I thought. I’m wasting time in the wrong place, and Claudia is still missing.
Then a second thought atop that one.
I’m missing something here. Something vital.
Something suddenly struck me as odd. How did all this construction material get here in the first place? Where was the road that a truck would use to deliver all this? The tiny hillside path might have been sufficient for a golf cart or four-wheeler but definitely not wide enough for trucks hauling construction materials.
I took a complete circuit of the proposed house and saw a dirt fire-road, leading off through another grove of apple trees with several more of the big crates scattered about here and there. I sucked in a breath of wounded surprise.
A road led right up to the house. From where, I had no idea.
Checking my cell phone one last time with the intent of warning my father, I found without surprise that there was still no service available.
Yet somehow, Graham had managed to call me, I thought.
I stepped up to the concrete slab of the mansion and scanned it. The foundation of some of the rooms had been fully completed, but others had been abandoned halfway through, leaving nothing but a sea of grey like the lid of a crypt.
The lid of a crypt, I considered.
It was then that I remembered the dream I’d had of lifting the coffin lid and seeing Claudia’s face.
I turned and looked again at the small graveyard. There were simple tombstones, a few above ground crypts (like the kind you might expect in New Orleans), and a single elaborate marble construct at its center complete with sculptures.
Was this a real cemetery, I asked myself. After a quick glance at some of the names on the tombstones, I realized that these were simple props. But more than that, the builder seemed to have real contempt for the mere concept of religion.
The first one that caught my eye was one that read, “Bill Gates, Welcome to the Ultimate Big Blue Screen of Death,” and just below those words, the following quote from him: “Religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
“Steve Jobs,” another read, with the following quote: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
The magicians Doug Henning and David Copperfield were there, along with some of the Twentieth Century’s greatest artists that had worked in the horror genre, George Romero, John Carpenter, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, William Peter Blatty, H. P. Lovecraft. Edgar Allen Poe’s tombstone read: “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
But my attention was drawn to the crypt in the center of the cemetery, the back side displaying the unfamiliar name of Ehrich Weiss. It was an enormous mini-building with Roman columns and full-sized angelic figures guarding each side. One held a flaming sword, the other cradled a pair of doves.
There was a quote chiseled into every side. One side read: “The greatest escape I ever made was when I left Appleton, Wisconsin.” Another read: “What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.” And: “Magic is the sole science not accepted by scientists, because they can’t understand it.”
Finally, I reached the front of the crypt as evidenced by a black wrought iron gate set into its face. Above a marble bust of Ehrich Weiss--the man the world knew as Harry Houdini--displayed the quote: “The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.”
I gave a dark chuc
kle at that one… that is, until I realized that I could very well meet the qualifications of the subject of that quote, instantly draining any humor from it.
A set of three steps led up to the iron gate. Warily, I gazed around the small cemetery and mounted these steps, peering through the bars of the gate door. There in the confining four by six foot space I could see another iron gate in the floor propped open against the interior wall of the crypt and a set of four steps leading down into a darkened hole in the floor.
I stepped back unconsciously, feeling an almost overwhelming compulsion to walk away, my eyes dropping to the keyhole on the wrought iron door, about the size of the key I had in my pocket, I would wager.
He wants me to come in, I thought. He’s done everything but roll out the welcome mat.
Then on the heels of this thought, another one: Not he. It. His master.
I took out the iron key and stared down at it. What I had first thought were just simple wavy designs along the shaft, I now realized were wings. Black wings.
As I slipped the key into the hole, a thin hope swelled up within me that it wouldn’t work. That it would be the wrong key. When I turned it, there was momentary resistance, followed by a rusty clack inside the door as the lock turned over. The door drifted open on protesting hinges.
I stood there at least five minutes thinking about my options, and every one of them seemed to end with me going inside. Again I checked my phone. No service.
Suddenly, I hatched upon an idea. Returning to the apple trees scattered around the front of the house, I made a pouch with the bottom edge of my shirt and collected as many apples as I could. I dumped them on the ground in front of the crypt and returned to the trees for another two loads. When I was done, I arranged the apples in a six foot long two foot wide crimson arrow pointing at the door of the crypt. Just to make sure they wouldn’t roll away, I used my heels to force them halfway down into the soft dirt.
The four apples I had left over, I set aside in my emergency kit.
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