Nick stopped, his eyes widening. The front of his shirt blossomed black, and with horror, I realized that I was witnessing all the blood from his jugular draining out of his throat. A dim beam of sunlight reflected off the blade at his throat in the hand of the figure behind him.
I dropped the grey wire and staggered back from the threshold of the crypt, yelling, “Get back!” and reaching for the shoulder holster at the same time, thanking God that Dad had never asked for it back after we’d escaped the cavern.
I may have had just enough time to pull the weapon from the holster and turn it on the pale figure emerging from the depths of the crypt, but Claudia grabbed at my arms in an attempt to support me and managed only to get in my way. I lost my balance and fell to the ground, the gun dropping from my hand and out of reach.
I watched in slow-motion horror as the object of my nightmares stepped over the limp body of Deputy Nicholas Baxter and staggered slowly from the crypt; the ghostly white blood-drenched face of Nathan Graham. His chin dripped steadily with blood. His lips were mangled. Both forearms seemed covered by long red sleeves down to his elbows. Massive chunks of flesh around his wrists were missing as if he had torn the skin off along with the zip-ties like an animal escaping from a trap. This also explained why several teeth were hanging broken from their sockets.
He was a pale visage of death itself.
Tracy and my mother drew back instinctively, while Claudia moved closer, attempting to pull me out of the way. He swept Claudia up in his arms, the knife rising with almost dreamlike motion to the cream-white flesh of her throat. From this distance, I could see his cold dead eyes now—devoid of any semblance of humanity--and the black ooze that dribbled from its corners.
From the corner of my eye, I saw my mother double over, seizing her stomach. She sucked in a lungful of breath, then seemed to gag. “This must end,” I heard her croak. She then made a whining sound deep in her throat. “Oh God,” she managed. “What-is-happening-to-me?”
Tracy gathered her about the shoulders, recognition in her eyes. “Fight it, Mrs. Graves. Push it out with your faith!”
I heard as my mother chuckled in response and looked up at Tracy, a dark glow in her eye. “This one believes only out of fear. It is a shallow faith,” the creature said using my mother’s mouth. It was fully capable of using Graham to speak, I knew. It was choosing to use my mother only as a show of its power.
Suddenly, someone rushed forward and scooped something from the grass. A moment later, Uncle Hank held my father’s gun on Graham.
A smile appeared on its torn lips and the yellow orbs in his head rolled around to fix upon my uncle.
“Do it, Hank!” Tracy growled.
My uncle’s hand trembled. I began to calculate the odds of my seizing the beast’s arm before he could make the cut, but I was held immobile by my own doubts.
“The Ancient Fathers want you and only you,” the unrecognizable voice spoke from my mother’s throat. “In their mercy, they will let the others walk away.”
“It’s lying,” Tracy hissed at Uncle Hank. “They are the Masters of Lies.”
“Why me?” I heard Uncle Hank ask Graham.
The eyes of the thing that was once Graham rolled in impossible directions in their sockets and it gurgled something that might have once been laughter. “Your very existence offends the Fathers.”
“Okay,” I heard my uncle pronounce in a voice that was entirely exhausted, and I felt my heart sink. I could see all the blood drain from Claudia’s face in shock and horror. “I’ll go with you, but I need you to let her go first.”
“Your attempts to deceive me are feeble, Priest.”
“You know by my vow as a priest,” Uncle Hank stated. “We value all life as sacred.”
I watched in amazement as the Graham-thing shoved Claudia to the ground, yet retaining a grip on her collar. It held a single arm out to my uncle, the knife still in its hand.
“Come now, oh man of God,” its bemused voice hissed from the throat of my mother. “Join with us. Become Legion.”
“All life is sacred,” my uncle said calmly, the wrinkles of concern in his face smoothing out. “But there’s no human life left in that body.”
He fired, the bullet catching it directly between the eyes. Graham’s head rocked back, and a black blossom bloomed on the face of the crypt. A split second later, the ooze dissipated into a cloud but my attention was on the knife that remained in its hand. I dived, grabbing Graham’s arm and slamming it back against the open door. The knife dropped from its lifeless hand and the inert body collapsed forward, scattering the apples I had laid in the grass.
Uncle Hank dropped the gun to his side, his chin falling to his chest.
My mother began to spasm and Tracy lowered her to the ground. “Hank?” she called. “Has Mrs. Graves ever received your blessing?”
Uncle Hank could only stare at Tracy blankly. “A blessing?”
It was then that my father and BeBe came running up. Dad fell to his knees next to my mother. “Is she shot?” he cried.
My mother’s eyes opened again, and she seized my father’s throat in her hands. He gasped, eyes widening in surprise. It was an attack from a direction from which he could never have predicted.
“No,” Tracy screamed, attempting to wrench my mother’s hands apart, but they must have been vise-like. “Hank!”
“Mom! No!” I yelled, releasing Claudia and falling into the grass next to her.
Uncle Hank drew the vial of holy water from his pocket and began to pray over her, but she ignored him, focusing all her energy on my father.
“All those years, you left her alone to enforce these futile laws of yours,” she said between clenched teeth. “All the emotional pain, the anxiety she suffered at your hands and you promised her it was over, this pitiful ineffective crusade you attempted to wage against us. All that time, this dark sweet resentment she harbored for you.”
“Kaaah...,” my father attempted. His eyes found hers and just stared, seeming to search deep inside those crazed eyes for hope. His eyes softened and his hands relaxed from around the hands that sought to end his life. There was love in those eyes. Through the pain and the confusion, he had somehow located the love.
For a moment her grip intensified, causing my father’s eyes to roll back into his head, then without warning, she let him go and threw her head back in a scream of pain, leaving him gasping for air. She rose and leaped upon Claudia, shoving her to the ground.
“And you, the harlot,” she barked, clawing at her face, ripping at her hair. “She distrusted you from the beginning and the designs you have on her child, her only child. She knows that you don’t truly love him. No one can ever truly love him like she can!”
I attempted to grab one of her flailing arms, but she swatted me away roughly. There was an intense sting, and I felt blood running down my arm. I looked up to see Graham’s fallen knife in my mother’s hand. Claudia barely held the straining hand just out of reach of her face.
With a dark satisfaction, the creature growled from the throat of my mother: “I’m going to cut your lips off so you’ll never again be tempted to kiss him with that foul mouth.”
“Get off my daughter, you sick fuck!” I heard Tracy bellow, the voice different yet familiar, because I’d heard it once before in the cavern below. She grabbed the knife in her bare hand by the blade itself and dragging it physically away from Claudia’s throat.
My father watched in frozen fascination as my mother turned and faced Tracy, letting the knife drop to her side. Indifferently, Tracy released the knife, the blood running briskly from between her open fingers. They both simply stared at each other eyes shifting in their respective sockets as if both of them were watching a particularly active ball game.
I gathered Claudia up against my chest and pulled her clear. She blinked with confusion at Tracy and asked me in a meek voice, “What did she just say?”
“Me and my family here are going to make it good
and damn clear that you and your kind will never bother anyone ever again,” Tracy said in an even voice. “Now stop hiding in there! Come out and face me, you pussy!”
My mother clenched her teeth and drew back a step.
“Get out of her, you cowardly piece of shit, before I go in there after you!”
I watched as my mother, brought the knife up and into Tracy’s side, then dropped lifelessly backwards into the grass. Blinking in confusion, my mother looked from one bewildered face to the other as my father rushed to her side.
Uncle Hank grabbed Tracy, but she sternly shook her head at him. “Not yet,” she gasped. “Bring Claudia.”
Overhearing them, Claudia pulled gently out of my arms and rushed to Tracy’s side as her legs folded weakly beneath her. She fell against Claudia, and she and Uncle Hank lowered her gently to the grass. Her eyes found Claudia’s face and gazed lovingly at her the way only a parent could.
“Now I don’t hardly know her,” a thin voice murmured with wispy breath. “But I think I could love her.”
She blinked at Tracy in confusion, tears streaming down her face. “Dad?”
“I’m so proud of the way you turned out.” Ronnie told his daughter, a robust smile blooming on Tracy’s face. “I spent my life denying the little gifts I was given; my health, the love of your mother, the fleeting time I got with you.” He swallowed painfully and winced. “I love you, daughter. More than you’ll ever know.”
“I love you, Daddy,” she whimpered, gently stroking the pale cheek. “Please tell Mom I love her. I didn’t tell her often enough.”
Tracy’s eyes seemed to search me out and when they found me, the father within stared hard at me for a moment then seemed to relax. “He’s still a boy, Claudie, but he loves you with a man’s heart.”
I released the breath I had been unconsciously holding.
“I’m glad I had the chance to see to you one last time,” he muttered, his voice starting to fade. “I can’t wait to see my Patty again.” A pleasant smirk appeared on her face and a single tear rolled down her cheek.
Tracy’s eyes seemed to clear then. Dad went to one knee alongside Uncle Hank, who was hurriedly administering the last rites. She nodded and pushed her leather spirit bag into my uncle’s hand. “Paul’s now,” she said in her own voice now, her expression serious. Then her face softened and she actually smiled. “About that debt I owe you three. We can call it even.”
“God will see you home, my child,” Uncle Hank said, touching her pale face. He clutched Tracy’s hand to his chest. She began to shudder, stiffen, and relax with a single long exhalation.
Claudia turned and buried her face in my chest, sobbing with abandon.
By the time the sun had fully risen, BeBe and Uncle Hank had placed Deputy Nick’s and Tracy’s bodies into the bed of BeBe’s truck, my uncle giving them both final blessings. Graham’s body they tossed unceremoniously down the chimney shaft, pouring a can of gasoline down and setting it afire for good measure.
Dad and I walked the women to the trucks, leaving my uncle and the sheriff behind to make the final preparations. We started down together; Dad, Mom and Courtney Noble in his truck and me and Claudia in my car.
Less than ten minutes later, twin thumps jolted the earth beneath our feet. Some later said that it was felt over twenty miles away. Uncle Hank and BeBe met us twenty minutes later at the bottom of the hill where the fire road cut across open pasture land and finally back to the main road.
Uncle Hank told us that the house’s slab, along with the whole cemetery, had collapsed entirely in on itself, leaving a gaping hole the size of a football field. It was fortunate for both he and BeBe that they had brought enough ignition wire to reach the fire road, because when the charges went off and the dynamite exploded, the hill they had been standing on had all but disappeared from existence.
BeBe told us that Uncle Hank had been adamant about stopping the truck and walking just far enough back up the hill to examine the remains, record some footage on the digital camera Mom had had the presence of mind to bring along, and say a blessing over the ground. Eventually, he would put a copy of that disc in a safety deposit, along with detailed maps. It was a decision he made on his own without any input from the rest of us.
Neither Claudia nor I have been able to view any of the images, though he’s told us that we have an open invitation to see it if we have a need. When I told him that we had no desire to and probably never would, he beamed down at me with a look of pride and squeezed my shoulder the way my own father always does.
A few days after things had settled down, I told my uncle in as much detail as I could what had happened to me just before we left the cavern. I told him about the heavenly creature and about its statement about the apples. He stared past me for a good thirty seconds. “It was her,” he said in hushed awe, then turned aside and removed his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose to hide the tears in his eyes.
He entrusted the care of his new-found daughter to the Fuseliers, a childless couple he knows and trusts from his parish. They know a version of the truth, one that started with a single mother whose young life was tragically cut short, and ended with Courtney returning to town seeking sanctuary. She’s led a hard life in her fourteen years, he told them, and he refuses to trust her care to a county foster home.
They were happy to oblige.
When Courtney first started asking about the passage of twenty years that she couldn’t account for and why she hadn’t aged, the Fuseliers came to us for answers. We decided against the truth--that for the past twenty years she had been in trapped in a bend in the road of contiguous reality. Instead, we told them that the drugs she had experimented with must have had an effect on her perception of what was real and what was fantasy.
We told Courtney to be patient and that the memories would soon return, but being an apple not far separated from the tree of logic, she never bought that fourteen years of intact memory could explain a twenty year chunk of missing time. In the absence of Tracy--our go-to expert on all things supernatural--we’ve decided that all of us would have to be in on the explanation when the day comes that she is psychologically strong enough to handle the entire truth. Day by day, that time draws closer. Not just because of the speed at which Courtney is healing, but especially since how every day we forget more and more about our time down there in the House.
Once when I asked my new cousin what she remembered, she looked at me with a furrowed brow and asked innocently, “What cavern?”
I’m glad now that I had the presence of mind to write it all down. Even now as I read back over these pages, I feel like I’m reading a work of fiction, written about a character that sounds vaguely like me. Yet, I know it’s all true. Every word.
We had a small ceremony in the Graves family plot for Tracy. Since her mother had died over ten years ago, we were the only family she had left.
My uncle and father her surrogate fathers; me and Claudia, her siblings.
Due to the suspect nature of her identity, the tombstone held no name, only the inscription: “In the end, she saved us all.”
Officially, the Haven County coroner’s office designated her as a “Jane Doe.”
Ironically, the girl who Tracy had pretended to be for the last fifteen years had returned to the role she had created, though now as the young ingénue, twenty years younger than her vitals claimed she should be at thirty-five. Claiming that a mistake had been made in some computer somewhere, Dad was trying to resolve the issue through the proper channels, though obviously it wasn’t going to go away overnight.
In the meantime, Claudia and I relished the fact that my cousin could legally score us alcohol any time we wanted, though, as you might imagine, because of our past experience, neither of us were all that into drinking, especially Jose Cuevo.
My uncle comes by our house more often now, nearly every weekend, sometimes for dinner, but generally just for a casual visit. Sometimes, Courtney and the Fuseliers accompany
him, but more often than not, Courtney comes alone. Uncle Hank and Courtney seem to have a rapport that transcends the years they’ve missed sharing together, though with the rest of us, she’s understandably still guarded.
Last Saturday evening, Claudia told me that she saw Courtney clutching my mother in a desperate embrace, crying with abandon. She told me that she wasn’t sure what had prompted it, but that it sounded like “a good cry.”
Sounds like a chick thing to me.
Now that my father is officially retired again, he has lots of time on his hands. Some mornings he and my uncle will just sit in the garage with their cups of coffee and complain about his Ford.
(The three of us came up with a new one the other day: Driver Returning On Foot. Get it? That’s FORD spelled backwards!)
Though, Dad won’t admit it, he left the cavern that day physically weaker. It took months but Mom and I finally managed to convince him to go see the doctor as he’d promised, and he’s now on heart meds that seem to be working. Still, I find myself unconsciously helping him more and more with the hard labor around the house.
I try not to worry unnecessarily about the man, but having witnessed the specter of death so often in the last month, I find it hard to ignore its inevitable presence. My uncle has taught me that death is a necessary progression of the human journey.
The other day Claudia surprised us by accompanying me and my mother to church, though my father hasn’t yet joined us. One Sunday morning when I intended to come back into the house to grab my forgotten cell phone, I spotted him through the kitchen window, drinking coffee and reading our family Bible, his rarely used reading glasses resting on his nose. I walked back to the car, keeping his secret between us two.
As far as Claudia and I go, we’ve decided to take things slow and build a traditional relationship that includes something other than ritualized murders and haunted caverns. Though we still have the occasional moment when egos clash and tempers explode, my love for her seems only to have grown since that time of friendship bracelets and serial killer school in the bleachers.
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