Twenty-two
“The Fall of the House of Belvedere”
7 January
Monday
There was still no word from either Shannon or her mother, and their voicemails were full. Hippie could occasionally sense Shannon, but she quickly hid herself, and she was good at it.
At least she’s okay, he would tell himself. But he was definitely not okay. He may have felt deep pain when he left Eden, but he knew that Eve had to stay in her own time, and their sins made his guilt compensate for the loss he felt. Still, it was Shannon who saved him from the limbo he was in afterward. Eve seemed to reach him through eons, becoming a tormentor and a captor. He owed Shannon his life, and that made his heart hurt more now that she was gone. He knew that lots of people said “I owe you my life,” but few knew the weight those words carried.
He did.
It was time now for him to honor her wish, to get rid of Melvin Belvedere’s house of horrors. He’d tried to focus by first drinking the pain away, but a buzz from any kind of booze lasted an hour or so, and that was followed by three hours of terrible headaches. He preferred to drink Zelda’s amazing coffee, which he was happy to tell her was better than his any day, and that she was spoiling him. He also drank unsweetened limeade, which she also made like an expert. Vince, already a muscular, beefy man, complained to Hippie that she was trying to make them all fat. It was a joke, but Zelda was right at home here with Vince, as Hippie knew she would be. He was happy for them…except for one detail.
***
Another nightmare
Robin made a very disturbing discovery the day before. It was not covered in the news except for an obituary. The man had found a place not far from the now burned-down town Nick Hall had blown off the map, and since Nick had no jurisdiction there, the place where the missing ghost hunter failed to return from was never mentioned, but with the software he gave Robin, she could find anything with the right keyword. And so it was found that on the night the great storm began killing, and Tommy Oppenheimer threw his last party, a man named Brannon Hawthorne went ghost hunting alone, violating the first rule of everything from swimming to urban exploration: never go by yourself.
His partner sat at home that night, not believing “Bran” would actually go, opting to be warm and safe and eat popcorn while he sat with his fiancee watching “Sleepy Hollow.” Johnny Depp made such a fine Ichabod Crane.
It shook him to his soul when he had to identify Hawthorne’s remains including his severed head.
The place in question was another plantation that predated the Patterson’s and went straight to early British colonial days. The town was named “Harrison Lot,” and there was one, and only one, history of it kept on microfiche until it was recently transcribed to the FBI database. That part was odd enough, but the story of Harrison Lot was pure nightmare fuel. She didn’t want Hippie distracted by those details yet.
Stan and Eddy were ready. A stolen box truck was carefully packed with the Harrow charges and research had revealed that it was touchy and powerful, so they used a three dimensional floor plan, rendered by Robin from the original floor plans, that could be tilted and moved left and right to choose the best positions for duct-taping the charges. Joe, who was there without Angie in case he got caught, asked, “Stan, you brought all of it?“
“It ends there. whoever he was writing this to never found out what happened to their nephew.”
“Joe, let me do mah job. Ye want a granite building brung down, you bring everything ye got, boy. I ain’t never seen this stuff in action so I ain’t takin no chance of comin back up here to finish the job. That big ass truck Vince has? It’s gotta be moved. Git it down the heel acuz they ain’t nobody safe up here, speshly not me. Turn off all phones and radios now. I’m wirin these to blow by dialin’ in a number, and I don’t wanna die acuz someone gotta send a tweet. Joe, ye an’ Hippie stay. Yer my guards. This place gives me the shits, boy, that thar ye kin take to the fuckin bank.“
Three hours went by. Stan came out first followed by Eddy and then Joe and Hippie. There had been no incidents; all was quiet.
Until they all met out front in the remnants of the gravel that was now in piles where the snow was scraped by Vince’s D-9 Caterpillar. He only had one, because there was an even bigger model now, but the D-9 was responsible for scraping feet of snow away on the climbing entrance road while going uphill. What a machine…
As Joe watched, a section of the granite façade changed. “Hippie…“
“I see them, Joe. Don’t worry about it. Remember, I’m hauling holy water.”
Faces, grotesque and menacing, stood out in a macabre relief, even appearing to blink their eyes.
But then they appeared to be singing, and more faces along the wall joined them. It was the original Scooby Doo song, and it was loud, seeming to travel up the hill from all sides, even deep in the valley by the river. Hippie knew that it was a diversion, a lame attempt to delay them. But he also knew that when it didn’t work, something worse would happen.
He used a large insecticide canister with shoulder straps and unlike previous models, as soon as the pressure top was locked, a battery instead of a hand pump-plunger pressurized the contents and the pistol grip wand at the end of the hose was charged. Everyone from gardeners to pest control employees used them now. Hippie wagered he was the first to put holy water in one. He aimed at one of the singing faces and sprayed it, causing the song to be interrupted by screaming, and each face he sprayed in turn wilted back to plain granite.
Sure enough, an attack was immediate, as from the side, the direction Joe said Danny had come from the day Hippie went missing, three huge black dogs came charging. They were lightning fast, snarling, and there was no time. Joe brought two down with WP bullets but one jumped on Hippie and knocked him backwards where he fell on the tank, knocking his breath out, and Joe pulled a backup pistol, a small Walther, from its holster at the opposite hip and fired right into the animal from beside it. The dog didn’t die but backed off. Joe used the Routson Model 50 in his right hand, fired, and the round began to eat the beast with white phosphorus.
“Goddamn ye sonsabitches, ye almost made me press the send key. All our problems would be over. Now quitcher fuckin round an’ let’s git the hail outta here!” Stan thought a fight with hellhounds was just “fuckin round?” the man was a rock.
Joe drove them down to street level and Stan opened his phone and dialed the receiver’s number.
Nothing happened.
“They’re blocking the signal,” Hippie raged. “I’ll have to do it from up there.”
He got out of the Yukon and asked for the phone but Stan said, “Beatnik, are ye fuckin crazy? That’s gonna be way too close and ye’ll go with it.”
“Has to be done, Stan. If you insist, you can come too, but I wish you wouldn’t. Your life is worth more than mine.”
No one had ever said such a thing to Stanley Roberts, and he was moved by it. It filled him with courage and he got out and said, “Let’s go, Beatnik.”
They trudged up the long hill, and Hippie stopped twice to lean on his walking stick; his left leg hurting too much to take. He had never thought about why the fruit restored his body except for the leg. Limping the rest of the way, he and Stan made it back to the parking lot.
Stan looked around and said, “We need cover. There’s a edge here where I can trigger them charges, but we caint so much as stick our heads up after detonatin’ or we’ll go right up with this here hell house. Let’s git down there.”
But it wasn’t going to be that easy. The building was so infested with evil that “stick people,” or powerful demons, surrounded Hippie while Stan got over the edge and watched in terror.
The black things faded from inky smudges to solid and back again, and it infuriated Hippie that they thought this trick would protect them. He let them get closer, surrounding him, then prayed quickly and raised the walking stick into the air. They made it seem like it was night, as if they could steal all the light from the world, but the light from the sky struck the raised stick, and Hippie channeled it through himself to his free hand, his palm facing the demons, and the light, more intense than a bolt of lightning, shot out, shattering the demon in front out him. Stan had been watching, unable to look away, until the light blinded his eye.
“Stan, blow it, do it now!” Hippie yelled as he kept fighting.
Stan, as soon as his eye could see, did what he was told, knowing that both he and the beatnik would die.
The charges went off sequentially so one blast wouldn’t extinguish the other, but the ground floor had to go all at once, because the debris had to fill the basement. That massive explosion blew Hippie clear of the parking lot, and he and Stan rolled and bounced hard down the hill, and Stan was laughing like hell the whole way down, having never seen such powerful destruction with his own eyes before. It was glorious and funny at the same time, and he was unaware that the positive shock wave had blown chunks, slabs and bits of granite, wood and furniture over their heads, soaring to parts unknown.
No one was anticipating anything this powerful.
Halfway down the hill, cut, bruised and just beginning to feel their pain, Stan was still laughing helplessly, while Hippie said, helping him up, “We better get the hell out of here. The air force will fly over any minute, Stan. Look.“
They both looked up the hill, and a giant mushroom cloud was already almost a thousand feet up, still violently boiling with flame in it like they had used a nuclear bomb. Stan just laughed harder and Hippie grabbed him by the arm and said, “Come on!“
Vince and Joe both drove out of the area as fast as traffic allowed, because everyone was slowing down to look up at the cloud of roiling smoke and flame, scared that a nuclear war had begun.
Their fears were not so unrealistic; granite and stone were hurled as much as eight miles away, windows were blown inward up to ten miles away. That included Fort George Meade, Glen Burnie, the airport, Reisterstown, Sykesville, and even Southwest Baltimore City.
The shock was felt 300 miles away and registered 3.2 on the Richter scale.
“Maintain comm blackout,” Joe said shakily on the radio to Robin’s base station. “Holy shit, Stan. I’d say that monstrosity won’t be causing any more trouble.”
Stan was still laughing. If fire was his favorite “pet,” he now had a second one. He had been turned into an even more dangerous man than he was before.
They were clear of the area before emergency units could react. Those just followed the broad column of smoke leading up to the mushroom cloud, and two Air Force F-15s had scrambled out of Andrews, but all the pilots could determine was that there were no enemy aircraft in the area. The smoke still concealed the damaged building, which was a crater full of crushed stone and granite, and the rubble was scattered outward in a tell-tale pattern, spreading everywhere.
While Hippie was relieved that the mansion was gone, he did, almost instantly, get that same voice, My husband, you have done well. Please come to me and free me so that we can be as one again and so that I may help you.
This time it carried a gentler feeling, one of pleading and longing. He knew who it was now and what he had to do.
When they got to Vince’s house, Angie, Robin and Zelda were replaying the shaky recording the computer onboard the command vehicle had taken. Hippie and Ugly Stan were visible tumbling downhill and as they came closer, Stan’s laughter was audible—and very contagious. They too were laughing, and Sandy said, “You’re crazy, every one of you.”
She went straight to the bar and poured scotch into a glass and drank eagerly. “Vince had a drone watching, but it was a casualty of the conflagration,” Robin said. “It caught that little fracas you had with stick men, Hippie. You want to tell me what I’m about to play?”
He was silent. Even Stan was silent now. He had seen it, but now, the memory sobered him up and he wasn’t laughing.
Clear as the lens could be, there he was below, in the parking lot, surrounded by the weaving stick men, luring them in. Then the stick was raised and lens flare kept them from seeing anything else until the recording ended with the ground floor explosions from Belvedere mansion.
While Joe had seen this before, none of the others had. Hippie said, “I don’t know what you want me to say. It just happened once, as if on its own, and now I can do it with a prayer. And faith.”
“Where did you get the stick you carry?”
“I don’t remember, Robin. It must have been at the seminary. Before that, I have no memory. I’ve been honest with you all along, and if I didn’t know something, there just wasn’t anything to tell. Considering all that’s happening, I don’t really want to know what happened before, because I’m beginning to think this is all because of me. The bishop who ran the seminary told me he knew I would want to remember, but he cautioned me never to try. He said some things are best forgotten, and if God wanted me to remember then he would take care of it in his own good time.”
“And since you left the seminary, you’ve been doing what, exactly?”
“As I’ve said, missionary work. I’ve done some preaching, but that’s not what I was trained for. I’m an exorcist and a protector. The reason I couldn’t go with you to Springwood was that a young man was in mortal danger. He was my priority. Whether it’s through dreams or visions, I know where I have to go and who I have to help. If I see more than one, I am shown who comes first. It’s not often that God calls me to pray for healing men like Vince and Joe, but I tell you, that’s all I do. God does the healing.”
As if that satisfied her, Robin nodded and turned back to the keyboard. She was monitoring emergency response channels to see if anyone had spotted their vehicles. If anyone had, there was nothing being said to indicate it.
“Next target?” Joe asked.
“Robin. Do me a small favor,” Hippie said. She turned to look at him. There was something about the way he said it. “Anything,” she said gently. He was troubled by more than the choice of their next target.
“The file copies Nick sent you. Can you pull those up please?”
“Sure, which one are you looking for?”
“There were two handwritten letters from the post-Civil War years. It’s in one of them. The other is written by a “cardinal” from Aquitaine. I happen to know for fact that there never was a cardinal there. Not by the name he signed especially. “Rochambeau” was here, not necessarily in this state, but he was not a cardinal. He fought with George Washington against the British, notably at Yorktown. Show the other letter first?”
There was no way to zoom in and still be able to read it. She read aloud,
“Dear Uncle,
It is with shame that I write about this, but if I tell no one, who will hear my confession? I attended a party given by the Widow Patterson, who I had, I admit, heard disturbing rumors about. I nonetheless attended, and she did not disappoint. Uncle, in these years following the war, I have both seen and heard the personal harm it caused to all, both soldiers and civilians. It has been most disturbing. Everyone was happy for the chance to celebrate a good and plentiful harvest of corn, tobacco, fish, beans, cabbage and pork. Every farmer and their friends gathered, and there was music with a fiddler, and Lady Patterson played a harpsichord. Every mood changed when she stood and disrobed, grabbing men by the crotch and goading them to join her.
“It was as if she bewitched them. Even I came under the spell and to be honest, I—”
Hippie was concentrating; trying to see the letter writer’s memories. If he could touch the physical letter, he might be able to, but it had presumably gone up in smoke. “I have to go there,” he said. “But Hippie, no one’s home. Why go down there?”
“I think I know who Lady Patterson was.”
“Yes, I thought we were sure it was Eve.”
“Imagine that for hundreds of thousands of years, your heart was broken. How could anyone handle that? Now imagine that you couldn’t. Maybe you kept on living and the pain and loneliness drove you to anger at God, at everyone, and what you might do.”
“So you think what, she was buried alive, and she goes out in ghost form causing havoc, killing people?”
“I don’t know, Robin. I need to go down there to find out.”
“Okay, but don’t go alone.”
“Sorry, kid. This time I have to.” And he left.