Beneath Claire's House (Mount Herod Legends Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One - Saint Thomas

  Chapter 1 - Out of the Storm

  Chapter 2 - The Patients Have No Virtues

  Chapter 3 - Dr. Anthony DeLuca

  Chapter 4 - The Games Patients Play

  Chapter 5 - The Courtyard

  Chapter 6 - Not So Sweet Dreams

  Chapter 7 - Bleed for Me

  Chapter 8 - Desperate Measures

  Part Two - Haunted

  Chapter 9 - Harrison

  Chapter 10 - The Richmond Building

  Chapter 11 - Paladin Comics

  Chapter 12 - Fear at First Sight

  Chapter 13 - The Back Room Council

  Chapter 14 - Gardens and Foxes

  Chapter 15 - Nightmare on Fisk Road

  Chapter 16 - Visitations

  Chapter 17 - EMFs

  Chapter 18 - When One Door Closes

  Chapter 19 - The Dungeon

  Chapter 20 - The Unexplained

  Chapter 21 - Burn the Ships

  Chapter 22 - Lies

  Chapter 23 - An Other Generation

  Chapter 24 - Chiller at Holy Trinity

  Chapter 25 - Schizophrenic Sandwich

  Chapter 26 - Dark Matters

  Chapter 27 - Snow Falls in June

  Part Three - Never the Same

  Chapter 28 - Sirens

  Chapter 29 - Loose Chains

  Chapter 30 - Midsummer’s Eve

  Chapter 31 - Final Departure

  Chapter 32 - The Whirlwind

  Chapter 33 - The Night of Reckoning

  Chapter 34 - Revelation

  Chapter 35 - Judgment Day

  Chapter 36 - Armageddon

  Chapter 37 - Resolutions

  Before You Go

  Free Preview

  Acknowledgments

  Legal

  Trademarks

  BENEATH CLAIRE'S HOUSE

  MOUNT HEROD LEGENDS™

  BOOK ONE

  Corey J. Popp

  www.coreyjpopp.com

  Copyright © 2015 Corey J. Popp

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0-692-54403-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-692-54403-7

  Cover Art Copyright © 2015 Jerzey Popp

  @jerzeypopp

  In memory of Norbert G. Popp.

  I miss you, Dad.

  Prologue

  Call me crazy. I see ghosts.

  OK, the truth is I no longer see ghosts. How quickly I’ve lost your trust. We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot, so let me back up.

  First, call me Claire Young. It is, after all, my name. Despite the circumstances of my story, I’ve decided not to change it.

  Second, at the time of the story that follows, I was a sixteen-year-old girl living in Harrison, Wisconsin with an affinity for alliteration. Mind you, I am no longer sixteen, and I am no longer living in Harrison, Wisconsin. I am, however, still a girl with an affinity for alliteration. Some things never change.

  By the very fact I’m writing this, you know I survive my story. I hope I haven’t ruined it for you. If it’s any consolation, not everyone survives. Furthermore, I could be writing this from prison or a psychiatric hospital. Keep that in mind.

  My story is terrifying and discomforting, and a little gross, too. If you wish to minimize its effects, read it on the beach in the middle of the afternoon under blue skies and sunshine. To maximize its effects, read it in a root cellar with a flashlight.

  I digress.

  My story starts in the juvenile ward at Saint Thomas Psychiatric Hospital, because that’s where I met Father Delevan, the one who changed everything…

  PART ONE

  Saint Thomas

  CHAPTER 1

  Out of the Storm

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4

  OUT IN THE sane world, June 4th was the last day of high school. My father had brought my assignments to the hospital daily for the past eight weeks after securing special arrangements with the school. I pre-calculated all my grades. I figured I’d finish my sophomore year with a 3.8 grade point average. Not that it mattered to the institutionalized student.

  I should’ve been asleep in room 307, but upon a bed-shaking crash of thunder, my burning eyes shot open to the sight of my room’s walls awash with a flash of lightning. With no hope of falling back asleep, I left the confinement of my room and wandered down to the rec room.

  The digital clock on the wall showed 11:39 p.m. Except for a single nearby lamp, I sat in darkness. A series of tall undressed windows stretched the entire length of a wall overlooking the shadowy hospital courtyard. A large painting of Jesus crucified on Calvary adorned another wall.

  Religious art adorned many of the walls of Saint Thomas Psychiatric Hospital. The institution was owned and run by the same Jesuit priests who owned Saint Thomas University, which was (and still is) an enormous campus on the east side of Mount Herod.

  Mount Herod lies on the shore of Lake Michigan, about thirty miles northeast of my hometown, Harrison. Saint Thomas wasn’t the closest psychiatric facility to Harrison, but it was the best according to my father. Plus, he worked in Mount Herod, so it made visits convenient. And he sort-of, kind-of knew the psychiatrist in the juvi ward, Dr. Anthony DeLuca. So, there you go.

  Back to the painting. I didn’t know why, but it captivated me. Something about its lines and dimensions. Its scale. Its perfection. Its sadness.

  A crown of thorns rested atop Jesus’ head. He’d been nailed to a cross through his hands and his feet. Blood ran from his right side. His eyes fell upon three people mourning at the base of the cross. I had no idea who they were. My mother would have known. She’d been very religious and sent me to Sunday school up until she died. After her death, my father stopped sending me. In fact, we stopped going to church entirely.

  When I was fourteen, he told me he didn’t believe in God. He was a man of science not of faith. He’d always had doubts, he said, but the death of my mother cinched it. Either God didn’t exist, or He wasn’t worth acknowledging. Regardless, no more church.

  He told me I was welcome to make up my own mind. I hadn’t, yet. I couldn’t think about the God-thing until I’d gotten past the fact my mother’s death was my fault.

  Again, back to the painting. One time, I asked Nurse Linda if she knew who’d painted it. She didn’t know, and she’d answered with such a guffaw I felt stupid for asking. Nurse Linda’s not my favorite, but only two nurses regularly attended to the ward. The other nurse, Amy, was a total tool. I never bothered asking her.

  Anyway, I sat in the rec room curled up in a super soft chair waiting for the storm to settle when I heard footsteps from the entrance hall. The nurses’ station sat near the ward’s entrance. When I looked up for the source of the footsteps, I only saw Amy slip on a sweater. She was alone in front of a computer, but Linda was due any moment for the shift change.

  The footsteps grew louder. I expected Linda to come around the corner, but a priest rounded the corner instead. He nodded and smiled at Dingbat Amy. She gave him little consideration.

  Priests made the rounds through the juvi ward once or twice a day. His visit wasn’t unusual except for the time of night. I’d never seen this dude before, but sometimes we got stragglers and seminarians. He stepped up to my chair.

  Peering out the courtyard windows with dark eyes, he said with a British accent, “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.”

  A subdued rumble rolled across the sky.

  I returned a polite smile, lowered my head, and hoped he’d leave. I
was in no mood for arbitrary gibberish.

  He put out his hand to shake mine. “I’m Father James Delevan.”

  I could have been rude and ignored him, but instead, without any eye contact, I shook his hand while emitting as much of a negative vibe as I could. He pointed to an empty chair across from me. “Do you mind?”

  There’s no comfortable way to say, “Go away,” so I lied and said, “It’s fine.”

  He sat down. A fruity, aromatic fragrance accompanied him. Cologne, perhaps. “This rain ought to cool things off a bit tomorrow,” he said. The weather had been sweltering the past week. Small talk. I hated it. I didn’t reply. “I hear you’ve been working on quite the puzzle, Claire,” he said.

  He knew my name. Who is this guy? I took a closer look at him. His face was chiseled and narrow beneath a heap of black hair into which had been sculpted a sweeping side part. Dark crescent moons sagged under his eyes. Buried within the depths of his black shirt in a recess just below his Adam’s apple was the familiar white shard of the clerical collar.

  He crossed his legs and folded his hands atop his knee. “Yes, I know who you are. Everybody’s talking about Claire Young, the girl who sees ghosts.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. I sat up in my chair and uncurled my legs. “I don’t want to do therapy tonight.” I said it louder than I’d intended.

  Amy looked up from the nurses’ station. I stared back at her, waiting for a scolding. Instead, she placed her finger over her lips and delivered a pathetic, wincing smile.

  Father Delevan appeared to deliver an apologetic glance over his shoulder. He warned me, “You might want to keep your voice down. The other patients are asleep. Look, I’m not here for counseling. I’m here to help. I believe your story.”

  I just spent the last eight weeks with a psychiatrist who’d been trying to convince me ghosts didn’t exist, and what I’d been seeing were actually delusions. “Be careful how loud you say that,” I said. “They’ll diagnose you with schizophrenia and start shoving pills down your throat.”

  “Do you think you’re schizophrenic?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  His eloquent voice reached out to me. “Not true. ‘What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground.’”

  It sounded like Shakespeare. It bothered me. “What’s that from?”

  “The Bible. It’s what God said to Cain after he killed Abel. Since the very beginning of time the dead have called out from their graves.”

  I recalled the story from Sunday school.

  I knew if I didn’t find a way to rid my life of the ghosts, someone like DeLuca was going to keep me in a place like Saint Thomas for the rest of my life. He’d house me with the insane until the day I died. But something else bothered me, too.

  In a recurring, seemingly prophetic nightmare, a ghost attacks my father on the basement stairs. Over time, I’d become convinced the ghosts wanted my father and me dead, yet no adult wanted to help me. They all just wanted to cure me. Father Delevan was different. Curious about what his riddles offered, I asked, “What do you know about ghosts?”

  “I know for a fact they’re real, and I know they’re scaring the bloody daylights out of you.”

  I considered the priest. Is he legit or a poser? What does he know about death and ghosts? What does he matter to the world, much less me? I pointed to the painting on the wall, and I tested him. “Who painted that?”

  Father Delevan didn’t even bother to look at the painting. “It’s a reproduction of a painting called Crucifixion by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. The original sits in a Russian museum.” He answered too fast to have made it up.

  “You might want to tell some of the staff,” I said.

  Father Delevan nodded. “Tomorrow I could go around this entire hospital and whisper into each of the staff members’ ears who painted that painting, and by tomorrow night they’d all forget. The problem isn’t no one knows. The problem is no one cares. It’s called apathy. The whole world’s addicted to it, but apparently you are not like the rest of the world.”

  “If I were, I wouldn’t be here.”

  He raised his eyebrows, smiled, and shifted his gaze to the floor. “You’ve got me there.”

  I waited. He said nothing more. “Who are the people with Him?” I asked.

  He turned to the painting and pointed to each person from a distance. “That’s His mother, Mary, in the middle. John the Beloved on the left. And that’s Mary Magdalene there on the right.”

  The man had my mother’s faith. It was quiet for a moment. I said, “I don’t want to be in here the rest of my life. If you know how to get rid of my ghosts, tell me how to do it.”

  Somewhere past the nurses' station a door opened and closed. I once again heard footsteps in the corridor.

  Father Delevan said, “I can tell you the dead obsess over the same things as the living.”

  A furious wind picked up outside and blew sheets of rain against the window. It sounded like the storm was trying to pound its way inside. A noise like the sky tearing open followed a blast of lightning.

  Nurse Linda rounded the corner. She looked at us, stepped up to the counter, and began speaking to Amy. They glanced at us while they conferred.

  I caught my breath. “Tell me what to do.”

  “I met someone once, right here in Mount Herod, who can help. How long before they release you?”

  “I don’t know. I see Dr. DeLuca tomorrow. I can ask him.”

  Linda’s sarcastic voice called from the nurses’ station. “Excuse me.”

  Father Delevan shot the nurse a look. “She’s not going to give up,” he said to me. “When you get out, look up a gentleman by the name of Hawkins.”

  “Hawkins?”

  “I said, excuse me!” Linda stomped her way into the rec room. “It’s time for Miss Young to go back to bed now.”

  The priest stood. “Do as she says,” he said with wide, mocking eyes. “Spencer Hawkins is the man you need.”

  Seconds later, her breath warm and putrid, Linda stood nose to nose with me. “Bed,” she said. “Now!” She pointed up the hall toward my room.

  “Bartolomé Esteban Murillo,” I said to Linda. Father Delevan smiled as he exited the ward.

  Linda’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  I pointed to the painting. “The painter. His name is Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.”

  Linda looked at the painting. Pointing her finger at herself, she turned back to me. “Linda Marie Peterson. Now. Go-to-bed.”

  I glared at her, contemplating what Father Delevan had said about apathy. I tried to think of something clever to say, but all that came to mind were obscenities. Without a word, I turned and began the walk back to my room. Outside, the storm raged on. Inside, I wondered how I’d ever get out of Saint Thomas to find Spencer Hawkins.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Patients Have No Virtues

  THURSDAY, JUNE 5

  THE NEXT MORNING, I once again sat in the rec room looking out the window. Sunshine sparkled off the wet green grass of the courtyard as if it had rained diamonds the night before. The unblemished blue sky looked as though I could send ripples across it with a touch of my fingertip. Other than the wet ground, no trace remained of the violent storm that shook Saint Thomas the previous night.

  The rec room itself was full of daylight, depression, and distractions. I often passed the time by reading the room’s countless books. I also played every board game imaginable. My favorite was Life. The irony did not escape me.

  In the corner of the room hung a large flat-screen television. Furniture and beanbags fanned out from the TV like a crowd of children gathered before a storyteller. The television told the same old weekday story. It was called The Price is Right.

  Fifteen-year-old Ben the Phobic sat pretzel-legged on a beanbag far away from the television in order to “avoid prolonged facial exposure to high levels of liquid crystal radiati
on” of which none of the others were really sure existed. But it did not stop the joking teens from always reminding the television’s nearest viewer they should back up in order to “avoid prolonged facial exposure to high levels of liquid crystal radiation.” To which Ben would often respond with an eloquent, if defensive, “Whatever.”

  With Ben’s help, I had become an expert in phobia names:

  Fear of snakes: ophidiophobia.

  Fear of dogs: cynophobia.

  Fear of crossing the street: dromophobia.

  Fear of mirrors: catoptrophobia.

  Fear of school: It began with a ‘D’ but I couldn’t pronounce it.

  Fear of spiders: arachnophobia.

  Fear of swallowing air: aerophobia.

  …and those were just the ones they had diagnosed him with so far.

  The staff at Saint Thomas wasn’t supposed to speak of anyone else’s illness due to patient confidentiality. Yet, Ben, over time, had asked enough questions and probed enough heads to discover what was wrong with everyone else in the ward. Because of Ben, I knew what most of my fellow patients suffered from.

  On the couch, a few feet from Ben, sat Cathy the Puppet, a seventeen-year-old girl cursed with both a horrifying case of acne and a voice like a forty-year-old man. Ben said Cathy lived in a constant out-of-body experience. She believed The Director controlled her physical movements. As in, the director of the movie in which she not only starred but also watched. She was an orphan. She belonged to the State.

  Next to Cathy sat newly admitted Danny. Danny smelled like wet wipes and his breath was rancid. I didn’t know Danny’s exact age, and neither did Ben, but we put him somewhere around thirteen or fourteen. Danny was allergic to water.

  Correction. Danny thought he was allergic to water. Ben called it a psychosomatic allergy. It meant Danny probably had a repressed memory of something that took place in or with water. His mind had turned the memory into a physical allergy so that it didn’t have to deal with the horror of whatever really occurred.