Found You (16 page)

“We’ll need flashlights,” Erik said. “Casey bought a new pack of double A batteries. I’ll grab them and the flashlights I have. After last time…” He looked at them with a kind of embarrassed shrug. “It was an impulse buy at Wal-Mart. I guess I figured, you know…just in case.”

Dorrie sipped at her beer. “It’s a good thing you did. Now, how will we find it once we get in there?”

Jake squeezed Dorrie’s hand. “I think it’ll find us.”

“When do we go?”

The warmth between them and the sense of accomplishment in coming up with a plan cooled. It was one thing to talk in theories and generalities about how to fight the Hollower, but it was another thing entirely to set a date and time.

“I say the sooner, the better,” Steve said. “I don’t want this dragging out any more. Tomorrow night sounds good to me.”

“Me too,” Jake said, and Dorrie nodded next to him.

She gently nudged Erik. “What do you guys think?”

Erik and Dave exchanged glances. Erik ran a hand through his hair. “Can we do this again, big D?”

Dave replied, “Well, I don’t have any other plans for tomorrow. I think I can squeeze you all in for one last hurrah and a quick brush with death, so long as I’m home by a reasonable hour.”

The dry chuckles that followed did not obscure the fear beneath them, not completely.

“Let’s say we meet at ten o’clock tomorrow night, at the door to the catacombs. I’ll go in first and secure the area, and then you slip in and we’ll head down into the catacombs and see if we can find the bastard.”

“Works for me,” Dave said to Steve.

“I feel better knowing we’re going to do something about it,” Dorrie said, and Dave and Erik nodded without much enthusiasm. A plan, they knew, didn’t guarantee anything.

“How are we going to kill it?”

They all looked at Jake. Dave finally said, “We can try to kill it like we did the first one, but…well, I guess we should all think it over for the night, see if we can come up with some backup plans, too. Just in case. The more options we have, the better.”

The others murmured their agreement, each lost in thoughts of ways to take the monster down.

“This one gets inside you somehow,” Erik said in a faraway voice.

“I know what you mean,” Dorrie said. “Sometimes I’ll have thoughts in my head that don’t sound anything
like me. They’re things I wouldn’t know, framed in a way I don’t usually think.”

“That’s part of it. But this one does more. It’s hard to explain. It’s not just that it puts its own thoughts into your head. It confuses things. It’s almost like if you let it take hold, it makes you feel…” His voice trailed off.

“High?” Jake asked softly.

Erik sighed. “Yeah. Just remember, tomorrow night it’ll throw everything it’s got at you. It’ll change the floor under your feet, even. You’ve got to keep it together and keep the Hollower out of your head. This one is a hell of a lot tougher than the last one.”

Still, with a plan in place, their spirits all seemed lifted. The night wore on, and no one made any move to part company until Erik announced that he needed to get home to Casey. He was afraid to leave her alone. With warnings all around to be careful, they made their way to the door. Erik left with Jake and Dorrie in tow, and Steve picked up his things to leave as well.

Dave walked them out. He took hold of Steve’s arm and stopped him. “Listen, man. Be careful, being in there alone tomorrow night, even if it’s for the short time until we get there. We’re more vulnerable when we’re alone. And this one, it doesn’t just show you things. It changes things. That kind of power…well hell, our first Hollower seemed to have to work up to those things.”

“Okay, man. Sure.” Steve didn’t look as confident as his tone suggested. He got about halfway across the lawn, stopped, and turned back to Dave.

“Do you think we can kill this? Do you, I mean, personally believe it?”

Dave thought to all the times Cheryl had asked, to when Sean and Erik had asked, to DeMarco’s face when she asked if he was up for getting them out of that mess.

He watched Erik’s car drive away. He had trouble looking Steve in the eye when he said, “No. But I’ll be damned if I won’t put everything I have into trying.”

Steve considered that for a moment, nodded, and made his way back to his car.

Dave turned back to his dark, quiet house to face the next twenty-four hours alone.

While Dave and the others discussed where to find the Hollower and how to kill it, it busied itself with tormenting the strangest and possibly the most grotesque of all the meats. This one, a woman who called herself Anita, but who the others thought of as DeMarco, was the most difficult to find. She did not produce the same kind of Hate or Fear or Doubt that the others did, and so it was little more than vaguely aware of a somehow round impression of her, and a sense inside a sense, a fullness inside her solid shell.

Her Worry seemed, by all accounts, to be focused on the consciousness inside her. She used the word “baby” for it. It could not sense this baby, not fully, but it knew the baby was there. Anita worried when it moved too much inside her, or not enough. She worried about the liquids and solids she sent splashing and sliding down inside her, whether they were enough or too much, whether there were (she called them “chemicals” in her
thoughts but it read her impression as “poisons”) in the liquids and solids, and how they would affect the way the consciousness, the baby, grew its shell and all its internal physical things. Her Concern for the baby outweighed and eclipsed all other Concerns, and a part of that Concern, Anita knew, was unfounded. This made it very difficult to find her.

When it did, though, it considered showing her terrible things—bullets tearing through stomachs, distended flesh bursting open and spilling its contents. But it searched her mindprints and found that she compartmentalized such things, that she put them in a different, distant place in her mind that seemed unconnected to the concept of the “baby.” Those thoughts were “work” thoughts, and the baby was a “home” thought, at least so long as she carried its shell inside her.

It didn’t matter. The Hollower discovered that those “work” thoughts did not have nearly so much an effect on her as simple puddles of blood in the small outer shell she called “underwear.” It told her that she was not strong enough to hold the baby, that the baby was not strong enough to be born. It couldn’t find the baby to quiet it, but it didn’t have to. She had seen the blood, and that was enough. She called her male to come get her right away.

When the male (“Bennie”) found her, she was curled up in a corner of the room, crying in the dark. She showed him the blood on her hands, the blood in a small pool on the floor.

It felt sharp waves of Fear from the male, then, too.
Although the blood had disappeared by the time the ground conveyance got them to the hospital (it remembered this word from the one called Sally’s thoughts), Anita remained tense and inconsolable throughout the darkening. It was the clearest the Hollower had ever seen her.

When it came back for her, it would know how to crush her.

It was late when Erik dropped them off on Cerver Street. Stars twinkled here and there in the sky, and a mild breeze lifted Dorrie’s hair. She was relieved to hear her wind chimes tinkling softly against the wooden post of her porch. Still, the street was much too quiet otherwise, and when she looked up at the moon, a full round white head without a face, she felt cold all over.

She glanced at her house, willing her feet to move across the street. They wouldn’t. It was dark, and her house hulked, unfamiliar and unwelcoming, on her lawn like an animal waiting for sudden movement to spring.

She felt Jake’s hand on her shoulder. “You okay, Dorrie?”

“I’m afraid to go back in there,” she said plainly. “After feeling so safe with you guys, I just…I don’t know if I can go back in there.”

Jake squeezed her shoulder lightly and blurted in a breath, “Look, I don’t mean this to come out all shady and wrong, and you can totally tell me to go to hell for even asking, and I swear I’m only asking because I know what you mean about feeling safer before, but…I don’t want to stay in my house alone, either. So if you wanted
to, I mean, if it wouldn’t be too weird or uncomfortable, well, you’re definitely more than welcome to stay at my house to night.”

Dorrie felt a flood of relief. “Really? It’s cool if I stay?”

Jake smiled. “Of course.” He led her to the front door, unlocked it, and let them inside. He gave her a tour of the house, and they chatted, that familiar, comfortable sense of security returning now that they were off the street. It didn’t feel like they had just met, but, rather, that they had run into each other again and had a chance to reconnect.

“So how about Cheryl living on this street, too?” Dorrie asked as they detoured through the kitchen. “I thought I recognized Dave from his visits to her, when we first walked in.”

“Crazy small town, small world stuff right there.” Jake opened the fridge, oblivious to her flinching at the motion, and grabbed a bottle of soda. He offered it to her, but she shook her head. He put it back in the fridge. “And what’s up with Cerver Street? This has gotta be the most cursed neighborhood in Lakehaven.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I remember Cheryl, though. I can’t believe she’s dead. It’s so sad. I’d see her on her way to work sometimes, or coming home. She always seemed like she had it all going on, you know? I always admired her. Envied her. She was so beautiful, so well put together. I always thought nothing bad could happen to a woman like that, and if it did, there would be nothing that she didn’t have the resourcefulness to handle. I guess—it’s stupid, but it’s true—that I made her something of goal to reach for.”

“I think you’ve done just fine being you.” He winked at her. “Cheryl never really did anything for me. I mean, she was really pretty and all—I see why Dave liked her— but I thought she always looked kind of nervous, like she figured no matter where she was going, she was going to be late and get in trouble. Plus, she was, I guess, too skinny for me.”

“Don’t you like skinny girls?” Dorrie crossed her arms over her breasts and her stomach with sudden shyness.

Jake looked pained. “Nah, I don’t like girls who are too skinny,” he answered, looking away. He absently rubbed the crook of his elbow. She thought he might have been thinking about that girl, his ex-girlfriend, who he’d told her about on the porch, the one who died of the drug overdose. Maybe he was done with bony hips and hollow eyes and arms weak and bruised and too thin. She suspected that maybe it was very much true, what he’d said, that maybe his taste for skinny girls was long gone.

“Well, what do you like?” she asked, timid. She’d never been much of a flirt, but she found she genuinely wanted to know what kind of girls Jake did like nowadays.

He looked up at her, seeming to remember himself again, and offered a smile. “I like women, with real curves. Breasts. Hips. Thighs.”

As he mentioned each, his eyes traveled over those parts of her. It didn’t feel dirty or disrespectful to have him look at her like that, even though his gaze was so intense, and the thoughts behind his eyes so startling
and unbelievable to her in their clarity. Instead, it was with such an earnest longing, such an honest appreciation of her as he looked at her body that it made her feel good. Sexy. Even a little bit adventurous.

His eyes returned to hers and with them, nervousness in his expression. “I think you’re beautiful.”

She felt heat in her cheeks. It was her turn to look away. “I…I’m not that…ehh, I don’t think so.”

“You should know so.” His voice was low, soft, as if the moment were encased in a bubble he was afraid of popping. “I wish you saw what I see.”

Her gaze returned to his. “What do you see?”

“Someone who’s never looked at herself long enough to see the beauty in her eyes or her smile, or the grace in the way she moves. The way she lights up a room.”

Dorrie looked away again, embarrassed. Guys didn’t say things like that to her often. She didn’t think Jake was a player type, the kind of guy to wax poetic at a girl who looked vulnerable, easy to lay, and so incredibly grateful for the compliments as to do anything to please him. But the insecurities flared like flames, hot in her cheeks, hot down her neck and across her chest. Hot everywhere. The feelings inside her confused her, made her feel light-headed. She wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t wrap her brain around his being attracted to her, to his wanting to grab rolls of flesh, to sink into the fat of her when he touched her.

But he stood so close to her, his breathing different now, the scent of him in her nose, in her lungs, inside her, and she wanted him. A part of her didn’t much care if he fed her lies right up until he kicked her out
the door, so long as, for at least a little while, for a time, she could have an experience to take out to remember when she felt like it. He made her feel special and desirable and wanted, even needed.

“Why me?” Her voice sounded almost too quiet for her to hear herself. “Why do you like me?”

Jake flinched, but never broke his gaze. “For lots of reasons. I know you don’t know me that well, and, under the circumstances, you haven’t seen much to want to get to know. I know I’m probably the last guy you’d want attention from. But I do like you, Dorrie, for lots of reasons. I’ve always thought you were great looking and funny, and today I saw how cool you are to talk to. When I first saw you, I was just wowed by you. But it’s more now. When I’m around you, I don’t feel stupid or useless. Maybe I am, but…look, I’m not good at this. It’s been a long time since…since anyone has mattered. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone in my life that I didn’t cause pain. After a while, you just push people away to keep them safe…” His eyes, glassy, almost wet, continued to look at her with that honest longing, so full of genuine feeling that Dorrie felt her own chest tighten.

“Maybe I’m just selfish, but I’ll tell you the truth, Dorrie. Since I first saw you, I’ve thought about you—where you go when you take walks, what you think about when you stand on your front porch. I never dreamed I’d be spending time with you. Or be alone with you.” He tilted his head, taking an awkward step closer to her. “But I’ve thought about kissing you. Touching you. Does that make me sound like an asshole? I’ll just—”