Found You (20 page)

Jake looked up, then back around the empty room in dumb shock. At first he wasn’t sure what the woman was talking about, but then a tendril of smoke rose up into his eye. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it to put it out.

“Hello? Anybody here?” It seemed a silly thing to say into the sanitary stillness, but it filled the emptiness a little and gave him a modicum of strength. He hated
hospitals—always had. He’d had pneumonia when he was five, and he’d spent days in a hospital bed alone, except when his big brother could come and visit. Mostly, though, he just inhaled the air circulated by the sick, listened to the machine beeps and bloops and the hurried chatter of doctors and nurses, and sucked in more air that just didn’t go anywhere, air that died in his mouth without satisfying his chest. The room had a television, at least, but it only got a handful of channels. They left cartoons on; the laughter and bright colors made his room seem a little more alive. But still, he couldn’t wait to go home.

His mother and father had died in a hospital, after the accident. His aunt, too, when the drinking and the cigarettes had given up toying with her health and decided to take her permanently. And he’d ridden in the ambulance when it came and got Chloe. That might have been the worst trip of all. With the others, he’d been party to the hushed hallway discussions about quality of life and care termination at the worst and abrupt ushering of family and friends out of the way so that medicine could be administered at best. But with Chloe, there was no next of kin to sign the papers and no strong and certain brother-type to make decisions about funeral arrangements.

Standing there in the waiting room with all the helplessness and pain flooding back, he wanted very much to get high. The thought of welcome oblivion, the death flow of a heroin high, gripped him tightly.

He turned to the nurses’ station. On the counter was
a little paper cup that hadn’t been there before. It reminded him of the methadone they gave him in rehab, and his chest ached.

Maybe rehab had been the worst hospital experience he had.

He crossed over to the nurses’ station and looked down into the cup. A dark reddish-brown liquid filled it halfway. Frustrated, he turned his attention to the clipboard, and he felt another ache in his chest, as well as a surreal sense of misplacement at seeing what was written there. In Chloe’s handwriting—he was sure it was hers—were scribbled a few words. It wasn’t signed, but Chloe had rarely signed any of the fridge notes or Post-its she’d left for him all over the house. Sometimes they were reminders, or requests. Sometimes they were just love notes, back when things were good. Absently, he rubbed his chest, reading the words again.

“Got you a present. Go look on the seat. Like old times.”

XOXO

Jake felt a little sick but turned slowly to the waiting area, to the one blot in an otherwise clean room. It had to be that seat she meant (it meant), and he fully expected a needle filled with heroin to be waiting for him. He didn’t have a good view of the cushion itself or what was on it until he made his way around a few other benches and came upon it. He looked down, and tears filled his eyes.

He was wrong about the needle. Amidst a clutter of
old razor blades and scattered pills was one of her eyes. Next to that looked like a shriveled corner of her mouth, and beneath them, a few of her black-nailed fingers and toes. Jake collapsed onto the floor, holding onto the next seat over, and dry heaved at the tiles.

The pleasant woman’s voice came down through the invisible speakers in the obscured ceiling. “You tore her apart, Jake.”

The voice filled the room, filled his head. He closed his eyes.

“Tore her up from the inside out.”

“Stop,” he whispered.

“Just like I’m going to do to you.” And the brassy laughter that followed reverberated through the speaker, sounding fake (
borrowed, not yours, that voice and those memories
aren’t yours, you bastard
), and Jake swallowed several times to keep his stomach in check and the solid sense of realness in his head.

“I didn’t kill her.”

“You don’t really believe that, now do you? It’s all your fault, Jake. Much like everything else, it’s all your fault. It has always been all your fault.”

“Shut up.” He thought about it, though. He knew he didn’t put his parents’ car in harm’s way any more than he fed booze and cigarettes to his aunt. But those things had always felt like they were his fault. Either he hadn’t listened the night before or he’d mouthed off or brought home a note from the teacher, and it was like clockwork. Shortly after, something bad happened. It was child logic, child inference, but of all the things in his life he’d had trouble shaking, child logic had proved the
hardest. Old habits, as they said, died hard. And old ways of thinking even harder.

He thought of Dorrie. A week ago, he never would have imagined someone as wonderful as her in his life. She looked at him with almost frantic intensity. When he’d been in bed with her, she had needed him, wanted him. She’d done everything to make him feel like he mattered, and he’d realized after, cuddling with her, that she might have been the first to ever make him feel that way. Even Chloe, as much as he’d loved her, even in the beginning when things were good, had made him feel insubstantial.

Or maybe he’d always made himself feel that way. Until Dorrie. There had never been a purpose, a person to protect, a reason
not
to get high, until last night.

He opened his eyes and looked at the chair. The drugs and the body parts were gone. On the seat was a jagged piece of rock, like a broken-off piece of concrete. One edge was very sharp.

“You could slice your neck with that,” the woman’s voice said through the speaker. “Probably wouldn’t even hurt much. You’d be doing yourself a favor. And that girl, too. She doesn’t need someone like you.”

He rose onto shaky legs and picked up the rock. It felt cold, heavy, and abrasive in his hand. He looked up. A low hum came from the speaker, wherever it was above him, as if the nurse-voice was waiting for him to make his decision.

Jake did. With an effortful grunt, he threw the rock upward with all his strength, straight at where he imagined the voice was coming from.

The speaker emitted a flatline sound, and the perfect white of the room began to peel away, like flakes of paint, like old dead skin, portions of white pulling away from the wall, drying to black and fluttering to the ground. Jake breathed hard, his panicked gaze darting around the rotting room. He wasn’t sure what to do, where to go, so he stood by and watched the illusion of a hospital meant to hurt him fall apart. And when it had fallen away, Jake found himself back in the tunnel. He followed it for a while, still breathing hard, badly shaken, until he came to another door. This one gave him a little more trouble, creaking protest as he slid it along the concrete floor. He managed to get it open enough to slip through. It was still dark, but he noticed the change in the air immediately.

Fighting very hard not to hyperventilate, Dorrie stumbled blindly through the dark of the tunnel, very much aware that the others were gone. She was afraid to call out to them, afraid that it might hear her and come looking for her, alone. Maybe do things to her like it had done to Steve. Maybe worse things.

She started forward in the tunnel, and as she did, the darkness grew steadily lighter. The ground loosened up into pebbles beneath her feet, and the air lost some of its musty closeness. In fact, she thought, as long, thin shapes loomed ahead in the duskiness, the air carried the smell of pine trees and lake water.

Dorrie was outside. The gravelly path fell away beneath her hurrying feet, and she was quite sure she could make out the trees surrounding the path around
the lake where she’d first seen the Hollower. She thought she even heard crickets.

“What the—how…?” Alert, looking for signs of anything that might be trouble, her head swiveled, her eyes darting, her breath tight in her lungs. She continued around the curve, the water lapping against the shoreline, the leaves rustling overhead. The path stretched out ahead of her, running straight where her feet were used to turning, but she followed it anyway. The long, black branches reached down into the pathway, overstepping their friendly canopy. On the lake path she was used to, the trees didn’t encroach so far into her territory, the land of the paved and made-for-man.

Here the crickets and tree frogs made strangled, painful croaks and chirps, like sadistic fists were catching hold of them and crushing them methodically in the hidden places between the trees.

She glanced behind her and discovered the path being eaten by the same kind of murkiness as in the tunnel. She couldn’t bear to go back, not now. Pressing forward through the wooded path couldn’t possibly be as bad as that. She turned forward then and stopped short.

A large wooden door in a doorframe stood in the center of the path. Trees grown up to either side prevented sidestepping it, and it took up the entire width of the pathway.

She approached it with caution, leaning forward a little to listen. No sound came from the other side. She tried to peer around it but couldn’t quite angle herself
to see past it between the trees. She touched it with a finger, and then with all her fingers, feeling the even, polished wood.

She knocked. No one answered. No one knocked back.

Dorrie checked behind her. The gloom ate up the path at a steady rate. It was getting closer, obliterating everywhere she’d just been. She felt a surge of panic as she turned back to the door. She grabbed the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. She shook it, begged with it under her breath to give. Behind her, the dark got closer. It made a whirring sound like a garbage disposal, chopping up the illusion of the woods.

Dorrie shook the knob harder, her hands sweating and slipping over the brass. Grabbing a corner of her shirt, she grabbed the knob hard and gave it a sharp twist.

The door opened, and she tumbled through, banging her shoulder against the doorframe. Behind her, the door slammed shut and blacked out her entire view.

The darkness inside was oppressive again, giving her the impression of a small room claustrophobically tight. The kind of room that big girls never felt comfortable in, because they always thought they took up too much space. By instinct, she felt upward, and a thin chain dangled against her hand. She grabbed it and pulled, and a sickly brown light came on.

Dorrie found herself in a small room lit only by a bare bulb hanging from a socket near the chain she’d found. Occasionally it flickered, threatening to go out, and during those brief blinks of dimness, Dorrie’s heart skittered in her chest. She looked around and determined
that she was in some kind of storeroom. There were metal bracer poles that formed racks with shelves to either side wall and along the back. On these were mostly boxes, big brown moving boxes like she’d used when she first moved out and into her place on Cerver Street. In fact—she squinted in the poor light, frowning as she approached one of the boxes—it looked like her handwriting, scrawled in loopy script on the cardboard sides. However, instead of labels such as KITCHEN or BEDROOM or even BOOKS, the boxes closest to her were marked NEW THIGHS, EXTRA HEADS, and stranger things: WHERE THE LIGHTS GO WHEN THEY GO OUT. ENDS. PORTABLE PORTALS.

She frowned, reaching a hesitant hand toward the nearest box, one marked DECORATIONS. She pulled it toward her. It came toward her so fast that it seemed as if another force from the other side gave it a push, and surprised, she let go of the corner she held. The box spilled over onto the floor, and the “decorations” tumbled out.

She covered her mouth with her hand to keep from gagging and stepped back, horrified that one of them might roll toward her feet. Globs of something yellowish and congealed and veined with white and red lay scattered about the floor. Tiny ornament hooks speared the globs, and a whitish crust that Dorrie couldn’t help thinking was skin seemed to seal them inside the globs, as if they had begun to heal and grow around the hooks.

Oh God. Oh my God, it’s fat. Chunks of fat. Balls and
beads and bubbles of fat. Baubles of fat
. The reiterated
thought drove bile up into her throat. Dorrie took several long breaths to fight the nausea.

Behind her, she heard stiff movement, the scuffing of something inflexible on the floor, and cruel giggling. She turned and jumped, a strangled little cry escaping her throat, and staggered back a little against the box-lined shelves.

The mannequins that were crowded at the far end of the room—there were four of them, and they took up a significant part of the small room’s space—regarded her with cold, painted eyes.
Not unseeing eyes
, she thought with dread.
They see me, all right. They’re watching me
.

Judging me
, she was tempted to think. A stupid thought, but it seemed right, all the same. The cool, naked forms, cream-colored, composed of bald heads, curving breasts, tiny waists, and small hips, posed, waiting. Each of them was propped up on long legs. One had no arms. Another sported only the bent arm, whose hand, connected by a seam at the wrist, rested on the hip. The third had two arms, at least down to the elbow, and the fourth had one long bent leg coming out of the shoulder socket. From everywhere that body part met body part, they bled out from the seams. In the quiet that hung between them, Dorrie could hear the blood droplets hitting the concrete floor, making little starbursts of red at their feet.

They stood in what were likely habitual display poses from their respective department store days, the flattering stances of supermodels and actresses. Their placement suggested a private conversation, an exclusive meeting of the beautiful people, a chick session of hen-pecking, catfighting, backstabbing, and two-faced,
double-edged sweet talk. Dorrie had been the outside conversation subject of many of these groups, from grammar school straight through college. Cheerleaders, sorority sisters, prom queens, and princesses with perfect bodies and beautiful faces and their pick of any boy around—girls who found her weight first a thing of disgust and ridicule as a child, then a thing of abject horror as teenagers, and finally, a thing of hushed and whispered pity as college coeds. Her self-conscious loathing of those girls had first begun to finally dissipate, ironically enough, with her neighbor Cheryl, who seemed above needing to remind the world that fat women made her look thinner, or needing to maintain someone else’s discomfort to lessen her own. But she remembered the stances, the conspiratorial whispers and nods of the head, the look of superiority in their eyes. Her mother told her once that all girls were insecure and that all teasing was only to draw attention away from those insecurities from the safety of mob mentality.