Found You (8 page)

Jake swallowed hard and it seemed to return some stuttering semblance of speech to him. “I…I didn’t…I s-swear I didn’t k-kill her, Greg.”

“Did she kill herself? Maybe she knew you weren’t any good, either.”

“Honest, it wasn’t my—it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t…I
didn’t—she just overdosed. Greg, ah…how’d you get in?”

“Yes, she overdosed, and you showed her how. You left her and you let her die. You might as well have shoved the needle in yourself.”

“It’s not,” Jake pressed, unable and more than a little unwilling to hear what Greg was saying, “you know, not that I don’t want you here. I’m glad to see you and all. It’s just that I’m pretty sure I locked the door…”

Greg ran the free hand over his face, rubbing his eyes as if to wipe off the patina of stupid caused by Jake’s presence. Then the hand fell away, and Greg looked up.

The head was pale, way too pale for the neck. Its eyes were rubbed out, the nose worn down to nothing, and smooth, unbroken white skin ran over the space where the mouth should have been.

Instinctively Jake pushed away from it, up and off the chair, away from the couch. “What the fuck!”

It raised an arm and waved a black-gloved hand at him, tilting that awful blank head. Its whole being radiated a cold kind of hate that gave Jake the sensation of sticking his hand in a freezer, pressing warm flesh against the ice crystals until they burned their own special super cold into him. It felt something like that—all over cold, all over hate. Jake shivered.

When it spoke, it had the girl’s voice from the dream. “You’re going to die, Jake, just like your aunt. Just like Chloe. Just like your brother.”

Jake sank a little where he stood. His brother? His brother wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be…could he? The idea of it, even after all these years of estrangement, brought
immediate tears to his eyes, hot, then cold beneath the gaze of the thing on the couch.

“Who are you?”

It made a fist. “Jake,” it said with the mildest tone of impatience. “I am simply your death. I’ve come to make you nothing—unloved, unwanted, unremembered. I’ll destroy everything you are, everything you might be, from the inside out, and then let you blow away like dust.” It opened the fist, and an unfelt breeze carried white powder—heroin—off and away from its glove.

What if it was right about his brother? What if it had gotten to Greg first? His brother, his only family, his only—

His only anything. Besides the drugs.

And it occurred to him that maybe not all the effects of withdrawal were done with him. Suicidal, even homicidal, thoughts, hallucinations, that know-you’re-caught sick feeling right in your intestines. Maybe this was some rare but powerful brain hiccup, like acid flashbacks or something.

Jake squeezed his eyes shut. He had never been so scared in his life. He thought briefly, just briefly, of calling Erik.

“You can try that,” it said to him in many voices. “But I’ll kill him, too. In fact, I will kill him anyway.”

“Leave me alone,” he whispered to it.

“Wanna get high, Jake?” The voices that responded were so close to his ear that he flinched, his eyes springing open.

It was gone. The TV stood silent and dark. The beer
bottle was gone. Jake searched the room with rabbit snaps of the head.

It took a long time for Jake to get the heat, the sensation back in his legs enough to walk. His hands shook as he lit each cigarette from the smoldering filter of the one before it. It took actual effort to lie down in bed. And the sky was taking on a pink dawn before his eyelids sank closed.

Across town, Dave, whose eyes were bleary and whose head was full of the roar of alcohol waves, flipped through the static channels of the TV and found a clear picture on channel 86 of 63 River Falls Road, just like it had been the night they’d killed the Hollower. He pulled back, shrinking away from the screen and against the cushions of the couch, his gaze riveted to what he was seeing. On the screen, the vast canopy of night had surged up from beyond the trees of Schooley’s Mountain and swallowed up the whole neighborhood. Looking up into it as the camera panned up was dizzying, the fathoms of its endless depth rising above, its stars eaten by massive forms that passed like great ships across the sky, defying any real description or categorization. Some of the shapes groaned like old pipes, old houses, old bones. Some growled low from deep inside the core of them. Their gliding over the houses made little other noise, and they seemed, for the most part, oblivious to the little humans on the pseudo-suburban lawn below them.

Dave shuddered, sinking further into the couch. Those humans on the TV screen were him and his friends. He
knew those big shapes above wouldn’t touch them—they were not meant to be prey for ones so big and so old. He and his friends were, in that warped and dimension-dipped version of River Falls Road, expressly the meats of the Hollower.

On the television, Dave and the others stood on the front lawn, unmoving. The needlelike grass, a chilly tint of green, looked more frost than plant. He watched it wrap around their ankles, cutting into their skin. Blood welled up from the indents and soaked the cuffs of their pants, but no one moved or even acknowledged pain or discomfort. They simply stood there as the shadows of the great beasts floating above passed over them. Dave opened his mouth to speak to them—to speak to the screen version of himself—but no words, no sound came out. He closed it again. In those moments when the shades were cast over his friends, Dave lost sight of them and felt real, true panic, intense and physical. Then the shades would pass and the light, sourceless (as there was no moon above them) but possessing the moonlight quality of pervasiveness and clinical cold, would once again take hold of the scene. The grass no longer holding onto them glinted like shards of glass. The Feinstein house behind them sagged where it stood, and with each pass of shadow, it seemed to rot a little more, exposing framework or insulation like bone and muscle. The strange silver light on the faces of his friends as the camera passed in front of each gave them a gaunt, pale quality, making their cheekbones waxy and underscoring the haunted, grayish pockets beneath their eyes.

Dave was scared for them. He found the alcohol
made his limbs heavy. He couldn’t get up and switch off the TV. He couldn’t even raise his hand to change the channel. But his mind was getting clearer. He could feel it all—the chilly bite of the grass on his skin, the fear, the guilt, the regrets of that night. He could remember that sureness that he was going to die, that the Hollower was going to tear him up from the inside out. And he remembered the weird ripples of the air, the strangeness that signaled the approach of the beast.

He felt it now, there on the couch, the oncoming weird. It was coming. It was close; and there it was, a
wrongness
in everything. Sean, the boy, had described it as a likelihood of finding dead ends, daylight, or corners of the real world at the far end of the street, and Dave suspected he knew what Sean had meant. It was that influence of the Hollower, the slightly skewed, artificial quality, as if everything they knew belonged to it and not to them.

It had that night, as it seemed to now, on screen. The camera swung toward the trellis by the house between what would have been Sean’s and the one next door. Black, pulsing, almost breathing, glistening in the silver light, the plant that snaked through the trellis was a grotesque, choking parasite of a thing. Four houses down from that, a blackened, burned-out stump of a trunk stood where there had been a large tree. Every house on the block, as far as Dave could see, had the same number—68, like Max Feinstein’s house—and the scarce few cars parked in the street all had the same license plate. It read, “DieDieDie.”

Like that night, there were six of them, watching and
waiting—Dave, Erik, Cheryl, DeMarco, who had been investigating both Sally’s disappearance and Cheryl’s work intruder, Sean, the little boy from across the street on River Falls Road, and Sally—

No, not Sally. That was the difference. She wasn’t there with them now.

A scraping sound like metal skittering over metal filled the earspace around them. They looked up, to the source of the sound, and the camera panned up with them.

The Hollower stood on the roof. This time, though, it looked as it had first appeared to them—a faceless white orb beneath the brim of the fedora hat, a black trench coat and clothes beneath, a black glove raised in a wave.

Except that wasn’t exactly right. Its hand was indeed held up, but it made sweeping passes over something in front of it that was just out of their line of view. The gesture was one that Dave had seen before, when the other Hollowers had come through the rip between their dimension and his. They’d made the same movements with gloved hands over the dead body of the Hollower that Dave and his friends had killed.

Silhouetted against a night sky that itself only existed between worlds, the Hollower giggled, high and hysterical, the voices of a hundred fragile minds breaking like glass. It made a dismissive gesture with the glove and, at once, heavy ash-colored bundles rolled off the roof. The thud they made hitting the edge of the driveway was jarring, an impact that Dave, watching from the
couch, felt in his head, his jaws, and his feet. There were four bundles, huddled fetal forms that bled out crimson pools that crystallized upon contact with the grass blades. Dave knew with hazy certainty that they were victims, unfortunate folks whose insecurities the Hollower had fed until they’d oozed up and swallowed them. The bundled forms were turned toward Dave, and he could see that although humanoid, they were faceless, sexless, all of them featureless except for the last one. That one had a thin stream of blonde hair, matted pink with blood.

A deafening crack like lightning suddenly tore at the air over the driveway. The on-screen version of him and his friends turned their gazes toward a gaping black wound suspended in the air. It looked to Dave as if the canvas picture of River Falls Road before them had been ripped into with a knife, and from the frayed and displaced edges, gloved fingers curled into view.

Out stepped another Hollower. And another. And another. The first made a long, steady sound like a siren—not the death wail Dave remembered from the dying shell of the monster they’d taken down, but a low, strong, angry sound, a war cry, a cry to battle.

It stepped out of the way, and hundreds of Hollowers poured through the rip, stepping over the bundles, never touching each other and yet somehow seeming to flow around one another, vying for a good position to strike.

Their feet made no sound, but their voices were deafening. Thousands of stolen words and stolen timbres, the voices of family and friends and lovers, all saturated
with hate, bombarded him and the other captives with human flaws, weaknesses, and fears until he thought the weight of them would bury him under.

Suddenly, the noises stopped. And Dave was aware of a buzz, a terrifying sense of utter vengeance, a collective thought coming straight through the television: this new one thought of itself as a Primary. And the other, the one they killed, had been a Secondary. And with that same alien invasive thought pattern in his head, radiating from the pictures on the television screen, he understood what that meant to them, the Hollowers. They would hurt him—even physically hurt him, without ever having to touch him. They could bend worlds. They could change things. But the Primaries could get inside you in new ways. The Secondaries were kings between dimensions, the thought pattern suggested, but the Primaries were damned near gods. They were deadly in ways he could only begin to imagine.

As one, they advanced, and Dave heard Cheryl utter a clipped scream off camera. The picture winked out and, within moments, was swallowed by static.

Dave immediately felt pain behind his eyes and an equally oppressive pain in his chest, which was made worse by the pounding of his heart. He clicked the television off with the remote and threw the remote across the room as if it were poisonous. It landed with a thud on the rug, buttons down. Dave wiped his hand on his pants, disgusted.

His head squeezed in on itself a little bit, and his mouth felt sticky and dry, but in spite of what was turning
into the beginnings of a mild hangover, Dave’s thoughts were very clear. He wasn’t drunk anymore. And as if to rush and fill a vacuum, the seriousness of what had just happened, what had been happening for longer than he cared to see, really hit him.

Without the fumes of alcohol to cloud things, he could see a series of events whose import, if not entirely the fact of them, he had chosen to dismiss since Cheryl left. The hat on the hood of Erik’s car that night hadn’t been the first sign that a Hollower was back in their world. What had come back to him (assuming it had ever really left) was an intense insecurity, intense enough to frighten off Cheryl, to put her off. And there had been the dreams during those long nights when the empty bed made it hard to relax.

When he and Cheryl had been together, it had been easy to forget. But now…

“
It was a word, Mr. Kohlar. HOLLOW. Does that mean
anything to you? Anything significant about that word
?”

And there was Erik’s sponsee. And the television. And Lord knows who else, seeing what.

He went into the kitchen to the phone. He’d call Erik. It was true; there had been safety in numbers. And if Dave was seeing evidence of a Hollower, it stood to reason that Erik would be seeing it, too.

Plus, he didn’t really want to be alone.

“Dave…”

He flinched.

The voice had come from upstairs. It sounded like Sally’s voice.

“I am not hearing this.” Dave ran a hand over his
eyes and wondered if maybe some of the alcohol still sloshed around in his head.

“Davey!” The word slid around the air above him, slipping under and over other sounds, other vague voices that were not hers. He followed the sound to the bottom of the stairs and peered up. Darkness obscured the second floor. No Sally-thing that he could see.

Still, he felt cold all over.