“Oh baby, I never would.” She snuggled closer to him and he gave her a squeeze and kissed the top of her head.
They were silent for a while and he thought she might have fallen asleep until she said, “Please come back.”
He wrapped his arm tighter around her, pulling her close. A hundred fears ran through his head.
He said, “Not even Hell could stop me from coming back to you.”
Chapter 8
Bennie lay awake most of the rest of that night. He kept checking on Cora, not just to make sure she was still breathing, but to make sure she was still there. When he did drift off into light and troubled dozing, he had dreams about Anita. In them, the skin of her face was being flayed by demon creatures and she was screaming. Her blood sprayed the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the front of her tank top as she whipped her head back and forth in an attempt to get away from the razored tentacles biting into her skin. Bennie was helpless to rescue her; in the dreams, something had ripped off his arms and legs and propped his bloody stump against a wall. He cursed and wailed in Spanish while an inky cloud ebbed and flowed and lashed solid tentacles against Anita’s face, and strips of skin, pieces of nose or lip, and an eyelid were ripped away and tossed to the stone floor below her.
When he awoke, sweat made him damp and cold and his stomach turned over, queasy. When he dozed again, his dreams continued, the high-pitched, tense laughter of many unearthly voices mingling with Anita’s screams.
By 6 a.m., he had fed, changed, and dressed Cora, played tea-time with her and her stuffed elephant Officer Trunk, and sat back down on the couch where he had insisted on sleeping, watching the clock with an impatient fidgeting. Cora was talking to herself, immersed in whatever story she was telling herself and Officer Trunk, so he turned on the TV and tried to watch the infomercials until regular morning news programming kicked in. His mind only half-recorded the reports of foreign unrest, domestic policy, and domestic unrest. There was a plane crash and a missing toddler found crushed to death in her step-father’s basement; there was a new medical study on the cancer-causing effects of vegetable pesticides and the cancer-preventing effects of additives and preservatives; there was a CFO indicted for embezzlement and a celebrity who had overdosed as a result of doctor-shopping.
None of it mattered to Bennie. He just wanted his wife back.
By 8 a.m., he was itching to call the nurse from the Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital, but he knew it was early. He thought about Anita, lost in the folds of space, a void of the unknown, and his stomach lurched. Did she have her gun? Was she hurt? Was she conscious? He knew her pretty well, and thought if she had left Cora with those nightmare monstruos, she couldn’t have been in any capacity to fight.
He glanced at the clock, and noticed the minute hand had creaked its way to the two: 8:10 a.m. He could wait an hour, maybe. An hour before calling.
Erik was downstairs and making coffee for them by 8:30. They went over a tentative plan, and that made Bennie feel a little better. They would call the nurse and tell her they had to see Mrs. Coley’s room to finish off the paperwork on the investigation into her suicide. If Anita was somehow there, sandwiched in between this world and another—if there was some way to get to her through that hospital, that room—Benjamin Horatio Mendez would find her.
At 9:30 a.m., Bennie began calling the nurse. He got her voice mail: Hi, this is Lauren. I’m not home, but leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
He left a message. He left his cell number. He told her it was urgent. He waited.
After three hours of silence, he called again and left another message. This time he mentioned Mrs. Coley, and the necessity of his stopping by that evening to look around so he could close his case.
Again he waited. When he got out of the shower, he saw he had missed a call and swore in Spanish. He went to the voice mail and thumbed the PLAY MESSAGE button.
“Hello, Detective Mendez. Um, this is Lauren Seavers, returning your call? I—”
***
“—just got your message, and of course you can come around tonight. I’ll be there from 7 p.m. on,” Lauren said into her phone.
She chewed on her thumbnail. She had just returned home from her coffee talk with Ian Coley to discover a thinly controlled, terse series of messages from Detective Benjamin Mendez regarding the very room and woman who had been the subject of conversation not that long before.
“Please come. Um...yes. Yes, I’ll see you then. Bye.” She hung up the phone. A policeman there might not be such a bad idea. The thought gave her a small measure of peace about the night to come. She was afraid of whatever she and Ian Coley might find in that room, whatever the godawful monsters haunting and twisting it into a den of pain and death might have planned for them if they knew. It occurred to her that maybe the presence of other people—authority figures like the police—might somehow chase those creatures away. It was a naïve thought and she knew it, but she didn’t like the idea of facing down monsters with no plan and only the son of a crazy woman as company. Any measure of security was better than none. She had been taught since childhood to trust policemen like her Uncle Henry. They protected people. They restored order. They made the world a little more real, a little less chaotic. She believed that, with the wholehearted and sincere eagerness of a child. She needed to right then.
And if nothing else, policemen had guns.
Yes, she would most definitely feel better with Detective Mendez there.
***
“—I just got your message, and I know what you’re planning. I know what you want to do. And I’ll kill you,” was the message, just barely audible beneath a wind tunnel’s worth of static. “I’ll kill the baby. You’ll never be able to protect her, just like you couldn’t protect your wife. You’ll die if you interfere, Detective. You, and all those you love will die.” By the end of the message, the words had decayed into a multitude of voices now familiar to him.
It threw him at first, the way the voice he remembered had changed into something else, something inhuman. And it scared him, the hate and hostility, the suggestion that he had failed his family. The latter ate into him worse than the former. He had failed Anita in his mind; he hadn’t been there for her when she needed him. When both his girls needed him. And now, he might never find her.
It also worried him that anything he and Erik planned, those putas would know. They knew, even when they went to wherever they went when they weren’t hurting people here.
They knew he and Erik were coming. Well hell, let them know; let them throw out their threats. Let them open up hell if that’s what they wanted. He meant to have his wife back, no matter what.
***
Ian collapsed on the bed, exhausted. His limbs felt like dead weight. His mind was burdened with thoughts of those creatures. The Hollowers, his mother had called them. His heart was heavy with thoughts of his mother. And interspersed with these thoughts in both his heart and his mind were thoughts of Lauren. She was beautiful. To him, she was what music would look like if it had a body, what a season would sound like if it could speak. He’d been easily taken with her, and therefore, now included her under his umbrella of worry. He hoped he’d done the right thing in contacting her, and that he hadn’t made things any worse—for him or her.
At that moment, he wanted to stop thinking and stop worrying. He just wanted sleep, a few blessedly peaceful hours of uninterrupted oblivion. And that seemed within his reach, so much so that when he first heard the woman calling his name, he discounted it as being part of a dream.
She kept calling, though, and by the fourth or fifth time, the voice began to pull him back from the edge of sleep.
“Ian....”
“Five more minutes,” he told the familiar voice.
“Ian, baby, where are you? I need you to get my supplies.”
“Mom, I’m sleeping. It’s—”
It’s my mother’s voice, he thought, and beneath the surface of twilight sleep
, an alarm bell went off in his head.
“You’ve got to get my supplies. I need them—hurry!”
He sat straight up in bed. Both the voice and the urgency behind it had echoed in this house many times before.
“Mom?” His voice sounded small and scared, just as it had those years ago when he realized the person who had spent nearly two decades taking care of him was now completely unable to care for herself.
He had never been afraid to be alone with her until the night the hospital people came to pick her up.
“Get my tape! I need my tape.”
He slid off the bed and padded into the living room. It was where he’d found her that night, frantically trying to hold newspaper over the front window with one hand and rummage for tape in the nearby desk drawer with the other hand. Her head had been bleeding over the left eye, her nose was running, her knee looked swollen, and her eyes...when she’d finally looked at him, those glassy eyes saw someone else, someone she hadn’t recognized, someone alien and dangerous.
He’d gone to call the hospital under the guise of retrieving her supplies. She’d gone to get a knife out of the wooden block on the kitchen counter under the guise of promising to go take her pills. Honesty between them had long since crumbled; what was there to being honest when reality itself was always such a fluctuating thing?
She had cut his arm and nearly speared his rib cage before he managed to wrestle the knife from her. The hospital staff who’d come to pick her up found a crumpled, middle-aged woman half-dressed and shrieking about her tape and bloodied up kid looking shocked, sad, and terrified. She’d screamed obscenities at him as they took her away, blaming him for letting the government take her for dissection to find the alien pieces they kept putting inside her.
The scene unfolding in his present-day living room was different. She was there in the room, as he had been half-expecting and utterly dreading, but she just sat on the couch, spaced out as she so often looked on her pills, pale, veiny hands folded in her lap. To Ian they looked like two large, dead moths. She leaned slightly to the left. She did not look up when he came in.
He felt his stomach clench at the sight of her. “Mom?”
She didn’t stir. Those dead moths didn’t flutter.
On some level, a voice in his head screamed against what his eyes were seeing, screamed for him to get out of there, to leave that apparition and get out of the house. The voice told him she was not, and in no way could be, his mother. And yet the thing on the couch looked like her, smelled like her perfume, even breathed like her.
“You left me,” it said to him.
“What?” The words were icy and he felt the sting of them.
“You left me there.” It looked up at him. “To die.”
“No! No, mom, I—”
“Look what they did to me,” she slurred. “Look at me.”
“Mom, I—”
“How could you? They killed me and you weren’t there! You didn’t stop them! You left me here and forgot about me!” The skin of her face began peeling around her hairline, and she dragged her nails across it, leaving long bloody furrows.
“Please, mom, you—”
“You wanted me to die! You hoped for it! You probably sent those things after me so you could get rid of me and be free! You felt free when I died, didn’t you? Didn’t you?!?”
She had never gotten up and yet somehow she was closer to him, up in his face, those dead moths now angry blanched boulders. Flaps of the facial skin she had loosened hung down into her eyes. She tore a them, dropping them in wet little clumps at his feet. The muscle beneath was red, pooling with blood as she worked her jaw and eyes.
“This is your fault! Your fault! Your fault!”
“Stop it!” He couldn’t take anymore. He bolted back to the bedroom, slammed the door shut, and locked it, just as he had countless times before. Let her keep the crazy out there with her—and the guilt, and the embarrassment. He didn’t want any part of it leaking in toward him.
He closed his eyes. It’s not my fault, he told himself, then whispered it out loud to try to make it true. “It’s not my fault.”
He sat up, wide awake, locked in his room until it was time to leave for the Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital.
***
The Triumvirate watched from an empty chamber inside the structure where they had opened the rip as each of the intended meats arrived in their ground conveyances. First came the female who spent most of the darkenings there, tending to other meats. Next came the intruding one, and the one they recognized as the destroyer of the Secondary and the Primary. Finally came the last one, the spawn of their first prey in this world. This close, the Triumvirate could hear their mindsounds teeming with their noisome words for things—so many words, words for everything, words that identified those concrete things in their physical world. In the structure where they waited, they could understand the words “nurse” and “detective” and “teacher” indicated their roles among other meats. There were words for more abstract and broadly defined roles, too: “father,” “wife,” and “friend.” These were more difficult to understand, but in many ways, more significant to their prey.
They could see how the Likekind before them could grow tired of such a world, where to understand so much of the world was to understand its effect on their base senses. The meats were sensitive to words. Words caused these beings Pain, Guilt, and Doubt. They caused Insecurity, Jealousy, and Despair. The act the meats called “lying” could do a great deal in getting them to produce desired sustenance. But the meats had so very many words, and some of them worked against the Triumvirate. Some of them produced an opposite effect. When that began to happen, it was time to move in and decimate.
Still, for as noxious as words could be, they were useful in the hunt. So close to the meats, the Triumvirate had everything they needed to tear into the souls of the meats.
One thing the Triumvirate found interesting was that the meats even had a word for the Likekind. It was understood the word “Hollower” meant one of them. It was a word for which there were many delicious Emotions, primarily Fear. They liked that.
That darkening, they would feed well.
Chapter 9
When Erik and Mendez arrived at the nurse’s desk on the second floor of Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital, the nurse he assumed to be Lauren Seavers and another young guy were already there. They’d had no trouble getting in. Mendez had flashed his badge to the night guard on duty and explained he needed to follow up with Ms. Seavers regarding the suicide of patient Helen Coley, and the guard had waved them in without question. Erik supposed the guard had called up to let Ms. Seavers know they were on their way, because the expressions of the nurse and her companion gave away their worry.
Mendez seemed to draw the same conclusion because he put on a smile as warm as he could make it and said, “Ms. Seavers, good to see you again. We won’t be long—I’m just following up on the Coley suicide, and need to check a few things.”
She shook Mendez’s outstretched hand. “Please, call me Lauren,” she said with a nervous giggle. Then she turned to Erik. “Are you a detective, too?”
“He’s a consultant,” Mendez said evenly. “This is Erik McGavin.”
Erik noticed the boy behind Lauren blanch a little.
Mendez moved beyond her and introduced himself to the boy.
“I know,” the boy muttered. “I’m sorry to hear about your partner.”
Mendez looked at him with thinly veiled suspicion. “Did you know him?”
The boy looked queasy. “No, my...my mother did, I suppose. She mentioned him in her journals.” It looked as if he was going to say more, but didn’t.
After a pause, Mendez said, “Coley, is it? You’re Mrs. Coley’s son?”
The boy nodded. “Yes—sorry. Yes, I’m Ian.”
“Are you okay?” Erik was sure in his bones that the boy knew, or at least suspected, why they were there.
The boy nodded again. “Just
a lot of bad memories connected to that room,” he said, and looked at the doorway as if not really seeing it. “A lot of bad stuff.”
“I can imagine,” Mendez said in a soft voice. Erik, who knew him pretty well, could hear the impatient strain beneath the carefully practiced patience. “I assure you, we won’t be long.”
“I don’t know what you’ll be able to find,” Lauren said. “I mean, they’ve since cleared out her room.”
“I understand,” Mendez said with that same practiced patience. “We just need to look around here and in the basement, and then we’ll be on our way.”
He and Mendez had discussed the basement on the way to LPH, and both were in agreement that it would be as important, if not more so, to check the basement as well, since that was where they found Mrs. Coley’s body.
“The basement,” Lauren said as if being given the answer to a puzzle. “Of course.”
“We appreciate your cooperation,” Mendez answered.
Alone inside Mrs. Coley’s room, Erik said to Mendez, “They know.”
“What?”
Erik looked back at the doorway. “I’ve seen the look before. Both of them. They’ve seen the Hollowers. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were here tonight to do...well, exactly what we’re doing.
“How can you be sure?”
“Experience.”
“Should we say something?”
Erik looked away, thinking of Dave. “There’s something to be said for strength in numbers. They’re safer with us than without us.”
“I don’t know, Erik. I think—”
“I think Erik’s right.”
The timid voice that came from the doorway belonged to Ian. He stood there with Lauren behind him, both looking a shade short of terrified. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We didn’t mean to eavesdrop. It’s just that... we—I mean my mother, she—you, and Steve, and Erik, and others, she knew them, wrote about them, wrote about the...the....” He looked flustered. He stopped, took a deep breath, and blurted, “Please, we need help. What are they? And how do we stop them?”
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