And yet each of them nodded at him. They understood. He nodded back, and flipped the switch.
Plates in the plane of the floor dropped out and they were falling, falling into the black at the end of the universe.
Chapter 19
Mendez opened his eyes and a sharp bolt of pain seared through his head. It occurred to him that all this exposure to and traveling between different dimensions and layers of his own dimension might very likely wreak untold havoc on the human body. He blinked and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to see through the haze of pain. After a moment, it subsided a little, and he looked around. Anita lay next to him, her eyes fluttering. She groaned. They were in a rough-hewn concrete cave, lit with dim bulbs of a sickly yellow and marked throughout with painted signs to KEEP OUT and keep alert. Near where Ian and Lauren lay sprawled on the floor was a dark brown stain in the concrete flooring, and a thick gray pipe ran above their heads. A thick rope tied in a noose hung from the pipe right above Ian. Erik leaned up against a heavy steel door marked with a small sign that read MORGUE, rubbing his head.
They were back—in the Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital’s basement, where they had begun.
Mendez got up and helped his wife to her feet. He wanted to leave, wanted to go home and hold his baby, rock her to sleep, feel her tiny breaths on his neck as she lay on his chest. He didn’t want to take the chance of being sent away again.
Then he looked at Erik’s face and knew that just couldn’t be—at least, not yet. It still wasn’t over. It wouldn’t ever be over until they killed those things. He and Anita would never sleep another peaceful night or hold their baby or make love or eat waffles or anything without worrying, waiting, watching.... He couldn’t go home until the Hollowers were destroyed.
“Are we...?” Ian stood, wincing from the pain in his back. He nevertheless extended a hand to Lauren to help her up. He noticed the noose, brushed it aside like it was crawling with bugs, and shivered. “We’re back in the basement...aren’t we? Are we really here?”
“Looks like,” Erik said, getting to his feet as well. “Looks like they’re done trying to break us. Ian, you still have the...you know, the artifact?” He looked around, saw what door he was leaning against, flinched, and moved away from it.
Ian patted his pants pocket. “Got it.”
“You think it’ll still work here? In our world?” Erik’s voice was a conspiratorial whisper.
“Provided the words still self-translate,” Ian answered in the same kind of whisper, “then yeah, I think so.”
“Good,” Erik said in that quiet, thoughtful, serious way he had. “No more fucking around.”
“So where are they?” Lauren asked.
She was answered by the ding of the elevator door. It had reached their floor. They held their breaths, waiting for the doors to open, waiting to see what the Triumvirate would throw at them next.
The doors opened on an empty car. A breeze blew out of it, though, which had enough gust behind it to almost have substance. It made a whistling sound like a breath over a glass soda bottle.
They waited.
A chittering sound echoed in the basement, then died.
They waited.
“This is the end of things.”
They jumped, their nerves frazzled, some throats choking out edgy little cries. The voice had come from behind them. They turned.
The Triumvirate stood there, loomed there, very tall.
Mendez saw Ian slide the artifact surreptitiously out of his pocket.
“We are done with you. Now you will die,” the left one told them.
“No,” Erik told them. “We are done with you. Get the fuck out of our world.”
He looked to Ian and nodded, and Ian held up the artifact and began to read. Mendez didn’t know if he was reading ancient Aramaic or the language, re-translated, of the ancient race who had written the words in the first place, but he kept going, loud and clear and strong, and as he did so, he began to change. It wasn’t anything drastic, but Mendez, who by then had spent several very long, strange hours with the young man, could see the difference. He glowed slightly, for one, and he looked taller, more muscular somehow. His body language was different, his posture different. It was almost as if the force of the artifact’s creators was possessing him, guiding him, driving him through the incantation.
The Hollowers did not appear pleased by this sudden turn of events at all.
“Stop,” the left one said.
Ian kept reading, his voice growing stronger, a chant picking up the rhythms of the cosmos.
The middle one made a motion with its glove, and with a savage growl, shot bolts of dark purple at Ian that fell to either side of his feet, causing the ground they touched to bubble and smoke.
Ian kept reading.
“Stop,” the one on the right said. “Stop this.” The basement around them stretched and yawned and creaked as if the whole thing might cave in on their heads. Babies cried from inside the morgue and the accusing voices of the dead bombarded them with vitriol and threats.
But Ian kept reading, right until the end. He lowered the artifact and stood his ground in front of the Triumvirate. And for seconds that seemed to stretch into years, they all held their breaths and waited.
There was a flash as a bolt of black lightning sizzled down, slicing the air, and the familiar heavy odor of ozone. The bolt folded in on itself as they had seen it do before, and then spread to a height of about six feet before pulling itself open. Around it and behind it, the air wavered as if heat were rising around it. Inside the rip, which struck Mendez as the opening of a throat leading to an endlessly hungry stomach, he could see nothing. He could hear, though. He could hear the storm of nonentity that used to be a universe tearing and shredding and crashing and rending far below.
“OhmyGoditworked,” Ian breathed.
The heads of the Triumvirate turned in unison to the rip, then snapped back to Ian. Mendez could feel the hate radiating off them, pulsating off them in waves that burned with cold. He could also sense their confusion and alarm. He thought he sensed their fear. It gave him no small measure of satisfaction.
“What did you do?” they asked him, their three multi-voices tinged with hysterical tightness.
“I told you,” Erik said. “We want you out of our world—for good.”
“Stop. You must not do this.” The one on the right tightened his glove into a fist. The air crackled between them. The middle one tilted its head at Ian and he cried out in pain. The metal figure fell from his hand and skittered across the ground. The Hollower on the right twisted its fist and the space that had crackled moments before began to open.
“No!” Anita shouted. She reached down and grabbed a chipped piece of concrete off the ground and threw it at the Hollower on the right. The rock crackled and disappeared with a small pop. There was a low hum, and then a flash from the space where the rock had been. It lanced out and hit Anita in the shoulder. She cried out and crumpled to the ground, breathing heavily. Mendez was by her side in a flash, checking the burnt cloth of her top and beneath it, the burn on her shoulder.
“I’m okay,” she told him. “No worries.”
“You think some trinket from a dead race is going to save you, when we can open up the gates of Hell and suffocate you beneath the flesh of demons?” The middle Hollower sounded angry for sure, but also uncertain. Mendez dared to hope they had done something right.
In front of the middle Hollower, a black schism tore the fabric of the basement air and began to open. Ozone choked Mendez’s nasal passages.
“They can’t come through, the others, they can’t, can’t,” Erik muttered under his breath, not to anyone in particular. Mendez thought Erik was thinking of Dave then, and the rip the last Hollower had opened when it had threatened to call its kin in droves to destroy them. Dave had died that night, rather than let more monsters in to hurt his friends. Mendez frowned. Erik couldn’t...just because Dave had.... But Mendez knew th
at look in Erik’s eyes. Nothing was going to change his mind, either.
“Erik—”
“Tell Casey I love her.”
“Whatever you’re thinking, I—”
“Promise me.”
“Erik, what—”
Erik dove for the metal figure and then charged the closest Hollower, the one on the left. With his left forearm, he rammed it in the gut, sending the line of them toppling backward through the rip. One by one that mouth swallowed them, and then Erik disappeared through the fluttering edges of the rip as well.
Mendez was at the rip in a second, reaching in and grabbing at Erik. His fist closed around clothing—the neckline of Erik’s jacket and shirt. He was yanked forward. His other hand flailed, reaching for something stable, and found a chain hanging from a concrete support post. He could smell Anita’s perfume behind him immediately and feel her arms around his waist, holding onto him. He didn’t dare turn away from the rip, though.
The hand and wrist plunged into the alternate space grew painfully cold and stiff, but he held on. He could see the Hollower Erik had charged holding onto him by the forearm. Strangely, awkwardly, it held the glove of the Hollower below it, and that one held the glove of the Hollower below it. They didn’t add any extra weight, so far as Mendez could tell—he was straining against Erik’s weight, and that was it. But to bring Erik back through the rip would be to pull the train of monsters back through as well.
“Let me go,” Erik puffed with strangled breaths. Even from where Mendez stood, he could feel the vacuum below tugging on the air of this world, drawing everything to it and chewing it up. “You have to...let...us fall.”
“No,” Mendez said. “You’re going home to your wife.” He pulled, but the fabric of Erik’s shirt made a ripping sound. Mendez felt the slack in the fabric as Erik pitched forward. He let go of the post and grabbed at Erik under his arm with his other hand. Behind him, a train of grunts indicated that the others felt the strain of holding onto him, but their grip didn’t loosen.
He could see the skin of Erik’s forearm around the black glove turning white, then blue, then black. Likewise, a white frost spread like moss over each of the Hollower’s fingers, then down the back of the glove and onto the sleeve. The frost moved quickly, and from the siren sound issuing forth from the depths of that dangling Hollower, it must have caused a great deal of pain.
Before the frost could reach the shoulder of the thing, Mendez saw the other glove spread its fingers, breaking its hold on the Hollower below it. There was a roar of surprise as two of the Triumvirate fell backward into the tearing, twisting darkness below. Mendez watched their forms until they grew small, at which point the substance of the chaotic storm beneath them tore them into little pieces. The death wail of their sirens lasted moments after, until the void swallowed the sound, too.
Mendez doubted the Hollowers were capable of anything even remotely like sympathy, but the Hollower with its icy death-clutch on Erik wailed when the last death notes of its comrades had faded away. It looked smaller somehow without the others making it whole.
Erik must have seen a chance in its diminutive moment of weakness, too. With his free arm, he pulled back and punched the Hollower square in the blank plane where a face should have been. His fist, still clutching the artifact, sank into the Hollower’s head, or else the head crumpled like paper around his fist. Immediately, Erik’s fingers and knuckles turned purple and cracked, bleeding into the concavity of the Hollower’s head.
The black glove let go of Erik’s arm as Erik pulled his fist away, and then the last of the Triumvirate was falling, too, its own siren call long and loud as black frothed over black beneath it.
“No joda con nosotros,” Mendez said to the shrinking form of the last Hollower, and yanked Erik back with all his strength. Behind him, Anita’s small, strong hands held him tight and caught the momentum, pulling too, and behind her, Ian and Lauren held their ground.
Mendez and Erik toppled backward onto the hard ground of the hospital basement. Erik winced and straightened his purple, swollen, bleeding fingers, and released his grip on the artifact. Mendez crawled over to him and picked it up. He held it, an important instrument of a long-dead race from another dimension, a key to opening up the storm of black holes that had once been the Hollowers’ home world And with a nod of encouragement from Erik, he tossed it through the rip and watched with satisfaction as it disappeared into the void. Then he collapsed next to Erik and lay there.
Only moments after, the rip crackled loudly and distorted, puckering and twisting, then sealed up with a pop and disappeared. A few seconds more and the ozone smell dissipated, the air smoothed out, and all trace of a rip ever having been there at all was gone.
Anita swooped down to hold him, and he saw the other two checking on Erik and his injured arm and hand. Lauren ran off to get bandages and medicines from the supply cabinet.
Mendez and Erik stayed there on their backs for a while, letting the others tend to them, and then Mendez started to laugh. It was a weak sound, almost just a cough, but it caught on. Erik started laughing, too. Anita and the others smiled, confused, but it didn’t matter.
They had done it. They had sent the Triumvirate home.
Epilogue
Two weeks later, Ian sat on his mother’s bed with the cell phone in his hand. All around him was the untidy evidence of his room re-do. Drop cloths covered the furniture too big to move out of the room. Small sample paint cans stood tiny sentinel around the baseboards. The plaster symbols had been knocked off and the wall scraped, sanded, and respackled where necessary. The newspaper had been peeled off the windows, and neither the Mayan can temples nor the box that had once occupied the space where Ian now sat were present in the room. He had thrown it all out, including her journals and news clippings. He wanted to remember his mother, but not those things. That part of her life—and his—was best left behind.
He did keep the collage. He found it captured all the things he did want to remember about her. And he kept the pictures of his parents on their wedding day. He’d even gotten frames for them, which he planned to hang when he’d repainted the room. He intended to paint it a bright color. A happy color.
It was a new life, a second chance. And he wanted to make the most of it.
His finger hovered over Lauren’s name in his phone’s address book. She was off that night. The thought of calling her made his heart pound almost audibly in his chest. He had to laugh to himself; he was more scared of calling the girl of his dreams to ask for a dinner date than he had been facing down man-eating monstrosities from another dimension.
His finger touched her name in the address book and her number popped up on screen.
But then, Ian had never been the type to swoop in and charm ladies. His battling inter-dimensional gods and monsters hadn’t made him much less shy. He taught dead languages and had weird hobbies and a tendency to babble when he was nervous, usually about things most people didn’t even understand, and—
Stop, he told himself. You’re better than you think, and on your way to being as good as you’d like to be. She had told him to call her sometime, in their new life. She liked him. And Lord, did he ever like her.
But what if she said no? What if she had just been trying to be nice? What if—
What if a dimension opened up in your living room and swallowed you whole tomorrow and you blew the one and only chance you had to be happy?
He’d meant it as a mental joke, but it lost its funny right off the bat.
Still, it was a good point, in a figurative sort of way. If he’d learned anything, it was that uncertainty was the order of things, and that in terms of life’s adventure, he wasn’t so bad a guy to have along for the ride.
He took a deep breath, and dialed her number. He could feel his stomach tightening up with each ring, and when her voice on the other end said, “Hello?” he thought he might pass out. He managed to croak out a greeting.
“Ian! Hi!”
/> He was pleased to hear how happy she sounded that he had called. He relaxed a little as they made small talk. They talked about her patients—Mrs. Saltzman had confirmed to her that the doormen had gone away—and his classes, the summer session of which would be starting the following Tuesday. It felt right. Maybe it was corny, but he really did feel like he’d known her his whole life. No awkward pauses bogged down the flow of chatter between them. They finished each other’s sentences with how much they had in common. And when she laughed, Ian felt buoyed by the airiness of it. He would have fought a thousand gods and monsters for the chance to hear her laugh again.
When they were almost an hour into the conversation, he screwed up his courage to ask her out.
“Hey, Lauren, I was wondering...I mean, do you think maybe you’d like to...well, that we could....” He took another deep breath. A new life, he told himself. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
He could almost hear her smile from the other end.
“I’d love to.”
The knot in his gut loosened. “Good! Tonight, at seven?” He smiled, too.
“Sounds perfect.”
And the date turned out to be just that.
***
Mendez met Erik at the Olde Mill Tavern that night. When he entered the dim warmth backdropped by the crooning of Mick Jagger from the juke box, he saw Erik in his usual seat at the end of the bar, staring off distractedly over his Diet Coke. He looked smaller somehow, more withdrawn. Mendez stifled a frown and walked up to him, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Oh hey, glad you could make it.”
Mendez noticed Erik had removed the bandage. The back of his hand showed patches of gray with stiff, reddish-purple skin around and beneath it. There was still a bandage over the patch on his forearm which Mendez had no doubt would be there for a while. The damage to the tissue had been extensive, and Erik would have a rough scar in the end to show for it. There was a sunken, shadowed look on Erik’s face that Mendez hadn’t seen since the days when Erik was using. He knew that wasn’t what was making Erik look so haunted these days, though. It was like Nietzsche said about the abyss. Erik had stared into it, had almost fallen into it, in fact. That it looked back into him—that it looked out through his eyes every now and again, particularly when Erik seemed to be wool-gathering—well, that was to be expected, wasn’t it?
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