“Well, it’s an ordinary door,” he whispered.
Chris made as if to cuff him and shook his head. Jason grinned, his teeth looking unnaturally white in the gloom.
“I feel like I should have a black woolen hat pulled down over my ears,” he said.
“Oh, shut up,” whispered Chris. He pressed his ear against the door. He could hear absolutely nothing. He pulled back from the door and gently lowered his bag to the ground. Jason did the same. There was a slight clank of metal on metal as Jason’s bag met the ground and Chris winced. He looked quickly around, but there was no cause for alarm.
“Now what?” Jason asked.
Chris leaned down and pulled the crowbar out from Jason’s bag. “Go back there and keep watch. I’m going to open up.”
He waited till Jason had walked quickly back to the building’s edge and then hefted the crowbar, examining the locks. They were simple. No need for the bolt cutters or anything like it. He just hoped to hell the place wasn’t alarmed. He looked over to Jason, who waved a hand to indicate that everything was okay. Taking a firm grip, he inserted the edge of the crowbar between the doorframe and the door, near the locks and pushed. There was a slight give, but that was it. Putting his back into it and gritting his teeth, Chris gave a hefty shove. With a splitting of wood and a loud crack, the door swung open. Chris sucked air through his teeth, looking around nervously. Jason looked back over his shoulder then back around the corner. Gently, gently, Chris dropped the crowbar back into the bag. He gestured for Jason to come join him.
What lay revealed behind the door was a small dark room, windowless and featureless in the lack of light. Chris picked up his bag and rooted around for the flashlight.
“No lights till we get inside,” he whispered. Jason nodded in response.
They slipped into the room and Chris pulled the broken door shut behind them before hitting the flashlight.
He played the beam over what turned out to be a simple narrow side room containing a desk, a closet, and some shelves, all in dark polished wood. There were a few papers in the desktop and Chris stepped over and started rifling through them, holding his flashlight aloft and pointed down at the table surface. There seemed to be nothing of immediate interest. He glanced around. There was another door set into the wall almost directly opposite where they had entered. He shone his flashlight at it then stepped over to it and listened, but there was no sound from the other side, though the noise of his forcing the outside door would have alerted anyone who might be lurking on the other side. He waved Jason over, killed the flashlight, and slowly turned the handle. He eased the door open a crack and tried to peer beyond. It was gloomy, open on the other side; clearly this door led into the cathedral proper. Swinging the door open a little wider, he verified that there was no movement from that dark, chill space.
Chris chewed at the inside of his bottom lip. This was not what it was supposed to be like at all. He didn’t know what he’d expected—medical equipment, a lab?—but it was just as he had seen it before, only draped in semi-darkness. Enough light filtered through the plain glass windows to touch the tops of polished wooden pews with a hint of silver light. The same for the dull floor.
“Shit,” he said under his breath.
“What is it?” whispered Jason beside him, craning over his shoulder to get a look.
“It’s not supposed to be like this,” he said, still whispering.
“What’s it supposed to be like?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Come on. This doesn’t make sense.”
Chris stepped into the vast echoing space of the cathedral itself. His footsteps were clear and unnaturally loud in the dim, empty space. He walked up the central aisle, looking carefully at either side, looking for some clue, for something that would tell him he hadn’t been imagining it all. He stopped right in the center. Jason stood at the other end of the aisle watching him. There was no need for the flashlights here; it was dark, but still light enough to see.
“Jesus,” he said.
“So what now?” said Jason, his voice sounding distorted as it echoed from the walls and floor.
“Shhh,” said Chris, holding up two fingers in a gesture bizarrely reminiscent of a religious benediction.
“What?”
Chris gestured for quiet. He had heard something, a vague whisper of something. He was sure of it. There it was again.
A gentle rustling sigh stirred through the space. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear that?”
It rippled around the walls, the floor, the ceiling, seemingly from all directions at once.
Jason cocked his head in a way that Chris would have found comical in any other situation.
“What?” he said.
The sound insinuated itself around them. Chris looked up. It was coming from somewhere above them. He narrowed his eyes, trying to focus on the source of the motion, peering into the darkness. At first, he wasn’t sure, and then the hint became a certainty. There was something moving up there. He tilted his head back, trying to maintain his focus, his attention. There was something wrong with what he was seeing, an almost wavering flowing in slight ripples, distorting the beams above him, wavering across the darkened ceiling vaults far above. He stared, hard, concentrating.
There was movement up there all right, movement above and along the vast wooden beams, dark night shapes jostling each other for position. Black shapeless forms shifted and stirred all along the beams and around the edges. There came the sound again, louder, and this time it was accompanied by a low murmur.
As he concentrated, the amorphous shapes started to resolve themselves into individual forms.
“Oh Christ,” he said.
All along the beams, clutching to the ceiling arrayed along the edges of the walls, were crows, gently shifting one against the other. Chris’s heart went cold. One of the birds croaked and then another, the sound echoing around the empty space, chilling him.
He couldn’t move. His breath was suddenly tight in his chest. He tore his gaze away from the creatures still there above him and glanced around.
Jason stood where he was, just staring blankly ahead, a slightly puzzled expression on his face.
“Jason?” Nothing, not even a flicker. Jason appeared stuck in place.
Chris forced himself to look up again. Black eyes were looking back at him, glittering, even blacker in the darkness.
One of the black birds detached itself from the rafters and launched itself into space, quickly followed by another. The first beat its wings against the air, slowing its descent, heading towards him, the other circling behind it. Chris swallowed, overcome with the image of hundreds of beaks rushing down upon him, tearing him to pieces. He couldn’t move.
The flapping bird came closer, but as it reached almost head height, level with Chris’s eyes, it seemed to lose form, becoming insubstantial, changing, reshaping. Its color faded, washing out and becoming paler and paler. And then it was past him, wings beating the air in cleanly defined strokes. A feather drifted down in front of him, spiraling lazily in the darkness, black against deeper grey.
Chris was having difficulty coming to terms with what he was seeing, what he’d just seen. It was as if he wasn’t there, not conscious and aware. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like at all.
“Gaaah,” he forced out between his lips with every effort of his elusive will.
Any moment, he expected to feel the weight of sharp claws landing on his shoulder. Stray dust motes caught the light of his flashlight beam, floating in seemingly random patterns. He pulled his attention away from Jason, trying to focus on them, trying to fix his concentration on something small and insubstantial, but his vision kept slipping in and out of focus. He couldn’t do it.
From above, came the sound of constantly shifting and rustling feathers. He tried to swallow, and couldn’t. He tried to close his eyes and couldn’t. Right then, right at that moment
, he felt drained, felt as if all feeling had simply flowed out of him and away.
The hollow-eyed people he had seen, immobile, scattered in various places. And as Chris thought about that, he remembered. He remembered that night when Stase and he had argued, when she had simply drained away to collapse on the kitchen floor. He remembered the men coming in the white van, pushing past him in the doorway without a word and taking her away. Somehow, some way, they had screwed with his memory too. They’d come back and taken him and done something to make his memory other than it was. They were screwing with him now.
That didn’t explain who they were and what they were doing. Was this some vast experiment? Some cosmic joke? Were people really little more than hollow vessels that could be filled with whatever thoughts and memories that could be thrust at them from without? Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe they were just manipulating the thoughts. Chris was struggling with the ideas. Patrick. Patrick could be one of them. Did these people, whoever they were—or were they even people after all? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t even rely on what his eyes were telling him. Did they just batter away at you through everyday life until there was nothing else, sensations, impressions, thoughts, memories, everything that made you what you were, gone? Or perhaps the people, these beings, were benevolent, monitoring what went on in the world every day, watching the media barrage—that much at least was clear from this place—and fixing the problem of perceptual overload when it all became too much.
Chris fought with himself, fought with the paralysis overwhelming him, summoning every ounce of his will, scrunching his effort into a tight ball that he thrust up and out, exploding into three simple words.
“Who…are…they?” he cried.
Chris’s perception started blurring then.
There was a hand upon his shoulder, and he jumped.
“Chris, what is it?” said Jason’s voice. “You okay, man?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
That Which Lingers
Chris sat in the car, looking down at the keys held in his hand. He had been going somewhere, or perhaps he had been somewhere. He closed his fingers around the keys. Strange. He knew he should know. He opened his palm again, looked at the keys and was just about to lean forward and push them into the ignition, when he noticed the black bag on the seat beside him. He didn’t remember putting it there. He put the key in the ignition and reached over to the bag, pulling it to him. It was heavy. He frowned, opened the bag and looked inside. There was the big flashlight from downstairs and a pair of pliers and a hammer. What the hell would he want those for? Perhaps Jason had asked to borrow them. There was dried mud on the bottom of the bag. He ran his fingertip over it. But if he was dropping the stuff off to Jason, what the hell was the mud doing there. Maybe he’d dropped the bag somewhere. That’s the only thing he could think of.
He shoved the bag onto the floor in front of the seat and leaned back, resting the back of his head on the headrest and rubbing his forehead with his fingers. There was the hint of a weird buzzing noise in his head, barely beneath his perception. He ran his fingers through his hair and gently massaged the back of his neck.
Putting his arm in that position fired a painful sensation on the top of his shoulder. That was strange too. He reached beneath his shirt and felt along the skin of his shoulder, probing for the source of the pain. His fingertips encountered something, and he sucked air through his teeth. Three raised ridges sat there, painful, like scratches. As he felt, he noticed a similar slight twinge in his other shoulder. There were more scratches there. What the hell had he been doing? It was probably something he’d done while attempting to clear out the garden, but what on earth had made marks like that? Had he been pushing through bushes or something? But that didn’t make sense either. He simply couldn’t remember. He shook his head, as if to clear it.
He wasn’t going to find any answers sitting in the dark in the car. He pulled the key out of the ignition, reached for the bag and stepped out to the roadside. He stood there for a couple of seconds, remembering something—or rather, half remembering something. It had to do with birds. He struggled with the memory for a couple of seconds then shook his head. It simply wasn’t going to come. He wished he could get rid of the buzzing sensation in his ears. It was like it was deep within his head, rather than something he was really hearing. He glanced over at the house. The windows were dark. It looked like Stase wasn’t home yet, or else she’d got home and had already gone to bed. Glancing down at his watch, he realized that that couldn’t be the case. It was only 9:30. With a brief shake of his head, he locked the car and headed for the front steps.
Once inside, he headed downstairs, dropped the bag in the cupboard where the stuff belonged, and went back into the kitchen. He looked around, seeking a clue, seeking…he didn’t know quite what he was seeking. He stood staring at the fridge, at the notes and photographs held in place with small round fridge magnets for a while, running the day’s events through his mind, but they kept slipping away from him, oily, sliding through his mental grasp. He frowned, walked out of the kitchen, passing the phone on the way and suddenly having second thoughts, he turned back to it. The only thing he could think of was that he was taking those things over to Jason’s. He picked up the phone and dialed.
The answering machine kicked in, but just as it was starting to grind out its message, someone picked up the phone.
“Jason?”
“Ah, Chris. What an unexpected surprise.”
“Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of something.”
There was a chuckle from the other end. “Not something I can’t talk about,” he said. “No, I was just fiddling with one of the doors downstairs.”
Doors? There was a brief flash of something. A door. Darkness. A crowbar.
“Um, right,” said Chris. “Listen. You didn’t ask to borrow anything did you? Some tools? A flashlight, maybe?”
“Chris, now why would I do that? Think about it, man. Or is this some sort of trick question?”
“Yeah right, sorry.” It was stupid. Jason had enough tools to set up a building company. Why would he want to borrow tools? “Sorry, I just forgot something, and I was trying to work out what it was.”
“You’re getting old, young man.” Another chuckle.
“Yeah, right. Well, sorry to drag you away from whatever you were doing.”
“Not a problem. So, how’s the little woman?”
Stase. Something about Stase. Confusion passed across his brow. “Yeah, um…yeah, she’s fine.” He struggled to remember where she was. “She’s out at the moment. Some work do or other.”
“Well, give her my best if she’s in any state when she gets in.”
“Yeah, I will do. Same to Claudia.”
There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end. “Ow.”
“What?” asked Chris.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve done something to my shoulder. Caught it on a nail or something I suppose. Damned if I can remember doing it.”
Chris reached for his own shoulder, frowning again.
Birds. Black birds. Big ones. The white noise in his head, buzzing behind his eyes. He winced.
“Right, well you take care now, Jason. You ought to be more careful. Hey, listen, it’s been ages since we’ve seen each other. You want to catch up for a drink some time when the girls are otherwise engaged?”
Jason chuckled. “Sounds like a plan,” he said.
Sounds like a plan. That meant something. Chris frowned. “Okay, I’ll give you a call,” he said.
“Sure. Later.”
Chris gently put down the receiver and stood staring at the phone. After a while, he stepped back into the kitchen, dropped a couple of painkillers and wandered back into the living room and flipped on the television. He didn’t really care what was on. He sat there in the darkness, watching the moving images without really seeing them, letting the noise simply wash over him. Occasionally he’d feel his eyebrows twitch, and t
hen he’d blink involuntarily. There was a strangely empty feeling inside at the top of his abdomen for most of the night, and though he tried to think, his head fogged the process, so he let it slip away.
Stase arrived home around midnight. She’d clearly had a couple too many, a little unsteady and giggly, still in her work clothes. She barely spoke to him and was up in the shower and to bed within half an hour. Chris sat there for longer, much longer, not motivated to do anything, let alone go to their strangely distant bed.
Chris never got the chance to set up his drinks date with Jason. Four days later, Stase came home and announced that Claudia had accepted a position overseas. Both she and Jason were going to be moving within the week, permanently. It was something they’d been negotiating for a few weeks, but they’d kept it quiet in case it hadn’t come off. It was an amazing opportunity and Claudia was going to be getting stacks more money, better conditions, a full relocation package thrown in. Stase was clearly envious, but more than anything, she was sad to be losing one of her closest girlfriends. Of course, she’d go and visit, and Claudia and Jason would probably be back from time to time, but it wouldn’t be a regular event. They had so much to do before they left that there was little chance to spend any real time together.
Chris couldn’t quite focus on Stase’s announcement. In the past few days, things had been occurring in Chris’s head, strange things, unexpected things. Brief flashes, images. He kept seeing these very conservative-looking faces, leaning in close to his own, and always, always, he’d be thinking about something and a quick sharp image would form in his inner eye—feathers, wings, beaks, eyes. He wondered if he might be starting to develop a morbid fear of crows.
On Tuesday, he was on the bus into work, when he saw the old guy who hung around the local shopping center, walking up the road carrying a couple of plastic bags. His breath caught in his chest.
“Patrick?” he said quietly.
“Excuse me?” asked the person sitting next to him.
The Hollowed Page 23
