Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Close to midnight, they paid the tab, left a tip that was not quite as generous as they would have left for Cheryl, and shuffled out into the night. Dave was “dulled fuzzy,” as Cheryl used to say, with warm tequila in his gut and in his head. The breeze blew softly, rustling the trees overhead, cool on his face. It did little to penetrate the alcohol haze, though, which blurred the edges of his vision, giving everything a soft, diffused quality, so much so that it took his brain a moment to register the dark shape on the hood of Erik’s car.

  “No. No no no.” Erik walked faster. Dave jogged to catch up, squinting ahead, trying to pull the black shape into focus. Was it a dead animal, curled up on the hood of the car? A piece of clothing? Why would someone—

  It was a hat. Something in his brain turned over and clicked and he saw it clearly—a black fedora hat. And he didn’t have to ask whose it was because at that moment, all his arguments and justifications to the contrary seemed flimsy and threadbare.

  The two stood in front of the car, Dave slightly swaying in the breeze, gazes fixed on the black hat.

  Finally, in a voice almost too soft to even hear himself, Dave said, “We killed it.”

  Erik didn’t look at him, only shook his head and said in that same soft voice, “We killed one. But there were others. And the last one…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.

  The last of the Hollowers, before slipping back through the rip between their dimension and this one, had said, “Found you.”

  Erik reached a tentative hand out to touch the hat, to verify the reality of it, but the breeze suddenly gusted, lifting the hat into the air and shooting it into the street. They watched as it skittered and rolled into the woods on the far side and disappeared in the gloom between the trees.

  Between them, in the air around their heads, Dave could have sworn he heard very faint laughter, the sound of its cache of voices. It could have been his imagination, most likely was because, goddammit, they’d killed the sonofabitch. But the tequila turned sour in his gut. The breeze had become very, very cold, and he shivered.

  They got into the car and closed the doors without speaking. Then Dave opened the door, vomited the burning liquid from his stomach, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and closed the door.

  “Some guy lost his hat,” Erik mumbled. His tone was flat and lacked any real substance. Dave nodded anyway. Neither spoke for the rest of the ride home.

  Dorrie’s stomach went from mere rumbling to insistent growling and, in the last hour or so after midnight, had graduated to actual pangs. In the ranch she rented on Cerver Street, the kitchen was just three rooms and a hallway away. A quick snack would help settle her, physically and emotionally.

  She lay in bed, debating whether she could sleep through the gnawing in her stomach. She thought of her thighs, her abs, her ass. She thought of the bag of Tostitos on top of the fridge. She could walk the extra half mile to work it off.

  But then Dorrie thought of how day four had gone and knew damned well that there would be no extra half mile and so no increased risk of running into…whatever the hell she’d run into that day. It had frightened her something awful, that thing leaning against the tree, but not so much because she believed it to be real. Rather, the thing she really feared seemed more tangible, closer to the possible truth than a faceless stranger making death threats.

  She’d obviously passed out—hallucinated, maybe, and then passed out. Lack of food, overexertion. Maybe, just maybe, some tumorous thing brought on by bad eats and no physical activity, something newly burst or nearly grown to a grapefruit and pressing on her brain. More than anything, that was what she thought had happened. And she was worried. Scared to death, actually. And when she was nervous, she found comfort foods cleared her mind and enabled her to formulate a calm, logical plan of action.

  It had looked real, sure. The darkness, the voice, the way it spiraled around her head and got under her clothes and sliced into the meat of her. But it wasn’t. Couldn’t be.

  But she couldn’t think rationally with that twisting ache in her gut, that hungry wrenching and the sloshing of stomach acid as she lay there. She was hungry. Day five be damned. She needed something to eat.

  Tossing back the covers, she swung her feet onto the floor and padded through the dark hallway, past the bathroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen. The low hum of the fridge and the occasional crackle of the ice machine on the freezer side gave her comfort. Reminded her, actually, of those nights as a little girl, with the yellow, lined-paper notes from her mom about working late and explaining what to do with the leftovers in the fridge.

  “Help yourself to whatever you want to eat, baby,” the notes had said. And Dorrie had done just that, alone in the dim light of the kitchen, most nights not even thinking too much about it. But that aching loneliness had been there all the same, chewing at her the way the hunger chewed at her stomach.

  Her hand on the handle of the refrigerator, she frowned. She had trouble picturing her mother’s face sometimes, except that it was lovely and it always wore makeup. She couldn’t remember her father at all; she understood he’d been a mousy kind of guy that people walked all over in personal, social, and professional life, a smallish man with thinning hair and hopeless eyes and a light but rarely used laugh. He’d never stood up to anyone, including the beautiful, powerful, successful woman he’d married.

  Instead, he’d simply shut off the TV one night, brought his beer can to the kitchen counter, and walked out the door. He hadn’t even taken the car. He’d just walked out and kept on walking, and had never turned around once, not even to eye for one last time the bedroom window where his four-year-old daughter slept.

  And Dorrie’s mother had watched him go. She didn’t try to stop him or ask where he was going or why he was going out so late. She’d let him go. It might have been the only passive thing she’d ever done. She’d only mentioned it once to Dorrie, and never again.

  It was as Dorrie was trying to call up her mother’s face in her mind that she heard the giggling in the fridge.

  The frown deepened. For a while, the hum of the refrigerator and nothing else filled the kitchen.

  Then she heard the giggling again, coming from inside the fridge, followed by, “Dorrie? Dorrie, is that you, baby?” The hunger in her gut turned sour. It was her mother’s voice, sharp and clear as it always had been.

  “Dorrie, help me. Let me out of here, baby.”

  Her fingers tingled against the handle where they rested. She could almost feel the cold from inside on her face, her chest. “Mom?”

  Until the voice coming from the other side of the refrigerator door answered her, she wasn’t sure she’d even spoken out loud.

  “Dorrie, open up. Let me out.”

  She took a deep breath and gave the door a yank.

  Inside the fridge were the things she knew she’d bought: a gallon of milk, margarine, a liter of diet soda, a carton of eggs. She saw a jar of pickles she’d bought a few days ago, the ketchup, a jar of grape jelly, and a jar of mayonnaise, all as she remembered. But scattered on both the top and middle shelves were Tupperware containers she had never seen before. Inside them, something dark like raw meat pressed against the semiopaque tops and sides. And Dorrie couldn’t be totally sure, but it seemed to her that the meatiness inside was quivering, moving by itself, humming and jiggling as if trying to wiggle itself free of the containers.

  “Baby, let me out,” her mother’s voice said, echoing from the different containers.

  Horrified, Dorrie backed away from the fridge. Whatever was inside the containers started to shake violently enough to cause the Tupperware to skitter and jump along the shelves. With a muted snap, one of the tops came loose along one side, and red-black ichor belched outward, followed by a thin bubble that looked to Dorrie like blood, which popped in a fine spray against the mayonnaise jar. The top flapped looser, and the containers picked up the giggling again, working themselves into a feverish high pitch. Th
e other containers bucked and slid across the shelves, their tops straining as the shivering chunks inside pressed against them for escape. Blood—she could smell it now, feral and metallic like steak blood—splattered across the shelves, the carton of milk, and the eggs. The giggling dropped in tone so that strands of bass male laughter tangled with womanly peals. And soft, not scared but hurting, not weak but wounded, her mother’s voice pleaded with her from the containers to be let out.

  She bit her lip to keep from screaming, to keep the heat behind her eyes from exploding into tears. In one quick gesture, she slammed the refrigerator door, cutting off the laughter and the pleading and the awful bloody containers with their stench of dead meat and their splashing blood.

  In the instant the door closed, all sound stopped. Dorrie sank to the floor, her eyes all the while on her shopping list pinned to the refrigerator door by a Happy Bunny magnet. She listened to the low hum which now seemed to growl from under the fridge. The tile on the floor felt cool when she put her palms down. Dorrie didn’t move. Shallow breaths caught in her chest.

  She was losing her mind. Had to be. Chopped up remnants of (God, she could only guess who) something didn’t just appear in refrigerators and hop around and speak with her mother’s voice.

  Her mother’s voice. That was it. She’d call her mom and make sure everything was okay…

  She rose slowly, keeping a level gaze on her shopping list, and made her way back across the kitchen to the phone.

  Her mother answered on the sixth ring. She sounded drowsy but told her she was fine. During the course of conversation, Dorrie could hear muted voices from the fridge—no one she could identify—but voices vaguely familiar and insistent and anxious.

  Dorrie hung up with her mom and slowly moved back to the fridge. Her stomach felt heavy and sick now, swinging uneasily with every step. She opened the door. No Tupperware containers at all. No traces of blood whatsoever. No smell of old meat.

  No sound. She closed the door.

  The voice of the stranger in the woods, the eerie wind chimes voice muffled by the door, said, “Found you, Dorrie.”

  For a moment, she thought she’d be sick. The world swam in front of her, and she took several deep breaths to pull things back into focus. Then she grabbed one of the kitchen chairs and pushed it up against the refrigerator door. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Dorrie grabbed her car keys, locked her front door on the way out, and drove to an all-night motel.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Primary Hollower had found them.

  There had been many lightenings and darkenings of their world while it waited. It hated everything about their place, their noxious dampening of the air with their breaths, their assault of brightness and heat and noise. They used words, clumsy sound that fell with endless rapidity from the foul gaps of their heads. And they touched each other, actually pressed limbs to limbs, heads to heads, appendages to appendages.

  They were weak and stupid casings unfit to carry the essences of their minds. It hated them. Found them, hated them, wanted them all dead and cracked open and sucked dry and left to wither, their hateful physicality to decay. It longed for the Convergence, the peace and quiet of the soft dark cushion between worlds where words went away—a place that was neither festering with blood and flesh nor barren like its own origin place, its…home.

  The Intended meats had a word for it. Home. It remembered home. A desolate place now, vapid and crumbling, shifting, falling into itself, unfit even for those who straddled worlds by their nature.

  It wasn’t going home. The emptiness inside it pushed and pulled and stretched, a tumultuous hunger which compelled it to gather the small number of Intended meats to feed on.

  It seethed with the rare emotions it had found occasion to feel in connection to perceiving the meats, emotion that alone eclipsed its hunger and made it demanding and specific. They, those loathsome shells in this place of bodies and sensations, called those emotions Hate and Anger. It understood little else of their feelings other than Fear and cared even less, except for what it could use to hurt them.

  And it very much wanted to hurt them. Some, it discovered by rather delicious accident. Their Fear was new, born of confusion. But others it had watched and waited for. It remembered them from before.

  There had been another, a Secondary, one who had made this dimension its hunting ground and who could abide the prey’s physicality for a time and draw out sustenance from them. They called it a Hollower, gave it a word. And they were afraid, for a time. But then they had hurt it by yanking it into their world and making it like them, solid and clunky. The prey had reduced the great hunter to its base self and killed it.

  The Likekind perceived its death siren and came for the body, and when they passed through from the Convergence to this dimension, the prey, dirty and triumphant, stood their ground while the Likekind claimed their Secondary. The thought even now made the Primary frost the air with Malice.

  As Primary, it had confronted them itself. “Found you.” It formed words, which it took from their own minds, for the first time.

  Found you.

  They, the prey, the Intended meats it had sought out in this place, gave it back words, too—jumbled, panicky mindsounds that represented Fear, Uncertainty, Anxiety.

  It would see them dead, every last one of them. The new ones, too. It would destroy every thread of their existence and see them reduced as its Likekind had been reduced. And it would feed until the voids were filled to bursting.

  The idea satisfied it some, soothed it.

  “Found you.” It stole the female’s voice, the one with the containers in the cold oblong.

  It sensed another then and left the comfort of the in-between place to stalk its new hunting ground.

  Jake found that more and more often lately the insomnia churned up his nights, leaving him tense and uncomfortable and sometimes restlessly horny, glaring at the clock, staring at the ceiling. Often his muscles would tighten, and he’d have to get up and walk around a bit, smoke a cigarette, stretch his legs, swing his arms. And he’d feel the tension behind the outer corners of his eyes, too—not quite a headache or even tightness in his face like wanting to cry, although it would be difficult to say that it wasn’t that, either.

  The symptoms weren’t nearly as bad as when he’d gone through withdrawal—not even close—but they reminded him of those terrible shaking, sweat-soaked, nauseating nights all the same. Sometimes, jerking off to thoughts of the girl across the street relaxed him a little and he could clean up, go back to bed, and close his eyes. He could at least settle into some kind of half sleep. But then he’d dream.

  He thought sometimes that maybe the answer lay in getting high again, but deep down, he didn’t think a desire to get high was the only reason he couldn’t sleep. He suspected it had something to do with the dreams. They were nearly the same, with little variation. In the dreams, he was in an alley with a thin blonde woman. She was fragile, very pale, with delicate, lightly veined hands and a curtain of blonde hair that hung in front of her bowed head. She wore a white dress with pink and orange flowers and she stood with her back to him amidst a scattering of garbage cans and chain link fences topped with razor wire, which seemed to crisscross along the length of the alley without keeping anything specific out or in.

  He knew he was high in the dreams, and he’d sort of slump against the brick wall, staring at her back and not thinking too hard about any one thing. And then she’d laugh, the blonde girl. A deep rumbling, almost like thunder, would vibrate in her chest and spill out of her, and strange voices carried on its crest would tumble over each other in cascades of unstable laughter. Jake’s high inevitably soured, and the former calm dissipated. He felt slowed down, weak, and vulnerable. It scared him. He’d try to stand up straight, move away from the wall and away from the girl and that hollow laughter echoing in the alleyway, but she’d turn around, and the curtain of yellow hair would fall away.

  Sh
e never had a face…

  He’d always wake up sweating, his stomach feeling tight and tortured and his heart painful in his chest.

  The dreams had gotten worse since he’d seen that…whatever it was that had pretended to be his aunt…in the backyard. The alley had taken on a sickening Technicolor-bled aspect, fuzzy and dull and slightly skewed in angle and curve. And nowadays in the dreams, the blonde girl wore a long black trench coat and a Fedora hat tipped down low over the yellow hair. Sometimes, in the laughter he thought he heard words, terrible words like needles all across his skin, urging him to drown himself in a heroin high, urging him to die, die diediedieyoufuckingloserdie. And nothing, not even the subsequently feeble and half-hearted attempts at jerking off, could settle him down after that.

  On the third night following the visit from the thing in the backyard pretending to be his aunt, Jake lay in bed, the sheets tangled around his waist. The digital clock on his night table read 3:14 a.m. His hand was still sore from the cigarette burn, and his wrist ached deep in his tendons. But those things were secondary. It was the TV that really bothered him.

  Sometime while he slept, it had turned on. There’d been no sudden jolt of volume that woke him up. It was more sinister, more gradual than that. At first, the muffled commentator voices and the dull background noise of the spectators seemed a strange part of his dream, like sports fans watching from beyond the chain link fences surrounding the alley. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them, cheering, calling plays, blowing whistles. It passed vaguely through the dream-induced drug high.

  But some back part of his mind broke through to the forefront of the dream, and it took form behind the faceless plane of the blonde’s head. When the head picked up, he heard the voices over the laughter tell him, “Wake up, Jakey.”

  The music wasn’t in his head but outside it, outside the bedroom, in the living room.

  “Wake up. I’m waiting…”