Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Slim pickings, optionwise, he thought, and uttered a short, bitter laugh as he held the gun in his hand. The cigarette clamped in his mouth sent up tendrils of smoke that got in his eyes and made them squint and tear. He sat in his bedroom, on the edge of his bed, feeling awkward and out of place. The air of the house felt different to him. He couldn’t shake the sensation of unseen eyes following everything he did, criticizing, passing judgment, watching from the street straight through the walls.

  The eyes of the dead, maybe.

  There was, he thought as he held the gun, surrounded by the cottony, thick quiet, more than one way for someone to die on you, more than one way for someone to leave your life. People got mad or hurt and passed out of your life forever. People dumped you. People continued to forget to call back. They were all like little deaths. It hurt just as much to have people taken from you. Worse when they took themselves away from you on their own.

  And if there was more than one way for someone to die on you, maybe that meant there was more than one way to kill someone. More than one way to lose someone forever.

  The metal warmed slowly to his touch. It fit in his palm but didn’t really feel comfortable there. It felt like having extra fingers. Deadly, cold fingers.

  He thought of Chloe, and the fight.

  The other woman had been a skinny-assed girl named Ali, with thin brown hair that was always in her eyes and pale, freckled skin, and tight T-shirts and jeans. She meant nothing more to Jake than the source of an occasional bag of smack; in fact, the longer he talked to her, the clearer he saw the stuck-groove loop of her words and the shallow repetitiveness of her thoughts. She possessed a kind of glassy calm, a sort of casual and accidental balance, like a sudden shock or a strong enough wind might blow her right over, but until then, she was just sort of hanging on.

  There had been one night when Jake had no money, and Ali had drugs, and he’d been feeling sick and shaky and achy and sweating and all she’d wanted was a kiss. Just a kiss with a little tongue, and—

  The memory made him feel sick, the heat of regret flushing his neck and cheeks.

  It had only been a kiss, and kissing her had tasted like dry paper and cigarette smoke, but Jake’s timing had always sucked, and Chloe always had a knack for catching him doing something wrong.

  Chloe thought Jake kissing anyone but her was about as wrong as wrong got.

  They fought for hours—Christ, hours—and he couldn’t take it. The shakes, the ache, the awful alternate heat and chills. He’d simply lost patience. He’d given up hope trying to make them or anything else in his life work, and he’d gotten up and stormed out of the house.

  He might have ended up exactly like Chloe, but his friend Joe down the street only had a few joints laced with heroin. Joe had handed them over willingly enough, and what there was in the joint calmed Jake down enough to sit there with his friend and watch the football game drinking beers until, as Joe put it, he could think of Chloe without wanting to punch a wall. That didn’t take long. The heroin took most of the edge off, and the beer and football took off the rest. Jake and Joe didn’t go back right away, though. They waited until they had a plan. Jake was to stop home, grab some stuff, and crash at Joe’s. Joe even went with him back to the house.

  The kind of dark that greeted them in the front hall was almost physically empty, as if some spark that normally made it a habitable dark had been snuffed out. It was the dark of warehouses, the dark of dead- end streets, a shade or dimension less than what he’d left.

  Jake found Chloe in the bedroom. She looked pale and a little bluish around the closed eyes and the cheeks. She wore only her underwear, and the rest of her looked pale, thin, and kind of bluish, too. On the night table next to the bed, there were a few razor blades she’d used to cut up her arms, stomach, and thighs—something he’d never seen her do and hoped for all the rest of his life he never saw anyone do again. Her blood left little irregular spatters on the sheets. But there was also a needle—her needle (they always used their own, and never shared needles with anyone)—sticking half out of her arm, just below the rubber band where she’d tied off.

  Jake thought he knew what she’d done right away. He tore through the room, looking in all the secret places where he suspected she stashed stuff to hide it from him. He found one empty heroin bag, a prescription bottle for Xanex with some woman’s name he never heard of and only a few pills rattling around in the bottom in the first night table drawer, and on the floor just under the bed, an empty bottle of Rum-plemintz, the kind she always complained tasted like mouthwash.

  She’d been planning for this. She’d prepared for it. He couldn’t imagine why, or for how long. There was more, he guessed, than just the thing with Ali, but…why couldn’t he remember? What else had they been fighting about?

  Jake thought about all that as he called 911 and managed to report the overdose in a fairly calm voice beneath the barrage of guilt. When he got off the phone, he broke down in tears, his whole body shaking from the inside. Joe stood behind him, uncomfortable, and patted his shoulder.

  “I don’t know, Jake, I’ve never done heroin before. I’m afraid, Jake. I’m afraid.”

  Years ago, that one time, the first time, had been the only time he’d even asked her to do it. At least, as far as he could remember. But she’d chosen to do heroin that time, and every time after that. He hadn’t killed her. He hadn’t even been home, and if he’d known, if he had any idea at all what she was planning to do…

  Still, she’d only ever done heroin in the first place to be with him, to keep up with him. To connect. Like he’d told Erik. And he guessed she’d overdosed to get away from him.

  Taking the cigarette from his mouth, he ashed it into the tray at his feet. He followed the pattern of the blanket, the one he’d taken from that apartment they’d shared, and his gaze fell to what would have been her side of the bed, to the pillow he’d also taken, the one she’d hugged and cried into on those nights he couldn’t score them anything at all.

  Yeah, there was more than one way to kill someone. With a final drag of the cigarette, he crushed it in the tray and straightened up. Jake’s grip on the gun tightened.

  He wondered if it would hurt. He hoped it would, just a little. It shouldn’t be over without any sort of…exit moment. There should at least be a single moment of pain, of awareness, for someone like him. A moment to feel alive and aware, guilty and afraid of what would happen next. A moment to connect with the death that seemed to follow him everywhere he went. Jake raised the gun to his temple.

  The phone rang, and he jumped, startled out of his thoughts, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He took the gun away from his head and looked at it as the phone rang. The safety was still on, and for a moment he thought, God, I can’t do anything right, and then pointed the gun at the telephone and made a gesture as if shooting it off the hook. It rang again. He sighed. A fourth ring. A fifth.

  After the sixth ring, Jake put the gun down on the bed next to him and got up to answer it. His brother had told him once that maybe there was no such thing as fate, but there sure as hell were carefully placed coincidences. And even on the day you check out of life— those were his exact words, the “day you check out of life”—even then you shouldn’t ignore those coincidences when they are laid right in your lap.

  The phone rang again, and Jake picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Jake.” It was Erik, his sponsor.

  “Oh, hey, man. Look, I’m sorry for freaking out on you the other day. I just—I’ve been under a lot of pressure, and I just, I dunno. Had a little break with reality.” He eyed the gun on the bed with impatience but kept that out of his voice. “Everything’s okay now, though.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “No, really, I’m telling you the truth. I just…needed a few days to get my head together. You know, to think straight. I’ll be back at Saturday’s meeting, I just—”

  “Jake,” Erik said calmly, “please don’t
bullshit me. I know what’s wrong. At least, I’m pretty sure I know. And I think we should talk about it.”

  Jake had never been able to lie to Erik, but he’d be damned if he could tell him about what was really going on. And even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. Erik couldn’t help him. The dead wanted to get him back, he supposed, and when that was the plain truth staring you in the face, what did you tell a guy who, but for the virtue of a few years’ more sobriety, was really no better off in this miserable life than you? “There’s nothing to talk about, man. I just saw—thought I saw—someone who looked like Chloe, and it bugged me out. I don’t even think—”

  “Jesus, man. I’m trying to tell you I understand.” That calm rippled with annoyance. “I’ve been there, where you are. I’ve seen things, too. I…know what you’re going through. It happened to me, too.”

  Jake frowned, offended by what he thought was Erik’s implication. “I’m not using,” he said in a defensive growl. “I swear on my life.”

  A sigh came from the other end of the phone. “Don’t ever swear on your life. It’s too easy to lose that. And besides, this has nothing to do with drugs.”

  Jake was momentarily taken aback by that. “Really? Then what does it have to do with?”

  There was a long, thoughtful pause from the other end of the phone, and then, “It doesn’t have a face.”

  For a moment, the world got fuzzy around the edges, and Jake slapped a hand against the wall to keep upright. “Huh?” No way, no way, no fucking way Erik could possibly be talking about the same thing.

  But what he said made the hairs on Jake’s arms and all along the back of his neck stand up. It made his skin tingle. He took a new cigarette from the pack on the dresser and lit it.

  “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Jake?”

  Jake couldn’t tell from his tone if he was coaxing an affirmation or looking for reassurance. “Yes.” The word came out as little more than a hiss, so he tried again. “Yes. I do. But I thought it was me. I didn’t think—I mean, how do you—I, ah…I thought…”

  He wasn’t sure how to explain what he thought, exactly, because he’d never considered the possibility that it wasn’t his punishment alone, whether in his head or outside of it. He’d always assumed that he’d done something wrong. That Erik knew exactly what it was he was seeing made him feel guilty, somehow. Exposed, like he’d been caught. He thought maybe a drug conversation might have been easier. “You know about it?”

  “Yeah, I know about it. And we all thought we were the only ones, for what it’s worth. That maybe we’d done something wrong, to deserve that. Yeah, I’ve seen it. It wears a black fedora hat and a long black trench coat. Black clothes underneath. Black gloves. Voice like a hundred people laughing at you, all at once.” Erik cleared his throat as if dusting off a rusty old instrument and went on, his voice a little stronger. “That is, when it isn’t pretending to be people you know, or…once knew. It doesn’t have anything remotely like a face of its own because it steals the faces it needs. The bodies. The lives. It doesn’t really touch anywhere when it walks, and it never touches you. But it knows things about you, knows about your family, your friends, your fears and insecurities and all your weaknesses. It wants to hurt you. It wants you to hurt yourself.”

  Jake cast another glance, this one steeped in guilt, at the gun on the bed. Erik knew. He knew, but how? How? He whispered, “What are they?”

  “It. It may appear as many different people, but it’s only one—at least so far as it ever was in our experience.” Something about the way the words came out bothered Jake, but he was too stunned to really think to question it. Erik continued. “And we don’t know exactly what it is, except that we think it comes from another dimension and can go between worlds. It can change and move the world around you to confuse you and scare you. It uses you against you, Jake. And it uses the people you love and even the places where you feel safe.”

  “You’re bullshitting me. Another dimension? You know how absolutely, totally-not-funny-right-now, bat-shit crazy that sounds?”

  “Anyone else under any other circumstances would, and rightfully so, hang up on me and write me off as a fucking insensitive asshole at best, or a lunatic at the worst. Except that you know I’m telling you the truth. I wouldn’t have called if I wasn’t sure that you…that I was right about this,” Erik replied carefully. A pause. “And this is the last conversation I’d ever want to have, except that I can’t avoid it. Not in good conscience, I can’t. It intends to kill you. But it isn’t invincible. My friends and I killed one once, together. We can kill this one, too.” At that last, his voice dipped into the tinny quality of empty comfort words, but Jake nodded all the same, right into the phone, still taking it all in. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t going crazy. And if he wasn’t the only one being haunted…maybe there was another way to end the bad stuff going on in his life.

  Jake exhaled a slow stream of smoke. When he found the words, he said, “We? Do other people see the—it, too? Sober folks? Why does it want us dead?”

  Erik replied, “I don’t know why. We have something it needs, I guess, when we’re at our weakest and most vulnerable. It feeds on that, gets off on it. And yeah, other people see it, too. Like I said, we—there were six of us—killed one a while ago that came after each of us. It tried to isolate us, make us give up on ourselves and each other. But we found we were safest when we were together. Jake, listen to me and listen carefully. You can’t fight it alone. It destroys people from the inside out. But you don’t have to do it alone, anyway. I guess that’s why I called. I know someone who will understand. The three of us can stop it.”

  “This guy was one of the six?”

  Erik laughed, a dry brittle sound that Jake didn’t much like. “You could say, the first of the six.”

  Jake had no idea how to respond, so he muttered the first, most honest thing that came off his tongue. “I’m scared.”

  Erik was silent for several seconds. Finally he said, “You should be.” As an afterthought, he added, “I’ll pick you up in an hour. We’ll go see Dave.”

  Jake didn’t argue. He hung up the phone, finished the cigarette, and returned to the bed, picking up the gun. He looked at it, then at the phone, then at the gun again.

  He thought, Maybe there is more than one way to save a life, too and slid the gun under the bed, before getting up to change his clothes.

  Dave got out the bottle of tequila. Jose Cuervo. An old amigo.

  He considered taking the phone off the hook, but Erik had gotten a hold of his sponsee and was supposed to call to let him know what time they’d be dropping by. Truth be told, although he didn’t want to be around anyone just then, he thought Erik might be one of the few people who could appreciate his loss.

  That is, aside from her brothers, he supposed. It was one of them who had called to tell him about Cheryl. She’d collapsed at Newark Airport. They’d rushed her to the hospital, but it had already been too late. In a strange turn of events, Cheryl’s brother told him, the doctors were inclined to list her cause of death as hypothermia. Her heart had stopped, her limbs had evidence of frostbite, and even her body temperature was far lower than it should have been. The doctors had been baffled; she was young and otherwise healthy, and found in the middle of a bustling, climate-controlled airport. They suspected maybe it was some foreign substance, a drug or poison whose effects produced similar symptoms. They were waiting on the toxicology report, but the doctors had already gently prepped them that it was likely they might never know the true cause.

  He’d called Dave because he knew that Dave would want to know. Cheryl, he said, had always cared for him. She would have wanted him to know.

  Dave felt like all the wind had been knocked out of him. His legs felt weak and his chest felt heavy. He thought he might throw up. He muddled through the phone conversation in a haze, and when he hung up, he sank into a nearby chair and stayed there until the dizziness passed.

  Tw
o deaths. Two of the most important women in his life had been ripped away from him in horrible, painful ways. And he suspected the same fucking thing was responsible for both.

  It was something her brother had said about cuts on her ankles and around her legs. It reminded him of the story she’d told him once about the man who had molested her as a girl at the beach. More so, it reminded him of the night the Hollower attacked her at the Tavern. She’d been alone, and he and Erik were on their way to pick her up, when it had found her. It reconstructed a whole shoreline, just like the day the man had touched her, and to keep her from running away, it had frozen the water around her ankles. The ice had cut into her legs, and when they found her, she was bleeding and didn’t have the strength to stand. Cheryl had only ever told him once about what happened that night, and then she filed it away and never brought it up again. But there were nights he’d lain awake with the soft sounds of her breathing floating in the night air of the bedroom, and thought too much and too hard about what a failure he was for not having gotten there sooner to protect her.

  But this account of her death (God, he had trouble even putting that concept together in his mind, her death)—the ice, the bruised, cut legs—sounded way too much like this new Hollower had gotten to her right through her memories. Right in a public place, in front of everybody. Like Sally, at the home. It was going after them, all of them who had been there that night, and some new folks, too, apparently, if Erik’s sponsee was any indication. One at a time, it would kill them all. It would destroy the ones who had killed its kin. He wondered about DeMarco, about the baby growing inside her, and didn’t envy what horrible things it could show her, if it found her. And poor little Sean…DeMarco had told him once that Sean’s mom had moved him to PA, to a nice, quiet little place called Uniontown, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. Too far for them to reach him, to protect him. It made Dave a little sick to his stomach.