Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  It did not, however, keep him from opening the bottle of Jose Cuervo and taking a hearty gulp. It burned a little going down, but he didn’t much care.

  Cheryl was gone.

  He loved her. He’d never quite told her in as many words how much she really meant, but he loved her. And the thought that he’d never see her again was like a heavy, black steel weight on his chest, on his back. It made him feel like he was being crushed beneath the sadness.

  And the guilt.

  She’d left because of him. And she’d been on her way back, he was sure, because of him. Because of Sally, maybe. Because of the Hollower. Maybe she sensed it. Maybe she knew. Or maybe she just missed him. But whatever the reason, she’d been alone because of him, and she’d been vulnerable because of him, and once again, he hadn’t done a goddamned thing to save her.

  Her or Sally.

  He was useless and pathetic, and it should have been him. He’d gladly rather it had been, if he could bring them both back and make sure they were safe from it forever.

  In that moment, his self-pity hardened into a black ball of self-hate. Somewhere beneath that, he was vaguely aware that it was exactly what the Hollower wanted, what it craved, but that didn’t make the hate go away. If anything, it almost seemed an invitation for the Hollower to come get him, too.

  She was gone. Both of them were gone. It was too much, too soon.

  He’d let them die.

  He drank more tequila, and taking the bottle, wandered over to the couch, fully intending to drink until blessed black oblivion swallowed him up.

  The phone rang, and it made him jump, almost sending him flying off the couch. Regaining his bearings, he set the tequila bottle down on the coffee table. The phone rang again.

  It was probably Erik. He groaned. He really didn’t want to deal with Erik or the Hollower or anything else.

  The phone rang again. He got up to answer it, swaying a little with the booze-induced vertigo. He steadied himself and made his way over to the phone, if for no other reason than because he’d promised Erik. Maybe he wasn’t much good for anything, but at least he could try to keep his promises.

  “Hello?” he said into the receiver. His own voice sounded funny in the gathering dusk, the empty, sad quiet of the house.

  It wasn’t Erik. The voice said, “Hello, Mr. Kohlar? This is Detective Corimar. We spoke once before, when your sister passed. I’m one of the investigating officers.”

  Dave closed his eyes, opened them, reclaimed control. “Do you have any news for me on her case?” He wished DeMarco hadn’t gone on maternity leave. He didn’t feel up to playing the run-around game with an officer who wouldn’t understand.

  “I think so. Well, I have some theories, and I would really like to sit down and discuss them with you. Will you be free any time in the next few days?”

  “I suppose there’s tomorrow—”

  “May I pay you a visit to night?”

  “Actually,” Dave said, clutching at the oncoming headache in his forehead, “I’m not in the best shape right now. In addition to losing my sister, my ex- girlfriend just died—”

  “Cheryl Duffy?” The recognition—the wonder—in his voice was evident. It made Dave feel nettled, maybe because Corimar was horning in on a private matter, because he wasn’t DeMarco and couldn’t possibly understand as much as he thought he did.

  “Yes, that’s her. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a tall bottle of mourning to attend to and I—”

  “Mr. Kohlar, I need to speak to you about a videotape.”

  Dave opened his eyes, focusing for the first time on the conversation. “I’m sorry?”

  “A videotape. I understand you were sent a copy of a videotaped suicide note of one Maxwell Feinstein, as requested in his Last Will and Testament, is that correct? In his file, there is a note about the videotape, and your copy of it, but little else by way of explanation. Do you have the tape still?”

  Dave didn’t answer. Detective Corimar seemed to take this as an affirmation nonetheless and pressed on. “We had a copy here, of course, in evidence, but I was told it was lost, and when I did finally find it and attempt to play it, there was something wrong with the tape. Perhaps someone left it near a magnet or something, accidentally erased it, but like I said, all I got was static—” the detective’s voice sounded funny, as if maybe that wasn’t all he’d gotten off the tape “—and that was about it. But I’ve been reviewing some files that may or may not be connected to your sister’s case, and I think there may be some important information on that tape. I’d like to see it, if I may.”

  Pushy sonuvabitch, Dave thought, the headache doubling its efforts. The detective had no idea how right he was— and how very unlikely it was that Dave would complicate things by showing him that damned tape.

  “I don’t have it,” he said.

  There was a pause, and then, “Mr. Kohlar, at risk of breaking our already tenuous rapport, I have to urge you to let me see the tape. I could go through the trouble of a subpoena and search warrants and all that crap, but I think we both know you don’t want that. And I don’t, either.”

  “Detective Corimar, I’m sorry, but I don’t appreciate—”

  “Look, I’ve seen it,” the detective blurted out. It was the first thing the man said that didn’t have that cop- confident authority, that practiced precision of words. It was the first genuine thing he’d said so far.

  Dave sighed. “Seen the tape? I don’t understand, then, why you need—”

  “No, it. The thing without a face.”

  The words felt like a knife to Dave’s stomach. The last thing, the very last thing he needed now was another person to feel responsible for.

  The detective breathed for a second into the phone, excited, expecting argument, and getting none, continued. “There are several cases of Detective DeMarco’s—I believe you’re acquainted—that all seem connected, and you seem to be either peripherally or centrally involved in all of them. Feinstein’s suicide, for one. A few unsolved hom i cides. Your ex-girlfriend—I am sorry for your loss, by the way—and her report of an intruder. Your sister going missing. Your sister’s murder.”

  “Murder? I thought—”

  “You know she was killed. And you know what killed her. I know it’s going out on a limb to say that, but,” he took a deep breath, “I’m not calling as a police officer. I’m calling as a guy who is being haunted by a creature that I’m willing to bet my career on your having seen before—all of you. A creature that has no face, no voice of its own, no remorse or conscience. It seems to know everything about me, and for that, it seems to want me dead.” Softer, he added, “I just want answers. I need them. Please. Let me see the tape.”

  Dave sighed, defeated. “Where did you first see the Hollower?”

  “The Hollower? Is that what it’s called? What is it?”

  “It’s easier if you see the tape,” Dave mumbled.

  By the drawn-out pause on the other end of the line, the detective seemed unsure how to proceed. Finally, he said, “I heard this Hollower first at your sister’s crime scene. It talked to me. And then in the jails, down on the basement floor of the precinct. That was the first time I actually saw it.”

  “It knows things about you?”

  Detective Corimar inhaled sharply. “It knows, yeah. It knows things about me, and it’s threatened to use them against me. It’s threatened to put that knowledge in the hands of people who could hurt me. Professionally. Possibly even physically.”

  “It won’t leave hurting you to anyone else,” Dave told him. “It will throw everything at you that you’ve ever been afraid of about others, about yourself. It’ll use every dark and nasty little thing you’re terrified to admit or to own. It’ll kill you, if it can. Or get you to kill yourself.”

  “You saw it?”

  Dave answered, “Me and about five others, including DeMarco. We all saw it. We…killed it. But now there seems to be another one.”

  “Can we
kill this one?”

  Dave noticed with grim amusement that the detective had already begun considering himself part of the hunting posse. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Are you seeing this one?”

  Dave sighed. The phone felt very heavy in his hand.

  “Will you let me see the tape? Tell me what you know?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay. When can you get here?”

  “In an hour.”

  “See you then, detective.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kohlar.”

  Dave sighed. “Call me Dave. And don’t thank me. You’re not gonna like what you see.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jake was waiting outside on the sidewalk by his house, smoking a cigarette while waiting for Erik to come pick him up, when he saw the girl from across the street have a meltdown.

  He’d seen her before. To say his sentiments toward her amounted to a crush would have presupposed that he ever stood a chance at a relationship with her, which he didn’t think was possible. He hadn’t given that too much thought. Why dwell on something he could never have? But he did make sure he positioned himself by a window when it was time for her to set out on her afternoon power walks, and sometimes on his way to meetings he’d see her on the porch beneath her wind chimes, with her head tilted and her eyes closed and the sun on her face, and he’d just study the contours and curves of her. If she happened to open her eyes and look at him, he’d offer a wave, but most times he just shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged down to the end of the block, sullen, angry inner voices reminding him how humiliating it would be to have to explain where he went every Saturday morning, reminding him that someone like her would never have use for a loser like him.

  He thought she was gorgeous, though. Her skin looked so soft and just sort of glowed, the way buttercups glowed under your chin. Her hair caught all the colors of a fire, golds and reds and soft browns. He didn’t know what color her eyes were, as he’d never really gotten that close to her, but he always imagined them blue or green, some color that would catch the light and sparkle like gems in her face. And he liked her body, full, round curves that moved in sync with her movements. Some nights, when he had trouble sleeping, he thought of her as he touched himself, wondering what it would feel like to touch her, to hold her, for her to look at him with desire in those blue-green eyes.

  She’d been standing on her porch when he came out, staring across the street as if shocked by some scene playing out there. He’d even followed her gaze to see what she was looking at, a vaguely unsettling sentiment of familiarity giving him pause to wonder if maybe she, too, could see it, whatever the hell Erik had called it.

  But there had been nothing there. Jake had noticed that the flower box that usually hung from her railing was gone and that plastic containers were littered all over the grass beneath the porch.

  She had opened her mouth, closed it, turned, and gone into her house. She returned a few minutes later with a knife. He frowned, unsure whether to turn politely away, but unable, really, to dismiss her completely.

  She, on the other hand, seemed completely oblivious to him. She studied her arms, looking for something, waiting, the point of the knife trailing lightly over her skin. And then she plunged the point of the knife into the skin of the tricep, and with a grimace and a wail of pain, attempted to drag the blade through her flesh.

  “Shit,” Jake muttered, and dropping the cigarette, ran across the street. He could feel panic, a kind of protective nervous jitter in his gut. What the hell was she doing?

  She hadn’t managed to get the knife far when he leaped onto the porch and was on her, his hand closing over the handle of the knife. She put up some resis tance to maintain control of it, but not enough, and with a jerky, awkward yank, he pulled the knife out of her in a small stream of blood. She looked up at him as if seeing him for the first time, and although her eyes were wet, she didn’t cry.

  She had aquamarine eyes. Blue and green.

  “I…I’m sorry,” was all he managed to say. He looked at the knife in his hand, and his fingers relaxed until it fell on the ground. He kicked it away from them, off the porch and into the grass. “I’m sorry, I just—I don’t— what were you doing?” He took off the belt he wore and tied it tightly around her upper arm, like a tourniquet. “I’m Jake,” he said.

  “Dorrie.” She tried to smile at him. He smiled back, looking more confident and, he hoped, more reassuring than he felt. He took her other arm and tried to steer her back to the house. She probably had antiseptic and bandages inside. She seemed to go willingly and then stopped short, a defeated look on her face.

  “I can’t go in there. It can get in there, too.”

  “What can?”

  She shook her head. “I think I’m going crazy. Help me. Please, help me. Call me an ambulance. I…I think I need a doctor.” She looked up at him, then down at her arm.

  “Why don’t we go inside and call an ambulance, then? And maybe get you some bandages.”

  “I’m not meat. I don’t go bad like that, with bugs eating all the fat, right? Tell me that can’t happen.”

  Jake’s eyebrows knitted in confusion. “I, uh, I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve never heard of anything like—”

  “It told me,” she said in a voice almost too soft to hear, “that it could change the muscle to Eaters, to the things it put in the Tupperware containers. It said they would chew through all the fat in my body, right through my skin, through my bones and muscle. It said I could try to cut them out before they began to eat.”

  Jake eyed the plastic containers on the porch and had second thoughts about going inside alone with her. Hot or not, she sounded completely stark raving, knife-toting, someone-else-is-in-the-house kind of crazy.

  “I know how this sounds. I couldn’t tell the police. And normally I would never have believed something so nuts myself—I can’t make you believe that, but it’s true. That I’ve never been like this before—but I saw what it did in the fridge and with the flowers, and the things it knows, and…it told me it wanted to kill me.”

  Jake felt cold and stopped trying to tug her toward the house.

  “What told you that?”

  She hesitated, but only for a moment, assuming, he supposed, that he couldn’t possibly think she was any crazier. “The man without the face. It—oh, God.” And then she did cry, streams of tears spilling over her cheeks. “I’m going crazy. There’s something wrong with me. There’s something very wrong with me.”

  “No, no,” he murmured, taking her arms, careful not to put too much pressure on her wound. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re okay. I’m here.” That last bit sounded lame to him—like she could find any comfort in him coming to her rescue—but he meant it, for what it was worth. What had sounded crazy before suddenly sounded all-too-familiar.

  She could see it, too. She and Erik and his friend. They could all see it.

  “It wanted me to hurt myself. And God, I’m so pathetic, I almost did.”

  Jake thought of the gun under his bed and felt his neck grow hot. “Don’t feel bad about that. That’s what it does. That’s its strength.”

  She looked at him, really looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “What do you mean? Do you…know?” Her hand flew to her mouth, her wet eyes wide as she pulled a little away from him. “What do you mean by that? Can you see it?”

  Jake nodded slowly. “And I’m not the only one. There are others.”

  Suddenly her face changed, and she looked suspicious. “Don’t humor me just because you think I’m crazy. I won’t have you making fun of me. Please.” She tried to pull out of his grasp altogether and nurse her wounded arm. “Just let me go. I need to call a doctor.”

  “It wants me dead, too. I—I know what you’re seeing. It showed me my dead aunt. My brother. My ex-girlfriend, who died of a drug overdose.” He winced at how easily that had come out of his mouth to her. “It showed me everyone I ever cared about,
and it felt like my heart was getting ripped out. I don’t know how to prove it to you, but I swear on my li— I swear on everything I have that I am not, absolutely not, humoring you, and I’m sure not making fun of you.”

  She searched his eyes again. She had an intense look, as if she were turning over rocks and beating bushes in his head to get at hidden truths and secrets beneath soft words. “Really?”

  “Really.” He crossed a finger over his heart.

  The strength seemed to go out of her, and she sank a little where she stood. He caught her before she sank too far, and felt a thrill, in spite of the situation, in simply touching her.

  “What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it doing this to us?”

  Jake shrugged. “I don’t know much more than you, but I’m waiting for someone to pick me up who’s going to explain everything he knows.” He paused. “You should come. I…ah, I insist. I can’t leave you alone here, not now.”

  “Oh, I…I don’t know, I—”

  “I mean it. You shouldn’t be alone. You shouldn’t have to face this thing alone. Look what it almost made you do.” He indicated her arm, and she blanched. Softer, he said, “I don’t want to do it alone, either. We can help each other.”

  She seemed to consider this for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay. I don’t know why I feel like I can trust what you say, but…I don’t know. I just do.” She let him lead her inside the house to get bandages, and he gently rinsed her arm with warm water. She winced when the water touched the cut she’d made, but she didn’t say anything. It didn’t look to him like it was that deep a cut, so he bandaged it up and she followed him outside to wait for Erik.

  They made little starts and stops of small talk; he asked about her job (she worked in the newsletters department of a medical equipment licensing company) and she asked about his (he’d recently gotten a raise at the Home Depot in the gardening department). She asked if he had family close by (he didn’t, and kept his answer grimly short), and he asked her if she had a boyfriend. It just kind of came out, and when it hung there between them, he wished he could scoop it back up and chuck it over his shoulder. She blushed. It made her cheeks look pretty. But her eyes looked sad.