“Cheryl?” Erik looked pained and pale.
Dave nodded. “Her brother called today. It found her. Got her like the other one tried to do at the Tavern.”
Erik passed a hand over his face, and in the breaks between the fingers, Dave caught a glimpse of wetness in his friend’s eyes.
Jake hovered uncertainly by the door until Dave told him he could smoke in the house so he wouldn’t have to go outside alone. The boy looked relieved. Granted the small comfort of a cigarette, he spoke what they were all thinking. “It knows we’re here. You all saw it, on the tape? It knows we’re together and that we know what it is, and…I think it’s going to make things worse.” Everyone nodded their confirmation at Jake, who lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and took several curt puffs from it before asking, “What are we going to do?”
Steve cleared his throat. “We’re going to stop it. Kill it before it kills us. Question is: how do we do that?”
No one said anything. All eyes were on Dave and Erik. Erik shrugged and said, “Weapons don’t really work. Dave and I—the whole lot of us—tried that. It didn’t work.”
“The mirror worked,” Dave said, more to himself than them. But feeling their expectant stares, he said, “In the box that Max’s tape came in, there was a mirror. At the end of the tape, the way it played when we first saw it, Max said we’d know what to do with it when the time came. Well, none of us did, but Sally, my sister, seemed to. She broke it and cut into the Hollower.”
“Cut a big, gaping mouth across the bastard’s face,” Erik added, and grinned a little.
Dave nodded. “It changed after that. It became…I don’t know, physical. Solid, somehow. And that made it weak and clumsy. We hurt it. Eventually, we killed it.”
“You killed it. Remember, Dave?”
Dave nodded. He remembered. He’d charged that fucking thing with one of the sharp twisted-up objects he’d found in Feinstein’s yard. He believed they had been keys to other places, other dimensions the Hollower hunted in. But they made fine weapons, too, he’d discovered. His whole hand had gone numb when he plunged the sharp end into what should have been a face. Contact had killed the first few layers of skin on his fist and split it where it was thinnest, like across his knuckles. But the Hollower’s body had shaken all around his hand from what felt like a small implosion inside it. Immediately after, he felt a tugging against his fist, like a vacuum. He’d let go of the handle just as one of the Hollower’s claws swung up and knocked him backward. Dave remembered watching the Hollower’s whole body tremble in violent spasms, its head shaking back and forth until it was almost a blur. It tottered on the long, unstable legs of its physical form. Its whips had drawn away from Sally, and she sank to the grass. Still, it made no sound, except the spastic clicking of its claws as it crashed to the ground and stayed there, unable to rise.
The tequila lurched in his stomach when he thought of dragging Sally away from it, cut and bleeding, her eyes closed, whimpering softly. She’d said, “It hurt me. I’m scared of it, Davey. It hurt me.”
He closed his eyes and opened them. “I remember.”
“So, we need a mirror, then?” Jake looked around for a place to put out his cigarette and decided on the empty beer bottle with an apologetic glance at Dave. “We’ve got mirrors everywhere. We just have to cut this thing open, then? Let the bad juices out, so to speak?”
Erik shrugged. “Maybe. I’d always thought touching it might upset whatever coat of indestructibility it seems to have, but Dave, I’m sure, can attest to the dangers of making physical contact with it.”
Dave showed them the back of his hand. There was a little bit of scarring still; white lines over his knuckles, puckered white marks and fine lines all across the skin up to the wrist. It wasn’t immediately visible and didn’t ever bother him nowadays, but turning his hand in the den light, they saw what even brief physical contact left behind.
“Besides,” Erik went on, “even if swiping at it with broken glass were the answer, it isn’t as easy as it sounds to even get that close. And to tell you the truth, as much of a stubborn son of a bitch that first Hollower was, this one sounds leaner and meaner. I don’t think it’s going to go down the same way.”
“What do we do, then?” Dorrie said. When none of the men answered, she said, “Look, this thing scares the hell out of me. I came very close”—she cradled her bandaged arm— “to doing something very dangerous and stupid, just to get that thing out of my head. I can’t live like that, always on the edge of losing everything. I just can’t. I may not have a terrible lot going for me, but…I like what I have enough to want to fight for it. We have to do something. Please.”
Jake came up beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t know about you guys, but…this is the strongest I’ve felt in a long time. Since we first walked through that door, I felt like we could beat this, that we could take this Hollower down. I don’t feel that way when I’m alone. Things come crashing back, and I can’t think straight. Nothing to focus on, nothing to believe in. But this here, all of us here—I believe in that. Am I nuts for thinking that?”
Dave smiled and looked at Erik. “No, I don’t think that’s crazy. Safety in numbers, man.”
“It’s more than that,” Steve said in a firm, quiet tone. “I don’t feel so…wrong. I don’t feel so unsure of me. Not here. Not since, like Jake said, since we got here.”
Erik chuckled. “Maybe all our crazy brainwaves cancel each other out.”
Steve rose from the couch. “It’s not a bad theory.” He began to pace Dave’s den. “Okay, obviously it can still contact us, even if we’re all together. The tape is proof of that. But for all we know, it could be throwing out a blind blanket threat. It didn’t change the room, really, except to keep the tape rolling. It didn’t reach out anything but its voice to us. Maybe it knows that our standing together gives us strength and makes us harder to find, harder to kill.”
He looked to Dave for confirmation, but Dave’s head ached and his stomach felt like a vat of acid, and he just shrugged.
They began talking at once: “Dave, what do you think?” “What should we do?” “How do we fight it?”
“I don’t know!” Dave said, more impatiently than he’d intended. They paused in their chatter. Softer, he said, “I don’t know. I always kind of thought that we killed the first one by sheer dumb luck. And it nearly killed us in the process. I want to help, folks, but I have to tell you, I don’t have such a great track record with keeping anyone safe from one of these things.” He sat down heavily. “I don’t know how to kill it, and I don’t know how to protect you from it any more than I knew how to protect my sister or my girlfriend or any of my friends. I honestly don’t know what to tell you.” He looked up at them all miserably, and the silence stretched out to the border of discomfort.
“Well,” Steve said after a time, “it’s a good thing you’re not alone in fighting it, then.”
Dave looked up and found him smiling. They all were. He gave in and smiled, too. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it is.”
Dave went into the kitchen and got them all another round of beers. He also went upstairs and grabbed a hand mirror. After Cheryl had left him, he’d been in a CVS one day, cutting across the hair care aisle, and he’d spied it. It was an impulse buy, an instinct buy, maybe, but he’d kept it close to the bed ever since, the unrealized and certainly unarticulated thought being just in case. Also, he supposed, on impulse, he grabbed a printout of an article he’d found online from the drawer of his night table.
He came back downstairs and found them settled back down on the couch and chairs.
Erik clapped his hands together. “So what’s our plan?”
He sat down on the chair next to Erik and put both the mirror and the printout on the coffee table.
“You never know. Better to have it if we need it.”
“What’s this?” Dorrie picked up the paper.
“It’s something I came across
on the Internet,” Dave explained, “while looking for ways to keep busy after Cheryl left. I wasn’t looking for stuff about the Hollower—well, not intentionally—but I found that from an accidental click-through on one of the sites about ghost sightings in New Jersey. You all know what they say about some of the places up in Bloomwood County, right? Just weird things that happen, people disappearing, doing crazy things? Very Lovecraft kind of stuff sometimes.”
“Sure,” Steve said. “Since LPD went electronic, we have a whole case file directory unofficially known as the Weird New Jersey files. You know, like the magazine.”
“Well,” Dave said, “this is probably one of those things that would end up in those files. Basically—you can pass it around if you want—to sum it up, it’s a brief mention of a teenager from Wexton, recently transplanted to Lakehaven. The teenager keeps an online journal—a blog, they call it. It’s anonymous, but her visible user information identifies her as a girl, and as being about fifteen.
“Anyway, this blog entry is dated, what was it, the sixth of January or thereabouts? Some time after we killed the first Hollower and before there were any real signs of the second. Now, I guess because it’s anonymous she feels free to discuss anything and everything. There is entry after entry of angsty rebellious ranting, secret worries about boys and friends and sex and even how her underwear fits. You know, teenaged girl stuff. You’ve got all the usual things she sees at school, at home, at the mall with friends. But she also talks about a stalker, with alternately melodramatic and unaffected tones, that follows her and some of her classmates around. She calls him ‘the man in the mask,’ and she makes him sound almost ghostlike. That he can walk through walls and disappear, that he leaves her ‘presents’ in her locker like dead mice (she’s afraid of rodents) and lunch bags full of spiders. That he cut the face of the pot-head four lockers down from her.
“The part I thought was interesting is near the end, there. See? Where she mentions how she intends to make the man go away.
“She says ‘we plan to blind its eyeless sight, and then push it back into the Abyss of Hell.’ I think that was how she put it. I scanned a bunch of the other blog entries before and after to see how, exactly, she did it or how it turned out, but I couldn’t find anything. Her entries after January sixth make no mention of the stalker at all, or any resolution regarding the problem. I went through them pretty thoroughly. Even for an anonymous blog, she speaks a lot in code, and I wrote all kinds of quirky little phrases down, did Google searches, looked them up in slang dictionaries. I came up with nothing. But the point is, she does describe her stalker man as someone very much like our Hollower. And whatever she did to make him—or it—go away, it seemed to work. The reason I printed it out is because, well…Erik and I can tell you, this Hollower is different. Meaner. Stronger. It’s called a Primary. It’s…a different species, maybe, or a different class. I don’t know. And there is one throw-away reference in there, if you skim down, where she calls her stalker a Primary. See? What I’m saying is, even the Primaries, the tough ones like we have now, even they aren’t invincible.”
Dave looked to each of their faces, taking some comfort in the glimmers of hope their eyes reflected back at him. He didn’t have the answers, but he thought that at least the potential for victory was something to go on. Back when they’d fought the first Hollower, the boy they were with, Sean, had believed wholeheartedly that all monsters had an Achilles’ heel, that nothing, natural or supernatural, was completely invincible.
“Everything has a weakness,” little Sean had said. And he’d been right. Sure, he and Dave and Erik and Sally and Cheryl and DeMarco had all dodged its attacks, had all overcome its temptation to lie down and die, but they hadn’t held much hope that they could actually hurt it, let alone kill it. But it did have a weakness, and they had managed to destroy it. Even if this new Hollower was a different class or even a slightly different species, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be killed, too.
“Best as I can figure,” Dave said, “we can beat this thing. If we can find it, that is.”
“Well,” Dorrie said, “I was thinking a lot about what you said about Max, that you found it…its lair, I guess…where Max died. Where it drove Max to suicide, I mean. So maybe, and, Dave, I hope you’ll forgive me if it sounds insensitive, but maybe we should start looking for it where it caused its first death here. That we know of, I mean. Maybe we should look where Sally died.”
It made sense. The catacombs beneath Oak Hill Assisted Living offered potentially endless possibilities for the Hollower to hide. Well, maybe not hide, exactly, he thought. It didn’t seem to be hiding from anyone.
“It won’t be easy getting in there,” Steve said, but Dave could tell from his tone that he was already working out a plan in his head for getting them all into the catacombs.
“At the risk of sounding all Late Night Horror Show,” Jake said, “we could go at night. I’ve uh…had some experience with getting into places where I wasn’t supposed to be.” He offered a sheepish look to Steve, who replied, “Good. It’s a crime scene, after all. I can go in as part of the ongoing investigation, but it’s a whole other kettle of fish getting you in there. Maybe you all can meet me somewhere…”
Jake looked solemn. “You get in, get the key, whatever we need. I’ll get the rest of us in.”
“We’ll need flashlights,” Erik said. “Casey bought a new pack of double A batteries. I’ll grab them and the flashlights I have. After last time…” He looked at them with a kind of embarrassed shrug. “It was an impulse buy at Wal-Mart. I guess I figured, you know…just in case.”
Dorrie sipped at her beer. “It’s a good thing you did. Now, how will we find it once we get in there?”
Jake squeezed Dorrie’s hand. “I think it’ll find us.”
“When do we go?”
The warmth between them and the sense of accomplishment in coming up with a plan cooled. It was one thing to talk in theories and generalities about how to fight the Hollower, but it was another thing entirely to set a date and time.
“I say the sooner, the better,” Steve said. “I don’t want this dragging out any more. Tomorrow night sounds good to me.”
“Me too,” Jake said, and Dorrie nodded next to him.
She gently nudged Erik. “What do you guys think?”
Erik and Dave exchanged glances. Erik ran a hand through his hair. “Can we do this again, big D?”
Dave replied, “Well, I don’t have any other plans for tomorrow. I think I can squeeze you all in for one last hurrah and a quick brush with death, so long as I’m home by a reasonable hour.”
The dry chuckles that followed did not obscure the fear beneath them, not completely.
“Let’s say we meet at ten o’clock tomorrow night, at the door to the catacombs. I’ll go in first and secure the area, and then you slip in and we’ll head down into the catacombs and see if we can find the bastard.”
“Works for me,” Dave said to Steve.
“I feel better knowing we’re going to do something about it,” Dorrie said, and Dave and Erik nodded without much enthusiasm. A plan, they knew, didn’t guarantee anything.
“How are we going to kill it?”
They all looked at Jake. Dave finally said, “We can try to kill it like we did the first one, but…well, I guess we should all think it over for the night, see if we can come up with some backup plans, too. Just in case. The more options we have, the better.”
The others murmured their agreement, each lost in thoughts of ways to take the monster down.
“This one gets inside you somehow,” Erik said in a faraway voice.
“I know what you mean,” Dorrie said. “Sometimes I’ll have thoughts in my head that don’t sound anything like me. They’re things I wouldn’t know, framed in a way I don’t usually think.”
“That’s part of it. But this one does more. It’s hard to explain. It’s not just that it puts its own thoughts into your head. It confuses things. It
’s almost like if you let it take hold, it makes you feel…” His voice trailed off.
“High?” Jake asked softly.
Erik sighed. “Yeah. Just remember, tomorrow night it’ll throw everything it’s got at you. It’ll change the floor under your feet, even. You’ve got to keep it together and keep the Hollower out of your head. This one is a hell of a lot tougher than the last one.”
Still, with a plan in place, their spirits all seemed lifted. The night wore on, and no one made any move to part company until Erik announced that he needed to get home to Casey. He was afraid to leave her alone. With warnings all around to be careful, they made their way to the door. Erik left with Jake and Dorrie in tow, and Steve picked up his things to leave as well.
Dave walked them out. He took hold of Steve’s arm and stopped him. “Listen, man. Be careful, being in there alone tomorrow night, even if it’s for the short time until we get there. We’re more vulnerable when we’re alone. And this one, it doesn’t just show you things. It changes things. That kind of power…well hell, our first Hollower seemed to have to work up to those things.”
“Okay, man. Sure.” Steve didn’t look as confident as his tone suggested. He got about halfway across the lawn, stopped, and turned back to Dave.
“Do you think we can kill this? Do you, I mean, personally believe it?”
Dave thought to all the times Cheryl had asked, to when Sean and Erik had asked, to DeMarco’s face when she asked if he was up for getting them out of that mess.
He watched Erik’s car drive away. He had trouble looking Steve in the eye when he said, “No. But I’ll be damned if I won’t put everything I have into trying.”
Found You Page 15
