Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Steve just stood there, shaken up and a little scared.

  Maricón. He’d been sure Bennie had called him that. And he was pretty sure it meant something like “faggot.” Still, there had been a different quality to his voice when he’d said it, something musical but off-key, something disturbingly multiple. Real or imagined, Steve didn’t like that numbing chill and that helpless shock that followed in the wake of Bennie Mendez’s departure. He looked after the empty door through which Bennie had exited.

  If he said anything to the other guys—

  If they heard…

  Steve kept his head down the rest of the day.

  They were coming.

  In the collected expanses of what they called time, it had seen its world shrivel and dry up, crack open and bleed out all life and vibrancy, just as it had seen the shells and the minds of countless weak and wounded do the same. It had filled the air of a darkening with the wails of the dying, like a canopy blocking out the be-yondlights. It had invaded subsewer holes and deep wells and boxy chambers without cutouts or portals, and it drew all the oppressive Panic and Pain in and out of the cowering shells that occupied them until they exploded in a showy display of Insanity.

  Never before, though, had the prospect of devouring the Despair of meats ever excited it so much. Its arrival in this dimension had been shrouded in disgust, but it had come to find what it was about these meats that made its Secondary stake out their world as its hunting ground.

  They were capable of more complex thought than some of those in other dimensions, but not so complex as to present impervious mindshells. They were succulent in their misplaced emotions, skewed thoughts, and slanted perceptions. Their insecurities came in such abundance and variety. And their shells were easy to punch through. Theirs was a world of possibility.

  But that was not for now. For now was simply to destroy the foremost meats, the Intended. It would have them all in one place, one captive place, and it would do things to them. Delicious things.

  In the Convergence, where the nothingness ate all lower senses, it pulsed zshsian. It the world of the Intended meats, that would have translated into sound, a crude and base approximation for the capability of a Self to express. The Secondary had called out to the Likekind as it lay dying, and the meats had thought of the zshsian as a “siren.” A sound.

  It pulsed zshsian again. The voids churned inside it, but the discomfort was eclipsed by its excitement.

  They were coming. And it would be ready for them.

  Standing in the quad of Oak Hill Assisted Living made Steve feel nettled all over again. The anxious lean of the buildings pressing in what should have felt like open air and space, the self-conscious gray stone, everything. He couldn’t imagine how anyone felt safe and happy there. Every time he took in the height of the rough gray walls, the sharp corners of the boxy buildings, and the sea-sickening undulation of the hills, he felt ill and a little dizzy. It seemed as perfect a place as any for a monster to live.

  In doing a perimeter of the place, he had discovered a back entrance to the quad where two wings of the buildings met perpendicularly, a chain-link gate to enter through, or more likely, to exit from in case of emergency or fire. The quad itself was quiet. He couldn’t shake the feeling that like the inhabitants, even the buildings and benches and the grass itself were sleeping and oblivious to his presence. So oblivious, maybe, that no amount of banging on doors or screaming up at the buildings would bring any kind of help running…

  It was a stupid, paranoid thought. He checked the time on his watch (it was just about 10 p.m.) and then crossed the quad to the catacomb door, aware of the rustle of his footsteps in the grass and the feel of the night wind blowing past his bare arms. He repressed a shiver.

  Since the scene had already been processed, he’d made a quick phone call to Henry Pollock, the administrator of Oak Hill Assisted Living, who had been accommodating enough (“Sure, officer, feel free to drop by any time. Tonight, if you’re so inclined. What ever you need to resolve this tragedy…”), whether to avoid the trouble of a warrant or the extra publicity of police activity. He’d given Steve full rein to look around.

  One problem solved, at least.

  Although Pollock told him he’d wait around to let him in, Steve didn’t want to encourage him hanging around. The supervising officer of the Kohlar investigation had been given a key to and a map of the catacombs. In the event that Pollock couldn’t stick around, having the police copy of the key and that map would mean one less obstacle to overcome. Steve hadn’t asked for either or signed them out. He’d found them in their respective envelopes in the board room, where the detectives met to go over charts and graphs and photo displays pertaining to cases, and he’d just slipped the key and the folded map into his pockets right after his shift. He was fairly sure no one saw, and that mattered to him. He wasn’t one to go against rules; he never had been. He thrived on structure and the sense of security derived from order. He’d felt like the key was burning a hole right through his pants the whole way out of the station, and on the drive over to Oak Hill, he kept expecting Shirley’s voice to break in over the radio and ask him to return what he’d taken.

  But standing there in front of the catacomb door, his hand in the pocket with the key, feeling the smooth brass neck of it, he felt like he’d done something good—or at the very least inevitable. Sometimes sacrifices had to be made, he told himself, so that others could be saved. If bending the rules meant he could uphold a greater good, he was willing to accept that.

  He checked his watch again. They were late. He hoped nothing was wrong.

  “Excuse me, uh…excuse me there. Hi, there. Yes, I see you’ve made it.”

  Steve turned at the sound of the voice. A dark-haired man in glasses and a neatly pressed suit and white coat had closed most of the distance of the quad between him and the main doors of the building. He recognized the man as Henry Pollock, the administrator at Oak Hill. When Steve first had gone down into the catacombs to investigate Sally Kohlar’s crime scene, Pollock had been there, a small man in smart clothes, explaining liability and accessibility to the supervising officer with careful, quiet, even-toned speech.

  Nothing about Pollock initially struck Steve as threatening, or even easily excitable, but an air of confrontation preceded Pollock as his purposeful strides brought him to the catacomb door.

  “I see you’ve made it back,” he repeated with the slightest tinny twinge of annoyance.

  “Yes, and thank you for allowing me to poke around, Mr. Pollock. I’m just here to give the Kohlar crime scene another once over, to look into a few things down there that may help me put some of these pieces together. I apologize for not stopping in the office first. It didn’t seem worth disturbing you, since we had a key and all.” He produced the brass item from his pocket and offered the doctor a smile that he thought reflected unquestionable authority as well as amiable confidence. No questions need to be asked and no paperwork needs to be done, thank you. Just take a hike. He chanced a quick look down at his watch and hoped Dave and the others would have enough common sense to lay low until Pollock disappeared.

  “Well, thank you for the phone call. I have to say, though, that I expected you earlier. I was just about to leave for the eve ning, when I got a call from Sherman, my security man on nights. We have a camera that surveys the grounds here, and you almost gave poor old Sherman in the security room a heart attack. Things are usually quiet here, and I suppose it slipped my mind, letting him know to be on the lookout for you.” The doctor chuckled, and Steve tried to volley back a light laugh, too, but he was worried about the others. The security camera might cause a problem for them to get in unseen. He hoped Jake would think enough to check for one.

  “Oh, allow me at least to open up for you. And then, please do take your time and feel free to roam about. Sally was like family to us, so we want done everything that needs to be done.” The mild, modulated tone of his speaking voice was there, and the expressio
n on his face placid. Maybe Steve had imagined the confrontational air about him. He seemed fine now. “I do hope you find everything you’ve coming looking for.”

  “Well, thanks. I’m hoping it will be a productive evening.”

  As he drew close, Pollock slowed before a big red rubber ball on the grass, which Steve assumed had been left over from some recreational game of kickball or something. Instead of sidestepping it, though, the doctor gave it a savage kick out of the way that launched it against the wall near the door. It popped when it hit the gray stone near Steve’s feet. It left a black starburst pattern down near the ground, a sticky sort of stuff that quivered when it hit and then stayed put.

  Steve frowned. The doctor was speaking to him, but he hadn’t been listening, something about his work on the force—

  “—as strong looking as you. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in even say, the last fifteen, twenty years. I guess that’s maybe why they overlooked you being a queer, is that it?”

  Steve’s head snapped back to the doctor. “Excuse me?”

  The doctor, facing the door, had his back to Steve, but he reached into his pocket to produce a key to the lock. Steve didn’t know how he’d missed Pollock’s black gloves.

  Pollock said, “The other detectives. They know, I’m sure.”

  Steve was about to answer when there was a click and a groan and the door flew open. Pollock turned around, and Steve felt his stomach bottom out.

  The doctor had no face. What had been neatly-combed black hair formed a hat. The white coat disintegrated into ash that blew off toward the center of the quad. The Hollower tilted its head to the side, and even without a mouth, it seemed to smile at him.

  “You don’t really think you can kill me, do you Steve?”

  By reflex, Steve clicked the safety off his gun and rested his hand on it in one motion. “We intend to, or die trying.”

  The Hollower’s laughter engulfed him, swimming in and out of his ears. Then it snapped off suddenly. “Then,” it said with ecstatic glee, “you’ll all die. Starting with you, Steve.”

  It backed through the open doorway into the gloom of the catacombs’ interior.

  At a quarter after nine that night, Erik pulled into the parking lot of Dave’s apartment building. In the back seat, Jake sat with Dorrie. All of them wore black. The two in the back fidgeted with the flashlights in their laps. As Dave got in the passenger side, he scooped up the flashlights meant for him and Erik.

  “Ready to go get us a monster?” He tried to sound light, but it fell flat in the tense air of the car. Erik gave him a weak smile.

  “How did Casey take it?”

  Erik looked pained. “She won’t talk to me about any of it—or anything else, really—until I come back.” It looked as if he were going to add “if I come back,” but he didn’t. Instead, he added, “She kissed me good-bye, though.”

  “Good luck, you mean.”

  Erik shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “I called my brother,” Jake said from the backseat. “He wasn’t…that’s not his number anymore. He was the only one I would need to say good-bye to.” Then, realizing the implication in what he said, he hastily added, “Not that it’s good-bye. But it would have been nice to hear from him anyway, ya know?”

  “I called my mom.” Dorrie looked out the window. “She sounded so happy to hear from me, I thought at first. Mostly, though, she kept rattling on about her job, her friends, her ladies’ group.” Dorrie wiped at her eyes, her head still turned away from them. “I had this friend Nela in college. She and her mom were best friends, and she always used to say how she could hiccup and her mom would know her well enough to know what she’d drunk too fast. I talked to my mother for a little over an hour, and she never once asked me what was wrong. And I never told her.”

  Jake put his hand over hers and squeezed.

  Dave wanted to be able to tell them that they’d talk to their family again, that Erik would be home and helping Casey pick out napkin colors for the tables at the wedding reception, and Jake would find his brother and maybe they could grab a beer, and that Dorrie could call her mom tomorrow and try to work a word in edgewise. But he found the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t make them surface.

  “So where do we go first?” Erik turned left at the corner onto the main road, toward the turnoff for the highway. Like Cheryl, he’d been with Dave to see Sally a few times, so he knew how to get to Oak Hill.

  “I don’t know. When Steve first told me, he just said they’d found her down in the catacombs. He didn’t say where. But I’m sure he could find the way back to the…place where she was. The crime scene.”

  “It was a word, Mr. Kohlar. HOLLOW. Does that mean anything to you? Anything significant about that word?” Dave didn’t think he had the stomach to see that.

  “I hope he’ll be okay there by himself, until we get there,” Dorrie said.

  No one answered, lost each in his own thoughts. Dave was worried, frankly. And not just for Steve. He remembered what happened last time, when they’d gone into Feinstein’s house.

  As they approached the turnoff, Oak Hill Assisted Living loomed gray and sad against the night sky. Dave shook his head, wondering how it was that he ever could have found that place a comforting and inviting home to leave his sister. Looking at it now, it filled him with such a distinct sense of unease.

  It will swallow everyone whole.

  It was a sudden thought, and he was fairly sure it wasn’t his. It had a mocking quality to it that he associated with the Hollower, reminding him it was never too far away.

  Erik pulled the car around back, and they parked toward the edge of the lot, near a dense line of trees and out of the pale, tan glow of the arc-sodium lights.

  Gripping their flashlights, they sat for several silent seconds in the car, their breathing falling in sync, their gazes drifting out over the property in front of them.

  Dave could see a side gate between two of the buildings, one of the metal link kinds with the U-shaped piece of metal that wraps around a solid bar to keep it closed. It mildly surprised him that there was no other lock on the gate and no other visible means of securing the facility.

  And then, of course, it dawned on him that easy access was probably exactly what the Hollower wanted.

  Come to me.

  Dave got out of the car. The others followed.

  And that’s when they heard noises in the quad.

  Steve remained stone still, waiting, counting off the seconds in his head, feeling each breath, in, out, in, out, and yet, the quad remained quiet. Confused, Steve peered into the doorway. He could see no trace of the Hollower in the inky interior, even when he shined the police-issued flashlight he’d brought into its depth. No sign of life in the windows above, he noticed as he turned around. He surveyed the quad in the moon-and starlight. Nothing in the grass, either. The benches squatted silent and empty. Not so much as a cricket or a tree frog.

  The Hollower was gone. He chanced one more sweep of the flashlight, keeping it low as it glided over one empty bench after—

  Wait. That one’s not empty.

  Someone sat on one of the far benches, down at the bottom of the sloping grass. Whoever it was sat facing away from him, unmoving. Maybe waiting for someone. It occurred to Steve that maybe the others had come separately, moving in at different times so as not to draw attention. Maybe that was Dave down there, or Erik.

  Either one of them would have come up to the catacomb door first, to look for me.

  He checked his watch again, pushing the button to make the numbers and hands glow. 10:30 p.m. already. They were late. Very late. He looked up at the figure on the bench, who did not turn to scan for him across the quad, or even shift to a more comfortable position.

  Steve started toward the bench. When he got within ten feet or so, his heart jumped a little in his chest, and he slowed down.

  It was Ritchie Gurban. The hair, gelled sharp in the moonlight, the back of his neck, the sprawl o
f his shoulders were all familiar.

  But what was Ritchie doing there?

  The answer came to him, plain and simple. It wasn’t Ritchie. It couldn’t be. It flew in the face of logic.

  And if it wasn’t Ritchie—

  A brilliant, blazing pain in the back of his head made the quad swim like white smoke in front of him for a moment. Drawing his gun, he spun around and aimed it about where the blow had come from. But seeing what had hit him, he lowered the gun, stunned.

  A humanoid form, made entirely, it seemed, of ash and strips of paper and torn up manila bits of tightly packed file folders glued together with the same black jelly that had splattered the wall from the burst kickball, raised a fist. A light wind blew, and fragments from the arm blew away from the main bulk. The wisps and scraps paused in midair and reformed into something that looked to Steve very much like a sledgehammer. The paper form swung this and connected with Steve’s wrist. He heard a crack on the heels of which followed a sharp pain, and he dropped the gun. Steve backed away from the paper thing in horror. From one of the buildings near where they stood, a window opened, and sheets of what maybe were medical forms or patient rec ords followed by folders and interoffice envelopes streamed like confetti out into the quad. These tore themselves into tiny pieces amidst a swirling wind that seemed to move nothing else. The bits quickly reformed themselves into other paper creatures like the one who had hit him. One of them had simulated a tire iron. He could tell by the shape. Another had a bat.

  Steve ducked down to pick up his gun as the one closest to him raised the paper sledgehammer again, and he raised it to shoot a hole clean through the bastard. The paper creature leaned over and made a motion like it was blowing on him, and the gun disintegrated in his hand. He shook off the black dust, horrified.

  Then the paper creature kicked him hard in the ribs, and he felt all the air being knocked out of him. He rolled over and tried to stand, but the other ones closed in around him and rained down blows with their weapons. They were the paper-trail anger and fear of hundreds of patients’ case files, the torn up resentment, reassembled and refocused. He heard snaps and cracks all over as explosions of pain went off like fireworks across his back, through his ribs, along his arms and legs. He kept trying to stand, his mind a whirling mess of panic and fury, but he couldn’t seem to get his footing before the next wave of blows from above. He managed to pull himself closer to the bench where he’d seen the likeness of Ritchie Gurban, and as he did, this seemed to spur it into motion.