Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Ritchie got up and turned around. He did indeed have a face, but all the warmth and honesty had been drained out of it. Slack-jawed, dull-eyed indifference met Steve as the thing pretending to be Ritchie took a few steps back. From the shadows stepped other figures, nonpaper types. Steve recognized each with an internal twinge of pain in his chest. His brothers in blue, his fellow officers, formed a semicircle around him as he got the shit kicked out of him, and not one moved to do a damn thing to stop it.

  Their faces, passive, disinterested, watched as a thick paper bottle exploded against his nose and blood spilled out and into his mouth. He spit. His angry eyes searched the faces of the other cops, but they made no move to help, no move to extend a hand. They didn’t look guilty or helpless, nor did they look pleased. They didn’t seem to think anything of it at all.

  Except maybe the world was better off with one less gay guy.

  He covered his head with his hands, unable now to catch his breath or to manage to even pull himself up on his hands and knees, and that was the thought, whether from his own insecure mind or from the seething hate of the paper monsters, that echoed in his head.

  One less, one less, one less…

  The sound of stacks of paper falling hard slapped down all around him, but it was starting to sound far away, like he was under the waves of the ocean and they were crashing over his head, pounding and tossing him against rocks and stones and surf.

  Through a small space between his forearms, he could see their black shoes lined up in a row in front of him. He thought he heard one say his name, but it sounded very far away.

  “Steve!”

  That sounded like Dave. He peeked through his arms. The black shoes were gone. They’d left him. But he heard a little thunder in the ground beneath his cheek.

  “Steve! Get the fuck off him, you bastards!”

  He rolled a little and felt a sharp pain that made the air leak out of his body. Throbs of pain went off sporadically all over. He couldn’t seem to figure out where his legs were or where they belonged on the ground. Then the night sky swallowed up all sight and sound.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was dark when they passed through the gate, and when Dave saw the weird paper people beating the hell out of Steve, he looked around for something, anything to fend them off with. Finding nothing, he charged them anyway, swinging his flashlight. The others followed close behind. They connected plastic to paper and sent bits of printed forms and folders and envelopes scurrying into the wind. The paper people broke up easily enough, a flutter of papers dervishing up into the air above Erik’s head. Dave suspected it was an empty victory. The Hollower had eased up on trying to kill Steve because it knew it would have another chance. A chance, now, to kill all of them.

  Steve didn’t look too good. Aside from a hundred little paper cuts all across his exposed skin, there were blotchy bruises on his face and arms, bloody patches on his back, little splatters of blood on the grass around him. He was breathing, but it came in hitching, irregular shudders that worried Dave for more reasons than those in the here and now. They crouched down around him, trying to get him to speak. Dave and Erik turned him over fully on his back. His left wrist was swollen and ruddy with the blood pooling beneath the skin, which had taken on a waxy shine. One of his eyes looked puffy and red. Blood darkened his chin and lips and spattered the light brown fuzz of five o’clock shadow on his jaw and beneath his nose.

  “Oh my God,” Dorrie muttered, and started pulling out the handkerchiefs she’d brought. She tied the long one into a sling and, with Jake and Erik’s help, slipped it over Steve’s head and got his arm through it. Dave kept trying to talk to him, to get him to wake up.

  After several long minutes, Steve groaned and opened his eyes. The others breathed a collective sigh of relief. Steve said something which came out cracked and smoky. He spit blood onto the grass and with another groan, sat up, and tried again. “Door’s open. It knows we’re here.”

  “I see that,” Dave said, and offered him a hand to help him up. “Are you okay?”

  Steve wobbled a little when he got up but righted himself and stood on his own, even if he did slump a little. He nodded at Dave but winced as he tried to rotate his wrist. “This is busted, though. Not that it much matters. Firing a gun at it is useless, and I’m sure as hell not going to swing at the fucker.” Then to Dorrie, “pardon my English.”

  Dorrie waved it off. “I don’t intend to swing at the fucker, either.”

  “Are you going to be okay to do this?” Jake glanced at the open doorway to the catacombs. “Devil only knows what it’s going to throw at us in there. Are you okay to get around?”

  Steve regarded him with solemn eyes. “Doesn’t matter either way. There is no way in hell I’m letting you all go in without me.”

  “Safety in numbers,” Erik muttered.

  “And it’s too late to turn back now, anyway.” Dorrie wrapped her arms around her body as if to shelter it from cold. “Can’t you feel it? Something’s different. It’s already changed things around us. No one’s going to come if we call. No one’s going to hear a damn thing. Because they’re in their world and we’re in the Hollower’s version of it. There is no place to leave Steve that the Hollower can’t make rise up and tear into him.”

  “I think Dorrie’s right,” Jake said. “I feel it, too.” He shined his flashlight up at the windows, waving the light wildly. Dark forms moved across their field of view but didn’t seem to notice them at all. “See? Wherever they are, it’s like there’s a one-way mirror between us. We can see out to them, but they can’t see—”

  One of the figures passing the window stopped and turned to look out at them.

  Dave felt his heart jump in his chest. Jake slowed the movement of the light and retrained it on the window. Whoever the person in the window was—and Dave was pretty sure that “person” wouldn’t cover the half of it—waved at them. Then it darted away from the window.

  Like it’s coming down here to meet us.

  “Run,” Dave said.

  “Huh?”

  Dave tugged at Steve. “Run! It’s coming!”

  “What is it?” Steve limped alongside Dave while the others, confused, hurried forward toward the catacomb doorway.

  “I don’t know. Let’s not find out.” Dave pulled him through into the darkness behind the others. From the mouth of the catacombs, they peered out, tense, ready to spring forth into the dark if necessary. Several seconds passed in silence with no sign of any figure emerging from the building.

  “What do you think it was?” Jake rubbed hands against his thighs and exhaled a shaky breath.

  “I think it was a nudge to get a move on, frankly.” Dave turned toward a long cement staircase leading down into the earth. He shined his flashlight down into the darkness, and they could see a gray door at the bottom, half-open, the rust from its hinges bleeding out on the cement walls. “Guess we should get going.”

  Steve limped in front of him. “We’re heading toward where they found Sally, right? Let me go first.”

  They followed Steve down the stairs, their footsteps echoing against the walls. When they reached the bottom, Steve moved to open the door. “Guys, help me. I can’t do it with one hand.”

  Dave and Erik pulled at the door while Jake slid partly through and helped Steve push. The door moaned grudgingly and gave them a few inches, enough for them to slip through to the other side.

  They congregated in a cavernous room that formed the mouth of a long tunnel. Their flashlights reached only so far into the blackness beyond their collective glow. Their tentative arms of light faded without really showing them much of anything beyond cracked slabs of thick, uneven concrete that made up the walls, floor, and ceiling, and faded paint, like old scars, which might have once labeled the tunnels and where they went. The air in the tunnel smelled stale and vaguely of ammonia, and it sat heavier in the lungs than the air outside.

  “So,” Dorrie gazed up and around the ch
amber, “where to, Steve?”

  Steve frowned. “Looks different. This…room, I don’t remember…it wasn’t like this.” The stiff, minimal movements of his lips revealed his pain. With a wince that came out as a flat whistle, he pulled the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. It had gray lines delineating the faint pink tunnels that ran under Oak Hill and indications of occasional rooms at the ends of smaller branches leading off from the main lines. Squiggly lines, inked over the map in pen, illustrated obstacles and blocks from caved in walls, weak ceilings, and weaker floors that made tunnels impassable or rooms inaccessible. Color coding marked off pipes and old electrical lines, which, Steve informed them, Pollock had said were dead now.

  Steve pointed to a large irregular shape at the bottom left corner of the map. “We’re here. I…I don’t know. I mean, it’s on the map, but…there’s something different about this room.”

  Erik frowned. “Maybe it’s already started changing things. Do we trust the map?”

  “We don’t have much choice.” Steve pointed to a small tributary tunnel running almost vertical on the map to a side branch off one of the main tunnels, about two-thirds of the way across. Someone, ostensibly one of the officers, had marked a grayish spot with a large red ball-point circle. “That’s where we found your sister, Dave. Shaft was right there.”

  Dave nodded. Something about even just the circle marking off the place where Sally died gave him the chills and soured the taste in his mouth. “We should go that way.”

  Steve indicated the middle-most tunnel of the four ahead of them. “We should take that one. That, at least, looks kind of familiar. I remember we took a tunnel that went that way.”

  Jake shined his flashlight at the head of the tunnel. The light spilled only so far as to illuminate a huge gray spider with very long legs scurrying away from the brightness. “Let’s do it.”

  They moved as a cautious whole in the direction Steve indicated, crossing the large cavern, flinching at the echo of their own footsteps.

  They stepped into the tunnel.

  “I probably don’t need to suggest that we ought to all stay together, huh?” Steve looked down at his swollen wrist. Dave thought he could detect fear in his voice—fear of being alone and even more vulnerable in his present state. Dave was pretty sure that Steve believed one more round with the Hollower would be the end of him.

  Dave knew the feeling.

  Erik chuckled, a sound as dry as the air around them. “Yeah, we thought so last time, too.”

  “What happened last time?” Dorrie asked.

  Before Erik could answer, a low rumble from behind them drew their attention back to the open chamber.

  “Oh my God.”

  It was standing in the center of the room, and it looked very, very tall to Dave, taller than the last one, taller at that moment than anything Dave had ever seen.

  The Hollower tilted its head as if studying them. The subtle ripples of its head suggested amusement.

  Jake raised his flashlight and shined it in the Hollower’s blank countenance. The ripples of the surface pinched in anger, and the black glove flicked in Jake’s direction. The light died. From the light of the others’ flashlights, though, they could see the one that Jake held shake in his hand.

  “Oh, shit!” He dropped it, and it rolled toward the Hollower’s feet and came to a stop an inch or so before the toe.

  One by one, the flashlights in each person’s hand winked out, and the chamber got darker and darker. Dave felt the flashlight in his hand vibrate, and then struggle violently in his hand. It began to buzz, and he felt something serrated scraping into his palm. He dropped his, too, and from the clatter of plastic that followed, he figured the others had followed suit.

  For a moment, silence reigned, and only the heavy, ragged breathing of the others verified that they were still there. Dave opened his mouth to ask if everyone was okay, and—

  A roaring, bestial face flew out at them from the darkness, glowing silver, hungry, hateful—an awful thing that morphed from one atrocity to another. They screamed and fled blindly into the tunnel. For a long time, the pounding of feet against concrete drowned out all other sound. Dave was afraid to look back for fear of tripping and maybe being trampled in the panic, or worse, being left behind. He felt occasionally for the wall to his right, its rough surface slicing into his hand as he grazed along its length. He cringed against the pain, drew his hand away, and kept up with the breathing and the slapping of feet and the crying which didn’t seem to be coming from anyone immediately around him but from some nebulous place in front of him.

  Crying? He didn’t understand how it was possible, but it sounded—it was crazy—like Sally…

  “I…I think…” Erik managed through breaths, “think it’s gone.” They skidded to a stop—that’s how it sounded to Dave. But something was wrong. The air was different. The feeling of space being occupied next to him was gone.

  The crying in the distance became laughing.

  “Okay, now what? The flashlights are gone, and we can’t see the map. I don’t think I can find this place on feeling my way alone. I think we should go back, see if we can find the flashlights and proceed from there.” Steve waited for an answer…a mutter…a mumble. No one answered.

  “Dave? Erik? Dorrie? Jake, come on, man. Somebody? Anybody?”

  No one answered. Steve was alone in the tunnel, in the dark. His wrist pounded out pain up his arm and down into his hand. Although he couldn’t see anything anyway, he felt one of his eyes was nearly swollen shut. It was tender and painful when he touched it with his good hand.

  Steve was in trouble. “Shit,” he muttered. “Fucking great.”

  He reached for his gun in the dark but remembered it had been reduced to powder. He couldn’t remember if he’d brought the hunting knife or the mace…he didn’t think so. No matter; weapons probably wouldn’t do him any good anyway, even if he did have them.

  He limped back in the direction from which he’d come. Even if he was alone, it didn’t mean he shouldn’t try to go ahead with what he’d said about finding the flashlights. He wouldn’t be able to find jack shit without a light—tunnel sites or people. The pain in his body made him want to just sit and let the darkness bury him over, but he kept on.

  When he’d gone what he thought was just about the distance they’d run away from the initial chamber, he felt around the walls for the mouth of the tunnel and an opening out into a larger space. His hand turned a corner, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He slid down slowly to the ground, feeling along for the dropped flashlights. As each minute passed where his hands turned up nothing but rough rock, that relief slipped further and further away.

  He was about to give up when his hand closed on something cylindrical and ridged, reminiscent of a flashlight handle. He slid his finger along to find the button to turn it on. It took a few seconds, but when he found it, it exploded in light. He blinked a few times and, standing with a groan, shined the light around the room.

  It was not the room they’d first found upon entering the catacombs. It was a locker room. Recognition dawned in degrees as he looked around. A row of lockers ran down the center of the room, as well as along the sides and back wall. Behind where he stood, three sinks lined a short wall, and beyond that, around the corner, was the shower.

  “Boys say things, sometimes. They don’t mean it.”

  Steve crossed his good arm beneath his bad one, over his chest. That had been a long time ago.

  “Boys say things, but that doesn’t give you the right—”

  It didn’t. He knew that. He’d put that kind of hair-trigger impulsiveness behind him. But the feeling was there, all the same. He remembered.

  He was a grown man, for God’s sake. A police officer. He’d passed the Academy at the top of his class. He was one of the youn gest officers to make detective in the whole county.

  And just the sight of those lockers frightened him. It wasn’t about the Big Bad Gayness magnified by b
eing a teenager. It wasn’t being unable to control his erection around other boys or being unable to listen to them talking about jerking off or screwing some girl in the back of their dad’s car without being distinctly uncomfortable. It was that terror, that anger when Robbie McCormick called him a homo and his thoughtless swing that sent Robbie flying into those tiles. His head cracked like a melon, and his blood gave those pale blue tiles a funny tint. Steve was fourteen.

  It had never been the fear or confusion of being gay. It had been the fear of getting caught.

  That, and the guilt of knowing he’d do just about anything, even hurt someone else, to make sure he didn’t get caught, bothered him.

  He crossed the locker room and moved around to the showers. The tiles where he’d knocked Robbie down still had a dark brownish stain.

  He blinked, shaking his head. This couldn’t be happening. Shouldn’t be happening. He was in a tunnel somewhere underground, under the Oak Hill Assisted Living facility. He was not, could not be in the locker rooms of Bloomwood High School.

  He reached out a finger to touch the tiles. They felt cool and smooth. The room smelled faintly like sweat socks and sprays of deodorant—smells he associated with gym class.

  A sharp whistle made him jump. His gym teacher had a whistle like that. He turned around. All the locker doors were open. Every single one, as far as he could see. He made his way back through the locker room and down the aisles. Locker after locker contained bloody clothes, bloody sneakers, gym uniforms soaked so dark Steve couldn’t read the logos.