Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Erik continued down the dark corridor, hypersensitive, listening for sounds ahead of him, behind him. Once he thought he heard a laugh track, and once, the snap of a belt. Once, he thought he heard the beer-soaked sound of his father’s laugh.

  “Erik…” The voice beside his ear made him jump and wheel around, but no one was there. The voice continued.

  “I know you still want to get high, Erik. I can feel it all over you. You can’t help Jake. You can’t help anyone. You’re just as useless as you were before. Every bit as much of a lazy, useless no good sonuvabitch. Admit it. Just tell me you still want to get high.”

  “No, I don’t,” Erik said to the heavy air and walked faster, afraid to run into the unfathomable black before him. Still, the voice followed.

  “You’re lying. I don’t like liars, Erik.” It was his father’s voice; same timbre, same tone, everything. It sent a shiver of cold across his skin, and Erik almost stopped. The unspoken command to obey, to stand there until his father was done with him, hung in the air all around him.

  He didn’t stop, though. Feeling along the wall, Erik moved faster.

  “You still can’t touch me,” Erik whispered.

  “Yes, I can,” the Hollower replied. “Oh, yes, I can.”

  Suddenly, flashes of memory, clips of sound and sight and even smell bombarded his senses, forcing him to a stop, dropping him to his knees.

  He saw the blood on the bed he and Casey shared, saw blood on her leg, which was just visible from the floor on the far side of the bedroom.

  Flash.

  The sound of his father bellowing throughout the house.

  Flash.

  Casey crying blood down the front of her white tank top, stinking of overturned things in the earth.

  Flash.

  Cocaine in long, brilliantly white rows on a polished mahogany table.

  The taste of it. The smell of it. The tingle of it in his nose.

  Flash. He tried to stand.

  A room with pale green sheets, a picture of Casey tacked to one of the plain white walls. Metal bars on the windows, scuffed tiles on the floor.

  The floor was a snowfall of cocaine. It kicked up in little puffs around his feet as he walked.

  He stopped. The dark tunnel was gone. He really was in that room. From the other side of the wall, he could hear a boy crying, begging someone to let him out, begging for a little smack to get him through the morning. The irregular sobs melded into a wail that tapered off and became the fiendish mumbling of words. They slowed into almost a chant, and Erik could make out some of the words:

  “Tell me you wanna get high wanna get high got drugs got ups got downs crack cocaine heroin get high wanna get high, wanna die die die so high wanna cocaine gonna swim in it, gonna drown in it, gonna ride it right up to the ceiling and be sooo hiiigh…”

  Erik tried to turn, to move toward the door, and found he couldn’t. He looked down. The cocaine was up to his knees.

  He felt a surge of panic, not only in being unable to move his legs, but in the quietly suggestive voice just beneath that told him not to bother.

  “Relax. It could be worse.”

  He closed his eyes, employing an old stabilizing trick.

  Ten…nine…eight…floor beneath my feet… seven…six…light on my face…five…four…

  His counting, the sound and sensation of his breathing, helped steady him, eclipsing the other, more suggestive voice.

  The soft rustle of cocaine against denim drew his attention. He opened his eyes and looked down. Now it was up to his groin.

  The Hollower was going to bury him right up to his nose in cocaine! Panic fired alarms all over his head, and yet his body didn’t respond. Somewhere in the back of his head (this sounded crazy, but even so), the thought of being buried over in cocaine seemed a good way to go. Fitting. Exciting. A culmination of all his greatest moments.

  He laughed, and then realizing what he was doing, stopped. But it took a few moments to get the giggles under control.

  Death by laughter. He died laughing. Busted a gut. Split a seam and he spilled out all over. Seasoned all his inside organs in white powder like flour like filets when Casey breads them then cooks them and—

  He dropped the train of thought. He had to get out of there. The cocaine was up to his waist. His arms were free, and good God it was so fucking close, and it would be so easy, so damned easy, to just pinch a little off the mound in front of him and—

  He remembered Casey, and all the other thoughts pulled back.

  Erik had come past this point in his life. He didn’t need coke, and he didn’t want it. He needed Casey. He wanted her. And he promised her he’d come back.

  Erik made swimming motions, pushing the cocaine out of his way. More spilled a little into the valley he created, but he wriggled and pushed and kicked and pushed until he’d managed at least a little leeway. The sensation of it, of so much of it sliding between his fingers and over his skin made him moan. The top half of the door—and, thank your Higher Power of Choice, the doorknob—were visible and just about at arm’s reach. He grabbed for the knob and used it to pull himself closer. He twisted it, and at first it wouldn’t budge. He was about to attempt to throw some elbow into it when the door flew open and he spilled out on a landslide of cocaine. He rolled on the ground, came to a stop, and then sat up.

  The lightest dust of the drug frosted the tops of the grass blades like powdered sugar. Otherwise, looking behind and all around him, all traces of the door he’d fallen through and the room he’d left behind were gone.

  Alone in the tunnel, Jake yelled out names—Dorrie’s, Erik’s. He yelled for help, feeling the panic-sweat under his arms and across his back, the dread spreading hot-cold waves up his neck and into his gut. He was in trouble now—big, bad-assed trouble. Extending his hands into the darkness, he felt his way forward until he came to something solid, cold, and smooth. His hands slid down its length and came to what felt like a metal handle. He pulled, and the solid thing—a door, he guessed—gave in his direction. A pale glow poured into the tunnel from the other side. Jake went through the opening and found himself in a room.

  Overhead speakers cranked out some saxophone instrumental song that Jake vaguely recognized the melody of. He glanced behind him in the tunnel, lit a cigarette, and turned around to find himself in a hospital waiting room. The cigarette hung from his mouth, forgotten.

  A large white desk, spotlit from lamps at either end, stood in front of the nurses’ station. Behind it, charts and files stuck haphazardly from labeled bins. A clipboard sat on the counter surface. On the far wall was a window boarded up. Between it and him, a series of upholstered benches formed a Grecian pattern across the floor. All of these but one were immaculately white and intact. The standout one in the center of the room was rust colored, with springs poking through the upholstery like thin bones through skin. The white and gray tiles on the floor followed the same pattern as the benches. A fan of dust motes hung in the air, visible through the stark, white light that seemed to have no direction or origin. It gave the whole place a sterile, scrubbed raw kind of feel. Jake also got the sense of the place not quite having completed the transition to total emptiness—a feeling that there had just been bodies there moments before he’d walked in kicking up the dust motes, that if he went and felt the seats of the benches he’d find them still warm.

  Medication time, Mr. Dylan. Jake shivered.

  The music paused. “Excuse me, sir,” a pleasant woman’s voice talked down to him from a speaker somewhere in the hazy white blur where the ceiling should have been. “This is a no-smoking facility. Please put out your cigarette.”

  Jake looked up, then back around the empty room in dumb shock. At first he wasn’t sure what the woman was talking about, but then a tendril of smoke rose up into his eye. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it to put it out.

  “Hello? Anybody here?” It seemed a silly thing to say into the sa
nitary stillness, but it filled the emptiness a little and gave him a modicum of strength. He hated hospitals—always had. He’d had pneumonia when he was five, and he’d spent days in a hospital bed alone, except when his big brother could come and visit. Mostly, though, he just inhaled the air circulated by the sick, listened to the machine beeps and bloops and the hurried chatter of doctors and nurses, and sucked in more air that just didn’t go anywhere, air that died in his mouth without satisfying his chest. The room had a television, at least, but it only got a handful of channels. They left cartoons on; the laughter and bright colors made his room seem a little more alive. But still, he couldn’t wait to go home.

  His mother and father had died in a hospital, after the accident. His aunt, too, when the drinking and the cigarettes had given up toying with her health and decided to take her permanently. And he’d ridden in the ambulance when it came and got Chloe. That might have been the worst trip of all. With the others, he’d been party to the hushed hallway discussions about quality of life and care termination at the worst and abrupt ushering of family and friends out of the way so that medicine could be administered at best. But with Chloe, there was no next of kin to sign the papers and no strong and certain brother-type to make decisions about funeral arrangements.

  Standing there in the waiting room with all the helplessness and pain flooding back, he wanted very much to get high. The thought of welcome oblivion, the death flow of a heroin high, gripped him tightly.

  He turned to the nurses’ station. On the counter was a little paper cup that hadn’t been there before. It reminded him of the methadone they gave him in rehab, and his chest ached.

  Maybe rehab had been the worst hospital experience he had.

  He crossed over to the nurses’ station and looked down into the cup. A dark reddish-brown liquid filled it halfway. Frustrated, he turned his attention to the clipboard, and he felt another ache in his chest, as well as a surreal sense of misplacement at seeing what was written there. In Chloe’s handwriting—he was sure it was hers—were scribbled a few words. It wasn’t signed, but Chloe had rarely signed any of the fridge notes or Post-its she’d left for him all over the house. Sometimes they were reminders, or requests. Sometimes they were just love notes, back when things were good. Absently, he rubbed his chest, reading the words again.

  “Got you a present. Go look on the seat. Like old times.”

  XOXO

  Jake felt a little sick but turned slowly to the waiting area, to the one blot in an otherwise clean room. It had to be that seat she meant (it meant), and he fully expected a needle filled with heroin to be waiting for him. He didn’t have a good view of the cushion itself or what was on it until he made his way around a few other benches and came upon it. He looked down, and tears filled his eyes.

  He was wrong about the needle. Amidst a clutter of old razor blades and scattered pills was one of her eyes. Next to that looked like a shriveled corner of her mouth, and beneath them, a few of her black-nailed fingers and toes. Jake collapsed onto the floor, holding onto the next seat over, and dry heaved at the tiles.

  The pleasant woman’s voice came down through the invisible speakers in the obscured ceiling. “You tore her apart, Jake.”

  The voice filled the room, filled his head. He closed his eyes.

  “Tore her up from the inside out.”

  “Stop,” he whispered.

  “Just like I’m going to do to you.” And the brassy laughter that followed reverberated through the speaker, sounding fake (borrowed, not yours, that voice and those memories aren’t yours, you bastard), and Jake swallowed several times to keep his stomach in check and the solid sense of realness in his head.

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “You don’t really believe that, now do you? It’s all your fault, Jake. Much like everything else, it’s all your fault. It has always been all your fault.”

  “Shut up.” He thought about it, though. He knew he didn’t put his parents’ car in harm’s way any more than he fed booze and cigarettes to his aunt. But those things had always felt like they were his fault. Either he hadn’t listened the night before or he’d mouthed off or brought home a note from the teacher, and it was like clockwork. Shortly after, something bad happened. It was child logic, child inference, but of all the things in his life he’d had trouble shaking, child logic had proved the hardest. Old habits, as they said, died hard. And old ways of thinking even harder.

  He thought of Dorrie. A week ago, he never would have imagined someone as wonderful as her in his life. She looked at him with almost frantic intensity. When he’d been in bed with her, she had needed him, wanted him. She’d done everything to make him feel like he mattered, and he’d realized after, cuddling with her, that she might have been the first to ever make him feel that way. Even Chloe, as much as he’d loved her, even in the beginning when things were good, had made him feel insubstantial.

  Or maybe he’d always made himself feel that way. Until Dorrie. There had never been a purpose, a person to protect, a reason not to get high, until last night.

  He opened his eyes and looked at the chair. The drugs and the body parts were gone. On the seat was a jagged piece of rock, like a broken-off piece of concrete. One edge was very sharp.

  “You could slice your neck with that,” the woman’s voice said through the speaker. “Probably wouldn’t even hurt much. You’d be doing yourself a favor. And that girl, too. She doesn’t need someone like you.”

  He rose onto shaky legs and picked up the rock. It felt cold, heavy, and abrasive in his hand. He looked up. A low hum came from the speaker, wherever it was above him, as if the nurse-voice was waiting for him to make his decision.

  Jake did. With an effortful grunt, he threw the rock upward with all his strength, straight at where he imagined the voice was coming from.

  The speaker emitted a flatline sound, and the perfect white of the room began to peel away, like flakes of paint, like old dead skin, portions of white pulling away from the wall, drying to black and fluttering to the ground. Jake breathed hard, his panicked gaze darting around the rotting room. He wasn’t sure what to do, where to go, so he stood by and watched the illusion of a hospital meant to hurt him fall apart. And when it had fallen away, Jake found himself back in the tunnel. He followed it for a while, still breathing hard, badly shaken, until he came to another door. This one gave him a little more trouble, creaking protest as he slid it along the concrete floor. He managed to get it open enough to slip through. It was still dark, but he noticed the change in the air immediately.

  Fighting very hard not to hyperventilate, Dorrie stumbled blindly through the dark of the tunnel, very much aware that the others were gone. She was afraid to call out to them, afraid that it might hear her and come looking for her, alone. Maybe do things to her like it had done to Steve. Maybe worse things.

  She started forward in the tunnel, and as she did, the darkness grew steadily lighter. The ground loosened up into pebbles beneath her feet, and the air lost some of its musty closeness. In fact, she thought, as long, thin shapes loomed ahead in the duskiness, the air carried the smell of pine trees and lake water.

  Dorrie was outside. The gravelly path fell away beneath her hurrying feet, and she was quite sure she could make out the trees surrounding the path around the lake where she’d first seen the Hollower. She thought she even heard crickets.

  “What the—how…?” Alert, looking for signs of anything that might be trouble, her head swiveled, her eyes darting, her breath tight in her lungs. She continued around the curve, the water lapping against the shoreline, the leaves rustling overhead. The path stretched out ahead of her, running straight where her feet were used to turning, but she followed it anyway. The long, black branches reached down into the pathway, overstepping their friendly canopy. On the lake path she was used to, the trees didn’t encroach so far into her territory, the land of the paved and made-for-man.

  Here the crickets and tree frogs made strangled, pain
ful croaks and chirps, like sadistic fists were catching hold of them and crushing them methodically in the hidden places between the trees.

  She glanced behind her and discovered the path being eaten by the same kind of murkiness as in the tunnel. She couldn’t bear to go back, not now. Pressing forward through the wooded path couldn’t possibly be as bad as that. She turned forward then and stopped short.

  A large wooden door in a doorframe stood in the center of the path. Trees grown up to either side prevented sidestepping it, and it took up the entire width of the pathway.

  She approached it with caution, leaning forward a little to listen. No sound came from the other side. She tried to peer around it but couldn’t quite angle herself to see past it between the trees. She touched it with a finger, and then with all her fingers, feeling the even, polished wood.

  She knocked. No one answered. No one knocked back.

  Dorrie checked behind her. The gloom ate up the path at a steady rate. It was getting closer, obliterating everywhere she’d just been. She felt a surge of panic as she turned back to the door. She grabbed the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. She shook it, begged with it under her breath to give. Behind her, the dark got closer. It made a whirring sound like a garbage disposal, chopping up the illusion of the woods.

  Dorrie shook the knob harder, her hands sweating and slipping over the brass. Grabbing a corner of her shirt, she grabbed the knob hard and gave it a sharp twist.

  The door opened, and she tumbled through, banging her shoulder against the doorframe. Behind her, the door slammed shut and blacked out her entire view.

  The darkness inside was oppressive again, giving her the impression of a small room claustrophobically tight. The kind of room that big girls never felt comfortable in, because they always thought they took up too much space. By instinct, she felt upward, and a thin chain dangled against her hand. She grabbed it and pulled, and a sickly brown light came on.