Found You

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Look, maybe we should turn—”

  A jaw-thudding recoil as the car suddenly lost the road sent them flying in their seats before the car pitched downward and stopped moving. The walls of a hole about four feet deep rose up around them on all sides. Dirt, rock, and chucks of street pavement tumbled down on top of the hood of the car.

  After several groaning moments, Dave and the others came around, rubbing bruised foreheads and elbows. “Anybody hurt? Is…are we…ow!” Dave tried to open the driver’s side door, but it wouldn’t budge. The dirt and rock caved in around it filled in too much space between the door and the slope of the hole. He rolled the window down and clumsily climbed out while Erik and the others got out on the passenger side. Pulling each other up onto the hood and then the roof of the car, they had enough leverage to climb out of the hole.

  They stopped where they stood.

  About fifteen or twenty of the faceless folks stood poised close to the hole, blind witnesses gathered maybe a hundred feet or so away. They didn’t move, but among them was a kind of menacing stillness, like cats crouched and ready to pounce on their prey. In the frozen clutching hands, they held knives and scalpels.

  “I think we can get past them,” Jake whispered. “I don’t think they can see us. And even if they can,” his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “we have joints and muscles. We can probably move faster.”

  Steve, leaning on Erik, said, “I’m just…so tired.”

  “Hang in there, Steve. We’ll get out of this.” Dorrie didn’t look at him, but her tone suggested there could be no argument.

  Dave wasn’t sure how they’d managed it, but the mannequins had closed some of the distance. Now a hundred feet seemed more like sixty.

  “Take them,” Dave said to Erik. “I’ll distract these things. Get the others out of here.”

  “We’re not leaving you behind,” Dorrie said.

  “There are more of them than there are of us. Just go.”

  “Not without you.”

  From the looks on the others’ faces, they seemed to all stand in agreement.

  “Dorrie, I appreciate—”

  “Look, I know you’re hurt and you’ve lost a lot. But we need you. We can’t do this without you.”

  “You don’t need me. I haven’t done one damn thing this whole time to help any one of you. I’ve dragged you deeper and deeper into the twisted folds and layers of this bastard’s mind and now…” He threw up his hands. It took every ounce of will not to mist up. “Now we’re in the middle of someplace that doesn’t even really exist, with no plan of action, no clue where to go, and…” He noticed a group of faceless teenaged mannequins with switchblades milling around outside a 7-Eleven across the street. Where in God’s name had they come from? One had a cigarette glued to the place where its mouth should have been. A stream of smoke rose up. Dave heard Jake light up a cigarette behind him. “And no one to help us.”

  “We don’t need help,” Erik said stubbornly. “We’re going to find it and kill it.”

  Dave sighed. “Where? How? It seems to have just stranded us out here.”

  “It won’t leave us alone out here for long.”

  “We don’t know what this one will do. It wants us to suffer. It wants us to hurt. It wants to wear us down until we give up, and it’s starting to work.” Dave turned away in disgust.

  After a while, Steve said, “Why don’t we head back? I mean, if we’re more or less in agreement that it’s going to make its presence known no matter which direction we head in, well, then…I say we go back to the heart of darkness, so to speak.”

  “You can’t make the walk,” Dave told him. “You can barely walk as it is. We’ve gone at least a mile, maybe two.”

  Steve waved him away. “I’ve done worse at the Academy. Don’t worry about me. Let’s just go.”

  Dave shrugged and said, “Okay. Okay, let’s try. I guess—”

  “Damn it.” Erik saw it, too—they all did. While they had been arguing, the colors of the buildings had run off. In fact, the very buildings themselves sagged and dripped at odd angles. The people, frozen in the postures of everyday life, had also slid into smeared disarray. Many had melded into each other, preventing any kind of access into or around any of the buildings. The hole into which Dave had driven his car had filled in until only a corner of the trunk poked up through the new asphalt like a newly discovered bone of an ancient behemoth. There was one road out, and it led in the opposite direction of Oak Hill.

  “This reminds me of a very bad dream I had once,” Erik muttered.

  “I don’t like this,” said Dorrie as they headed down the road. The air around them blew chilly across their skin. As they covered ground, the buildings became scarce. The periodic gnarled things that might have passed for trees suggested tortured shapes—one feminine form cut off at the shins, another a broken little rag doll–type whose neck bent at terribly wrong angles and whose body looked contorted in unnatural ways. Dave rubbed his eyes. The battle with the first Hollower, the swipes that death took at every one of them, seemed nothing compared to this endless feeling of being lost, of being tormented by the past, of always worrying about imminent danger and never being sure when, exactly, it was going to strike. Dave imagined that this was very much what it felt like being in hell.

  They trudged along in silence, and Dave realized that if it was hell, it was also, to a much more magnified degree, just what it felt like being him, on an average day.

  After a while they came to a railroad tunnel. It rose like a massive yawning mouth of mud-colored rock; the pings of something liquid dripped in its interior and echoed out to them. No other sounds issued from the opening—no laughter, no derisive layers of voices, no other indication of the Hollower’s presence whatsoever. For some reason, this struck Dave as more terrible. It was like waiting for his mother to get home to yell at or punish him, waiting for a test you know you failed, waiting for that phone call that you knew in your heart meant the relationship was over and she was never coming back. It was a terrible feeling of anticipation. If the Hollower wasn’t in the tunnel, then it was surely waiting for them on the other side.

  The ground beneath their feet rose up in a simulation of tracks that disappeared into the sable curtain of air beyond.

  “Now what?” Erik shook his head.

  “No light to go into,” Jake muttered. “Thought there was supposed to be a light.”

  Dorrie frowned at him but took his hand. With her other, she grabbed Erik’s hand. Steve grabbed his and then Dave’s.

  They plunged into the darkness.

  There were many things it could have done, wanted to do in the tunnel. It populated the lightlessness with blind and hairless things that gaped and bore razor teeth and shuddered and slithered and skittered across the ceiling on soundless feet, drooping long feelers and flicking barbed tails silently all around the meats. It considered letting those things hit them, bite them, scare them, send them fleeing, just as blind, down the remainder of the tunnel. It had grown impatient, and the anticipation of feeding on their dying Despair had set the voids inside it roiling and churning. It burned with hunger and the desire for Vengeance, burned to hurt, to destroy.

  But it found the Fear of silence, the silence itself, a torture to them. For ones whose every moment was cacophonous with the obsessive replay of Insecurity and Anxiety, the silence, pregnant with horrors, was more delightful than any contact with the pets of its imagination could provide. It stretched the tunnel wide, very wide, as wide as its dwindling patience would allow.

  The tunnel, which the senses beyond sight implied to them was fairly constricted, maybe just a breadth away from being claustrophobically so, widened about halfway down. The dark, too, seemed to lighten to reveal walls, first rough-hewn and rocky, but smoothing out by various degrees to a smooth cement finish.

  Dave thought it before Jake said it.

  “I think…I think we’re back in the catacombs. I think we’re in a ca
tacomb tunnel.” The defeat he fought hard to keep from weighing his words down hung between them in the poor light. He was right, by their estimation. They were back in the catacombs. It was a very likely possibility that they had never left.

  The cement all around them felt like a tomb. They pressed on. The ammonia smell, stronger than the smell of dust and stale air, and that leaden quality that made the air feel like bricks in his chest made his heart sink. That confirmed it.

  “No! No no no. We’re back in the fucking catacombs?” Steve ran his hands over his face. “Why is it doing all this?”

  “It’s tired of wearing us down. It’s brought us back to its lair to finish things,” Erik said.

  “Where…where are we?” Jake looked around.

  “Beats me if I know,” Steve said, the fight in him faded some. “The map won’t do any good now.” He shrugged, and then winced from the pain. “I’m not even sure I could get us back to the entrance now.”

  “So we’re stuck down here? With…it?”

  “Plan’s no different than it was before,” Erik said. “We find it and kill it. Or, it finds us and we kill it.”

  “Or it finds us and—” Jake said.

  “No!” Erik held up a warning finger to Jake. “No. There are no other options.”

  “Erik, I think—” Dave began.

  “No.”

  “I think we have to look at the fact—”

  “No.”

  “—that maybe we’re stuck. Maybe it won.”

  “No…”

  “Erik,” Dave said.

  “No!” The look on Erik’s face silenced them. “No,” he said, quieter. The desperation in his face told Dave everything he needed to know. Erik was thinking of Casey, who he’d promised to return to. “We’re going to find it and kill it.” He turned and started walking, adding over his shoulder, “Or it will find us. And we’ll kill it.”

  Dave nodded. “Okay. Okay. We’ll find it and kill it.” And he started following Erik.

  Jake looked at Dorrie and then Steve, then he shrugged and followed after. “Or it will find us.”

  “Either way, we’ll kill the bastard,” Steve said, and he and Dorrie hurried to catch up.

  They followed a long tunnel in almost absolute darkness, saying very little other than commenting about foods they’d like to have when they got out, wines and beers and shots they’d like to drink at the Tavern, hot baths, warm clothes, Monday Night Football. They didn’t talk about what they’d seen in the catacombs the first time. They didn’t talk about the Hollower. It was enough that it hung over their heads, the impending fight. None of them had any idea what to do when they found it again, but they were fairly sure it would eventually tire of toying with them, as Erik said, and actually try to kill them.

  Dave estimated that they’d been walking for about an hour when they came across a cavernous room. Strangely enough, bare-bulb light filled the room. Wiring stapled to wooden beams ran across the ceiling. A washer and drier set stood in the far corner across the room from them, and the casing for the furnace and the water heater stood in another corner off to the right. The floor beneath their feet crackled as they crossed the room. Dave looked down and found a crimson stain spread out across the better part of the floor.

  “This…can’t be…”

  Dave turned and saw a staircase that ran up into the gloom of the ceiling above them. He jogged over to it and looked up. It was just like he remembered.

  The door at the top looked smeared, as if someone had taken a damp thumb to an ink picture. Exactly like it had looked last time.

  “Oh, hot damn,” Dave said, rejoining the group.

  “No way,” Erik said. “No fucking way.”

  “What?” Steve looked from one to the other. “Fill us in.”

  “It’s Feinstein’s basement,” Dave told them.

  “Huh?”

  “Max Feinstein,” Erik explained. “It’s Max Feinstein’s basement. Where we found the Hollower. Where we…hurt it.”

  “Oh.” Jake sounded worried.

  “Well,” Dorrie said, “I guess we know which plan to follow. The one where it finds us.”

  “Found you.”

  They all jumped and turned.

  It stood there, taking up the center of the room, its presence—its will, Dave thought—weighting the air all around them.

  It had found them. And this time, Dave was sure it didn’t intend to let them go.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Up close, it looked just like the other one, just like Dave remembered. The blank surface of the face was not entirely empty. The movements of countless tiny fractal threads of ash-gray in the white formed subtle expressions—suggestion, amusement, anger, triumph. Dave thought that beneath that black trench coat, its hate churned like a storm, driving it, moving it forward. And he hated it right back. This thing that had taken everything from him—he loathed it. Despised it. He wanted it dead.

  It stood in the center of the basement by the stairs, right about where the first one had stood. He half expected it to change. He remembered how the first one looked there in Feinstein’s basement, shooting up into the air to a terrible height and throwing off the trench coat like a sheath of dead skin. He’d watched as its body pulled backward and the upper torso elongated to form a long goose neck on which the faceless head hung. The lump of a body had split four ways so that two pairs of long, lean scissor blades could serve as legs and propel it around. The horror Dave felt at seeing the discs of bone that swam in and out of the curve of its back was nothing compared to its series of whips, which ran along the length of the body to either side, their segmented bony spikes dangling like dungeon chains. It shook something awful, its head and its body twitching with every movement.

  It had hurt them very badly with those whips. It had touched them. And yet, when it was physical, it was vulnerable. They’d been able to hurt it. They’d brought it down out of the untouchable realm of nightmares and into the everyday world of things that have reason and explanation. And they’d been able to kill it.

  It was then that Dave remembered the mirror, the one he’d bought at CVS, just in case. He’d tucked it into a back pocket and forgotten about it, but now, in the simulation of Feinstein’s basement, it seemed worth a shot. Maybe if he could take some of its power away, they could take it down, kill it like the first one. Maybe there was still a chance. He pulled it out of his pocket and with the blood from the car accident, still tacky from the palm of his hand, he smeared a basic smiley face on the mirror. Then he turned it on the Hollower.

  For a moment it shrank back, the white faceless surface curving and wrinkling in what appeared to Dave to be a frown. He wondered what it was they saw, the Hollowers, when they looked into mirrors—the frothing hate, the voids inside them, the elements of their own fears and insecurities, if they even had such things? He liked to think maybe they saw all the stolen faces of the people they hurt, all the expressions of surprise and pain and despair. At the thought, he smiled.

  But the Hollower surprised him. Its black glove swiped the air between them and the mirror shattered. The pieces fell like crystal rain onto the hard floor, but didn’t stay there. A moment or so passed, and the Hollower made a noise that was unlike anything Dave had ever heard, a whistle of air passing through something empty and forgotten, and the glass leaped up and flew at them. Dave felt a cool slice of pain against his cheek before he threw up his hands to protect his face. From the shouts and cries of the others, he assumed they were being cut as well. Cuts opened up through his sleeves, biting into his forearms, his shoulders, his stomach, and legs. There couldn’t possibly be so many pieces of glass, and yet jabs of pain kept coming.

  And then suddenly, they stopped.

  Dave dropped his arms and looked around. Steve’s cuts glittered with shards and dust of glass. Tiny cuts formed irregular lattices over Dorrie’s cheek, neck, and bare arms. Jake had a piece of glass embedded deep in his hand. And Erik…

  Dave
felt a little sick when he looked at Erik, whose nose and cheekbone bled and whose bloody knuckles were tight fists. A large piece of glass had buried its tip an inch or two into Erik’s side, and a burgundy stain spread quickly all around it.

  “Erik,” he said, but Erik waved a hand away.

  “I’m okay.” He swallowed. “Okay.”

  But Dave already felt awful. Once again, he’d allowed his friends to get hurt. Once again, it was undeniably his fault.

  They were going to die in those catacombs and no one would ever find them, and the reek of their rotting bodies would join the must and ammonia and the flesh of them would fall away and the hard bones would turn to dust and blow away to mix with the dust of the basement and—

  Those weren’t entirely his thoughts. He glared at the monster.

  In response, the Hollower’s laughter bounced off the walls and filled the basement room to an almost deafening level. It threw back its head, soaking up their fear and pain.

  Dave felt a hot flash of rage. No.

  It stopped laughing but seemed to have trouble containing stray giggles. “They are coming. I have called them.”

  It raised a black-gloved hand, and with the other, plucked off the glove, which took an indistinct animal shape with wings and fluttered off. A glinting silvery claw reminiscent of a crab’s waved where a hand should have been. The Hollower chattered the claw a little and then swiped at the air next to him.

  With a sudden sizzling sound, a black bolt of what reminded Dave of lightning cut through the air right next to the Hollower. The bolt folded in on itself, seeming to indent the very fabric of the reality around them in a jagged, crackling cut. It spread to about six feet from top to bottom and then pulled itself open. Beyond the fluttering edges of the rip, a gaping blackness yawned.

  “They will come, and we will devour you all.”

  It took Dave a few moments to realize what the Hollower had done. But it wasn’t until it tilted back its head and a siren wail filled the valley between the Oak Hill buildings that Dave really understood what the Hollower meant to have happen.