“Good evening, Mrs. Saltzman. How are you tonight?”
The old woman didn’t answer.
Lauren administered medication and checked her over and changed the sheets on the bed, adding an extra blanket from the closet because the early April night was forecast to retain a last bit of winter’s chill. All the while, she spoke to Mrs. Saltzman about small pleasantries and innocuous news about other patients on the floor. And all the while, Mrs. Saltzman hummed disjointedly and watched her with those opaque blue eyes, her arthritic, bird-bone hands trembling in her lap.
Lauren was in the midst of telling her about the new ice cream flavor the hospital administration had added to the menu when, as she walked by, Mrs. Saltzman growled at her.
She paused, startled but not particularly alarmed. “Well, that’s not—” She reached out to touch her arm and Mrs. Saltzman surprised her again by jerking away from her. The old woman bolted up out of her seat and moved with surprising speed and agility away from her, to the wall across from the bed. Her lower jaw dropped and from deep in her throat came a sound like a siren.
Lauren gaped at her. A number of thoughts ran through her head very quickly. Had the old woman swallowed something that was making that noise in her throat? Had she swallowed some pills that gave her that strength, new but by all bets temporary? Or was it some new symptom of her illness? If it was the latter, it was something she had never come across in a dementia patient of Mrs. Saltzman’s advanced stage.
When she found her voice again, she spoke to the woman seething and hissing and growling across from her. “Mrs. Saltzman, I need you to calm down. If something is hurting or bothering you, I need you to try your best to tell me what it is so I can help. I—”
“There is something you can do for me,” the old woman said in a number of simultaneous voices that weren’t hers. “You can die.”
“What?”
“You let your cousin kill himself,” the voices in Mrs. Saltzman’s mouth told her. “You let your uncle hurt him over and over. You even told him how to end it. And you think you should be allowed to care for others? You think any single one of these meat bags in this place could ever really be safe with you? How could anyone trust you? You deserve for someone to let you die. To make you die.”
“No...no, that’s not true.” Tears blurred her vision.
The bottom jaw dropped again, only lower this time, as if it had unhinged from her head and she meant to swallow up Lauren in one bite. The old woman’s pointed little chin hung down between her sagging breasts, the cavernous maw lined with impossibly long teeth. From the depths of her throat, the siren welled up again, growing louder.
Lauren pushed the panic button at her belt that alerted orderlies and if necessary, security to assist with a potentially dangerous patient. She had never had to use it before, nor could she understand why she suddenly had to with an elderly dementia patient, but she used it now more out of instinct than any real training. The vibes of hate coming off Mrs. Saltzman were thick and freezing, almost palpable, and her gut told her the old woman who most days couldn’t remember how to feed and dress herself and couldn’t recognize the nurses was, at that moment, possibly very dangerous.
Mrs. Saltzman’s head started vibrating so fast it blurred her features, though never broke the steady wail of that siren. Lauren cried out. When the head stopped moving, holes that took up the space where her eyes and nose should have been dribbled thick blood.
Lauren bolted for the door and swung out into the bright hallway, sliding and nearly crashing to the floor. She burst into tears then, clutching the door frame. It took her two, maybe three minutes to bring herself to look into the room again, to make sure the thing that had been Mrs. Saltzman was still a safe distance away from her. Behind her, the footsteps of the running orderlies began to fill the silence.
Inside the room, Mrs. Saltzman, fragile, small, and very, very old, dozed in the chair by the window. Peaceful little snores had replaced the siren. Eyes (although closed), nose, and mouth all appeared as they should. No blood. The sudden reversion to normalcy choked off the last of the sobs, but the tears still came. They were still streaming down her face when the orderlies, their voices a cloud of noise outside her head, rushed Mrs. Saltzman’s room. They still wet her cheeks as she managed to explain she was okay, that she had just panicked, that she was sorry to worry them, and as she examined the confused and groggy old woman while they watched silently behind her.
But when they were gone and everything had settled down, in the newly-resumed silence of the hallway beyond the nurses’ station and the shadowed rooms of the sleeping patients, the tears did not come. Even with thoughts of her cousin Dustin, the tears did not come.
It wasn’t Mrs. Saltzman who knew about any of it. It was her doormen. They knew.
They knew it all.
***
Ian stood outside his mother’s bedroom, his hands on the door. He thought what he needed might be inside the room.
At daemon, homini quum struit aliquid malum, pervertit illi primitus mentem suam.
His mother’s demons were shut up inside that room. And he thought—no, felt throughout the very marrow of him—that answers about his own three demons could be found in there, too.
He paused. There would be ghosts in there, too.
Since that first afternoon when the demons had appeared across the street, he had seen them everywhere—at the ends of school hallways at work, in the produce aisle at the local grocery store, amidst the sunshine and laughter of the park down the street. They watched him, heads cocked to one side, and he could feel the radiation of their hate. They meant to kill him.
That Saturday afternoon, he had discovered that they had killed his mother, too.
He had run some errands—the bank, Walmart, Home Depot—and when he returned home, his front door was open. He frowned, glancing behind him then back at the door. He made his way up the steps, but couldn’t see any immediately discernible reason why his front door should be open. He’d locked the door before he left; he was sure of it.
“Hello?”
No one answered. He put the bags down on the porch. “Hello?”
From somewhere inside the house, he heard children laughing. His heart sped up in his chest. He walked inside. For a moment, he just stood in the foyer, unsure what to do. He reached into his pocket for his cell phone, considering calling the police. It was break-in, after all, and even if the culprits were only children, he still thought it better to let the police handle it.
The phone buzzed in his hand, making him jump. He looked down, but there was no call, no text. He put it on the side table by the front door.
The laughter came again from upstairs.
“Hey,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “Hey there. Whoever you are, you better get the hell out of here.” A high-pitched giggle on the edge of hysteria floated down from upstairs. From his mother’s room. His stomach turned. There was someone, maybe more than one someone, in his mother’s room.
“I have a gun,” he said, and then kicked himself mentally. A gun? What if whoever was up there called his bluff?
“Ian? Ian, honey?”
That sick feeling rose up into his throat. It was his mother’s voice.
“Ian, come on up here, honey. I want to talk to you.”
“Mom?” his voice sounded very small in his own ears. He took the first few steps and paused, confused. It was his mother’s voice.
“Ian....”
He jogged up the rest of the staircase. The upstairs hallway was empty and it was dark, darker than usual. The door to his mother’s room closed. “Mom?”
He crept down the hall to the door. “Who are you?” he whispered.
“Death,” voices from behind him said. He wheeled around.
The three faceless things stood at the far end of the hallway, blocking his access to the stairs.
“Oh God,” he said, slumping against the door to his mom’s bedroom.
/> “Your God does not exist,” the one on the left told him. There was no mouth to speak from.
Ian eyed the staircase and considered his chances.
The middle one laughed, and it sounded like the crying of children.
The right one said, “You will die like your mother. We will tear the life from you.”
Ian reached behind him. His hand felt the cold metal of the doorknob. “How do you know about my mother?”
“We bled her dry,” the middle one told him. “She tried to keep us out, and we cracked her open.”
“We fed,” the right one told him. “Her cans and wires and silly plaster stick figures couldn’t stop us.”
“You killed her,” he whispered. “You killed her.”
“In the end,” said the one on the left. “And we will kill you, in time.”
The one in the middle reached out toward the wall next to him and made a motion like it was grabbing something and pulling it toward itself. The wall groaned and leaned toward the three, plaster chips and chunks exploding suddenly outward. Ian jumped and yelped, skittering away from the hole. Leaning forward, he looked into it. It seemed to stretch out and down into blackness, and from the abyss, he could hear screaming. He thought he could also see movement rising upward.
“Oh...oh shit...oh shit....”
He looked back to where the three stood but they were gone. Scraping and growling and clicking accompanied the screaming now, and Ian wanted to scream with whatever was down there, but couldn’t find his voice. There was a lump of fear in his throat that choked it off.
A mass of moving, fleshy parts drew closer, and Ian found both his voice and his ability to move. He tore away in the direction of the steps and took them three at a time, tumbling out the front door and tripping over his own bags.
He collapsed in a heap on his own front walk, has hand and arm scraped and bleeding. He panted for several minutes, waiting for his heart to slow and that sick knot in his stomach to loosen. Nothing flew out the door at him. Nothing followed down the stairs. He heard some growling, but within moments, that subsided, and the screaming snapped off completely.
It took him a long time to get to his feet and go back into the house. He listened for several moments from the foyer, but heard nothing. He crept up the stairs slowly, peeking over the landing through the bars of the railing.
All trace of the hole was gone. Nothing had come through into the hallway. He glanced down toward his mother’s bedroom door and noticed it was slightly ajar. As if noticing him back, it blew shut with a tight little slam.
Chapter 5
It had been beyond the scope of time since the Likekind had seen their Origin world. The Triumvirate were the last who could remember it, and even from their earliest collective Memory, it had been a bleak and dying world. Desolate and crumbling, shifting, falling into itself, the world had been made of the same as what was inside them, an emptiness that continually pushed and pulled and stretched. Their world was likewise always pulling apart and crashing together, tumultuous and hungry. The slow and ancient races, those less than Tertiaries, had not long survived there. The Likekind had opened them and picked them dry. Their desiccated physicalities were eventually swallowed by the scorched plains, their inside-frames spiking out of the ground, reaching upward into a red sky as if pleading for salvation. None came.
The Likekind had taken to the Convergence, the soft dark cushion between worlds where there were no sounds, no sights, no hateful physicality, neither someplace nor no place but the space in between it all.
Beyond it, there were other worlds to feed in.
The Likekind had never seen a dimension like theirs in any of the Outworlds beyond the Convergence. In their collective Experience, gathered, maintained, managed, and disseminated outward by the Triumvirate, none had ever found a world in which they could replace the Origin. This was of little to no significance to the Likekind. They were predators above all, and in most of the discovered Outworlds, they had power to sharpen their hunting skills by manipulating and reshaping those dimensions as needed.
They had found, on occasion, that some dimensions were unsuitable as hunting grounds. The natural inhabitants in some were of too little intellect to form the Emotions and Distortions the Likekind could sense and absorb. Sometimes the worlds contained other predators whose strengths and intellect made them impossible prey. Those predators and the Likekind hunted around each other, sharing worlds, circling each other carefully. Some Outworlds were made in such a way as to slow or maim the Likekind by solidifying them. And there were many empty dimensions, as yet to develop lifeforms at all, or whose time had long passed when anything could live in them.
The Triumvirate had come to a dimension central to many of the Likekind’s and others’ hunting grounds. The meats who populated it used a word for it—Earth. It was their original home dimension, and the Triumvirate were fairly sure they did not know others existed (except for the dimensions they called Heaven, Hell, and Dreams—these were indeed the alternate worlds closest in proximity to their own). This Earth had proved to be something of a dilemma. The Experience of Likekind in that world had reported many successful hunts of complex prey. Three notable enticements, Fear, Guilt, and Insecurity, had proved immensely capable of quelling the black holes inside for a time. But the meats had proved themselves more resourceful. They had killed some of the Likekind—a Secondary and a Primary. The latter had once been part of a previous Triumvirate, but had left specifically to hunt the meats that had destroyed its favorite Secondary. That it had been, it turn, destroyed as well was unacceptable. The Likekind wanted the wholesale slaughter of the world and a flooding of that dimension, followed by cutting it off from the Convergence.
Only a Triumvirate could make decisions regarding the Likekind’s request, and only the Triumvirate could carry out the actions detailed. Only they could manipulate across dimensions and sense the unsensible. Only they could call on the Scions, the Zxom, the varich-har, or the hinshing at will. The decisions of the Triumvirate were final and unquestionable. Their execution was unchangeable and unstoppable. Even the ancient Ones Without Names, whose amusements were the chaosium of galaxies, whose very will, uttered or thought, had length, width, and depth, who had created countless Origins—even They abided the actions of the Triumvirate, including the pinching of the Convergence when necessary.
The current Triumvirate of Primaries had wielded this power with supreme efficiency.
In the Outworld called Earth, the Triumvirate had already decided that those meats responsible would be eliminated. It was yet to be determined whether they should then pinch the Convergence and tear open the boundaries, flooding Earth with the deadly spawn of adjacent dimensions. Should that be the decided course of action, it would become necessary to seal off Earth’s access to the Convergence forever. The colliding of dimensions would mean total annihilation; better to let the course of it wipe the place clean without the threat of such carnage leaking into good hunting grounds.
To set about completing such lengthy and involved actions, they first had to feed. They had found a structure which contained a number of meats to feed on. They had also found some of the meats responsible for the death of the Primary and had eliminated them. They had only come across one unforeseen issue—the interference of a meat whose mission, it seemed, was to protect other meats. The word, when they got close enough to the dimension to pick it up, was detective.
Their objectives did not include it, but they would kill it if necessary.
In the meantime, they would pay a visit to the one this interfering meat called “wife.” They believed that would serve as a deterrent. And further, the “wife” creature had played a part in killing the Secondary. It was time to strip all that it loved away from it, and watch it crack open and die.
***
Bennie Mendez left Erik’s house feeling like he’d been hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer. It was dark by then, and the shadows he had never thought twice abou
t between homes, inside cars, and across lawns now had taken on a sinister suggestiveness.
Casey, Erik’s wife, had been making dinner when they both walked in. Mendez had met her a few times before. She was a pretty little thing, too thin for Bennie’s taste but lovely nonetheless in that sweet, girl-next-door sort of way. He knew Erik was crazy about her. From the smile and warm kiss she planted on Erik’s mouth when she saw him, Bennie saw she was crazy about him, too.
When she pulled away and had a moment to study Erik’s expression, her eyes immediately filled with worry, her smile sagging. “What’s wrong?”
“Hollowers killed Jake and Dorrie. They just got Steve, too,” he said with a heavy sigh.
“Wh—what?” She pulled away.
“There are three of them.”
“But...you said—”
“We thought we closed the rip for good. I don’t know how they got here.”
She turned, distracted, and went back into the kitchen. Erik shook his head.
“What was that about?” Bennie asked him in low, confidential voice.
Erik halfheartedly tossed up his hands. “She can’t handle when this happens. I thought...last time would be the end of it.”
They followed her into the kitchen. She greeted Bennie as if seeing him for the first time, then went to the stove to stir whatever she was cooking in a large black pot. She didn’t seem angry to Bennie so much as preoccupied. He supposed she actually was handling it as well as she could, and given the circumstances, she was holding up; he imagined hearing the Hollowers were stalking her husband again must be something akin to hearing cancer cells had returned. It would be another brush with death, one that this time Erik might not return from.
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