by Peter Laws
It’s all he could say, because a hand reached out of nowhere and swatted the phone against the wall. The plastic shattered and he noticed a breeze that wasn’t there before, icing up his shoulder. The back door of the kitchen was half-open. Matt felt two hands shove him forward, and he toppled to his knees.
Bessie screamed, ‘Get out of my house!’
He tried to turn, to see who had pushed him, but the two women’s faces suddenly filled the little red window in the door, eyes wild, heads flailing. The door handle started yanking up and down rapidly. Bessie tried to hold it, but she wasn’t strong enough. The door heaved inwards.
He sprang forward to help her, but Bessie shouted, ‘Leave my stick alone. That’s my stick! It’s mine.’ He knew what that meant soon enough, when something long and sharp smacked off Matt’s shoulders. His arms gave way. His chest hit the pink fluffy carpet and he belched out air. He saw Bessie stagger forwards, hands flailing, skin white. Her teary panic fixated on the stick. ‘That’s mine! It’s mine.’
The women started slowly pushing through, and Matt saw the fire of daylight throw a very thin, long line on the carpet. The opening door hit Betty right in her hip. She stumbled away from it and fell against the wall and quickly slid down it. Then the strip of light grew fat and wide, and Matt saw the women’s hands, curling around the door frame like mad spiders, filling the gap, eating all that sunlight away.
His shoulders were stinging, absolutely throbbing, so he flipped himself over to stop that damn stick from hitting him again. He saw a man standing over him in the hallway. He wasn’t what Matt expected. He assumed it’d be Jason Statham, all skinhead and uber-tight muscle-top, but he saw a man in his sixties looking like a veteran sailor, or an old boxer, with a wild mop of grey hair and a heavy knitted jumper hanging. And while Matt expected the guy’s face to be all anger and violence, he saw something else instead. Sheer, blind panic. The old boxer’s wrinkled, puffed-up eyes darted to a million places, and he swayed on his feet, gasping, while Matt heard an odd, unexpected sound from outside. The wailing scream of a child, scurrying through the back door.
‘I just called the police.’ Matt nodded at the shattered phone. ‘They know my location. They’ll be here any second.’
The man shot out a hand to steady himself against the wall. ‘Jesus …’
‘So, it’s pointless, isn’t it?’ Matt pointed to Bessie’s walking stick, still clamped in the man’s hand. ‘So, it’d be better for you if you just put that down.’
One of the women spoke from behind him. And her voice sounded strange and childlike. ‘Don’t listen to it, Milton. Got claws. Got worms in its eyes. Look. A liar, liar.’
Then the other woman, the one with the neck scarf, spoke much clearer, but her voice was riddled with panic. ‘Milton, we’ve got to go right now.’
Slowly, Matt turned to see Bessie wheezing on the floor, and realised that for her sake, it’d be best to just let these nutters go. The police would catch them in the end. Forget the grab-the-stick plan. Forget the big rescue.
But none of them were leaving yet. The old man just kept staring at Matt’s legs.
‘Milton …’ The second woman again, who really did look familiar. She shouted it, incredibly loud. ‘Now.’
The old man groaned. ‘Let’s get it in the car.’
Wait. What?
‘I’ll get its legs. Grab his arms. We’ll bundle it in.’
Matt bolted forward on all fours and lunged into Milton’s legs. He took two handfuls of the old coot’s mud-spattered jeans and started dragging his body down. The guy screamed, and Matt landed a punch in his groin. Impact. The guy let out a wet gasp of breath and scraped his nails down the wall. Sharp enough to tear a gaping triangle of wallpaper. Matt reached for the walking stick but then two pairs of female hands were on him, pushing him down. And another moment, a sensation that chilled him the most, the feel of that little girl who he’d seen at the window. She was helping them. Her hands were grabbing his hair, helping to pull him down.
Milton whacked him with the walking stick again right on the back of his neck. Pain burst across his shoulders. Then another smack, just where the sun don’t shine. He shouted into the carpet, ‘Where’s Zara East? Where is she?’
‘Make it quiet,’ one of them said. ‘Hit it hard.’
Furious and desperate, Matt roared, ‘Where is she?’ Deliriously thinking that his anger might fill him with power, he tried to grab them again, but the stick smacked against his fingers and head and the white hot pain mushroomed across his body. Bessie hadn’t said anything for a while. Strength faded. His split, throbbing knuckles started trickling.
They slipped something round his wrists.
‘She ran away, if you must know …’ Milton shouted, as they tied Matt up. ‘Said she’d bring the whole world on us cos of what we were planning. And look, she has! That vicious little slut … she has.’
‘Milton, there’s no time.’ The woman again. Desperate. ‘We’ve got to get him to Chervil. Get the car.’
‘Okay. Right. I’ll bring it round now.’
Matt tried to pull his hands apart, but he couldn’t. Tried his feet too and couldn’t.
He felt a deep, profound panic bloom, just then. That he hadn’t managed to finish his conversation with Bowland on the phone, to tell her to call Wren straight away, and to insist that under no circumstance must she go to Chervil church tonight. But even the panic of that thought seemed to drown, just as the light faded.
The last thing he heard, as his brain powered down, was when one of the women said, ‘For crying out loud, cover its eyes.’
And then the old man said, ‘No … it’s okay. It’s closing them anyway. Praise Jesus. Look. It’s closing them anyway.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
They’d dried the melting hail from their bodies with the white robes from the vestry. It felt fitting and wonderfully symbolic to take the mocking dresses of the Hollows and turn them into towels. They scrubbed the holy garments into their hair and blew their nose into them too. Prosper shoved one down his trousers and marched in a circle. Everybody laughed. Then they scrunched them up and tossed them into a corner where they sat crumpled and damp, as pathetic as they always were.
The amazing hailstorm, bigger than any of them had seen before, was a wonderful touch from Jesus. A rapid and timely reminder that they weren’t alone. After that, they’d spent a good hour prepping the church. He helped line up all the candles then watched Uncle Dust light each of them in turn. Every new flame unleashed a horde of monstrous shadows.
At one point, Prosper asked Ever to give him a hand with some rope. There was a thick and heavy pile of it in the van. When they went outside to get it the sky had turned crazy dark – a mixture of the coming night and the thickest storm clouds he’d ever seen. It looked terrifying up there and he tried not to look at it. They dragged all that rope into the church and he tried not to think about how much of it there was. This special Hollow must be seriously powerful. When he asked about it, Prosper just smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’
At one point Prosper almost slipped, carrying a metal bucket from the van to the altar. He dumped it on the stone floor and a twirling puff of black powder burst up from it.
‘What’s in there?’ Ever asked.
‘What’s left of that Hollow you burnt,’ he grinned. ‘Milton scooped it up with a shovel. Wanna see?’
Ever closed his eyes. ‘No, thank you.’
He looked around the church instead, staring at the long, dark and painful benches that the Hollows liked to sit on. It all looked very glum and cold, except for one little section near the back. That part had bright, curvy chairs with happy yellow-face cushions. Instead of icy stone, the floor was covered with a sweet little carpet of roads and fields. The walls were different in this part too. Crayon pictures draped the wall, scrawled by the Hollow children. They showed Jesus healing the sick, feeding the five thousand. walking on water … all the really great stuff. W
hich made it all the more infuriating to see what the death-obsessed adults preferred in their art. The rest of the church had paintings of Jesus being beaten with a whip and carrying his cross while crowds cheered. They’d even made the large back window show a giant Jesus dripping on a cross, while the Father rejoiced in heaven.
It was baffling to see how the Hollows could get the Lord so wrong, while their kids appeared to have gotten him so right. The first thing he’d do, once this was all over, would be to tear down all those paintings glorifying death, and he’d stick up the kids’ pictures instead. Plaster the whole church with them and throw smiling cushions on the altar too.
But not now. Because now they were stuffing all that rope under the altar, hiding it with the white sheet. Once that was in place, Prosper put a hand on his shoulder and dropped to the floor next to him. ‘I have something to show you. It’s in the kiddies’ section. The bit you keep looking at. Come on.’
They walked back up the aisle and Prosper sat cross-legged on the roadmap carpet. ‘I notice you’re enjoying their pictures. So, I want you to see one that I drew myself, last night.’ Prosper reached for a large sheet of paper tucked into the bookshelf. He placed the sheet on the carpet and pressed his palm into the centre.
Ever stared at it. ‘It’s blank.’
‘That’s cos it’s upside down, ya dingbat.’ He smiled. One of his gentle ones. ‘I drew this for you, Ever. Just for you.’
‘Is it Jesus?’ he smiled. ‘What’s he up to this time?’
‘Crikey, it’s not Jesus.’ Prosper shook his head slowly. ‘Hope just thinks it’s time you saw one.’
The hair on his arms bristled.
‘You know all those Hollows we’ve seen so far,’ Prosper said, ‘they look like us on the outside. But not if you peel the skin away.’
‘I know that.’
‘But you’ve never actually seen one, have you?’
He stared at the paper and shook his head.
‘Do you want to see?’
He heard the sound of his own breath. He shook his head again.
‘It’s not a choice.’ It was Hope, sitting in one of the creaking pews. He hadn’t seen her before.
He saw her rise to her feet then stride between them, as tall as a tree, with her eyes rolled down. Then the tree sank to be with him, and a coldness from the sky came with it. ‘You have to know what you’re dealing with.’
He turned back to Prosper, ‘How many have you seen? I mean, without their disguise.’
‘I’ve seen a couple, without their skin on. Hope’s seen more.’
‘Plenty more,’ she said.
‘But I drew this one the best I can, cos this is what you’ll be killing tonight. And when you do, we’ll walk in the world, and we won’t have to hide—’
‘And Pax …’ Hope trailed off. ‘My Pax’ll be clever again. So you’ll do it, won’t you? You won’t let her down?’
He wanted to reach over and touch her hand. He felt like that might be the right thing to do, for a woman who so often wept over Pax. But he didn’t want to touch her that much, so he just said, ‘I won’t let her down. Or any of you.’
‘Good. And if you ever think the one tonight is normal …’ Prosper went to turn the sheet. His thin bald head and naturally bulging eyes made the moment even more intense. ‘Just remember this is how they really look. And deep down, where it really counts. They’re Satan’s sons and Satan’s daughters. And they’ll crucify us, Ever. They’ll crucify us all.’
The picture, scrawled in crayon, was now in sight.
And it was vile.
He gasped.
On the paper, in jagged and unkempt black, was what looked like a tall thin rabbit standing on its hind legs. Its head was lean and pointed, with ragged but stiff ears protruding into a strange downward curve. Its spindly arms were reaching forward, claws outstretched, desperate to grab. And hundreds of little razor teeth lined the thin black lips. The only other colour was red. With it, he’d drawn drips of blood hanging from its mouth, and the same colour was repeated for the eyes. Scribbled, thick vertical lines. Those eyes looked up, and Ever wanted to turn and run as far from the church as he could.
‘I saw one in the park one night,’ Prosper said, sliding a finger across its eyes to block the stare. ‘It was sleeping in a subway and it came at me, creeping up the tunnel. And it was reaching for me, like this …’ Prosper reached out to him, grasping and wriggling his fingers and Ever flinched. ‘It was desperate to touch me. Made the weirdest sound you ever heard. Like bones cracking, over and over.’
‘That’s how they talk,’ Hope said. ‘Sounds like a spine being twisted underwater. Like insects scuttling. But they must do a clever little trick, so we hear it like a normal voice. It’s not normal, though. It’s how the Father talks. Yeah, I’ve often thought the Father might be some sort of insect.’
His mouth was open. His heart thudding. The thing at the door …
‘I … I think I saw one.’
They looked at each other, ‘When?’
‘Last night, over there,’ he turned and slowly pointed to the church doorway. Squinting when he did it, in case it was still there. ‘It’s gone now.’
‘Good. We must have scared it off,’ Hope said. ‘And this Hollow tonight hates Jesus, but Jesus hates it. So you won’t hesitate, will you Ever? Because Micah hesitated and it all went wrong.’
‘Micah …’ Ever thought of their newest member, and how the grown-ups always sat with him on the porch. Always talking, always planning. And Micah’s mum, sitting there and listening, but never really speaking. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Hope said. ‘But that’s okay. He was weak and that’s why he failed. But you won’t fail, will you? Prosper said you killed that one at the farm like a hero.’
Don’t cry, don’t cry. He pressed his lips together.
‘So, you won’t hesitate here, will you?’
Finally, words came out. ‘I won’t hesitate.’
‘Good. And remember it’ll be way easier than you think. You just have to stop its heart and we’ll do the rest … You don’t even have to touch the axe …’ She slapped the paper hard into his hand. ‘So you put this in your pocket, Ever, and you remember who they are inside. These are the demons that put a chain around your mummy’s neck and threw Prosper onto the street and hounded your Uncle Dust and filled his mouth with sand, and these are the ones …’ she paused for a breath, ‘who smashed my little girl’s brain to mush … and turned her into a … a baby.’
He put his hand on her knee.
‘God,’ she said. ‘She was always so bright—’
‘Car!’
Ever jumped and Prosper too. They snapped their heads to Dust whose panicked voice was echoing from the other side of the church. ‘There’s a car coming. It must be Hunter.’
Hope shot bolt upright and checked her watch. ‘It can’t be.’ Her voice was calm, her face wasn’t.
Headlights flashed through the tall church windows and a swooping white block of light swept across the walls. Ever threw a hand across his silent scream.
‘They’re way too early.’ Hope hurried towards Dust, who was starting to open the door so he might see.
‘Does it matter?’ Prosper quickly dragged a black bag to the altar. ‘The sooner the better, if you ask—’
‘It’s not them,’ Dust stood at the open door. ‘It’s …’
Hope gasped. ‘Milton?’
‘And there’s no other car. No Hunter.’
‘What the hell? He’s supposed to be watching Matt.’ Hope slammed the door fully open and ran out into the blackness. Prosper followed. For now, Ever and Dust stayed at the door, as Milton backed up Hope’s car.
‘Uncle Dust?’ Ever said. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Shhhh.’
‘Where’s the Hollow?’
‘Shhhh, dammit!’
Trembling, Ever watched Milton stagger out of the car like he was gasping for breath.
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br /> ‘Jesus …’ Dust said, ‘he’s got Verity … and … and … holy shit, he’s got Pax and Merit.’
‘Mum!’ Ever rushed outside, and the wind slammed into him instantly, pushing him into a side stumble. Dust was close behind, grabbing Ever’s hand and pushing down the blustery gravel path. Hope got there first, desperately trying to get everybody to quiet down.
Milton was propped against the car, while Prosper barked questions at him, but Dust walked right up to him and set two hands on his shaking shoulders. ‘Just breathe, Milton, okay? Just catch a breath and tell us what happened …’
‘It came to the farm. The Matthew one.’
Prosper moaned, raked a hand through his scalp and spun.
‘It found Bill’s body, too,’ Milton said.
‘What?’ Hope stomped to Milton and pushed Dust away. She shoved her hands hard against the old man’s chest. ‘What the hell were you doing? You were supposed to be watch—’
‘I did … I … I was at its house, like you said.’
‘And?’
‘You said to stay with it, so I followed its car. I had no idea where it was going. But it went … it went to the farm.’
‘But how?’ Dust said. ‘How could he even know about that?’
‘It just knew, and I couldn’t let it see me so …’ Milton was wheezing now. ‘So, I couldn’t stop it going in, and I couldn’t very well kill it, could I?’ He glared at them all. ‘Could I? Tell them, Verity …’
She was hugging Ever by now, but she pulled back and nodded. ‘Matt came to the door, and I turned him away.’
‘He saw you?’ Hope shouted. ‘He saw your face?’
‘Not fully. He didn’t recognise me. Then he found Bill’s body in the car,’ Mum said. ‘Hope, he’s called the police.’
She flung her head back, and the sky filled with the most terrible sounds of lament.
Prosper said, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s over, it’s over … we’ll have to use the other way …’
‘No, it’s not over …’ Milton shouted. ‘We weren’t followed. Nobody knows we’re here.’
