Found You (17 page)

“No,” she said hastily. “Not really. I think it’s sweet.”

He managed a small smile. “Good.”

In that moment, nothing else mattered. Dorrie wanted to be close to him and to kiss him, too, to feel the weight of him on top of her, to feel him pressing inside her. Surprising herself, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. He seemed startled but returned the kiss fiercely, slipping his own arms around her waist. She cringed in that first second that he’d feel her and think her fat, but the way he kissed her melted those worries away. When they parted, panting heavily, he took her hand and led her without a sound to his bedroom and eased her down onto the bed, kissing her again. Just the contact of his skin felt good. The scent of him was intoxicating.

“I want you,” he whispered. She wasn’t sure if it was meant as a request, whether he was looking for permission to take her, or whether he was simply stating an intention. She responded by kissing him and reaching for him. He was already hard, and this, more than anything else, convinced her that whatever happened after didn’t matter, because for this moment, he did want her, and she felt gloriously attractive.

For a good two hours, neither of them thought of the Hollower, of getting high or losing weight or flashing cop lights or cruel teasing teenage boys and unkind names, or of anything else except being with each other, close to each other, in each other’s arms. They touched and kissed, delighting in discovering those places that made the other gasp or breathe heavily, and later, in discovering each
other’s rhythms and feeling like they belonged to each other. They felt alive, protected from the Hollower so long as that connection between them remained unbroken. And when they were done, Jake held on to her like he would never let go. They fell asleep like that, tangled arms and legs and wet skin drying pleasantly cool.

It was the first night in a while that Dorrie felt safe and maybe the first night ever that she felt good enough for someone else. And although she didn’t know it then, it was the first night in longer than Jake could remember that he slept easily and soundly, without bad dreams.

It took many lightenings and darkenings of their world before it had found the child-meat they called Sean. He lived outside of the Secondary’s hunting ground, and the Primary had found that child-meats were far more resilient in some ways than those who had marinated in their Fears and Insecurities well into adulthood. Therefore, he appeared blurred in its perception, much like the oddity called “baby” inside the meat called DeMarco’s shell.

This did not mean it couldn’t hurt him. It could get to him, given time.

But that would have to come later. The other meats had plans that demanded its immediate attention.

Still, it would make the child-meat feel its presence.

It gave him a terrible nightmare about big red bug-filled shells that floated on strings, a whole roomful of them, and a decaying figure known to Sean as “Dad.” It rubbed out the dad’s face, as a reminder.

Sean remembered. He awoke and spent the rest of the darkening with his room filled with light.

Satisfied, it pulled back and waited for the next darkening. When the others were destroyed, it would come back for the child-meat and kill him, too.

Early the next day, Steve had brunch with Eileen, who was up from Trenton on another case and had stopped in to say hello. She didn’t have much to add to Sally Kohlar’s case except that she’d died from a severed spinal cord and head and neck injuries. She confirmed that the blood that formed the word on the wall was in fact Sally’s, and that given the nature of her injuries, she could not have smeared it herself. This was confirmed by the fact that there was no trace of blood on Sally’s fingertips and no skin or anything else to indicate a finger had smeared the word onto the wall.

“Meaning what?” Steve stirred Splenda into his coffee.

Eileen shrugged. “Glove, maybe, although the blood layer is thin and there just isn’t a seam mark, a brush stroke, a stray fiber, a layer of epithelials, or a fingerprint anywhere. Not a breath of a clue as to who made those marks, or how. It’s almost like the blood just flew up onto the wall and flowed into a pattern of letters.” She laughed and sipped her coffee.

He couldn’t quite return a laugh with ease. But he wasn’t really surprised. He figured the Hollower hadn’t
really touched Sally’s blood at all—couldn’t, maybe. But it could have made the blood move. The thought made him feel a little sick around the edges.

Eileen handed the Kohlar file to him. Sally Kohlar had been a delicate little woman, and even minor stresses on her system had effects that wouldn’t have registered with a normal body. Steve looked at the pictures, seeing the family resemblance between her and her brother in the blonde hair, the gray-blue eyes, the haunting shadow that never quite left the cheeks. But Dave was sturdier, hearty in spite of his evident drinking problem. Sally had been a wisp, a fragment of that health.

After lunch, he’d thanked Eileen and gone back to the station. That’s when Bennie found him.

Bennie looked tired and angry. But when he saw Steve in the locker room, he lunged at him, pushing him up against a locker.

“Man, I told you to leave it alone. I told you.”

Steve tried to loosen Bennie’s grip on his neck. He managed to splutter a choked, “Wha-whaha?”

“She says you woke it up.” Bennie eased up on his neck. When he spoke again, the faint Hispanic accent and the utter exhaustion tinted his words. “Some kind of…I don’t know, some kind of monster, a
monstruo
that eats souls or something. She thinks it came after her. It’s crazy talk, the same fucking crazy talk in the files you asked me about the other day. I told you she was excitable. Impressionable.”

Steve gave Bennie a little shove, not hard enough to elicit fresh anger, but hard enough to put some space
between them. Mendez’s implication was clear. “Bennie, I swear I didn’t talk to her. I know she’s got enough going on. I wouldn’t involve her in any of this. Is she…okay? What happened?”

Bennie pressed his palms to his temples, as if trying to wait out the pain of a headache. Still, though, his eyes remained fixed on Steve. “I just got back from the hospital. I came home last night, and she was bleeding. Crying. Thought she’d lost the baby.”

“How—”

Bennie held out a hand for him to shut up. “There was blood on the floor, Corimar. I saw it. Blood all over her sweat pants. Blood on her hands. But it was gone when we got to the hospital. All of it. Like it had never been there. And she kept mumbling about it, about the voices in her head telling her it had killed the baby, that her body wasn’t strong enough to hold it, that the baby wasn’t strong enough to live. It was dead inside her, dissolving into poison right inside her. That it was gone, stolen. All night long like that. All night, man.” And Mendez mumbled a word.

“Bennie, I’m sorry, I—” Then it sank in, what Mendez had called him. He pulled away from the angry officer, hands outstretched in a “hold up there and just wait a sec” kind of way, and inched out from between Mendez and the locker. “W-What did you call me?” A distinct unease made his heart beat faster, and he felt heat creeping up his neck to his cheeks.

Bennie glared at him. “What are you, deaf, too? I said, ‘all night, man.’ I didn’t call you anything.” From his
expression, he honestly didn’t seem to know what Steve had meant. He didn’t pause long on the subject; instead, he launched into a monologue of half English, half Spanish about how he didn’t know what, exactly, was going on, but pregnant-lady rantings about boogeymen that ate babies right out from between their mother’s legs and babysitting new detectives who wanted to go play ghost hunter amounted to too much crazy talk on top of twelve-hour shifts. He slammed his locker closed and stormed out of the locker room.

Steve just stood there, shaken up and a little scared.

Maricón
. He’d been sure Bennie had called him that. And he was pretty sure it meant something like “faggot.” Still, there had been a different quality to his voice when he’d said it, something musical but off-key, something disturbingly multiple. Real or imagined, Steve didn’t like that numbing chill and that helpless shock that followed in the wake of Bennie Mendez’s departure. He looked after the empty door through which Bennie had exited.

If he said anything to the other guys—

If they heard…

Steve kept his head down the rest of the day.

They were coming.

In the collected expanses of what they called time, it had seen its world shrivel and dry up, crack open and bleed out all life and vibrancy, just as it had seen the shells and the minds of countless weak and wounded do the same. It had filled the air of a darkening with the
wails of the dying, like a canopy blocking out the be-yondlights. It had invaded subsewer holes and deep wells and boxy chambers without cutouts or portals, and it drew all the oppressive Panic and Pain in and out of the cowering shells that occupied them until they exploded in a showy display of Insanity.

Never before, though, had the prospect of devouring the Despair of meats ever excited it so much. Its arrival in this dimension had been shrouded in disgust, but it had come to find what it was about these meats that made its Secondary stake out their world as its hunting ground.

They were capable of more complex thought than some of those in other dimensions, but not so complex as to present impervious mindshells. They were succulent in their misplaced emotions, skewed thoughts, and slanted perceptions. Their insecurities came in such abundance and variety. And their shells were easy to punch through. Theirs was a world of possibility.

But that was not for now. For now was simply to destroy the foremost meats, the Intended. It would have them all in one place, one captive place, and it would do things to them. Delicious things.

In the Convergence, where the nothingness ate all lower senses, it pulsed
zshsian
. It the world of the Intended meats, that would have translated into
sound
, a crude and base approximation for the capability of a Self to express. The Secondary had called out to the Likekind as it lay dying, and the meats had thought of the
zshsian
as a “siren.” A sound.

It pulsed
zshsian
again. The voids churned inside it, but the discomfort was eclipsed by its excitement.

They were coming. And it would be ready for them.

 Standing in the quad of Oak Hill Assisted Living made Steve feel nettled all over again. The anxious lean of the buildings pressing in what should have felt like open air and space, the self-conscious gray stone, everything. He couldn’t imagine how anyone felt safe and happy there. Every time he took in the height of the rough gray walls, the sharp corners of the boxy buildings, and the sea-sickening undulation of the hills, he felt ill and a little dizzy. It seemed as perfect a place as any for a monster to live.

In doing a perimeter of the place, he had discovered a back entrance to the quad where two wings of the buildings met perpendicularly, a chain-link gate to enter through, or more likely, to exit from in case of emergency or fire. The quad itself was quiet. He couldn’t shake the feeling that like the inhabitants, even the buildings and benches and the grass itself were sleeping and oblivious to his presence. So oblivious, maybe, that no amount of banging on doors or screaming up at the buildings would bring any kind of help running…

It was a stupid, paranoid thought. He checked the time on his watch (it was just about 10 p.m.) and then crossed the quad to the catacomb door, aware of the rustle of his footsteps in the grass and the feel of the night wind blowing past his bare arms. He repressed a shiver.

Since the scene had already been processed, he’d
made a quick phone call to Henry Pollock, the administrator of Oak Hill Assisted Living, who had been accommodating enough (“
Sure, officer, feel free to drop by
any time. Tonight, if you’re so inclined. What ever you need to
resolve this tragedy
…”), whether to avoid the trouble of a warrant or the extra publicity of police activity. He’d given Steve full rein to look around.

One problem solved, at least.

Although Pollock told him he’d wait around to let him in, Steve didn’t want to encourage him hanging around. The supervising officer of the Kohlar investigation had been given a key to and a map of the catacombs. In the event that Pollock couldn’t stick around, having the police copy of the key and that map would mean one less obstacle to overcome. Steve hadn’t asked for either or signed them out. He’d found them in their respective envelopes in the board room, where the detectives met to go over charts and graphs and photo displays pertaining to cases, and he’d just slipped the key and the folded map into his pockets right after his shift. He was fairly sure no one saw, and that mattered to him. He wasn’t one to go against rules; he never had been. He thrived on structure and the sense of security derived from order. He’d felt like the key was burning a hole right through his pants the whole way out of the station, and on the drive over to Oak Hill, he kept expecting Shirley’s voice to break in over the radio and ask him to return what he’d taken.

But standing there in front of the catacomb door, his hand in the pocket with the key, feeling the smooth brass neck of it, he felt like he’d done something good—or at
the very least inevitable. Sometimes sacrifices had to be made, he told himself, so that others could be saved. If bending the rules meant he could uphold a greater good, he was willing to accept that.

He checked his watch again. They were late. He hoped nothing was wrong.

“Excuse me, uh…excuse me there. Hi, there. Yes, I see you’ve made it.”

Steve turned at the sound of the voice. A dark-haired man in glasses and a neatly pressed suit and white coat had closed most of the distance of the quad between him and the main doors of the building. He recognized the man as Henry Pollock, the administrator at Oak Hill. When Steve first had gone down into the catacombs to investigate Sally Kohlar’s crime scene, Pollock had been there, a small man in smart clothes, explaining liability and accessibility to the supervising officer with careful, quiet, even-toned speech.

Nothing about Pollock initially struck Steve as threatening, or even easily excitable, but an air of confrontation preceded Pollock as his purposeful strides brought him to the catacomb door.

“I see you’ve made it back,” he repeated with the slightest tinny twinge of annoyance.

“Yes, and thank you for allowing me to poke around, Mr. Pollock. I’m just here to give the Kohlar crime scene another once over, to look into a few things down there that may help me put some of these pieces together. I apologize for not stopping in the office first. It didn’t seem worth disturbing you, since we had a key and all.” He produced the brass item from his pocket
and offered the doctor a smile that he thought reflected unquestionable authority as well as amiable confidence.
No questions need to be asked and no paperwork needs to be
done, thank you. Just take a hike
. He chanced a quick look down at his watch and hoped Dave and the others would have enough common sense to lay low until Pollock disappeared.

“Well, thank you for the phone call. I have to say, though, that I expected you earlier. I was just about to leave for the eve ning, when I got a call from Sherman, my security man on nights. We have a camera that surveys the grounds here, and you almost gave poor old Sherman in the security room a heart attack. Things are usually quiet here, and I suppose it slipped my mind, letting him know to be on the lookout for you.” The doctor chuckled, and Steve tried to volley back a light laugh, too, but he was worried about the others. The security camera might cause a problem for them to get in unseen. He hoped Jake would think enough to check for one.

“Oh, allow me at least to open up for you. And then, please do take your time and feel free to roam about. Sally was like family to us, so we want done everything that needs to be done.” The mild, modulated tone of his speaking voice was there, and the expression on his face placid. Maybe Steve had imagined the confrontational air about him. He seemed fine now. “I do hope you find everything you’ve coming looking for.”

“Well, thanks. I’m hoping it will be a productive evening.”

As he drew close, Pollock slowed before a big red
rubber ball on the grass, which Steve assumed had been left over from some recreational game of kickball or something. Instead of sidestepping it, though, the doctor gave it a savage kick out of the way that launched it against the wall near the door. It popped when it hit the gray stone near Steve’s feet. It left a black starburst pattern down near the ground, a sticky sort of stuff that quivered when it hit and then stayed put.

Steve frowned. The doctor was speaking to him, but he hadn’t been listening, something about his work on the force—

“—as strong looking as you. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in even say, the last fifteen, twenty years. I guess that’s maybe why they overlooked you being a queer, is that it?”

Steve’s head snapped back to the doctor. “Excuse me?”

The doctor, facing the door, had his back to Steve, but he reached into his pocket to produce a key to the lock. Steve didn’t know how he’d missed Pollock’s black gloves.