Found You (22 page)

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 catacomb 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.

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.

It meant to have other Hollowers pour through, just like what he’d seen on his television that night. It occurred to Dave that, unlike the other Hollower, this one wasn’t willing to risk death just for sustenance. This one wanted vengeance, and it was willing to give up its meats just to see them all destroyed.

Its thought-answer felt like a sharp pain behind his eye.
No. You’re mine. The others will come and destroy everyone
that any of you have ever loved, everyone connected to
you, everyone whose lives you’ve ever touched. They will find
ways to hunt them all down and wipe them all out. Any trace
that you all ever existed, and any ripple outward through your
Likekind, mine will obliterate
.

From the looks on the others’ faces, he knew that they had heard this, too, in their heads.

“You can’t do that,” Dave said out loud.

“Yes, I can,” it told him. “I can make it like you never were at all.” And it giggled again, high-pitched and manic.

Dave felt all the guilt, the frustration, the anger—everything he couldn’t do for Sally, everything he couldn’t be for Cheryl—all of it, and something snapped inside him. His whole body felt hot and tingly, a pins-and-needles sensation of getting the feeling back in a limb that has fallen asleep. His vision blurred a little and grew white around the edges, like he was going to faint, but he knew he wasn’t; he’d never felt so strong, so alive. He’d never felt so powerful. So in control. He knew that no matter what happened, however it all
turned out, no feeling in the world would ever be able to top this one moment.

Dave knew the Hollower wasn’t going to hurt any more of his friends. Simply, he wouldn’t let it.

Dave not only saw but also felt the Hollower, which, poised with confidence on the edge of the rip, awaited its kin. He felt its anticipated triumph, its hate, and Dave’s own senses, particularly the ones above and beyond his basic five, sang with energy. A bellow of rage and determination rose up from the soul of him, the marrow of his bones, the blood in his veins.

No
.

He remembered seeing the Hollower he’d killed stringing up his sister in its barbs and whips, a thing they’d made physical, ugly, weak. He remembered thinking deep down that he couldn’t save her, that he never had been able to save her, and the sheer rage toward the beast that was hurting her. And toward himself, for not knowing how to have protected her in the first place.

A low, quick sound, like a horn that hasn’t actually fully realized its tone, the sense of a sound about to crescendo, stirred the air. It was coming from the rip. Somehow, it was more horrible a sound than growling or screaming or crying, because it suggested what was to come. It meant they were coming, and the very notion of a thousand or even a hundred Hollowers, hell the thought of even one more of them coming through that rip was absolutely unbearable.

No
.

He didn’t know if he’d ever been much good to anyone in his life, but he’d be damned if he didn’t at least
try to stop it. It would not, would
never
so long as he breathed hurt another one of his friends again. The sentiment was a pull, undeniable, useless to fight against, and he let it sweep him up in its intensity.

No
.

He charged the Hollower head on, tackling it with arms gripped around the torso, and for just a moment, he expected to fall straight through it, like passing through smoke, and into the rip, down, down into the blackness beyond. But he connected with something, not quite solid, but not exactly lacking substance, either.

Like a torrent of blood
was the thought that came into his mind. It felt like hitting a wall of something, a liquid surface that the image of thickening blood seemed to capture just right.

They both tumbled backward, back through the rip and into the dark, he and the Primary, the Hollower, struggling in his grasp. He could see just enough to make out both himself and the monster, as if they were illuminated from within, but nothing beyond.

Then the cold started in on him. It felt like freezer burn on the places where his exposed skin made contact with the Hollower’s body. The cloth of his shirt against his chest felt stiff, uncomfortable, even painful. The Hollower struggled against him, looking to Dave to be worse off than he was. Where Dave touched it, it rippled and even vibrated as if caught in a terribly strong and concentrated wind. He could feel nothing but the cold, and yet, somehow, he could sense where the forces pressing against the Hollower came from—the volatile, the unstable, the ever unbalanced vacuums inside it.

Dave shivered, the cold sinking so low into his body that it made him numb and heavy. He found it difficult to move at all, to even blink, and eventually the shivering slowed and stopped, too. So did the pain. He felt insubstantial, less
there
. Dave, whose body was never meant for a place in between dimensions, could, however, still feel the shuddering of the beast in his arms, and with the last of his strength, he let it go.

It drifted away from him in their free fall. It wailed, a siren sound he’d heard once before from the depths of another Hollower, a death-wail that only by the sheer power of it carried at all through the nothingness around them. Then, whatever unstable vacuum was inside it punched through—around the middle, where Dave’s arms had been, a blackness several shades deeper than the nothing-space around them, darker than anything Dave had ever seen, sucked at the Hollower’s pretended clothes, its pretended form, and pulled them into itself.

The wail crescendoed for several moments while it struggled, and then the Primary Hollower simply winked out of existence. Its death siren carried for a few seconds after that, and then it, too, faded out.

It was not just a matter of there never having been corporeal bodies in this place. There could be no physicality there. Dave was sure of that. His solidness, his realness, had polluted the Hollower. And now he could feel that solidness unraveling and dissolving all over. It didn’t hurt. In fact, it didn’t feel much like anything at all.

Dave smiled—or at least, that was the sentiment behind
the movement, although he was past the point of knowing or caring whether he’d been successful in achieving it. He had a moment to wonder where he’d go once he winked out of existence, too, and then he thought of Sally, waiting.

He’d fixed it. He’d fixed all of it.
Not bad, Kohlar.
Not bad
.

Then, with perhaps the only truly contended exhalation of breath in his entire adult life, Dave Kohlar faded out of being, too.

Dorrie screamed when Dave made contact with the Hollower and watched in horror as they stumbled backward, locked in hate, and fell through the rip.

It sealed up behind them with a faint pop that the cavernous walls of the catacombs bounced back and forth above their heads.

Dorrie, Erik, Jake, and Steve half ran, half limped (and in Steve’s case, was half dragged) to the spot where the rip had been, feeling the air with outstretched hands, hoping to grab some part of Dave still left in this world.

But he was gone.

Dorrie’s tears came fast and heavy, her sobs echoing on the heels of their movements. Jake pulled her close and held her, blinking and finally wiping the blood out of his eye. Erik sank to the ground beside Steve, both of them stunned and in too much pain to stand. With effort, Steve clapped a hand on Erik’s shoulder, and for a moment, he thought he would crumble beneath the modest weight of it. Erik did buckle a little but remained upright.

“He did a brave thing,” Steve said softly. “Sally would have been proud. His girl Cheryl, too.”

Erik didn’t turn to look at him. In fact, he didn’t move at all. Steve didn’t think Erik heard him until his words, thick, saturated with the heavy threat of tears, drifted back over the clapped shoulder.

“For once, I hope he was proud of himself. He should have been.”

“You’re talking about him like he’s…” Dorrie broke off and buried her face in Jake’s shoulder.

“He’s dead,” Erik said in that same thick tone, a certain note of inarguable sureness in it that left the others silent. “Him, and that thing with him.” He rose, offering Steve a hand to get up. “It’s done now.”