Found You (9 page)

“Davey, help me. It’s hurting me.”

He took a step up. Another. His feet carried him up. He paused once, glancing down at where he’d been and beyond it to the front door.

He could leave, just get out now and—

“Davey, please.”

He could hear crying now, muffled as if into a pillow, coming from the bedroom. His bedroom. It took all his willpower not to run—either to the crying or away from it.

Moving down the hallway, though, the crying got worse. To Dave, it sounded as if whoever was crying was being choked off at the throat by the tears, gurgling in phlegm and salt water, a wet, chunky sound that made his hands feel cold as he clenched and unclenched them. He came within view of the bedroom door threshold. The light was on. He peered in.

There, on the bed, lying face down, was Sally. He recognized the fragile form, the almost clear porcelain of the pale arms, the thin, limp blonde hair the color of yellow crayons.

A tight lump formed in his chest. It felt like a black
hole grew inside him, pulling his lungs, his heart, even his ribs toward it, crushing them.

“Sally.” The word came out weak, brittle, and the form on the bed responded to it with a tiny shiver. Dave could still hear the sobbing, but the pillows and blankets, which were tangled haphazardly on the bed, muffled it.

Dave stepped into the room. Hot tears blurred her for a minute, and he blinked them away. “Sally?”

He got up close to the bed and looked down on her. Her arms were wrapped around her head, her legs sprawled out on the comforter. He reached out to her, his hand sinking slowly close to her as if through some thick liquid.

Sally’s body suddenly jerked, and a loud crack, like the breaking of a chicken bone, made Dave flinch.

Her hip looked wrong, twisted in a terribly wrong way and separated from her body. Her arm flung out with another awful crack, the bottom half snapping so far the wrong way that her wrist touched the back of her shoulder. The bone that should have fit snugly and comfortably at her elbow protruded from the split skin, and blood so dark it was almost black dripped from the hole off the side of the bed, soaking a small puddle on the rug.

Dave recoiled in horror, squeezing his eyes shut and then opening them, hoping against all he knew and felt that this was some alcohol-induced hallucination, a delirium tremens, maybe, that had finally caught up with him.

She was still there. The other arm flung away from the face, and the fist opened, jetting teeth in a tinkling spray against the far wall of the room. Dave watched as
her leg broke and twisted itself up in impossible contortions so that the side of her ankle touched one of her shoulder blades.

Dave thought for a moment he might be sick. He swallowed hard several times, sinking toward the floor.

Sally’s neck cracked, and her head pushed up off the bed, off the pillow, until it almost touched her broken foot. Blood stained her hair a dark pink. The hair fell away from her face, but Dave couldn’t bring himself to get up off the floor, to look at her.

The broken body that looked something like Sally twitched, and with jerking movements, turned on the bed to face Dave, the head righting itself to look at him, dangling awkwardly on the broken neck. Bloody pits watched him vacantly, any sense of eyes gouged out. Beneath that, a broken nose dribbled blackish blood, and lipless torn-up flesh where the mouth should have been twisted into a sneer.

“You’re gonna die, Davey. Just like me. It’s going to kill you, too, all of you. It wants you dead, dead, dead. Remember? It’s ageless, and it won’t die.”

Dave tried to speak, but only air passed over dry lips. He swallowed and tried again. “It did die. We killed it.”

The torn flesh pulled itself into a frown, and the brow crinkled. “No, Dave. It hurt me. You left me alone and it hurt me. Look what it did to me.” It moved the stiff, broken arm with a grinding groan that Dave felt deep in the meat of him. Then it twisted the torn-up flesh of the mouth into a smile. Teeth like metal shavings filed to points glinted in the glow of the bedroom lamp on the night table. “The Secondary wasn’t
alone. And this one—this one—will see every one of you cracked open. Every one of you broken.”

“You’re not Sally.” It was a lame thing to say, impotent and painfully obvious, but a part of Dave was already shutting down, already unable to swallow everything that was happening. Talking, saying anything, was allowing him to hold on, to focus on conscious functioning. Behind the empty words, behind his eyes, which blurred in and out of focus, his reason and security were crumbling.

Can’t be, can’t be, we killed it. We killed that one and the
others left and we were done. We were safe. We were supposed
to be free and this can’t be, it couldn’t have found us, it can’t
hurt us because we were supposed to be okay
—

“You’re not okay,” the Sally-thing said, reading his thoughts. All the color bled from its face, and the blood of the wounds where the facial features should have been faded as well. The face itself, as if it were made of hot wax, melted off the head, dribbling in pale corpse-gray rivers down the neck and staining the nightgown with a kind of sallow stain. Dave turned his head away.

“Found you.”

The horror of the words, the memories it brought back of that night at Feinstein’s house, made him turn back to the figure on the bed.

It sat upright, restored and straightened out on the tangled covers, looking so much like the other Hollower that every nerve in Dave’s body sang with fear. The black fedora hat, the long black trench coat, the black clothes beneath, devoid of marking or distinction, the black gloves, the black shoes that, although appearing to be planted firmly on the carpet, never actually
touched any part of this world. And the bald white orb of the head, luminous, smooth and unbroken by anything even remotely resembling a face.

It leaned forward on its knees. “Found you.”

Then it exploded in a cloud of dust and ash. Dave squinted, shielded his face from the spray, but the light snow of gray never touched him. He opened his eyes and surveyed the room.

The Hollower—this new Hollower—was gone.

Dave looked around the room. Everything seemed okay, except…

The hole. There was a hole in the wall, tilted slightly down, as if sinking into the depths of the house itself. He rose slowly, falling once on shaky legs, and crossed the room. Peering deep into the hole, he saw an endless darkness that reminded him vaguely of the night sky over Feinstein’s house. And as he watched, there was a low rumbling. He had just enough time to throw up his arm to shield his face before a spray of pain knocked him on his back in the center of the room. When he looked down, he saw shards of the broken wall embedded in his arm. He looked up at the hole, and it was gone. The wall stood perfectly smooth. But there was a word there, carved into the drywall. And where the cuts in the wall appeared, a black ooze coagulated in the crevice.

DIE

Then that faded, too. Dave shut his eyes, sinking onto the carpet with the shards of wall still in his arm, possessed of a horrible idea. This one was different. It was
stronger. It didn’t have to touch him to hurt him, and…it knew tricks the other didn’t. It knew different ways to use his own world against him. And it very much meant to see them all dead, perhaps with a drive and an ability even the other Hollower, in all its terrible power, didn’t have.

Tomorrow he’d call Erik. But to night, he was tired. Too tired. He fell asleep where he lay and didn’t—couldn’t—move a limb until morning.

It was downtime between shifts, and Shirley was out getting the morning guys’ coffee. Sitting there at his desk, the light dawn casting shadow in the relatively quiet headquarters, Steve frowned over the files on his desk.

He would have thought, based on what he’d seen in the jails downstairs a few days ago, that the stress of being promoted to detective sergeant and the morbid strangeness of his most recent hom i cide case were affecting him mentally and emotionally, affecting his judgment. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a police officer. Maybe he didn’t have the intestinal fortitude for it. Maybe there was something unbalanced in his brain, something that ran in the family (“
Your father’s right
…”) that made him prone to seeing things, to hearing things. Maybe (“
Boys
…
people like you, they can’t be cops. It isn’t right, son. They’d
never accept
…”) his parents were right. Maybe guys like him (“
Son, if they found out
…”) really weren’t cut out for police work.

That under-part of his thoughts was bullshit. He knew it—intellectually and in his heart, he knew it. Maybe thirty years ago, when his uncle worked for the
Bloomwood County Prosecutor’s Office, maybe then people would have thought that his being gay would make him a bad police officer. Hell, maybe some people might think it now. But even at four years old Steve had been tottering after his speeding Tonka trucks, wearing his uncle’s police hat, giving tickets to his teddy bears, and having shoot-outs behind the big easy chair, long before anything about sexuality mattered. Letting closed-minded homophobes hinder him from doing a job he thought he could do and do well just didn’t seem like an option.

Especially if no one had to know. He was a cop before he was…anything else.

But his being stress-crazy…maybe that was bullshit, too. Maybe. Sure it was. The files proved it. He’d found them shoved at the bottom of one of Detective DeMarco’s desk drawers.

When he’d gotten to one labeled “Feinstein, Maxwell—Suicide,” Bennie Mendez had swooped down out of nowhere, it seemed, and snatched the file out of his hand.

“Anita never was good about the filing,” Mendez had said in an almost apologetic tone, and, not seeming to know what else to say—or maybe, afraid Steve would ask questions—he turned on his heel and walked back to his desk. Steve had seen that he locked the file in his own bottom desk drawer and pocketed the key, glancing up once to offer Steve what he seemed to hope was a nonchalant grin.

Steve didn’t ask questions. He was new, but he was aware that some things were strictly need-to-know police
matters. You had to earn your way into the information, if you ever got to have it at all.

But the other files, the ones that had been rubber-banded with the Feinstein file, Steve still had. Some instinct dictated that just for shits and giggles he ought to leave them be in the bottom drawer until Mendez and his partner, that Italian guy, left for the day. But now there was a lull, and no one was around, so he pulled them out to look at them.

The first was a hom i cide, a woman named Debbie Henshaw from Plainfield, who’d been killed up in Lake Hopatcong, house-sitting at her sister’s place. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and stomach, and most of the skin of her face had been removed. Someone had gouged out her eyes and filled the sockets with the ashes of burnt paper. She’d been a pretty young girl, freckled and blonde and small-boned.

The mess in the pictures barely looked human.

A neighbor had found her with half of her white blouse torn off. Someone carved a word into the pale skin beneath her breasts. Very much like the case of the missing guy and the strips of skin that spelled out HOL. And exactly like the Kohlar case, with the word HOLLOW written in blood….

Good God
. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

He flipped open another file. A woman named Savannah Carrington had been found dead on her back patio with several shards of glass in her neck, arms, torso, and legs. The impossible odd angles of some of the shards indicated a hom i cide rather than a suicide.
People didn’t stab themselves in the back, down to the spinal cord. The report indicated the police searched both her front yard and back yard and the neighboring properties to either side but found nothing significant other than a cracked (but unbroken) glass table from one of the neighbors’ patios. Yet there were huge pieces of glass in her face, chest, back, and abdomen. Glass glittered all over the lawn, glass glinted up from the bottom of the in-ground swimming pool. The photo in the file showed her slumped against the sliding glass door, her nightgown splattered with blood. Sticky puddles of blood—not quite foot-or handprints, but vaguely and eerily reminiscent of them—formed a haphazard halo around her. The door against which her bloody cheek was pressed was intact; smeared in blood on the large pane of glass above her head were two words.

“My face.” It wasn’t exactly the same kind of message as the others, but…

But wait. Something
…

Steve frowned, spreading the photos of Carrington, Henshaw, Kohlar, and Peters. The photo of Peters’ bedroom showed a mirror in the corner of the picture, just a sliver of it, reflecting the bed and a black fedora on it. Steve scanned the report again, but there was no mention of a hat on the bed or anywhere else in the room. He squinted at the picture of Carrington’s back yard. Again, reflected in the glass of the sliding glass door, a blackish shape very much like a hat sat on the grass a few feet away from the body. And again, Steve searched the report for a mention of it in the scene and found nothing.

He let out a long, slow breath, and with the emptying of his lungs, there rushed in a horrible realization, a connection staggering in its implication.

The thing in the jail cell downstairs, that freakish faceless figure that had threatened him and stolen his gun, had worn a hat. A black fedora. Like in the pictures.

He closed the files slowly and looked up and around the office with a kind of new awareness and the half-formed idea that maybe he’d get caught.

Caught? Doing what, going over old cold cases? What’s
wrong with that? Nothing. Nothing at all
.

But it felt wrong. It felt to Steve like the information contained in those files was a secret meant only for the cops from Lakehaven, the cops born and bred there.

Which was stupid. He was a part of the police force at Lakehaven. If he discovered something that might break a case, something like, say, a black fedora, then wasn’t it his obligation to investigate?

And what are you going to tell them
? the little voice in his head asked accusingly.
Gonna tell them that the boogeyman
in the black hat made all your bad guys disappear from
their jail cells, just so he could tease you about being gay?
Gonna take that right to the chief, are you? How about telling
him that after it threatened to see you dead, it just disappeared
from a secure jail cell itself
?

Steve slid the files under a stack of papers on his desk, feeling a little sick. Just beneath the surface of fully formulated thoughts, he was only vaguely aware that it couldn’t be work-stress hallucination if there really was a connection to these other cases. Not unless they all suffered from the same mental twitch.

It obviously hadn’t worked out well for them. But Steve didn’t think too hard about what that meant for him.

Shirley poked her head into the station room then and said, “Steve, hon? Someone here wants to report something. Intruder. I’m going to send her back to you. Cool?”

“Sure.”

A minute or two after that, a woman came through the doors, clutching a purse. She had a smooth, soft face with large eyes and a pretty bow of a mouth, and she hovered just to the left of being a bit more than full-figured. Steve supposed she struck him so because of the way she moved—a practiced, almost stiff kind of gait that didn’t bend too far in either direction, that was carefully reigned in to avoid jiggle. It reminded him so much of a girl he’d known in college, one who’d explained why she sat a certain way, or posed a certain way for pictures, how the tilt of a head could minimize the look of multiple chins and a turn of the hips deemphasize their wideness. That discomfort, that lack of freedom of movement, this woman possessed in every step.

Carefully, she sat down on the chair on the other side of Steve’s desk.

“Hello, ma’am. My name is Detective Corimar. What can I do for you this morning?”

Her eyes swept the room before she settled on his face. “Well, I…I wanted to…okay, well my name is Dorothy Weatherin. Dorrie. And I…I guess I wanted to…” She stopped.

“Ms. Weatherin? Is everything okay?”

Her expression struck him as odd—soft, like her face, but running a series of thoughts. Finally she said, “I think it wants to hurt me.”

“Who? Who wants to hurt you?”

“I don’t know what it is. It isn’t anyone I know. In fact, I’m not sure it’s a person. I mean, it told me it wanted to kill me at the lake. And it kind of seemed like a person then. And then last night, in my fridge—” She studied his face for a minute, and her expression seemed to fall off her face. She looked utterly deflated. “Oh for chrissakes, I sound like a lunatic. I knew this wouldn’t do any good.”

“Ma’am, maybe you should start at the beginning. I’m a little confused. Now you say someone threatened you?”

“I don’t know if it’s someone or something. I see it sometimes. I hear it. It’s cruel, and it knows about me.”

“So…someone is stalking you?”

“I don’t think—I don’t know.” She looked flustered, confused.

“But you’re sure it wants to hurt you?”

She seemed to mistake his tone (and perhaps the expression on his face that his slow-dawning recognition formed) as doubt, maybe even derision. She got up. “I’m sorry for wasting your time. It—it was a mistake to come here. I’m sorry. Sorry.”

“Wait, Ms. Weatherin,” Steve said, rising. “If someone’s trying to hurt you, you did the right thing in coming here, but I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me. Please—”

“You can’t help me anyway,” she said softly, and she moved with a quick grace across the room. He began to follow her.

“I can if you’ll just wait a minute and explain this to me. What did this person look like? Can you describe height? Weight? Distinguishing features?”

At this she stopped without turning around and laughed. “Well,” she said, and her voice sounded hysterically on the verge of tears. “It sounded like my mother.”

And with that, she was out the door, leaving Steve dumbfounded in the middle of a just about empty station room, wondering what the hell her scant descriptions meant exactly. On the heels of that morning’s file contents and his own unsettling experiences downstairs, he didn’t like the sound of any of it.

When Erik saw Jake later that morning at the rec center, he was struck by how tired his sponsee looked. Bone tired, exhausted to the marrow. Erik remembered those days. He’d had many mornings where his whole body ached, even his scalp and fingertips, where his skin hurt to touch.

He’d wanted so badly to get high back then that the ache wore him out.

And that was before the Hollower…

Erik used to call it the Jones in a hat. He’d been convinced that seeing it was a bad trip, some weird side effect of his newfound sobriety. But then Cheryl had seen it, and Dave, and Sean and Max and DeMarco…

He worried about Jake. It had crossed his mind more
than once that if Hollowers could sense one’s insecurities, one’s fears about oneself, all the skewed perceptions and screwed up ways of thinking, then people like Jake (and people like him) were easy targets. Sitting ducks, really, bundled in jittery nerves and cluttered minds and weakened bodies.

But they’d killed it, like Dave said, and that was it. Out of sight, out of mind.

If he asked…if Jake mentioned a faceless figure in a black hat and coat…

He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The chances had to be like getting hit with lightning. Of all the billions of fucked-up people in the world, there was no reason at all to think a Hollower would target the same fucked-up guy twice, or even any poor fool associated with him by common bond of sworn sobriety. It wouldn’t get Jake through him. Couldn’t. Erik was better. And Jake…well, he was getting there. Getting there slowly but surely.

Nevertheless, Erik frowned as Jake shuffled up to him with the last inch or so of a cigarette dangling between his fingers. He handed Jake a cup of straight black coffee, steaming hot and faintly metallic from overbrewing, in one of the cheap foam cups they had downstairs for refreshments. Jake took it gratefully and sipped at it through dry lips.

“You okay, J?” Erik asked him. “Everything going okay at home?”

Jake smiled, and the shadow of truth flickered in his eyes before he lied. “Sure, man. Everything’s cool. Just not…sleeping well lately.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

Jake shook his head, looking down into his coffee. He dropped the butt of the smoke onto the ground and crushed it with small, thoughtful crescents beneath the toe of his boot. “Just bad dreams. Nothing. Nothing worth the effort.”

Erik nodded, deciding not to press the issue. “Well, you know if you want someone to talk to…” As an afterthought he added on impulse, “Whatever you’ve got going on, I know I’d understand. I’ve been through a lot myself, J. Really, really strange shit.”

The last part got a reaction, albeit subtle, from his sponsee. He raised an eyebrow at Erik and seemed about to ask something or say something, but then closed his mouth and offered a weak attempt at a grin. “Strange shit. Yeah.”

Erik felt the beginnings of dread in his gut, lead-lining him and making him feel heavy, even poisoned. Jake knew. Something—something more was going on than Jake was telling him. And he hoped to God that whatever weird shit it was, it wasn’t the Hollower.

Instead of asking, he said, “Part of recovery, man. The good, the bad, the strange, the dark, and the downright dirty, right?”