The Hollower (24 page)

The tunnel had a dank, chemical smell, metallic in her throat. She became aware of the sudden absence of the dripping, and stopped to glance back. Cheryl hadn’t heard the door behind them close and wasn’t completely sure it had, but the dark stretched its legs
out behind them, the empty room from which they’d come now lost.

Cheryl reached out in front of her with the nail gun. A flash of purple from below drew her attention. The floor had fallen away from a platform on which they now stood. Far beneath it, blackness swirled in blackness, drawing thin streams of red downward like a drain. Cheryl cried out, momentarily unsteady on the platform, and Sean squeezed her hand. She could feel its heat, the sweat of his palm, even the light, quick beat of his pulse in his wrist.

“Don’t look down,” he whispered. Cheryl nodded, even though she doubted he could see, and fixed her attention ahead of her. Reaching out the hand with the nail gun again, she inched forward.

The muzzle of the nail gun eventually brushed with something hard and she exhaled a surprised “Oh!” and accidentally discharged a nail with a small, sharp bang. She felt ahead and determined it to be a length of rough wood. Further search yielded a cold metal knob. She turned it and stepped into a closet. Sean packed in after her. A lightbulb like a bulging eye gazed down at them from the low ceiling, its rusty chain grazing her shoulder. A brass bar ran across the length of the closet about level with her neck, and musty, ragged clothes hung on old wooden hangers. The clothes retained the bulk of breathing chests and strong muscles. They hung tense with that careful, calculated stillness that masks and dolls seem to possess. She could imagine one of those moth-eaten sleeves reaching up and knotting tightly around her neck.

She felt between them, shivering as their fabrics brushed her arms, for a door on the other side. There
was nothing there, nor to either side. She looked up. No trapdoor to the attic, either. She gave the back wall a solid kick and swore under her breath.

A sleeve reached up to touch her back, and she jumped.

“Just me,” Sean said with an apologetic grin. “Are you okay?”

No. No, no, no
, she thought. It couldn’t be a dead end, not after all that. If they were in some goddamned maze between worlds, she was pretty sure that they would never manage to find their way back to the empty room. But she’d be damned if she would let them suffocate in some tiny closet quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

“Hm-mm.” She couldn’t bring herself to say yes.

“Now what?” Sean asked, breathless.

She choked on the disappointment. “I guess that wasn’t the way out. We’ll have to go back.”

“I can’t.” His voice was hoarse. “I can’t do it again, Cheryl.”

She grasped the knob. “We have to, sweetie. We can’t stay in this—”

She opened the door and stepped out into a hallway she didn’t recognize. Not the upstairs hallway, but someplace else.

Cheryl turned to Sean, who stood inside the closet doorway. “Well, at least we don’t have to—”

The bulb winked out inside the closet. The door creaked once and swept inward to close Sean off from her. She thought fast and reacted faster, thrusting an arm in the doorway. She cried out from the impact of wood on her forearm, and squeezed her eyes shut as sharp pain ran up to her armpit. But she felt his shirt, his shoulder. She had him.

“Sean?” she said through gritted teeth. She felt his hand on her own.

“I’m here, but something’s in here with me. Please get me out of here. Oh . . . oh God.” He sounded very close to tears. She tried using her foot and shoulder to widen the opening, but the door wouldn’t move.

“Please, Cheryl!” Sean’s voice cracked on the other side of the door.

“I gotcha, don’t worry.” She clenched his shirt tighter and the pain in her forearm grew hot and bright behind her eyes. She tucked the nail gun between her knees and worked her good arm into the opening, then threw her weight against the door. It resisted her attempt, but budged enough to let Cheryl pull the boy through. The door slammed shut behind him.

He hugged her, and for several moments, she just held him. She didn’t ask what he saw and he didn’t tell her. She just hugged him and after a moment, she thought she heard little sobs, muffled by her clothes.

It felt nice, to be needed. To be the comforting one. The brave one.

When he pulled away, she saw his eyes were red, but he rubbed them with the heel of his hand before she could see tears.

“Where are we now?” He cast a suspicious glance around the hallway.

“I don’t know. Looks like some kind of hospital.”

“That can’t be good.”

“Probably not.” Behind them, to the right, were a couple of closed doors, painted a pale eggshell color. Off to the left was an empty nurses’ station, and beyond that, the door to the fire stairs. The entire hallway
was dusted in white powder. It reminded Cheryl of snow.

She noticed a small plaque outside the door through which they’d just come. It read kohlar, sally in neat black lettering. Her grip around the nail gun tightened. Not good at all.

“Do you hear that?” Sean frowned, hugging the bat close to him.

“Hear what?” She strained but heard nothing.

“That,” he whispered, his eyes wide, and then she heard it, too. A scrabbling sound, like a thousand tiny legs skittering over the hard floor. And the groan of wood under pressure.

From beneath the door at the far end of the hallway, black blood oozed onto the tiles, sending up puffs of white dust. At least, at first, that’s what Cheryl saw. But then large individual drops of black began moving on their own. They caught the fluorescent lighting and shined.

Sean’s bat fell to his side. “Oh God.”

They poured into the hallway in an inky wave, kicking up a whitecap as they surged forward. Their contact with the powder increased the metallic smell, making it sharp in Cheryl’s throat. Some drops jumped up onto the front of the nurses’ station desk, leaving smoking furrows as they skittered along its length.

“Let’s go,” Cheryl said, but Sean stood transfixed to the floor, his horrified face taking it all in. “Now, Sean!” She tugged on his shirt and dragged him toward the fire stairs and pounced on the handle.

It wouldn’t move. Inside her head, Cheryl screamed.

How could it be locked? She threw her good
shoulder into it, trying to force open the door. No luck. Her gaze darted to the nurses’ station. Was there a key, maybe? A security button?

Sean held the bat out in front of him, ready to swipe through the first wave of attack. She grabbed his arm and led him over to the nurses’ station. On the desk was a box with a series of buttons, but nothing marked security. There was one marked fire alarm. She jabbed it.

A splintering sound like an ambulance siren filled the hallway with noise. The sprinklers turned on and snowed more powder down on top of them. The wave of black hesitated. The white piled up fast, burying the drops beneath it. Cheryl grabbed Sean and lunged back toward the fire door.

A long wail rose above the siren. She had
made it angry
. She wasn’t sure where the thought had come from—it wasn’t hers, really—but she knew it to be true.

The piles of white rustled from beneath. The drops were burrowing their way out again. She turned the handle and slammed herself into the door. It swung open and she and Sean spilled out onto the stairs. They raced down, two at a time to the landing, then down farther to the bottom. Only then did they stop and listen.

The stairwell echoed with their ragged breathing, but they were alone.

Sean offered her a grateful smile. They both turned to the door at the bottom of the stairs.

DeMarco opened the front door and stepped into the police station.

“What the . . . ?” She blinked, but there it was. Most of the other desks, even the night-shifters’ desks, were unoccupied, their phones quiet, their desk lamps turned off for the night. The captain’s door stood closed, the light off. Hers was on, though. So was Bennie’s, and Joe Rubelli’s. But she appeared to be alone in the room. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

“Hello? Anybody here?” No one answered.

Gun drawn, she crossed the room to her own desk. Everything on it appeared to be in order. She opened the top drawer. Extra paper clips, a granola bar, and some rubber bands, all as they should be. But this wasn’t the police station. It couldn’t be. What had happened to Feinstein’s house?

She picked through the contents on top of her desk. Her case files lay stacked neatly in one corner, along with her morning coffee mug, her legal pad, telephone, computer . . .

The computer was on. She was sure she’d logged out and shut it off before she’d left.

An open writing document filled the screen. In a large black font that took up most of the page, someone had typed:

LOOK
BEHIND
YOU

She clicked the safety off her gun and turned slowly.

At Rubelli’s desk, a body lay slumped over. Another at Bennie’s, too. She recognized them from
their builds, even hunched over, and swallowed the tightness in her throat.

Not Bennie. Please, not Bennie
.

“Guys?” She moved toward Bennie’s desk. A quick sweep of the room again told her no one else was there.

“Bennie? She looked down on him. From this close, she could see a couple of drops of blood already dried brown on his desk blotter.

“No, but I could be.” The body sat up—jerked, DeMarco thought, like a puppet on a string—and tilted its head up at her.

She uttered a small cry and pointed her gun at it, backing away.

It had no mouth. No eyes or nose, either, but she suspected it could see and smell her as well as it had been able to talk, as if facial features were window dressings, and not actual conveyances for the senses. It did have a bullet hole, though—right where its forehead should have been. The skin around the small hole was stippled with gun powder. DeMarco felt a sharp pinprick in her chest.

No exit wound. There’s no exit wound. There should be
—

She clung to this thought, because underlying it was a more important one: this thing hadn’t thought to form an exit hole in the back of its head because it hadn’t copied a bullet wound from a real-life model. Which meant maybe Bennie Mendez was alive and kicking somewhere.

It seemed to hear her thoughts, and as if in defiance, blood dribbled out of the bullet hole and down the length of its face.

Behind it, at the other desk not too far away, the Rubelli-thing’s body jerked upward. Scorch marks
in the pasty flesh indicated where eyes would have been. It had a bullet hole in its chest. A crimson halo stained the front of its shirt and part of its tie.

“We found you,” the Rubelli thing said. The sound came from the burn holes.

“Who are you?” DeMarco saw the Bennie-thing push its chair out from the corner of her eye, and she leveled the gun at its head.

“Don’t you know?” It bled a little more from its bullet hole as it spoke. Its voice—Bennie’s voice—sounded close to her ear, over her shoulder.

“I know who you aren’t,” she said.

When the Bennie-thing rose, she fired at its head. The bullet never made contact, though, because the thing dissolved into a pile of white powder on the chair. The bullet lodged itself in the wall behind the desk.

She turned and found the other one had closed half the distance between them. Each step pumped fresh blood through the bullet wound in the chest, too. The front of it shone in the dim light.

She fired at it and before the bullet could reach it, it snowed into a pile on the floor.

DeMarco ran a hand over her eyes and found them wet.
Pull it together, An
. She crossed the room, sidestepping the pile of dust on the floor, and opened the door to the waiting area—

—and found herself in Feinstein’s basement, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

She assumed, at any rate, that it was the basement. Wiring hard-stapled to wooden beams ran across the ceiling. The washer and drier stood in one corner, and the casing of the water heater and the furnace stood in another. The floor beneath her feet
crackled when she took a step, and she looked down. A sticky crimson stained the concrete.

The furnace belched and she jumped. The after-echo sounded like a word. . . .

And then she heard soft crying, like a child’s, from somewhere farther in the basement. Ahead of her, the room took a ninety-degree turn to the right. She moved forward, the gun guiding her way, listening for the source of the crying. At the bend, it occurred to her there was something broken-record-like about the sound, its dips and swells following a pattern. She thought she even heard the muffled clip of a record skipping in its groove.

She kept going anyway. In the basement acoustics, her ears could deceive her. And besides, a record player still needed someone to turn it on.

The remainder of the basement around the bend proved a shorter distance. It ended in a door. She approached it with caution, weary now of doors and what could lay beyond them in the confines of the Feinstein house.

A sob broke out from under the door, and dissolved into whimpering and sniffles.

She leaned an ear closer. “Hello? Anyone in there? Hello?”

“Help me,” a woman’s voice said.

DeMarco tried the door but it was locked. “I can’t get in. Are you hurt? Can you unlock the door?”

“It’s unlocked,” the voice replied.

“Well, then it might be stuck because I can’t—” She turned the knob and the door eased open.

She stepped into a small storage room. Stacked boxes marked
HOLIDAY DECORATIONS
and
WINTER COATS
and
GLADYS
walled the room in on three sides.
DeMarco felt for a switch and flipped the light on. In the middle of the room, sitting on the floor with her legs tucked under her, was a frail blond woman. She hugged herself tightly with bony arms. Tears cupped in the skin beneath her eyes spilled over onto her cheeks.

She looked familiar—a photo from the missing persons case file.

“Ms. Kohlar? Everything’s okay, ma’am. I’m a police officer. I’m going to get you out of here.” She flipped the safety of the gun back on and put it in its holster. “Everything will be okay.”