Authors: Mary Sangiovanni
It had never been the fear or confusion of being gay. It had been the fear of getting caught.
That, and the guilt of knowing he’d do just about anything, even hurt someone else, to make sure he didn’t get caught, bothered him.
He crossed the locker room and moved around to the showers. The tiles where he’d knocked Robbie down still had a dark brownish stain.
He blinked, shaking his head. This couldn’t be happening. Shouldn’t be happening. He was in a tunnel somewhere underground, under the Oak Hill Assisted Living facility. He was not,
could
not be in the locker rooms of Bloomwood High School.
He reached out a finger to touch the tiles. They felt cool and smooth. The room smelled faintly like sweat socks and sprays of deodorant—smells he associated with gym class.
A sharp whistle made him jump. His gym teacher had a whistle like that. He turned around. All the locker doors were open. Every single one, as far as he could see. He made his way back through the locker room and down the aisles. Locker after locker contained bloody clothes, bloody sneakers, gym uniforms soaked so dark Steve couldn’t read the logos.
As he turned the corner, he saw one of the lockers wasn’t open. A combination lock hung from the door. Smeared in something black and goopy on the door were three numbers: 18-9-13.
With his good hand, Steve tried the combination and pulled on the lock. It opened. He eased open the locker door. There was a folded note inside and his gun. He took the note and unfolded it. It simply said, “Shoot yourself. Make it stop. Shoot them. Make it all stop.”
He dropped the note, kicking it aside. But he took the gun anyway. He had no intention of shooting anyone, but…it felt better to have his gun back on him. Just in case.
Just in case of what
? He didn’t know.
Just
…
just in
case, dammit
.
A school bell rang, the kind indicating class changes, and it made him flinch. At that moment, the lights blew out in a fizzle and light spray of sparks. A door opened somewhere, and a low growling entered the room, followed by a shuffling, lumbering sound. Steve hid behind one of the lockers and peered out. Things were filing into the room; things that moved on appendages that dragged and slithered and undulated over the floor. By shapes in the dimness more so than in any detail, Steve picked out their grotesque forms. One looked eerily reminiscent of a decapitated head (
Robbie’s head. Oh my
God, it is! It’s Robbie’s head
.), its vacant, dazed expression rocking back and forth on what looked like an oversized hand with too many fingers. Another looked a little like an angler fish hoisted on long stiltlike legs. The last two of them came in dragging something that looked like a gnawed part of a torso, stringy flesh hanging from stumps where the legs and waist would be.
Steve groaned. He crept around the side of the row of lockers, doing his best to keep the metal between him and the indescribable things on the other side. He glanced at the door and then back at them, judging distances, wondering how fast they could move if they saw him.
They were spreading out along the row of lockers, slapping at each other, making gurgling and warbling
sounds among them. The only place out of the line of view of the lockers was in the shower, and he’d be damned if he’d back himself into that particular corner.
The end cap of the locker would be too narrow to hide him for long. They were going to see him, and if they caught him—
A long, high-pitched scream speared the air over his head, and he looked back. One of the monsters, a creature with a bulbous body that seemed to fill and shrink, waved a long black tentacle lined with spikes in his direction. He dove for the door, feeling the heat of acrid breaths and the smack of something wet and scaly on his back. He cried out when it hit him but pushed through the open door anyway and tumbled out next to Ritchie Gurban’s bench outside in the quad.
Confused, he collapsed on it, feeling its solid cool surface beneath him, and dragged in full lungfuls of outside air. The place where the thing had touched him burned on his back.
Dave spun around to see an empty black tunnel. He waited a moment, his heart knocking on his chest. A cold, panicked sweat formed under his arms.
“Erik? Steve?” No one answered, but his voice bounced lightly against the catacomb walls, taking on a ghostly thinness that Dave couldn’t help but feel was mocking him, moving away from him into the darkness and changing into the sound of many odd voices.
He almost called out Cheryl’s name but stopped himself, remembering this was a different time, a different place. He felt a twinge of sadness. The last time,
he’d been fighting for women he cared about—a sister that he felt he owed a better life, and a woman that he very much thought he could marry someday. Who was he fighting for now? And what difference did it make if the Hollower got to him, too?
The difference
, said a voice in his head,
is that if you
don’t fight, it gets away with killing the people you loved most
in the world. Vengeance can work two ways, Dave. It may have
its facelessness in a twist because you killed its Secondary. But
then it went and killed people that mattered to you, too. It
comes down to you or the Primary, one way or another
. The voice had a Cherylish aspect to it, and Dave supposed that was because he wanted to hear those words in her voice. He wanted to believe she could still be with him, at least in some small way, even here and now.
He wished for the flashlight as he took a few steps forward. The mustiness of the air, the faint smell of ammonia and dust, got caught up in his nose and made him sneeze. The sound reverberated into the black.
He hadn’t gotten that far when he noticed the outline of something in the distance lit by a faint aerial glow. As he got closer, it became clearer, and at five feet away, it was very nearly spotlit from the sourceless light above.
A small table (
like the one in Feinstein’s upstairs hallway
, he thought) stood in front of him, made of polished wood with thin, slightly curving legs. On the table sat a black toy telephone, an old-fashioned rotary type with a wheel that spun out dialed numbers in a series of clicks. Dave scowled at it. His whole life phones meant doctors calling with bad news, police calling with worse
news, Cheryl calling to say she was leaving; Georgia calling to tell him his boss was angry again.
He hated them. Them, and big grandfather clocks.
Still, when it began to ring, he closed the remaining distance between him and the phone on numb legs and answered it. He was sure he’d hear Sally on the other end, just like last time.
He didn’t. “I—I used the towels. They’re ruined. I used them to s-soak up the blood. There w-was so-so-so much. S-so much blood.” It was his own voice he heard on the line, distant through time and a little less weathered and gravelly, but his voice all the same. This came with a sharp, vivid image of a sunny day, Sally’s tiny blonde head in a quickly spreading corona of blood. The air smelled like apple blossoms, and the sun felt hot, making him sweat down his neck and back and under his arms and behind his knees, hot and guilty and helpless. Sally’s eyes stayed closed long after he thought she should have gotten up. Only her skinny little chest moved, and even then, only in shallow, irregular hitches that didn’t sound right or normal, even to a nine-year-old boy.
He remembered calling for his mother, thinking the frantic, terrified squeak would never reach her, but worried at the same time that if he left his sister something even worse might happen, and then he’d really be in trouble. He also remembered his mother running across the backyard. She looked at him as if he’d failed her, failed his mother and Sally both. It had been the first, but not the only, time she had looked at him like that.
“It was an accident.” He mouthed the words along with the mental image of his nine-year-old self.
He also remembered the way the lady next door kept a chilly wall of disapproval between her and him. No comfort, no hugs, no reassurances that Sally wasn’t going to bleed dry all over the ambulance. She glared down over the tip of her nose at him like he was some hooligan, fatherless and directionless and by all accounts Godless, a mere nine years away from prison and maybe only five away from some juvenile detention facility. Even her words were crusty, brittle with the sureness that he’d pushed Sally on purpose. Like he’d hurt her on purpose. Like he was always pushing her right into the path of trouble.
He’d sneaked out late to mop up the blood. Knowing it was out there, soaking into the wood, staining the concrete, drove him crazy. If he had to look at those blood stains every time he played out there, he’d smack his own head senseless.
He’d used his mother’s towels. They were ruined, stained a sickening purple-red. He even mopped up a couple stray blonde hairs. She’d smacked him for ruining her towels. Never once did she ever tell him it wasn’t his fault. And she’d never said Sally was okay.
Dave was about to say he was sorry into the little black toy telephone when there was a click like call-waiting, and then another voice got on the line.
“I’m so cold, Dave, so cold all over. Help me. My feet are frozen. And my legs hurt so, so bad…” Cheryl. Hearing her voice brought immediate tears to his eyes.
Dave blinked to clear his vision. He couldn’t find words to respond.
“Dave, tell me there are no more Hollowers. Tell me that one will never come back. Tell me we’re free.”
“Cheryl, I—” his voice cracked.
“Tell me that underneath all that fucked up, cowardly, self-pitying, self-centered, drunken bullshit, there’s a man that might be able to satisfy me once in a while, that might be able to keep up with me, that might actually be able to protect me and provide for me. Tell me you’ll do more for me than you ever did for your mother or sister.”
Dave couldn’t tell her those things. Even now—especially now—he couldn’t reassure her. His eyes felt heavy, the tears solid, like pebbles in his sockets. He held the receiver of the toy telephone to his ear and his chest heaved, but the tears didn’t fall, and he couldn’t make a sound.
“The only thing you’ve ever done right,” Cheryl’s voice said in a maliciously calm, precise way, “is realize you ought to just do yourself in. But you’re too stupid to have picked any way faster than alcohol. Now Erik, he had the right idea. Your new friend Jake, too. Your new cop friend, well, it was just a matter of time before someone kicked the life out of him. Oh, I love that shuddery little sound you make when you can’t quite draw in enough air to breathe, when all kinds of things are broken and jagged inside you, puncturing your lungs like balloons and tearing holes into those blood bags you call organs. But then you die all the same, don’t you? You all do. That stupid fat cow you’re hanging with nowadays was as dense as you. Still, once I cut through
the fat…” The voice changed as she spoke, becoming an all too familiar kaleidoscope of highs and lows and overlapping timbres. She (it) laughed, a deep bass unlike anything Cheryl’s voice had ever produced. “If you think you can help them, you’re wrong. They’re dead already, every one of them—all the ones you fought with before and all the ones you brought with you to night. All the silly self-help tricks in the world couldn’t save those sorry lots of meat. So now, it’s only you. All by your lonesome. All by yourself. Everyone’s been taken away from you, so
why don’t you just die
?”
“How?” The word came out dry, rusty.
“Telephone cord will hold up to asphyxiation. Or take the razor out of the table drawer. I sharpened it just for you.”
Dave opened the little drawer of the desk, beneath the phone. There was indeed a straight razor in the drawer, along with three unmarked orange bottles of pills. He picked one up, shook it, and it rattled. He put it back in the drawer.
“You can go fuck yourself,” Dave said quietly, and hung up the phone.
He turned to walk away when it rang again, sounding a little more shrill in his ear, he thought, with each ring. He hesitated a moment and then picked the receiver back up. Elevator music filled his ear, some mournful Michael Bolton–esque sax version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” After a moment, the music paused, and a voice said, “We’re sorry. All operators are currently unavailable. But your death is important to us. Please stay on the line, and the next available representative will take your call. Thank
you. We’re sorry. All friends are currently unavailable. But your—”
He slammed the phone down, but the elevator music started up again. He could hear it through the receiver, a faint echoing strain of saxophone that sounded soulless between the walls of the tunnel. He closed his eyes. “You’ll have to try harder.”
When he opened them, both phone and table were gone, the music already fading. He pressed forward into the encompassing black.
He’d gone about a hundred feet or so farther down when the ground fell away from him. The air rushed out of his lungs in a panic as he fell. Every once in a while, the wall would grow brighter, like someone was adjusting a television set, and he’d see flashes of words. He was falling fast enough that he didn’t have time to read any of it, really, and could only guess at the names, parts of phrases, and beginnings of Biblical quotes based on the little he did see and the connections his own brain made.
He did catch one word, though, just before he connected with solid earth.
HOLLOW.
Erik was alone in the tunnel. He took a deep breath and swallowed the panic. This couldn’t be happening. Not again. Not here. Not now.
He was pretty sure it wouldn’t be like the last time, and that scared the hell out of him. This Hollower wasn’t looking to tease and torment them. It wanted them to give up completely. It wanted to crack them open like walnuts and chew up their despair.
He walked forward. Moving would give him a rhythm, a purpose, a sense of direction, at least. It would help him think.
All around him, the darkness swallowed up the tunnel. He couldn’t see where he was going. More often than not, he tripped over a bump in the ground. Loose pieces of rock, he assumed. Sometimes his foot dipped into a crater and his heart jumped, a tingling feeling traveling up his body from his misplaced feet in anticipation of a fall. In those moments, his thoughts turned to dark wells and shafts and the very real possibility that he might plunge headlong as Sally had into a black pit in which maybe even the Hollower wouldn’t be able to find him.
He slowed, feeling his way with feet and hands.
By degrees, the diffused light of the tunnel increased somehow, enough so that the first forms and outlines his hands brushed against made him jump, and it took both his eyes and his brain a few seconds to register them as drawings on the wall and not actual beings. In the sharp, carved contour of rock, Erik saw other worlds.
Garish paint, like overdone makeup, was smeared all over some of the carvings, accentuating the crude and almost primitive violence of some and the outlandishness of others. One scene depicted a scarecrow of some sort slicing off a naked woman’s face with a large hunting knife. In another, a man was peeling strips of his own skin off his arms, chest, and calves and laying them in a pile while a shadowy figure in a hat lurked in the background. In yet another farther down, a cave beneath a forest, lit only by firelight, contained a child with pain-glazed eyes whose head bled from the nose down, while a hideous figure added small lips to a wall of hanging mouths, dried like parallel worms and arranged as hunting trophies. Erik felt a little sick.
The painted bas-relief got more bizarre and more disturbing as he followed the corridor down. Another showed a stampede of a strange race of tripod beings, their pyramid faces shrieking and wide-eyed as they poured down a hill. Behind them, a city suspended in the sky rained grotesque skeletal beasts down on them. The beasts tore them apart, devouring pieces of some and doing other unspeakable acts to others as they lay mangled, maimed, and dying, abandoned and half-
trampled by their own. Another showed a small village with tears in the dimensional fabric causing ugly lesions across the landscape. From these, long fingers curled out, along with the first curves of heads, the first scissor-blade of a leg or the tip of a crablike claw. Dead bodies, split open down the middle as if overripe, lay strewn about the grass in between the buildings.
Erik’s hand passed over these, feeling not just the cold scrape of the stone from which they were made, but also something else, some sense of the abject terror the subjects of the paintings must have felt. He also got a dreadful sense of a bigger picture, a broader spectrum of hate, an awful sinking recognition of what the pictures represented not just for his world, but evidently for others in other dimensions, other places like and even not so like his own.
The Hollowers were everywhere. And, if the illustrations on the walls were correct, they were only one of many races that preyed on worlds like Erik’s.
Even entertaining the vaguest notion that putting this Hollower down might not even begin to cover other doorways and other invasions of unspeakable things was too much. Erik turned away, the thought too horrible to let surface.
Sprinkled around the hasty portraits, terrible alien landscapes, and off-kilter still lifes were all manner of painted and carved symbols—Egyptian hieroglyphics, graffiti, even tick marks. Some of them, strange symbols that curved in and swam out of each other, extended out into the tunnel. As Erik continued, the crammed art (he couldn’t quite think of those paintings and carvings as
art without grimacing in disgust) grew few and far between until the rock smoothed out. The sporadic gaping mouth or blind eye would draw his attention, but he blocked most of it out, refusing even to touch the wall as a guide through the dark.
A spray-painted stick figure whose face had been rubbed off caught his attention. Erik stopped to look at that one. The artist had endowed it with an impossibly large cock, which it held up over the head of another stick figure whose circle eyes bled red paint down the flat round cheeks. Beneath the lower figure was a name:
Casey.
There was another one a little farther down that made Erik cringe to look at. It was a crude painting, faded now, of a dead Confederate soldier, his skeletal horse rearing up, his gun raised high in victory. And more so than the other things he’d seen portrayed on the walls so far, that one made him feel sick to his stomach.
Erik reached out and touched it. The chalkiness of the colors got on his fingertips. He rubbed them vigorously against his jeans, but the red stained.
He backed away from the painting. It dredged up a memory from his childhood, but rather than let that take hold, his mind slipped him instead a recollection of when the Hollower first split them up. He remembered the awful panic at finding himself alone, making his way down what he thought was Feinstein’s upstairs hallway. The terrible sinking feeling returned as Erik recalled seeing his father in the sweat-darkened T-shirt, faded from black to a dull gray, sitting on a couch in an
almost bare room—a slice of the past removed and re-pasted onto the present, out of sync, out of time. His dead father with the meaty hands and rough elbows and big, tattooed arms.
He remembered the tattoo on his father’s bicep. A dead Confederate soldier whose skeletal horse reared up over the massive plane of skin. He used to focus on that tattoo, to concentrate his strength, his will not to cry when his father rained blows down on him. He’d grown to loathe that tattoo and what it meant. He feared it. It meant pain. It was the threat of death.
Erik continued down the dark corridor, hypersensitive, listening for sounds ahead of him, behind him. Once he thought he heard a laugh track, and once, the snap of a belt. Once, he thought he heard the beer-soaked sound of his father’s laugh.
“Erik…” The voice beside his ear made him jump and wheel around, but no one was there. The voice continued.
“I know you still want to get high, Erik. I can feel it all over you. You can’t help Jake. You can’t help anyone. You’re just as useless as you were before. Every bit as much of a lazy, useless no good sonuvabitch. Admit it. Just tell me you still want to get high.”
“No, I don’t,” Erik said to the heavy air and walked faster, afraid to run into the unfathomable black before him. Still, the voice followed.
“You’re lying. I don’t like liars, Erik.” It was his father’s voice; same timbre, same tone, everything. It sent a shiver of cold across his skin, and Erik almost stopped. The unspoken command to obey, to stand there until
his father was done with him, hung in the air all around him.
He didn’t stop, though. Feeling along the wall, Erik moved faster.
“You still can’t touch me,” Erik whispered.
“Yes, I can,” the Hollower replied. “Oh, yes, I can.”
Suddenly, flashes of memory, clips of sound and sight and even smell bombarded his senses, forcing him to a stop, dropping him to his knees.
He saw the blood on the bed he and Casey shared, saw blood on her leg, which was just visible from the floor on the far side of the bedroom.
Flash
.
The sound of his father bellowing throughout the house.
Flash
.
Casey crying blood down the front of her white tank top, stinking of overturned things in the earth.
Flash
.
Cocaine in long, brilliantly white rows on a polished mahogany table.
The taste of it. The smell of it. The tingle of it in his nose.
Flash
. He tried to stand.
A room with pale green sheets, a picture of Casey tacked to one of the plain white walls. Metal bars on the windows, scuffed tiles on the floor.
The floor was a snowfall of cocaine. It kicked up in little puffs around his feet as he walked.
He stopped. The dark tunnel was gone. He really
was
in that room. From the other side of the wall, he could
hear a boy crying, begging someone to let him out, begging for a little smack to get him through the morning. The irregular sobs melded into a wail that tapered off and became the fiendish mumbling of words. They slowed into almost a chant, and Erik could make out some of the words:
“
Tell me you wanna get high wanna get high got drugs got
ups got downs crack cocaine heroin get high wanna get high,
wanna die die die so high wanna cocaine gonna swim in it,
gonna drown in it, gonna ride it right up to the ceiling and be
sooo hiiigh
…”
Erik tried to turn, to move toward the door, and found he couldn’t. He looked down. The cocaine was up to his knees.
He felt a surge of panic, not only in being unable to move his legs, but in the quietly suggestive voice just beneath that told him not to bother.
“
Relax. It could be worse
.”
He closed his eyes, employing an old stabilizing trick.
Ten…nine…eight…floor beneath my feet…
seven…six…light on my face…five…four
…
His counting, the sound and sensation of his breathing, helped steady him, eclipsing the other, more suggestive voice.
The soft rustle of cocaine against denim drew his attention. He opened his eyes and looked down. Now it was up to his groin.
The Hollower was going to bury him right up to his nose in cocaine! Panic fired alarms all over his head, and yet his body didn’t respond. Somewhere in the back of his head (this sounded crazy, but even so), the thought
of being buried over in cocaine seemed a good way to go. Fitting. Exciting. A culmination of all his greatest moments.
He laughed, and then realizing what he was doing, stopped. But it took a few moments to get the giggles under control.
Death by laughter. He died laughing. Busted a gut. Split a
seam and he spilled out all over. Seasoned all his inside organs
in white powder like flour like filets when Casey breads them
then cooks them and
—
He dropped the train of thought. He had to get out of there. The cocaine was up to his waist. His arms were free, and good God it was so fucking close, and it would be so easy, so damned easy, to just pinch a little off the mound in front of him and—
He remembered Casey, and all the other thoughts pulled back.
Erik had come past this point in his life. He didn’t need coke, and he didn’t want it. He needed Casey. He wanted her. And he promised her he’d come back.
Erik made swimming motions, pushing the cocaine out of his way. More spilled a little into the valley he created, but he wriggled and pushed and kicked and pushed until he’d managed at least a little leeway. The sensation of it, of so much of it sliding between his fingers and over his skin made him moan. The top half of the door—and, thank your Higher Power of Choice, the doorknob—were visible and just about at arm’s reach. He grabbed for the knob and used it to pull himself closer. He twisted it, and at first it wouldn’t budge.
He was about to attempt to throw some elbow into it when the door flew open and he spilled out on a landslide of cocaine. He rolled on the ground, came to a stop, and then sat up.
The lightest dust of the drug frosted the tops of the grass blades like powdered sugar. Otherwise, looking behind and all around him, all traces of the door he’d fallen through and the room he’d left behind were gone.
Alone in the tunnel, Jake yelled out names—Dorrie’s, Erik’s. He yelled for help, feeling the panic-sweat under his arms and across his back, the dread spreading hot-cold waves up his neck and into his gut. He was in trouble now—big, bad-assed trouble. Extending his hands into the darkness, he felt his way forward until he came to something solid, cold, and smooth. His hands slid down its length and came to what felt like a metal handle. He pulled, and the solid thing—a door, he guessed—gave in his direction. A pale glow poured into the tunnel from the other side. Jake went through the opening and found himself in a room.
Overhead speakers cranked out some saxophone instrumental song that Jake vaguely recognized the melody of. He glanced behind him in the tunnel, lit a cigarette, and turned around to find himself in a hospital waiting room. The cigarette hung from his mouth, forgotten.
A large white desk, spotlit from lamps at either end, stood in front of the nurses’ station. Behind it, charts and files stuck haphazardly from labeled bins. A clipboard sat on the counter surface. On the far wall was a
window boarded up. Between it and him, a series of upholstered benches formed a Grecian pattern across the floor. All of these but one were immaculately white and intact. The standout one in the center of the room was rust colored, with springs poking through the upholstery like thin bones through skin. The white and gray tiles on the floor followed the same pattern as the benches. A fan of dust motes hung in the air, visible through the stark, white light that seemed to have no direction or origin. It gave the whole place a sterile, scrubbed raw kind of feel. Jake also got the sense of the place not quite having completed the transition to total emptiness—a feeling that there had just been bodies there moments before he’d walked in kicking up the dust motes, that if he went and felt the seats of the benches he’d find them still warm.
Medication time, Mr. Dylan
. Jake shivered.
The music paused. “Excuse me, sir,” a pleasant woman’s voice talked down to him from a speaker somewhere in the hazy white blur where the ceiling should have been. “This is a no-smoking facility. Please put out your cigarette.”