Authors: Mary Sangiovanni
Maybe that was true of some. Some were just bitches.
She’d come to find the world did contain women like Cheryl, who moved with unassuming grace, whose beauty seemed present but immaterial. She’d thought that maybe she’d reached a point in life where she was willing to attribute those qualities to other beautiful women, to make all modelesque women less powerful monsters and more vulnerable human beings. And to reinforce that idea, Dave had told them a little about his ex-girlfriend in the car on the way to Oak Hill, how she worried that people wouldn’t think she was smart enough or capable enough, how it made her feel like a
helpless little girl when men leered at her, but how in spite of those things, she stumbled through. She tried to make informed decisions, tried to read the paper to learn about things to talk about (she also encountered, more often than not, people utterly uninterested in actually
talking
to her about anything important, or hearing what she had to say.) Maybe women like Cheryl felt insecure and scared and unsure of themselves.
But the looks on the faces of the mannequins masked no fears and insecurities of their own. Those looks, which seemed to observe and ultimately despise every part of her without any movement whatsoever of the eyes, chilled her. Those looks of hate meant retribution. They meant cruel pranks and torments that sometimes bordered on dangerous. They wanted to, in a sense, eat her alive with their hate.
And they stood between Dorrie and the only door out of the store room.
Without taking her eyes off the mannequins, she reached behind her, feeling for the top of one of the boxes, and stuck her hand in, hoping for (
Oh God, anything,
anything at all but blood and guts and body parts
and
—) something to use as a weapon. Her hand closed around something cold and hard, and she pulled out a tire iron.
Oh, thank God
.
“Aren’t you going to cry, Dorrie?” The mouth of the mannequin with no arms didn’t move, but its voice, eerily muffled, rattled around its insides, trapped, a vicious animal waiting to spring. It sounded, Dorrie thought, vaguely familiar, from another time and place.
Ashley. Ashley Tiller from middle school, blonde and blue-eyed—a girl whose power was secured through whispers behind the backs of hands and displays of callousness in the lunchroom.
“Uh…excuse me?”
The mannequin with the leg in its shoulder socket tilted its head with a stiff scuffing sound. “You were always such a crybaby. Whiny little Dorrie with her fat ass and her hurt feelings, bitching about why everyone was always so mean to her.” Natalie Romanieri from high school, the beautiful dark-haired cheerleader, the girl who only dated college boys, whose locker was more treacherous to navigate past than any girls’ room or gym locker room in the school.
Heat flushed Dorrie’s face. All the powerless anger and insecurity drove her free hand into a fist, set her eyes alight. There were a hundred things she wanted to say—almost twenty years’ worth of comebacks and insults running around in her head. But when she opened her mouth to speak, none of them came out.
“Do you have something to say to us, Dorrie? No? I didn’t think so. You never did. Your mouth was always full.” That one hit home with aching familiarity, down to the words verbatim. Jennifer Rossler, another high school girl, pretty, popu lar, wild, and looking to lash out at anyone that she could showboat over to draw more attention to herself.
A fresh wave of angry heat washed over Dorrie. She swung the tire iron in front of her.
The one with upper arms laughed. “What do you think you’re going to do with that, Dorrie? Really, this
unhealthy, I daresay borderline obsessive, hostility you have toward women who have everything you don’t is just sad, frankly. Do you really intend to swing a tire iron at us?” And finally, Madison Monroe, from Seton Hall University, with her double-edged kindness and her pitying eyes. By then, even if Madison had actually possessed a single genuine bone in her body, Dorrie would have hated her. She was the woman that girls like Ashley and Natalie and Jennifer grew into.
“I will,” Dorrie said, “if you don’t let me out that door.”
The one she’d come to think of as Natalie shook her head. “Not likely. You can’t fit.” She kicked her shoulder-leg out toward the door. “Not a lard-ass like you.”
Dorrie looked at the door. It did look smaller—a lot smaller. Not so small that she couldn’t squeeze, maybe, but…smaller, definitely. She felt acutely aware of her body and its dimensions, her hips, all the places of her that billowed out enough to be a potential problem.
She surprised herself by answering, “I’ll get out that door if I have to ram one of you through the wall to widen it. One way or another, ladies.”
With jerking steps, Madison moved toward her. “How about you try that?”
Dorrie took a few wide steps around it and headed toward the door. Madison stepped in front of her, moving surprisingly fast on such stilted legs.
“Oh, uh, Dorrie?” Jennifer said sweetly. “Why don’t you let us give you a makeover? Girls to girl. First, we’ll rip all the fat off you. Then we’ll stretch your legs and puff up your lips and paint your face. Let us play.”
Dorrie was absolutely terrified. She knew that tone; she knew they meant to do everything they said. For the second time that night, she surprised herself by swinging the tire iron into Madison’s perfectly curved fiberglass waist. It cracked, caving in a little.
Madison swung one of her upper arms and smacked Dorrie hard across the face. The pain sent white sparks across her eyes. The mannequin dropped another blow down on the dip between her shoulder and neck. Sharp pain flared out into her neck and back. She swung up, the tire iron catching Madison in the jaw, and the face first cracked then caved in. The empty cavity behind the face filled with blood, which spilled out onto the floor. The mannequin wailed in pain and sank to the ground.
The mannequins still standing collectively sent up a wail to join with Madison’s. It sounded to her like a siren. Blood poured out of their seams where the body parts met, streaming down their bodies and puddling on the floor.
Dorrie quickly stepped over the puddles to the door and yanked it open. Gagging, she tumbled out.
And she found herself on the quad.
Dave looked around the quad for his friends. Dorrie leaned against a corner where the buildings came together, her hand on her heart, catching her breath. Jake, his whole body shaking, crouched on his knees over by the gate where they’d come in. Steve sat slumped against the bench where the paper creatures had beaten him unconscious, bleeding and breathing in huge gasps. And Erik rose slowly to his feet in the center of the quad, in the dip where the hills sloped down into a little valley, away from the buildings.
“Hey, you all okay?” he called out to them, and, seeming to notice each other for the first time, the pain and uncertainty on their faces eased. They weren’t alone anymore. They rose with effort and made their way toward each other.
They all met in the middle by Erik.
“I’m confused,” Jake said. “Why did it bump us all out here?”
Erik shrugged. “I have to admit, I kind of thought it would try to bury us alive in there.”
“So, what, is that it? Did we have our trial by fire?”
Jake shoved his hands in his jeans pockets. He looked very washed-out. “Are we done?”
A creaking sound in the sky, like something about to fall over, drew their attention upward. Overhead, stars hung scattered across the sky, but they could also see dark and swirling spots, huge vortexes that ate the stars. A trail of black spun out behind them, spitting out the processed light as glittering dust. Directly above them, strange flat islands floated across the night. They measured maybe fifty feet long and dropped sprays of dirt and sand into their hair. On many of them, black trunks and branches grew, and grotesque organic shapes with eyes and teeth in all the wrong places peered down at them from the branches.
“I don’t think so,” Dave said. He took a few steps and looked around. The last time a Hollower had put them in the middle of a dimensional crossroads like this, it had been hurt, maybe dying, and it just cranked out whatever odd images were in its head. The physical stuff—the houses with meat peeling off their frames, the lawnful of faces, the geysers of blood and rocketing jets of bone—that had all been what the Hollower itself was afraid of. He was sure they hadn’t hurt this one, or even ruffled it very much. So what was it doing? Experimenting? This…this was like the Hollower was still tapping into collective memory and smearing its own across that, a layer of its experiences over theirs. Maybe in doing that, it could accomplish what probing their fears couldn’t.
“What is this place?” Dorrie drew closer to Jake.
Before anyone could answer, a rumble like thunder
nearly shook them off balance. One of the islands stopped overhead, and it took a moment before they realized they should—
“Run!” Dave said, and, dragging Steve, hurried up the side of the hill. They scattered, but the impact of the island knocked them over.
“Okay, okay. Everybody, let’s just go over by the catacomb door and figure out what we should do ne—” The words died in his throat as Dave stood up and turned around.
They were in the parking lot. Dave glanced back to the entrance they had used. Huge chains with thick links threaded in and out of the gate, with padlocks sporadically gathering and locking the chains. Curling barbed wire spiraled along the top. Wooden boards completely covered the windows. A broken-off piece of board, hanging from a rusted chain, said, “One more game.”
“What the hell?” Erik came up alongside him. “What’s it doing?”
Steve, with the help of Jake and Dorrie, limped up to join them. “It kicked us out? That doesn’t make any sense. I find it hard to believe it’s just going to let us walk out of here.”
“I don’t think it is,” Dorrie said. “Look at that sign. It’s still messing with us.”
“Well, I’ve got nothing.” Jake indicated the gate with a wave of the hand. “If it won’t let us back inside, I can’t see how we’re supposed to find it.”
“Dave!”
Dave felt his skin grow cold. It was Cheryl’s voice.
He turned to the car—his car. It looked like someone sat in his passenger seat. The dark hair hung from the bowed head, obscuring the face, but he thought he recognized her anyway. He jogged and then broke into a run, the others following behind him. He vaguely heard a warning from Erik that it wasn’t Cheryl, but he dismissed it. He had to know. Had to see.
When he got to the car, though, the figure was gone—no trace of anyone in the passenger seat or anywhere else in the car. Dave slumped a little where he stood, and Steve clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Who was it?”
“Cheryl,” he said. “It was Cheryl. Well, it was something that looked and sounded like Cheryl.”
“Uh, guys?” Jake tapped them on the back, and they turned to see what had drawn Jake’s attention. The paved parking lot was melting. The few other cars in the lot groaned as they sank into the spreading ocean of liquid blacktop.
“We have to go,” Dave said.
“We can’t! Who knows if we’ll get another chance at this thing?”
Dave turned on Steve. “We won’t have any chance if the parking lot drowns us where we stand.” He dug in the pocket for his keys and made his way around to the driver’s side. Erik took the shotgun seat.
“This is what it wants,” Dorrie said. “If we get in that car—”
“If we don’t, baby,” Jake interrupted gently as Steve climbed in the backseat, “we might be in bigger trouble. It’s the lesser of the two evils.” He tugged her to the car. “I promise it’ll be okay.”
She smiled at him, but she looked sad. “You can’t promise that.” But she got in the car anyway, and he followed.
Steve groaned as he watched his own car, traded with the police cruiser before he drove over, disappear beneath a wave of asphalt.
“Hurry,” Erik said through tight lips as Dave tried the ignition.
The car started, and he threw it into drive, heading for the hill and the main road that ran parallel to the bottom of it. A sheet of pavement heaved in front of him, and he swerved around it, narrowly missing the floe in the liquid mess of the parking lot. They all cried out when the car jumped, the back wheels pulling out of road reduced to tar right under them.
Dave’s car shot through the open gate and out onto the main road, heading by instinct to the Olde Mill Tavern.
After a moment, Erik said, “Okay, what in blue hell was that?”
“It wanted us out,” Dorrie said. “Although I can’t imagine…” Her sentence trailed off. They all noticed it at about the same time.
There were no other cars on the road. Normally that would not have been so odd at that hour of the night, except that there were none in the parking lots, none on the street, none anywhere. There were no lights in any of the store or diner windows, no signs lit up, and the street lamps winked out as they drove by each one. The street signs glowed, though; they hung slanted on the posts, the names a series of black smudges across their luminous faces.
The most unsettling part about the whole thing—the thing that made it abundantly clear that even though they’d driven away, they hadn’t really gotten away—was that there were people out on the street, walking, sitting, staring at the car as it drove by, going in and out of restaurants and diners. And none of them had a face. Not a one. None of them moved. They looked like mannequins, positioned to simulate life in a place that didn’t exist, a place devoid of anything human besides them.
“It’s never going to let us go,” Dorrie finally said. “We could drive out to California, drive right out into the damn Pacific Ocean, and it would twist the fish into sea monsters on our way to the bottom.”
“Look, maybe we should turn—”
A jaw-thudding recoil as the car suddenly lost the road sent them flying in their seats before the car pitched downward and stopped moving. The walls of a hole about four feet deep rose up around them on all sides. Dirt, rock, and chucks of street pavement tumbled down on top of the hood of the car.
After several groaning moments, Dave and the others came around, rubbing bruised foreheads and elbows. “Anybody hurt? Is…are we…ow!” Dave tried to open the driver’s side door, but it wouldn’t budge. The dirt and rock caved in around it filled in too much space between the door and the slope of the hole. He rolled the window down and clumsily climbed out while Erik and the others got out on the passenger side. Pulling each other up onto the hood and then the roof of the car, they had enough leverage to climb out of the hole.
They stopped where they stood.
About fifteen or twenty of the faceless folks stood poised close to the hole, blind witnesses gathered maybe a hundred feet or so away. They didn’t move, but among them was a kind of menacing stillness, like cats crouched and ready to pounce on their prey. In the frozen clutching hands, they held knives and scalpels.
“I think we can get past them,” Jake whispered. “I don’t think they can see us. And even if they can,” his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “we have joints and muscles. We can probably move faster.”
Steve, leaning on Erik, said, “I’m just…so tired.”
“Hang in there, Steve. We’ll get out of this.” Dorrie didn’t look at him, but her tone suggested there could be no argument.
Dave wasn’t sure how they’d managed it, but the mannequins had closed some of the distance. Now a hundred feet seemed more like sixty.
“Take them,” Dave said to Erik. “I’ll distract these things. Get the others out of here.”
“We’re not leaving you behind,” Dorrie said.
“There are more of them than there are of us. Just go.”
“Not without you.”
From the looks on the others’ faces, they seemed to all stand in agreement.
“Dorrie, I appreciate—”
“Look, I know you’re hurt and you’ve lost a lot. But we need you. We can’t do this without you.”
“You don’t need me. I haven’t done one damn thing this whole time to help any one of you. I’ve dragged
you deeper and deeper into the twisted folds and layers of this bastard’s mind and now…” He threw up his hands. It took every ounce of will not to mist up. “Now we’re in the middle of someplace that doesn’t even really exist, with no plan of action, no clue where to go, and…” He noticed a group of faceless teenaged mannequins with switchblades milling around outside a 7-Eleven across the street. Where in God’s name had
they
come from? One had a cigarette glued to the place where its mouth should have been. A stream of smoke rose up. Dave heard Jake light up a cigarette behind him. “And no one to help us.”
“We don’t need help,” Erik said stubbornly. “We’re going to find it and kill it.”
Dave sighed. “Where? How? It seems to have just stranded us out here.”
“It won’t leave us alone out here for long.”
“We don’t know what this one will do. It wants us to suffer. It wants us to hurt. It wants to wear us down until we give up, and it’s starting to work.” Dave turned away in disgust.
After a while, Steve said, “Why don’t we head back? I mean, if we’re more or less in agreement that it’s going to make its presence known no matter which direction we head in, well, then…I say we go back to the heart of darkness, so to speak.”
“You can’t make the walk,” Dave told him. “You can barely walk as it is. We’ve gone at least a mile, maybe two.”
Steve waved him away. “I’ve done worse at the Academy. Don’t worry about me. Let’s just go.”
Dave shrugged and said, “Okay. Okay, let’s try. I guess—”
“Damn it.” Erik saw it, too—they all did. While they had been arguing, the colors of the buildings had run off. In fact, the very buildings themselves sagged and dripped at odd angles. The people, frozen in the postures of everyday life, had also slid into smeared disarray. Many had melded into each other, preventing any kind of access into or around any of the buildings. The hole into which Dave had driven his car had filled in until only a corner of the trunk poked up through the new asphalt like a newly discovered bone of an ancient behemoth. There was one road out, and it led in the opposite direction of Oak Hill.
“This reminds me of a very bad dream I had once,” Erik muttered.
“I don’t like this,” said Dorrie as they headed down the road. The air around them blew chilly across their skin. As they covered ground, the buildings became scarce. The periodic gnarled things that might have passed for trees suggested tortured shapes—one feminine form cut off at the shins, another a broken little rag doll–type whose neck bent at terribly wrong angles and whose body looked contorted in unnatural ways. Dave rubbed his eyes. The battle with the first Hollower, the swipes that death took at every one of them, seemed nothing compared to this endless feeling of being lost, of being tormented by the past, of always worrying about imminent danger and never being sure when, exactly, it was going to strike. Dave imagined that this was very much what it felt like being in hell.
They trudged along in silence, and Dave realized that if it was hell, it was also, to a much more magnified degree, just what it felt like being him, on an average day.
After a while they came to a railroad tunnel. It rose like a massive yawning mouth of mud-colored rock; the pings of something liquid dripped in its interior and echoed out to them. No other sounds issued from the opening—no laughter, no derisive layers of voices, no other indication of the Hollower’s presence whatsoever. For some reason, this struck Dave as more terrible. It was like waiting for his mother to get home to yell at or punish him, waiting for a test you know you failed, waiting for that phone call that you knew in your heart meant the relationship was over and she was never coming back. It was a terrible feeling of anticipation. If the Hollower wasn’t in the tunnel, then it was surely waiting for them on the other side.
The ground beneath their feet rose up in a simulation of tracks that disappeared into the sable curtain of air beyond.
“Now what?” Erik shook his head.
“No light to go into,” Jake muttered. “Thought there was supposed to be a light.”
Dorrie frowned at him but took his hand. With her other, she grabbed Erik’s hand. Steve grabbed his and then Dave’s.
They plunged into the darkness.
There were many things it could have done, wanted to do in the tunnel. It populated the lightlessness with blind and hairless things that gaped and bore razor teeth
and shuddered and slithered and skittered across the ceiling on soundless feet, drooping long feelers and flicking barbed tails silently all around the meats. It considered letting those things hit them, bite them, scare them, send them fleeing, just as blind, down the remainder of the tunnel. It had grown impatient, and the anticipation of feeding on their dying Despair had set the voids inside it roiling and churning. It burned with hunger and the desire for Vengeance, burned to hurt, to destroy.