Found You (15 page)

Dave smiled, too. He could remember that same feeling of connectedness, that same feeling of safety in numbers, when he and Erik and Cheryl had first gotten together. There was camaraderie there, a sense of having found people to believe in—and people who were willing to believe in you.

Dave thought maybe, just maybe, they had a fighting chance. And that possibility made him feel good. Better, he supposed, than the tequila made him feel. He held it together, intending to ride out the alcohol in his system, but Erik gave him a look that indicated concern (Are you okay, man?), and Dave nodded reassuringly that he was fine.

After a while, the chatter and the laughter died down a little, and the purpose for their meeting seemed to sink over the company like a heavy fog. Some of them still nursing their beers, they settled down around Dave’s den. Steve and Erik took the couch, and Jake the easy chair. Dorrie sat on the arm, and Dave saw that Jake was holding her hand, squeezing it, he supposed, for comfort.

Dave himself stood by the television. He didn’t feel
much like sitting, although the tequila made his head heavy and his limbs clumsy and oversized. He tried very hard not to sway where he stood and thought he managed tolerably well. Still, he could feel Erik’s eyes on him, anxious, concerned. Dave imagined his friend felt that same anxious knot in the stomach that he felt. Erik had seen what was on the tape. He knew about Max Feinstein blowing the back of his head off in his upstairs bedroom because dealing with the Hollower had gotten to be too much. He remembered the night they set out with Cheryl and Sean and, later, DeMarco to kill the monster before it killed them. And whatever little answers they’d gotten from that tape, whatever little comfort their meager knowledge had provided, seemed to pale in comparison to the powerful, vindictive, savage thing they were up against now. He didn’t much think that the tape would offer any new clues, or even anything this new crop of victims could take to sleep with them that night, and he suspected Erik felt very much the same way.

“You ready?”

They nodded at him, their faces solemn, their eyes expectant.

He pushed the PLAY button on the VCR and waited.

The blue screen was followed by a flash of static. Max’s hand shadowed the screen for a moment, and then it pulled away. Max sat behind a desk, hands folded over a forest-green blotter amidst a tumultuous sea of curling Post-it notes. Max smiled.

“Who’s that?” Dorrie asked. Her voice sounded loud among the held breaths. Dave paused the tape.

“Max Feinstein,” Erik answered her. “He owned a
house on River Falls Road. It was his place where we found the first Hollower…its lair, I guess. We killed it there, on his front lawn.” He barely glanced at her. Since all this business had started with the new Hollower, Erik had become quieter, more serious than he had been, and far less warm, less open. It was almost like he was constantly cringing from some phantom ache, ever tensing in his muscles to brace himself against pain. It made Dave despondent to see him like that, and it threatened to topple some of that newfound hope. Erik had always believed they could fight the Hollower. It was that unshakable belief that had encouraged them, united them. Without that…

Finally Jake asked, “Where is he now?”

“Dead,” Dave answered flatly. “He shot himself in his bedroom right after making this tape.”

Dave thought Jake’s face drained of color at that, and the boy turned away from his gaze.

Dorrie shivered. “That’s awful. That poor man.”

Steve didn’t look surprised, but Dave supposed he didn’t expect the detective to. Steve had probably been putting scraps and bits of this story together long before this. The tape was probably the unifying element, the key to the code.

“It’s not the half of it,” Dave said, and pressed PLAY again.

“Uh, hi, David. Hi,” Max’s voice said on the tape. “Or maybe I should call you Dave. I hope you’ll forgive me for taking the liberty of informality here, but I believe we share a common affliction.” After straightening his tie, Max reached out a hand as if to adjust
the camera angle then drew back, leaving the camera angle as it was.

Leaning into the lens, he said, “I hope you can see and hear me okay. I have so much to tell you. Sally tells me you’ve seen the Hollower. Worse, the Hollower has seen you.” He chuckled. “I suppose ‘seen’ isn’t the right word. It doesn’t see you the way you or I might see each other. No,” he said, and shook his finger in their direction. “Oh no. It’s a different beast entirely.”

He pulled a bottle of scotch and a glass of ice from some place behind the desk, poured some with badly shaking hands, and set the bottle down again off-camera. He raised the glass, and Dave noticed the tiniest tinkling of the cubes against the sides as Max held it up in a toasting gesture. Then Max took a gulp and swallowed. “I’d offer you some, but obviously, I’m not in a position to do that. I’m not a drinking man—never have been. But this is a special occasion. Today…” His voice trailed off and he took another smaller sip.

“Today is the last day.”

There was an appreciative murmur from the new members of the audience. Erik said nothing. Dave glanced in his direction and saw the grim, set expression, the gaze fixed on the television.

“Dave,” Max’s voice was saying, “let me see if I can explain this thing as I have come to understand it. See, the Hollower is an intangible being. Where our senses stop, its senses start, and continue above and beyond the range of even the most psychic of our kind. The Hollower is not quite physical here, but it seems able to act
on this world. As far out as all that sounds, I think you know this much. This…being, this monster—it feeds on its victims’ sense of unreality. On their surreality, if you will. People’s confusions. Their insecurities. I know that’s vague, but it’s the best way to put it, believe me. The Hollower is sustained by impressions and perceptions and points of view. Its greatest protection is its anonymity and androgyny. How does it find you on such vague terms, you ask? By ‘smelling’”—Max made finger-quotes around the Hollower’s concept of smell— “your most skewed thoughts. By smelling your irrational feelings. These evidently carry their own musk, their own meaty scent that clings to us. Think about it, about those wonderful, awful dating years and how you just got…vibes, I guess you’d call it. Feelings about people. The strongest scents set off red flags about their neediness, their stalker potential. So maybe we do possess a glimmer of that sense it uses to ‘see’ us or ‘smell’ us.” He smiled, and Dave was once again struck by the fatigue in the man’s face, the utter rubbing out of once clear features and sharp eyes. He had a dull, hazy look. He took another drink.

“It collects identities and voices at will and uses them against you. It’s the perfect weapon—the perfect disguise. Few things can hurt us more than the way we can hurt ourselves, am I right? Little else shakes our faith in ourselves so much as self-doubt, however off-kilter or misplaced. And few things are more dangerous than misconceptions about the world around—”

On the videotape, Max drew in a sudden, sharp breath.
His eyes grew wide. In the background, the sound of a few footsteps drew closer to the camera and then receded. Dave felt his chest tighten in anticipation. God, he remembered this part. Hated it. He hadn’t looked at the tape, not once, since the night he showed it to Cheryl and Erik. In truth, he hadn’t even been sure he’d be able to find it to show to Steve. He’d gone to put the tequila bottle away, and when he’d come back, the tape was lying on the coffee table. Like someone had taken it out for him. Like something had wanted him to go ahead and have it at his disposal, by all means, for whatever little good he thought it would do. Like something was very much amused by the idea that Dave would show his weak and terrified little friends the last words of a dead man who hadn’t been able to fend off even a Secondary.

That was the thought, almost verbatim, that had popped into his head. It wasn’t his thought at all, not in even his own mind-words, but he’d understood it well enough, and where it came from. He’d been almost afraid to touch the tape (Hell, why not be honest? He’d been damned well afraid to even look at it too long), with the mental residue of the Hollower still in his head. So there it sat until the others arrived, and he’d pushed it into the VCR to give up its secrets.

All around the room, the others, including Erik, leaned in toward the television.

On the tape, a soft and sexless chuckling close to the mike caused Max to grow tense where he sat. The picture dissolved into static, and the chuckling broke up like cell reception in a tunnel. The static didn’t clear, but every once in a while it would clear for just a second,
just long enough for the eye to register Max’s form, wide-eyed, leaning close to the camera.

“It knows. The Primary, it knows. It’s here, I think. Outside,” Max whispered. A flash of clear picture showed a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, and—

Shit…is that blood on the wall behind him
? Dave felt a dreadful unease in his chest. The tequila, which had settled down to a manageable half-buzz, roiled angrily in his stomach, threatening nausea.

Something was wrong with the tape. Dave and Erik exchanged glances. This wasn’t how it played out last time. The others, having no prior experience with the tape, kept watching.

“—always watching, waiting.” Another pause, followed by his own laughter, tinny and forced, that was drowned out by a crescendoing wind-tunnel noise that roared over the static. Louder still than that came more laughter, the sadistic delight of many voices at once.

Another flash of clarity, and Max slumped over the desk, a rough exploded mess of red and gray and white replacing the visible back portion of his head. Jake squeezed Dorrie’s hand. Erik shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Dave shook his head, hoping to clear it, hoping to bring some sense back to what he was seeing. Steve, glancing up and seeing their reactions, gave them a quizzical look.

“What?”

Dave said, “It isn’t supposed to show that. The tape is different. Different than last time. This”—he waved at the TV as the static took over again— “isn’t supposed to be there.”

In the next moment, Max, still slumped over the desk, no longer had a halo of blood on the wall behind him. Now it streaked the wall, forming crude letters:

HOLLOW

The frame of the camera only caught the side of a sleeve, a black glove, the flap of a trench coat that stood next to the blood letters behind Max. Most of the figure stood off-camera. But they recognized it; the collective gasp of the room confirmed that.

The wind-tunnel noise stopped dead, but the laughter didn’t. And the black glove raised over Max’s head and closed into a fist.

“Every one of you,” it said, “will be killed.”

Static erupted across the screen again.

Dave jabbed a finger out and pressed STOP on the VCR, but the tape kept running. The picture cleared, and Max’s body was alone again. After a second or two, it picked its bloody head up.

There was a gaping hole where the mouth should have been, except that it was vertical, taking up the majority of the facial plane, its frayed edges of flesh singed black, swaying like cilia. Otherwise, the smooth, pale expanse of the head was blank.

“All of you will be killed, just like Sally, just like Cheryl, just like all the others. And I’ll make it hurt so much that you’ll trickle out all your pain and despair for me, just like they did. You will die, die, die, die, die.” The voice that spoke didn’t come from the mouth hole of the figure on the tape. In fact, it didn’t seem to come
from the tape at all. Each of them cringed when the sound got too close to his or her ear. Dave swore under his breath when the voice came close enough to make neck hairs stand on end.

The Max-thing on the tape rose and leaned in close to the lens, pointing a black-gloved finger. “Every one of you. You always were nothing but meat.”

Then the gloved hand reached across the frame again and shut the camera off, and the screen went dark.

For several minutes, none of them spoke. Dave looked from face to face. All were washed out, with worry in the eyes, soft downturns of the mouth, all chests rising and falling with ragged breaths. All of them looked exhausted, unsure.

Seconds ticked by as they waited to see if they were alone in the house, or if the Hollower would make any other moves. They warily eyed the few paintings that Dave had hanging on the walls, mostly landscapes that they half-expected to become populated with distorted figures or horrific acts captured in the stark stillness of paint and ink. When, as a whole, they came to the conclusion it was gone, they began to relax a little and started moving around slowly, as if coming out of a deep sleep. But their few words were mumbled and sounded too loud, too stiff in the quiet of the house.

“Cheryl?” Erik looked pained and pale.

Dave nodded. “Her brother called today. It found her. Got her like the other one tried to do at the Tavern.”

Erik passed a hand over his face, and in the breaks between the fingers, Dave caught a glimpse of wetness in his friend’s eyes.

Jake hovered uncertainly by the door until Dave told him he could smoke in the house so he wouldn’t have to go outside alone. The boy looked relieved. Granted the small comfort of a cigarette, he spoke what they were all thinking. “It knows we’re here. You all saw it, on the tape? It knows we’re together and that we know what it is, and…I think it’s going to make things worse.” Everyone nodded their confirmation at Jake, who lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and took several curt puffs from it before asking, “What are we going to do?”

Steve cleared his throat. “We’re going to stop it. Kill it before it kills us. Question is: how do we do that?”

No one said anything. All eyes were on Dave and Erik. Erik shrugged and said, “Weapons don’t really work. Dave and I—the whole lot of us—tried that. It didn’t work.”

“The mirror worked,” Dave said, more to himself than them. But feeling their expectant stares, he said, “In the box that Max’s tape came in, there was a mirror. At the end of the tape, the way it played when we first saw it, Max said we’d know what to do with it when the time came. Well, none of us did, but Sally, my sister, seemed to. She broke it and cut into the Hollower.”

“Cut a big, gaping mouth across the bastard’s face,” Erik added, and grinned a little.

Dave nodded. “It changed after that. It became…I don’t know, physical. Solid, somehow. And that made it weak and clumsy. We hurt it. Eventually, we killed it.”

“You killed it. Remember, Dave?”

Dave nodded. He remembered. He’d charged that fucking thing with one of the sharp twisted-up objects
he’d found in Feinstein’s yard. He believed they had been keys to other places, other dimensions the Hollower hunted in. But they made fine weapons, too, he’d discovered. His whole hand had gone numb when he plunged the sharp end into what should have been a face. Contact had killed the first few layers of skin on his fist and split it where it was thinnest, like across his knuckles. But the Hollower’s body had shaken all around his hand from what felt like a small implosion inside it. Immediately after, he felt a tugging against his fist, like a vacuum. He’d let go of the handle just as one of the Hollower’s claws swung up and knocked him backward. Dave remembered watching the Hollower’s whole body tremble in violent spasms, its head shaking back and forth until it was almost a blur. It tottered on the long, unstable legs of its physical form. Its whips had drawn away from Sally, and she sank to the grass. Still, it made no sound, except the spastic clicking of its claws as it crashed to the ground and stayed there, unable to rise.

The tequila lurched in his stomach when he thought of dragging Sally away from it, cut and bleeding, her eyes closed, whimpering softly. She’d said, “It hurt me. I’m scared of it, Davey. It hurt me.”

He closed his eyes and opened them. “I remember.”

“So, we need a mirror, then?” Jake looked around for a place to put out his cigarette and decided on the empty beer bottle with an apologetic glance at Dave. “We’ve got mirrors everywhere. We just have to cut this thing open, then? Let the bad juices out, so to speak?”

Erik shrugged. “Maybe. I’d always thought touching
it might upset whatever coat of indestructibility it seems to have, but Dave, I’m sure, can attest to the dangers of making physical contact with it.”

Dave showed them the back of his hand. There was a little bit of scarring still; white lines over his knuckles, puckered white marks and fine lines all across the skin up to the wrist. It wasn’t immediately visible and didn’t ever bother him nowadays, but turning his hand in the den light, they saw what even brief physical contact left behind.

“Besides,” Erik went on, “even if swiping at it with broken glass were the answer, it isn’t as easy as it sounds to even get that close. And to tell you the truth, as much of a stubborn son of a bitch that first Hollower was, this one sounds leaner and meaner. I don’t think it’s going to go down the same way.”

“What do we do, then?” Dorrie said. When none of the men answered, she said, “Look, this thing scares the hell out of me. I came very close”—she cradled her bandaged arm— “to doing something very dangerous and stupid, just to get that thing out of my head. I can’t live like that, always on the edge of losing everything. I just can’t. I may not have a terrible lot going for me, but…I like what I have enough to want to fight for it. We have to do something. Please.”

Jake came up beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t know about you guys, but…this is the strongest I’ve felt in a long time. Since we first walked through that door, I felt like we could beat this, that we could take this Hollower down. I don’t feel that way when I’m alone. Things come crashing back, and I
can’t think straight. Nothing to focus on, nothing to believe in. But this here, all of us here—I believe in that. Am I nuts for thinking that?”

Dave smiled and looked at Erik. “No, I don’t think that’s crazy. Safety in numbers, man.”

“It’s more than that,” Steve said in a firm, quiet tone. “I don’t feel so…wrong. I don’t feel so unsure of me. Not here. Not since, like Jake said, since we got here.”

Erik chuckled. “Maybe all our crazy brainwaves cancel each other out.”

Steve rose from the couch. “It’s not a bad theory.” He began to pace Dave’s den. “Okay, obviously it can still contact us, even if we’re all together. The tape is proof of that. But for all we know, it could be throwing out a blind blanket threat. It didn’t change the room, really, except to keep the tape rolling. It didn’t reach out anything but its voice to us. Maybe it knows that our standing together gives us strength and makes us harder to find, harder to kill.”

He looked to Dave for confirmation, but Dave’s head ached and his stomach felt like a vat of acid, and he just shrugged.

They began talking at once: “Dave, what do you think?” “What should we do?” “How do we fight it?”

“I don’t know!” Dave said, more impatiently than he’d intended. They paused in their chatter. Softer, he said, “I don’t know. I always kind of thought that we killed the first one by sheer dumb luck. And it nearly killed us in the process. I want to help, folks, but I have to tell you, I don’t have such a great track record with keeping anyone safe from one of these things.” He sat
down heavily. “I don’t know how to kill it, and I don’t know how to protect you from it any more than I knew how to protect my sister or my girlfriend or any of my friends. I honestly don’t know what to tell you.” He looked up at them all miserably, and the silence stretched out to the border of discomfort.

“Well,” Steve said after a time, “it’s a good thing you’re not alone in fighting it, then.”

Dave looked up and found him smiling. They all were. He gave in and smiled, too. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it is.”

Dave went into the kitchen and got them all another round of beers. He also went upstairs and grabbed a hand mirror. After Cheryl had left him, he’d been in a CVS one day, cutting across the hair care aisle, and he’d spied it. It was an impulse buy, an instinct buy, maybe, but he’d kept it close to the bed ever since, the unrealized and certainly unarticulated thought being
just in case
. Also, he supposed, on impulse, he grabbed a printout of an article he’d found online from the drawer of his night table.

He came back downstairs and found them settled back down on the couch and chairs.

Erik clapped his hands together. “So what’s our plan?”

He sat down on the chair next to Erik and put both the mirror and the printout on the coffee table.

“You never know. Better to have it if we need it.”

“What’s this?” Dorrie picked up the paper.

“It’s something I came across on the Internet,” Dave explained, “while looking for ways to keep busy after Cheryl left. I wasn’t looking for stuff about the Hollower—well, not intentionally—but I found that
from an accidental click-through on one of the sites about ghost sightings in New Jersey. You all know what they say about some of the places up in Bloomwood County, right? Just weird things that happen, people disappearing, doing crazy things? Very Lovecraft kind of stuff sometimes.”

“Sure,” Steve said. “Since LPD went electronic, we have a whole case file directory unofficially known as the Weird New Jersey files. You know, like the magazine.”

“Well,” Dave said, “this is probably one of those things that would end up in those files. Basically—you can pass it around if you want—to sum it up, it’s a brief mention of a teenager from Wexton, recently transplanted to Lakehaven. The teenager keeps an online journal—a blog, they call it. It’s anonymous, but her visible user information identifies her as a girl, and as being about fifteen.

“Anyway, this blog entry is dated, what was it, the sixth of January or thereabouts? Some time after we killed the first Hollower and before there were any real signs of the second. Now, I guess because it’s anonymous she feels free to discuss anything and everything. There is entry after entry of angsty rebellious ranting, secret worries about boys and friends and sex and even how her underwear fits. You know, teenaged girl stuff. You’ve got all the usual things she sees at school, at home, at the mall with friends. But she also talks about a stalker, with alternately melodramatic and unaffected tones, that follows her and some of her classmates around. She calls him ‘the man in the mask,’ and she makes him sound almost ghostlike. That he can walk through walls
and disappear, that he leaves her ‘presents’ in her locker like dead mice (she’s afraid of rodents) and lunch bags full of spiders. That he cut the face of the pot-head four lockers down from her.

“The part I thought was interesting is near the end, there. See? Where she mentions how she intends to make the man go away.

“She says ‘we plan to blind its eyeless sight, and then push it back into the Abyss of Hell.’ I think that was how she put it. I scanned a bunch of the other blog entries before and after to see how, exactly, she did it or how it turned out, but I couldn’t find anything. Her entries after January sixth make no mention of the stalker at all, or any resolution regarding the problem. I went through them pretty thoroughly. Even for an anonymous blog, she speaks a lot in code, and I wrote all kinds of quirky little phrases down, did Google searches, looked them up in slang dictionaries. I came up with nothing. But the point is, she does describe her stalker man as someone very much like our Hollower. And whatever she did to make him—or it—go away, it seemed to work. The reason I printed it out is because, well…Erik and I can tell you, this Hollower is different. Meaner. Stronger. It’s called a Primary. It’s…a different species, maybe, or a different class. I don’t know. And there is one throw-away reference in there, if you skim down, where she calls her stalker a Primary. See? What I’m saying is, even the Primaries, the tough ones like we have now, even they aren’t invincible.”

Dave looked to each of their faces, taking some comfort in the glimmers of hope their eyes reflected back at
him. He didn’t have the answers, but he thought that at least the potential for victory was something to go on. Back when they’d fought the first Hollower, the boy they were with, Sean, had believed wholeheartedly that all monsters had an Achilles’ heel, that nothing, natural or supernatural, was completely invincible.

“Everything has a weakness,” little Sean had said. And he’d been right. Sure, he and Dave and Erik and Sally and Cheryl and DeMarco had all dodged its attacks, had all overcome its temptation to lie down and die, but they hadn’t held much hope that they could actually hurt it, let alone kill it. But it did have a weakness, and they had managed to destroy it. Even if this new Hollower was a different class or even a slightly different species, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be killed, too.

“Best as I can figure,” Dave said, “we can beat this thing. If we can find it, that is.”

“Well,” Dorrie said, “I was thinking a lot about what you said about Max, that you found it…its lair, I guess…where Max died. Where it drove Max to suicide, I mean. So maybe, and, Dave, I hope you’ll forgive me if it sounds insensitive, but maybe we should start looking for it where it caused its first death here. That we know of, I mean. Maybe we should look where Sally died.”

It made sense. The catacombs beneath Oak Hill Assisted Living offered potentially endless possibilities for the Hollower to hide.
Well, maybe not hide, exactly
, he thought. It didn’t seem to be hiding from anyone.

“It won’t be easy getting in there,” Steve said, but Dave
could tell from his tone that he was already working out a plan in his head for getting them all into the catacombs.

“At the risk of sounding all Late Night Horror Show,” Jake said, “we could go at night. I’ve uh…had some experience with getting into places where I wasn’t supposed to be.” He offered a sheepish look to Steve, who replied, “Good. It’s a crime scene, after all. I can go in as part of the ongoing investigation, but it’s a whole other kettle of fish getting you in there. Maybe you all can meet me somewhere…”

Jake looked solemn. “You get in, get the key, whatever we need. I’ll get the rest of us in.”