We Are Here (48 page)

The fingers spasmed, letting go of the gun.

Reinhart was too strong though, and my blow to the face hadn’t done more than delay him for a second. He slammed into me from the side as I was reaching for the cop’s weapon, throwing me off balance to tumble toward Raul, too twisted to try to roll out of it.

A kick caught me under the arm where he’d hit me time and again in the restaurant, sending a vast bloom of pain across my ribs, unusually sharp and pointed, but in my head it was like being winged on the leg by the hood of a car while running across a highway—I knew I absolutely could not stop driving forward, no matter how much it hurt, or Reinhart would tag me time and again until I couldn’t move anymore … and this time he’d leave me dead on the floor.

I scrabbled out with my fingers and got ahold of the gun while Reinhart pulled back for another kick, and as I rolled onto my back I could see in his face that this one was coming at my head and would stop me cold. His eyes were already seeing a world in which I was deceased and all that remained was finding a chainsaw.

I swung my arm around to the front and pulled the trigger. I saw his eyes fly open.

Then he was gone.

Not run, not ducked, not sidestepped. He disappeared.

I jumped up, gun gripped in both hands, raking it around in a shaky circle. I panned past Jeffers, who’d finally made it to his feet and was heading to the end of the hall, shambling like an old man.

“Where’d he go?”

Maj looked dumbfounded.

“Where did he go?”

“He’s one of us,” he said, slowly, as the penny dropped.

“What do you mean? How
can
he be?”

“Well, what did you think?” the cop muttered. He’d pushed himself up onto his elbows. There was blood on his face and his eyes looked groggy but were refocusing fast.

I pointed the gun at him. “Are you one too?”

“Me? I’m just a regular guy.”

“So … are you Reinhart’s friend? His real person?”

“Hell no. Way he tells it, he killed that guy years ago, before he came to the city. Whacked him in a motel room in the back of beyond, somewhere out West. He’s killed a lot of people since, like I tried to tell you in the hospital, but you wouldn’t fucking listen. Every one has made him stronger. I did
try
to warn you, asshole.”

Maj looked like a person whose world had sheared apart in front of his eyes. “But … how can he have killed his friend and still … be?”

“Search me. You’re the freaks. You figure it out. All I know is he’s got a dozen of you people heading into the streets tonight to do the same thing.”

Maj walked quickly away toward the door. I shouted to him, “What does this mean?”

The cop took his chance and started to get up. He looked like a man who knew he’d been playing the wrong side of the fence for a long time and if he didn’t get rid of me, he was about to pay for it.

“Stay the fuck down,” I said, bearing down on him. “Where’s Reinhart now?”

“I have no idea. He comes and goes. I did start out trying to nail the guy, you know, like a real policeman. I worked out that wasn’t going to be possible, and well, you know how the song goes. If you can’t beat them …”

I realized I’d read him wrong. “Why aren’t you scared I’m going to call you in?”

“Because you’ve got a girlfriend and you have no idea where Reinhart is right now. Or where he’ll be tomorrow night when you’re sleeping.”

“If he wants to hurt us he’ll do it anyway.”

“That’s true,” the cop said cheerfully. “You’ve made some bad life choices recently, huh.”

“Where
is he
?”

“Downstairs,” Jeffers said.

Keeping the gun on the cop, I stepped back to widen the angle and saw Jeffers reemerging from the door at the end of the hall. He shut it behind him and set off toward the street door, limping. His nose was at an angle, there was blood at the corners of his mouth, and his breathing was ragged. Reinhart had hurt him badly, inside, and he needed a hospital—and yet the priest looked lighter than I’d ever seen him before.

“How do you know? Did you see him down there?”

“I don’t need to.”

Jeffers got to the end of the hall and pulled the main door shut. He gave it a tug to make sure—a man trying to set in order the parts of the world over which he feels he has control. “He won’t have run. The devil never does. He bides his time; he entreats and entices. He’ll wait until you’re off guard and then reappear, and this time he’ll kill you.”

“What’s downstairs?”

“Don’t go down there.”

“What’s downstairs?”

“Cellars. They stretch under the church and the houses on each side. Full of chairs that need repairing and Bibles and prayer books that seem to be surplus to requirements these days. And dead people.”

“
What
?”

“The previous father knew about the ghosts too. He allowed some to rest here, as they waited the call home. I didn’t work that out until today. I thought it was just
his
spirit down there, restless, unsatisfied with my work. In a way it’s a relief to know it’s not.”

“Excuse me—
who’s
downstairs?”

He ignored me. “It’s not working, though. They do not fade and will not leave. Either God isn’t calling them loudly enough or they’re just not listening. It’s my job to lead them home. To lead you all.”

With a great deal of effort he fumbled something out of his trouser pocket. It was a key. He locked the door, then started doggedly back the other way.

“Jeffers—what are you doing?”

“Don’t worry. I don’t think any of them will aid Reinhart. They’re Hollows. You can feel their presence but they don’t move much anymore and they don’t care enough about anything to help. He wants
you
to go down there, though. Can’t you feel that?”

I could. I didn’t know whether it was merely my desire to finish the business with Reinhart, or something else, but there was an undeniable draw to go downstairs.

“You must not,” the priest said. “In the darkness he will win. Evil always thrives in the dark, whether it is literal lack of light, or mere ignorance.”

“John,” Lydia said. She was bending down, her hand on the floor. “You getting this?”

I didn’t understand what she meant and ignored her, focusing on the cop—who showed every sign of wanting to get back into it—and trying to make sense of what the priest was saying. “We can’t leave Reinhart down there,” I said. “I’m not going to just let him go.”

“Oh, neither am I. There’s only one thing that has always worked,” Jeffers said, as he got to the remains of the altar. “It purges and transforms.”

“Jeffers—what the fuck are you doing?”

“
John
,” Lydia said more insistently, but by then I’d already realized what she was talking about. The floor was getting hot under foot.

The priest opened the door in the wall behind the altar and threw the key through it, threw it hard, as smoke came billowing out.

David and Dawn sat with their arms wrapped around each other’s heads. Of course they’d tried to unlock the doors and smash the windows, but cars aren’t designed to allow this. The designers of modern automobiles do not realize that someday you may have to try to escape from things you cannot touch and can barely see. David had tried talking to the people in the back. The more he talked, the clearer they became, though this was not a good thing. There were two men, one woman. He recognized them.

The woman in back giggled, and the car locks went back up. “You can get out now,” she said.

Her voice sounded like the strange friend of your mother’s who one night said, “Go on, try it, just this one time; you may even like it.”

Dawn kept her head buried in David’s shoulder. She couldn’t see the people in the back. She’d tried, but all that happened was that her vision went blurry and she felt twists of fury and vicious misery, like tiny arrows of premenstrual tension. She could make out their voices, like snatches of a radio in the next street, but she didn’t try to hear what they were saying. Dawn wasn’t having any of this. It wasn’t lack of strength, and her husband understood that. It was a simple refusal to deal.

David envied her that. He’d always accommodated, always had his doors open too wide. Things had come in. Things had gone out, too—and stayed alive. “No,” he said, however. “I’m not opening anything.”

“This is our whole problem, you see,” the girl in the back muttered. “All your heavy, heavy things. And
Christ
does it piss us off.
Open the door
.”

“No,” David said. “You can’t do anything to us.”

“You’re very wrong. As your fat friend Talia would tell you, assuming she could still talk.”

“You … What did you do to her?”

“A little game. Real people play in make-believe.
We
get to play with real life—so
much
more fun. Dreams can bite—and they draw real blood. Now open that door or I’m going to slip into your wife’s head and scare her so badly she’ll abort right here and now.”

Dawn jerked her head off David’s shoulder. “Who said that?” she whispered. “Who’s
back
there?”

“See?” The thin woman laughed. “She can hear
some
things. She’ll hear enough when I tell her secrets about what people do to other people sometimes. And especially to little children.”

“What do you
want
?” David pleaded, knowing he was fighting a losing battle. “We’ve done nothing to you.”

“You all do something to
all
of us. And we’re done putting up with it.”

“Open the door,” one of the men in the backseat said, the one with straggly hair.

“Open it. Open it,” chanted the man with the shaved head, leaning to put his face next to the woman’s, “or I’ll take the ride into your wife’s tidy little soul too. It’ll be some trip, dude. I’ve always been the most imaginative when it comes to breaking things.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said the woman. “Though impersonating the trailer whale’s dead beau
was
your idea, I’ll admit. Open the door, David.”

Then her expression changed. She hissed: “
Quickly
.”

David heard shouting and saw Maj running up the street. It was like feeling every lie you’ve ever told and every mistake you’ve made coming bubbling up out of your subconscious at once, as if someone had found the hidden notebook in which you’ve written your worst deeds and thoughts and started to read it out loud.

And David realized things had gotten even worse.

Maj stopped at the car. He took a deep breath. Then he reached out and opened the door. David stared up at him: caught, guilty, powerless.

“David,” Maj said, years of hurt and loneliness starting to burn. “We really need to talk.”

Dawn turned to see a man in jeans and an untucked shirt. His hair was tousled and his jaw stubbled. It was a look she knew David could pull off, though she’d given up trying to lead him toward it.

“I can see you,” she said.

“Makes sense,” the man said. “You probably know him better than anyone but me.”

“No,” Dawn said, pushing herself away from David and getting out of the car. “I know him
better
.”

“Dawn …” David said, getting out the other side.

Maj stared her down. “You don’t even know who I am.”

“You’re Maj. He just told me everything.”

“I doubt it.”

“So you’re his friend—I get that. You were kids together. I get that too. But he’s not yours anymore. He’s my
husband
.”

David came around the front. “Dawn, let me—”

“No!” she shouted. “I’m
not
going to let you handle this. That’s not the way it’s going to be, sunshine.”

Maj wasn’t getting drawn into the discussion. When he’d seen the car, he’d known this was meant to be, that David arriving in town so soon after Lizzie had gone—and moments after realizing Reinhart had never been real—meant it was time for this joke to be put to bed. Either David was going to put him back into his rightful place in his life, or Maj would take it from him.

Dawn saw this in his eyes, or felt it, and stepped in front of David, keeping him back with her arm.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Maj said, taking a step toward them. “So get out of the way.”

“No,” Dawn said. “Not doing it.”

“He’s mine.”

“Mine.”

“I
deserve his life
. I was always the one who made things happen. He’s a liar and a taker. You
all
are.”

“He’s not,” Dawn shouted.

“If you don’t know that about him,” Maj said, in wonder, “then you don’t know him at all.”

“I know who he is. You just know who he
was
. People change and friendships end. Deal with it.”

David kept trying to pull Dawn away, but she was strong, and furious like he’d never seen her before. Meanwhile, the three skinny people had slipped out of the car and were crowding around, laughing at him in the way he’d always suspected people did when he wasn’t looking.

“I’m having a real life,” Maj said. “It’s time.”

He pushed Dawn aside. David backed up, trying to get away around the side of the car. He couldn’t get past the skinny people. They blocked him, rubbing their bodies against him. They possessed no substance except for the disgust they made you feel, but that was enough.

Maybe he shouldn’t
try
to get away.

Maybe this had been coming all his life, or at least since he got a phone call in the middle of the night a decade ago telling him that his mother and father were dead. If it had
always
felt like a struggle to live, to make friends, to write, to be alive, perhaps it would be easier to let it all go.

“Yes,” a voice said, close to his ear. The red-haired woman had pushed even closer to him, letting the front of her dress fall open. It smelled bad in there. “You’re right, Davey. It would be
so
much easier that way. You won’t be lonely anymore. Do it. Just let go.”

David’s mind filled with a flash image seen through some other boy’s eyes, a scene from many years ago. It was so brief that he couldn’t register what it showed—only that the boy in question had been broken into pieces one dark winter’s afternoon in a house somewhere up in Wisconsin twenty years ago, and that this woman and her three brothers had been that boy’s attempt to surround himself with something he could understand—though it turned out that even the people out of his own head were not his friends. It all got very badly away from him, and there arrived the week when he murdered his family, slowly, one at a time, along with several other people he’d never admitted to and whose bodies have never been found.