The Triumvirate Read online

  “Who’s that?”

  “The day nurse who comes to check on you.”

  Mrs. Saltzman made a face. “I think I can understand some of what they’re saying. When they talk to us, of course, they use words. We’d never be able to pronounce the three-dimensional words, even in the siren language. But I still think I can catch a little of what they mean.”

  “Come now—let’s get you back into bed.” Lauren took Mrs. Saltzman’s arm and guided her gently to her feet. The old woman was surprisingly steady. She got into bed without help, and Lauren went back and retrieved the blanket from her chair. Since moving to LPH, she refused to go to sleep without it. It was a present—a guilt gift, they were called secretly among the staff, from some relative of hers who sent checks but never came to visit.

  “There now...are you comfortable Mrs. Saltzman?”

  “Yes.” She turned over on her side, away from Lauren, already slipping further into her own head.

  “Okay, good. Good night.” Lauren got as far as turning off the light by the bathroom when Mrs. Saltzman said something she couldn’t quite catch.

  “What was that?” She turned back to the old woman and found her sitting up in bed, those clouded eyes fixed on her.

  “Be careful. They want you dead. The doormen....” she slid back down under the covers and turned away. “They killed Helen Coley. They know about your cousin and what he did. And the doormen want you dead as they are. They want to watch you die.”

  Lauren hovered in the doorway, her stomach turning a little. “Wha—what? Mrs. Sa.... I....”

  “Go to sleep,” the old woman murmured. She started humming, and before Lauren had managed to shake the words off her and get moving again, the humming had dulled to light snoring.

  Chapter 3

  Upon arriving at Steve’s apartment, Bennie Mendez ducked beneath the yellow tape and dodged CSU and the other detectives until he found Gordon. A uniformed officer was taking Gordon’s statement as he sat, pale and hollow-eyed, holding a mug with a shaking hand. As Bennie approached, Gordon looked up and tears resurfaced in his red-rimmed, dark-circled eyes. The look was one of apology; he claimed to have somehow slept through the attack. His hair was a mess, sticking up in bed-head spikes, and his round chin was shadowed and in need of a shave. Both were very uncharacteristic of so neat and well-put-together a man. Those things—the look of him and the look in his eyes—made it real, somehow, more real than what his captain had told him, more real than the voice messages from his pals at the precinct, more real than the yellow tape that had been strung across the apartment doorway. It was always like that for Bennie, seeing victims’ loved ones in such states of grief. It reconnected in him what he necessarily needed to detach

  Bennie had wanted this to be a mistake, a case of mistaken identity or a terrible clerical error of some kind. Hell, he would have even settled for a terrible joke in poor taste, if it meant being able to walk through a doorway he had come to feel was a second home to him over the last four years and see his partner sitting up, drinking a beer and A-OK.

  “He’s gone, Bennie,” Gordon said, unashamedly letting the tears streak down his face. The quick glance to the body bag beneath the television led Bennie’s gaze in the same direction. Bennie sank down on the easy chair across from Gordon, leaning forward to put his head in his hands. Other officers, noticing his presence now, walked by with soft words of condolence and pats on the back or shoulder.

  He got up suddenly and forced his legs to carry him over to Eileen Vernon. She was packing up her kit, busying herself with the clasps on the case. He touched her shoulder. She looked up. He could tell she had been crying.

  “Eileen,” he said, and nothing else. Neither could speak for several moments. She hugged him, fiercely and tightly, and he hugged her back, glad not to have to look into her eyes, afraid his own machismo would crumble and he’d begin to cry himself.

  “How?” he finally whispered.

  She pulled away and, without looking at him, crouched down by the body. “Don’t let Gordon see again.” She unzipped the body bag, and for all Bennie had seen as a cop, he nonetheless pulled back in horror and revulsion.

  Bennie recognized Steve’s body by the tattoo of a Chinese dragon on his forearm that he’d gotten to celebrate his promotion to Detective Lieutenant and his moving in with Gordon, both major steps in his life. However, where Steve’s face should have been was a tortured mess of torn-up flesh. His bottom jaw had been torn completely away, and the places where his nose and left eye should have been were shredded and swollen beyond recognition. The right eyelid was closed, but looked caved in, as if the orb it had once protected was no longer beneath it.

  “Dios mio.” Bennie thought for a moment he might be sick. He took several deep, silent breaths until control returned and crouched down next to her. He winced at the edge-curled smell of early decomposition and the meaty smell of blood, and something else—something vaguely reminiscent of ozone.

  “Not sure what the car battery smell is,” Eileen said dully as she zipped the bag back up. “I’ll let you know.” A pause. “This is a lot like the last two, over on River Falls Road. Concentrated injury to the face and neck. Nowhere else. No one heard a thing.” The last she said with a skeptical glance in Gordon’s direction.

  “Time of death?” He spoke before he realized he was really talking, partially just for something to say and partially because job instinct was beginning to take over. He might not be able to detach himself from Steve’s death, but he’d be damned if he didn’t catch the puta madre who killed him.

  And he had been killed; no animal attacks here to speak of. Large bands of bruising around the neck denoted strangulation, likely as his face was being mutilated.

  “Some time around midnight or 1 a.m. would be my guess.”

  “Murder weapon?”

  “Nothing,” Eileen replied, the unspoken agreement that it was murder acknowledged between them.

  Bennie went to stand and Eileen grabbed his arm. Her grip was tight, her eyes shining and intense. “I want you to find the bastard that did this and take care of it. Make it right,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “No questions, no details. Just make it right.”

  Bennie took a deep breath and let it out slowly, meeting her eyes for several moments before nodding. “I’ll get him.”

  He moved away to talk to Gordon when he caught a glimpse of figures in the kitchen.

  They weren’t dressed like cops; they didn’t move like cops, either, and that’s what he noticed first about them. As he made his way toward the kitchen, he also realized that no one else seemed to notice them. No one spoke to them. No one even seemed to have need to move around them. He frowned. There was something unsettlingly familiar about the way they looked....

  Their backs were to him. They stood at the sink as if conferring over something. All three wore long black trench coats, black gloves, and black fedora hats. All three appeared to be bald, the bloodless white of the backs of their necks reminding him very much of dead flesh. As he passed through the doorway into the kitchen, he felt a biting cold all across his skin, and revulsion crawling beneath it. The three turned in unison.

  None of them had a face. Bennie felt the air rush out of his lungs and a ball of ice form in his stomach. He thought of Anita and Steve, of the cold cases in the file cabinet they were all supposed to forget about.

  Anita talked in her sleep; once she had dreamed of something she called a Hollower. When he asked her, she had grown evasive, and that had been answer enough. Her experience on River Falls Road at that same house where they had found the bodies of those two young people was somehow connected to the experience that had left Steve beaten all to hell and those unsolved files he had once advised both Steve and Anita to spin, sign, and forget about. The Hollowers. He knew it, felt the connections all at once, firing off paths in his mind.

  The Hollowers.

  “You can tell her we killed it. It isn’t coming back.” Th
at’s what Steve had asked him to tell Anita. They had killed the monstruo, the one she had been so convinced had found her, so convinced was trying to kill her and the baby. He thought of Cora, three now, and finally understood her fear.

  “What are you doing here?” Bennie flipped the safety off his gun.

  The one to his left cocked its head as if considering his question. The one to his right looked off into the den. The middle one spoke to him—at least, that’s what Bennie assumed was speech, although it had no mouth that Bennie could see, and the voices intertwined were both high and low, loud and whispering, seeming to wash toward his ears like a tide, coming from numerous directions.

  “We have come to bring death,” the middle one told him.

  “You will not interfere,” the one on the right added.

  “I can’t help that,” Bennie said slowly. “It’s my job to interfere in cases like these. To stop death when I can.”

  “You cannot,” the middle one said. “This is only the beginning. It will not be stopped.”

  “I can’t let you hurt any more people,” Bennie said. He could feel their hate radiating off them in icy waves, an almost tangible, painful thing against his tense nerves. His hand was on his gun, and his mind, while he spoke to those things, was calculating the risk of shooting at them.

  “You can’t hurt us,” the left one said, as if reading his mind. “We are ageless, and we won’t die.”

  “Everything dies,” Bennie replied.

  “No joda con nosotros,” the middle one said, “or everyone who means something to you we will tear apart.”

  “What?” he asked, his heart racing now.

  Don’t fuck with us, is what they had said. The blank expanses of the three figures were fixed on him.

  “Detective Mendez?”

  He flinched and turned to find the officer who had been taking Gordon’s statement standing in the doorway.

  “Mr. Wrighston asked to speak to you.”

  Bennie turned back to the sink. The figures were gone. He swallowed, trying to calm his heart.

  “Detective?” The officer sounded hesitant, confused.

  Mendez turned. It didn’t look like the officer had seen the figures at all. Mendez could see from his stance and the look in his eyes that he knew something had just happened to his superior officer, but that he didn’t quite think it his place to question him at the moment. Mendez didn’t give him an opportunity to change his mind.

  “I’ll be right there.” He glanced back once more to make sure those things—the Hollowers—were gone. They were.

  But as he passed back into the living room, he could have sworn he heard multiple strains of voices laughing softly behind him.

  ***

  Over the last four years, Erik had seen a lot of death. It had started with the suicide of a man he had never met, a man named Max Feinstein, who used to live at 63 River Falls Road. Following that had been the deaths of Sally Kohlar and Cheryl Duffy and Dave Kohlar, and more recently, Jake Dylan and Dorrie Weatherin. There had been others—a number of strange cold cases and open cases that the police of Lakehaven, New Jersey had yet to solve. His friend Steve had told him about those. Steve had known they were connected, and in Erik’s mind, it didn’t take a great leap of faith to see how. For hundreds of years, the world he knew had been a hunting ground for beings that could straddle dimensions and bend the surroundings of this Earth to mimic the worst of one’s fears and insecurities. The beings were terribly strong and full of hunger and hate. And everywhere they went, they caused pain and fear and so, so much death.

  Max Feinstein had called them the Hollowers. They had driven Feinstein to splatter his brains all over the back wall of his bedroom. They had killed just about everyone he knew who had fought back. And they had taken Dave.

  He’d had a lot of trouble with Dave’s passing; he and Dave had gotten to be good friends in the time they’d known each other. Dave had helped him fight—the urges to go back to coke, the Hollowers, all of it. Dave had, in a sense, helped him find the strength to reclaim his life, to find a reason to hold onto himself. Dave had been the connection between them all. Dave had given his life to save them from an influx of evil the likes of which none of them could begin to imagine. To say he had trouble with losing Dave was an understatement, to be sure.

  And he was having trouble with Jake’s death, too. Jake had been his sponsee, a little brother of sorts in the family of those recovering from substance abuse. He’d felt protective of Jake, who, like all recovering addicts, had fought for a second chance at life. As his sponsor, Erik felt it was his responsibility to safeguard that second chance, and help Jake make the most of it. But he’d failed Jake, and he hadn’t even known Jake was in trouble! Why hadn’t they called, especially if a Hollower had been involved? And that was the plain truth of it, wasn’t it? He and Steve didn’t have to say it. They were brothers in another kind of family, one where survival meant words weren’t always necessary. Gut feelings and warning signs and the horrific calling cards of monsters were enough to be sure. Jake had needed him and he hadn’t been there. Maybe there hadn’t been enough time. And if that was the case, it added a new and terrifying layer to the situation. The Secondary and the Primary they had fought before had toyed with them, stalking them for a time before amping their power to shroud him and his friends with dangers from their own minds. He and Dave had supposed it took time for the Hollowers to build enough power in this world to attempt death blows, especially against those who were alert, aware, and waiting. This Hollower, it seemed, was swift and deadly right out of the gate.

  It didn’t make sense. They’d agreed to keep each other in the loop regarding any possible return of the Hollowers. If Jake was being stalked, he would have told Erik. And if the Hollower was newly arrived in this world, how could it be so strong as to kill two of them right off without warning?

  The answer was there in his head—had been since the last time they’d battled a Hollower to the death. It wasn’t something he’d ever told the others, because to do so had seemed cruel. It was a secret he’d felt justified in keeping at the time. But what if he had been wrong? What if keeping that secret had left Jake and Dorrie unarmed?

  Erik had been stuck alone for a while in a tunnel somewhere between this world and the Hollower’s mind. In the sharp, carved contour of rock, Erik had seen other worlds.

  There had been carvings, garishly painted, depicting the kind of sometimes self-inflicted mutilation and violence he had come to associate with the Hollowers. Those had been horrible—faces peeled from skulls, pounds of flesh cut away for some fervent need for peace of mind. There had been a horrible depiction of a child with pain-glazed eyes whose head was a bloody mess from the bridge of the nose down, surrounded by a mural of small lips and hanging mouths hung like hunting trophies. One in particular which had made him feel sick and cold all over was a carving showing a stampeding race of tripod-beings, their pyramid faces shrieking and wide-eyed as they fled down a hill while behind them, a strange and terrible city suspended in the sky sent terrible skeletal beings in a locust rain after them. The atrocities spread along a significant length of the tunnel wall, showing the beasts devouring pieces of the screaming alien things, raping and mangling and maiming them. Another portrayed a small village leprosied by dimensional rips from which long fingers curled out, along with the first curves of heads, the first scissor-blade of leg or the tip of a crab-like claw. Dead bodies, split open down the middle as if overripe, rotted in the grass in between the buildings.

  He had known then, feeling the rough rock beneath his palms, that the fear and horror the Hollowers had caused were not limited to his world, nor were they even the worst these creatures could offer. Other worlds were terrorized, possibly destroyed completely. And as the carving with the pyramid-faced creatures suggested, the Hollowers were not the only nor the worst monsters to decimate an alien world. That other doorways and other invasions of unspeakable things was possible had proved too muc
h for Erik at the time. But as he sat in his truck, watching the gold-orange of the setting sun glance off the hood, the possibility of something even more horrible than a single Hollower seemed very likely.

  “You said it was...animal attacks?”

  “With odd circumstances.”

  “Odd how?”

  Erik remembered that there had been one other thing he thought confirmed the idea. In the years that had passed since, he’d dreamed of it often, each time reinforcing the certainty that it was a language of some kind. There had been painted and carved symbols amidst ancient pictographs that actually extended from the wall, curving and swimming in and out of each other. He was sure the third dimension to the writing was significant to its meaning and understanding, a language unpronounceable by human vocal chords, maybe capturing words and ideas utterly foreign to human experience. He didn’t know when he’d first seen them what they could possibly mean, but translation suggested itself in vague concepts to him in his dreams, and the meanings were always almost unbearably sinister. It was an ugly language, whatever it was, full of cosmic taboos and curses and magic older than the known universe. It was a language of monsters and demons. He sometimes wondered—only during those dreams, where he couldn’t help but wonder—if knowing what that language meant in its entirety could help or do irreparable harm.

  A sudden, sharp knock on the truck door made him jump. He turned to see Bennie Mendez. When Erik had been knee-deep in a coke habit, he used to run into Mendez, who had been working in Narcotics then. It had been Bennie Mendez who had dropped his skinny, coked-out ass off at Trinity Methodist Church in Wexton for his first N.A. Meeting, and although Erik had never said it, he’d always felt that Mendez had probably saved his life in doing so. He had gotten to know Mendez better through Steve, and also through Anita DeMarco, who had helped him and Dave kill the first Hollower years before. DeMarco and Mendez had a little boy who was probably about three by now, and had gotten married not too long after he and Casey had, last year. Whether through fate or coincidence, Mendez had become interwoven in his life, and that was a good thing. Erik liked him.