Found You Page 7

  In the dream, Jake shook his head, trying to clear it of the remnants of heroin, and in doing so, he found it—

  “Waiting in the other room for you.”

  —difficult to breathe, and his body twitched in bed. Suddenly, he was awake. The sounds of some kind of sports still came from the living room. Jake looked at the clock. It had been 3:11.

  By 3:14, he found that curiosity, mixed with an urgent need to see how the TV came to be on (he was sure he’d shut it off), drove him out of bed. He didn’t quite want to believe the nagging certainty of there being someone else in the house, which dusted the crust of his thoughts; still, it was damned near impossible to get out of his head. And whoever that someone was, he or she was watching…baseball, it sounded like baseball in the living room.

  He crossed the room and paused at the door to the hallway. He lived in a ranch—many of the houses on Cerver Street were built the same way, essentially, with the bedrooms on one end of the house, separated from the kitchen by a long hallway, and, beyond that, the living room. As he stood there, he listened for movement—the creaking of the floor, a soft groan from the couch springs, maybe even the clicking of the remote changing the channels.

  He imagined his aunt in her sweat shorts and tank top, sitting on his couch with her bare feet tucked under her, a cloud of Marlboro smoke hovering above her head. He was sure, though, that the skin would be stained dark from her time spent in the ground. Milky film would cover the eyes, whose gaze would be fixed on the ball game. Her fingernails, long and painted, would look like claws.

  And he would have bet money that when she turned to look at him, the features of her face would fall away, and she’d rumble deep in her chest and throw back her head to exhale the cigarette smoke and the erratic laughter of a hundred maniac voices would come tumbling out.

  He moved into the hallway, taking care not to creak the floorboards himself. On the television, the commentators were discussing Yunel Escobar’s RBI, how his season was going, how Pedro Martinez looked on the mound facing off against Escobar, and what Glenn Hubbard had to be thinking at that moment, whatever “that moment” was.

  Jake inched around the corner into the living room, and, seeing the figure on the couch, sucked in a breath. A hot, unpleasant weight thudded in his stomach.

  It was not his aunt, or anything remotely resembling his aunt. It was his older brother, Greg.

  Jake came up from behind and so had a few moments to study the broad shoulders, the sandy blond hair, the barbed wire tattoo that ran around the thick left bicep. Greg wore a football jersey—his own from college, sporting his number across his back. Jake remembered with a twinge of sadness how that number—23—had always been a lucky number. Jake had been born on January 23. The 1987 Mets had scored a grand total of 823 runs, and on May 23 of that year, Greg had taken Jake out for the day to get away from their aunt. They’d gone to a baseball game, and it had been the best afternoon Jake could ever remember—hot dogs and soda and popcorn and baseball caps and cheering for the Mets as they took on the Los Angeles Dodgers. They’d lost, but really, it didn’t matter. He’d been with his big brother, doing guy stuff, talking about girls and cars and sports and kick-ass video games like “Street Fighter” and “Double Dragon” and movies they’d seen like Creepshow II and Ernest Goes to Camp. On his twenty-third birthday, his aunt went to Vegas for the weekend, and he’d had the house to himself. He’d thrown a party that boasted four kegs, three pounds of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and about fifty-seven people, including him and Greg. And his brother helmed the cleaning up of the mess the morning after, so his aunt would have less to bitch about. The twenty-third day of September 2006, he’d spent in court but had managed a probation and drug counseling in lieu of jail time. Greg sat there in the public section the whole time, grim expression betraying no disappointment or judgment. He’d hugged Jake after, then turned and walked out. It was the last time Jake had seen him.

  He’d looked up to his big brother with the fierce, all-encompassing love and admiration that their personalities naturally seemed to allow. Greg was possessed of California looks, school smarts, and popularity that characterized the All-American Jock, and Jake was just young enough to be impressed by Greg’s seemingly endless accomplishments, in that sweet and fleeting period before his own string of failures and insecurities both in school and in connecting with others made him the dark and reckless opposite of everything he’d ever been proud of in Greg.

  Sitting on the couch in the living room, Greg leaned forward, elbows on his legs and a Corona bottle dangling from his hand between his knees. His attention was focused on the game. Jake followed his gaze. The Mets, hosting the Atlanta Braves, were up at bat at the bottom of the fourth. Atlanta, from the look of it, had been handing them their asses while Jake slept. The score stood at 9-3 Braves, with Buddy Carlyle pitching.

  For a moment, it was like old times. Jake forgot the weirdness of Greg’s presence in the living room. It felt right to have his brother there, watching the game.

  Then his brother looked up at him, face empty, haunted eyes in purplish sockets. Greg didn’t smile. For a moment, he seemed to look right through Jake, and Jake felt a pang of loss in his chest.

  “Greg?”

  His brother didn’t answer at first. He turned back to the ball game, took a swig of his beer, and belched lightly. Jake crossed the room and sat in the big easy chair facing the couch. Greg’s expression grew dark. His facial expression never changed, not really, but something did. Something got cold and ugly, distorted under the skin.

  He said, “So, I hear you killed her,” without looking at Jake, without that somehow hard-to-pinpoint awfulness beneath his face ever changing. Jake felt all the air leak out of his lungs.

  “What?”

  “Chloe. I hear you killed her.”

  Jake’s mouth dropped open, but there was only traitorous silence, so he closed it again.

  “You never really were any good, Jake. Even Aunt Naomi, the old hag, even she knew you weren’t ever any good. Just like all those asshole boyfriends she had. Just like Dad.” This was followed by a healthy swig of beer.

  Jake frowned. His brother never talked like that—not that he had kind things to say about the aunt that he made out to be little more than a necessary annoyance to him, or about any of the men she brought around, but he didn’t talk about him like that. And their father was dead and therefore off-limits, the kind of sacred and untouchable concept that is reserved for living rooms where only grownups go, and for words and thoughts grown ups used to impress each other.

  Jake swallowed hard and it seemed to return some stuttering semblance of speech to him. “I…I didn’t…I s-swear I didn’t k-kill her, Greg.”

  “Did she kill herself? Maybe she knew you weren’t any good, either.”

  “Honest, it wasn’t my—it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t…I didn’t—she just overdosed. Greg, ah…how’d you get in?”

  “Yes, she overdosed, and you showed her how. You left her and you let her die. You might as well have shoved the needle in yourself.”

  “It’s not,” Jake pressed, unable and more than a little unwilling to hear what Greg was saying, “you know, not that I don’t want you here. I’m glad to see you and all. It’s just that I’m pretty sure I locked the door…”

  Greg ran the free hand over his face, rubbing his eyes as if to wipe off the patina of stupid caused by Jake’s presence. Then the hand fell away, and Greg looked up.

  The head was pale, way too pale for the neck. Its eyes were rubbed out, the nose worn down to nothing, and smooth, unbroken white skin ran over the space where the mouth should have been.

  Instinctively Jake pushed away from it, up and off the chair, away from the couch. “What the fuck!”

  It raised an arm and waved a black-gloved hand at him, tilting that awful blank head. Its whole being radiated a cold kind of hate that gave Jake the sensation of sticking his hand in a freezer, pressing warm flesh against the ice cryst
als until they burned their own special super cold into him. It felt something like that—all over cold, all over hate. Jake shivered.

  When it spoke, it had the girl’s voice from the dream. “You’re going to die, Jake, just like your aunt. Just like Chloe. Just like your brother.”

  Jake sank a little where he stood. His brother? His brother wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be…could he? The idea of it, even after all these years of estrangement, brought immediate tears to his eyes, hot, then cold beneath the gaze of the thing on the couch.

  “Who are you?”

  It made a fist. “Jake,” it said with the mildest tone of impatience. “I am simply your death. I’ve come to make you nothing—unloved, unwanted, unremembered. I’ll destroy everything you are, everything you might be, from the inside out, and then let you blow away like dust.” It opened the fist, and an unfelt breeze carried white powder—heroin—off and away from its glove.

  What if it was right about his brother? What if it had gotten to Greg first? His brother, his only family, his only—

  His only anything. Besides the drugs.

  And it occurred to him that maybe not all the effects of withdrawal were done with him. Suicidal, even homicidal, thoughts, hallucinations, that know-you’re-caught sick feeling right in your intestines. Maybe this was some rare but powerful brain hiccup, like acid flashbacks or something.

  Jake squeezed his eyes shut. He had never been so scared in his life. He thought briefly, just briefly, of calling Erik.

  “You can try that,” it said to him in many voices. “But I’ll kill him, too. In fact, I will kill him anyway.”

  “Leave me alone,” he whispered to it.

  “Wanna get high, Jake?” The voices that responded were so close to his ear that he flinched, his eyes springing open.

  It was gone. The TV stood silent and dark. The beer bottle was gone. Jake searched the room with rabbit snaps of the head.

  It took a long time for Jake to get the heat, the sensation back in his legs enough to walk. His hands shook as he lit each cigarette from the smoldering filter of the one before it. It took actual effort to lie down in bed. And the sky was taking on a pink dawn before his eyelids sank closed.

  Across town, Dave, whose eyes were bleary and whose head was full of the roar of alcohol waves, flipped through the static channels of the TV and found a clear picture on channel 86 of 63 River Falls Road, just like it had been the night they’d killed the Hollower. He pulled back, shrinking away from the screen and against the cushions of the couch, his gaze riveted to what he was seeing. On the screen, the vast canopy of night had surged up from beyond the trees of Schooley’s Mountain and swallowed up the whole neighborhood. Looking up into it as the camera panned up was dizzying, the fathoms of its endless depth rising above, its stars eaten by massive forms that passed like great ships across the sky, defying any real description or categorization. Some of the shapes groaned like old pipes, old houses, old bones. Some growled low from deep inside the core of them. Their gliding over the houses made little other noise, and they seemed, for the most part, oblivious to the little humans on the pseudo-suburban lawn below them.

  Dave shuddered, sinking further into the couch. Those humans on the TV screen were him and his friends. He knew those big shapes above wouldn’t touch them—they were not meant to be prey for ones so big and so old. He and his friends were, in that warped and dimension-dipped version of River Falls Road, expressly the meats of the Hollower.

  On the television, Dave and the others stood on the front lawn, unmoving. The needlelike grass, a chilly tint of green, looked more frost than plant. He watched it wrap around their ankles, cutting into their skin. Blood welled up from the indents and soaked the cuffs of their pants, but no one moved or even acknowledged pain or discomfort. They simply stood there as the shadows of the great beasts floating above passed over them. Dave opened his mouth to speak to them—to speak to the screen version of himself—but no words, no sound came out. He closed it again. In those moments when the shades were cast over his friends, Dave lost sight of them and felt real, true panic, intense and physical. Then the shades would pass and the light, sourceless (as there was no moon above them) but possessing the moonlight quality of pervasiveness and clinical cold, would once again take hold of the scene. The grass no longer holding onto them glinted like shards of glass. The Feinstein house behind them sagged where it stood, and with each pass of shadow, it seemed to rot a little more, exposing framework or insulation like bone and muscle. The strange silver light on the faces of his friends as the camera passed in front of each gave them a gaunt, pale quality, making their cheekbones waxy and underscoring the haunted, grayish pockets beneath their eyes.

  Dave was scared for them. He found the alcohol made his limbs heavy. He couldn’t get up and switch off the TV. He couldn’t even raise his hand to change the channel. But his mind was getting clearer. He could feel it all—the chilly bite of the grass on his skin, the fear, the guilt, the regrets of that night. He could remember that sureness that he was going to die, that the Hollower was going to tear him up from the inside out. And he remembered the weird ripples of the air, the strangeness that signaled the approach of the beast.

  He felt it now, there on the couch, the oncoming weird. It was coming. It was close; and there it was, a wrongness in everything. Sean, the boy, had described it as a likelihood of finding dead ends, daylight, or corners of the real world at the far end of the street, and Dave suspected he knew what Sean had meant. It was that influence of the Hollower, the slightly skewed, artificial quality, as if everything they knew belonged to it and not to them.

  It had that night, as it seemed to now, on screen. The camera swung toward the trellis by the house between what would have been Sean’s and the one next door. Black, pulsing, almost breathing, glistening in the silver light, the plant that snaked through the trellis was a grotesque, choking parasite of a thing. Four houses down from that, a blackened, burned-out stump of a trunk stood where there had been a large tree. Every house on the block, as far as Dave could see, had the same number—68, like Max Feinstein’s house—and the scarce few cars parked in the street all had the same license plate. It read, “DieDieDie.”

  Like that night, there were six of them, watching and waiting—Dave, Erik, Cheryl, DeMarco, who had been investigating both Sally’s disappearance and Cheryl’s work intruder, Sean, the little boy from across the street on River Falls Road, and Sally—

  No, not Sally. That was the difference. She wasn’t there with them now.

  A scraping sound like metal skittering over metal filled the earspace around them. They looked up, to the source of the sound, and the camera panned up with them.

  The Hollower stood on the roof. This time, though, it looked as it had first appeared to them—a faceless white orb beneath the brim of the fedora hat, a black trench coat and clothes beneath, a black glove raised in a wave.

  Except that wasn’t exactly right. Its hand was indeed held up, but it made sweeping passes over something in front of it that was just out of their line of view. The gesture was one that Dave had seen before, when the other Hollowers had come through the rip between their dimension and his. They’d made the same movements with gloved hands over the dead body of the Hollower that Dave and his friends had killed.

  Silhouetted against a night sky that itself only existed between worlds, the Hollower giggled, high and hysterical, the voices of a hundred fragile minds breaking like glass. It made a dismissive gesture with the glove and, at once, heavy ash-colored bundles rolled off the roof. The thud they made hitting the edge of the driveway was jarring, an impact that Dave, watching from the couch, felt in his head, his jaws, and his feet. There were four bundles, huddled fetal forms that bled out crimson pools that crystallized upon contact with the grass blades. Dave knew with hazy certainty that they were victims, unfortunate folks whose insecurities the Hollower had fed until they’d oozed up and swallowed them. The bundled forms were turned toward Dave, and
he could see that although humanoid, they were faceless, sexless, all of them featureless except for the last one. That one had a thin stream of blonde hair, matted pink with blood.

  A deafening crack like lightning suddenly tore at the air over the driveway. The on-screen version of him and his friends turned their gazes toward a gaping black wound suspended in the air. It looked to Dave as if the canvas picture of River Falls Road before them had been ripped into with a knife, and from the frayed and displaced edges, gloved fingers curled into view.

  Out stepped another Hollower. And another. And another. The first made a long, steady sound like a siren—not the death wail Dave remembered from the dying shell of the monster they’d taken down, but a low, strong, angry sound, a war cry, a cry to battle.

  It stepped out of the way, and hundreds of Hollowers poured through the rip, stepping over the bundles, never touching each other and yet somehow seeming to flow around one another, vying for a good position to strike.

  Their feet made no sound, but their voices were deafening. Thousands of stolen words and stolen timbres, the voices of family and friends and lovers, all saturated with hate, bombarded him and the other captives with human flaws, weaknesses, and fears until he thought the weight of them would bury him under.

  Suddenly, the noises stopped. And Dave was aware of a buzz, a terrifying sense of utter vengeance, a collective thought coming straight through the television: this new one thought of itself as a Primary. And the other, the one they killed, had been a Secondary. And with that same alien invasive thought pattern in his head, radiating from the pictures on the television screen, he understood what that meant to them, the Hollowers. They would hurt him—even physically hurt him, without ever having to touch him. They could bend worlds. They could change things. But the Primaries could get inside you in new ways. The Secondaries were kings between dimensions, the thought pattern suggested, but the Primaries were damned near gods. They were deadly in ways he could only begin to imagine.