The Triumvirate Read online

  She closed her eyes again and opened them, and Dustin was gone. Standing by the window were three figures Lauren could only assume were Mrs. Saltzman’s doormen. They wore black clothes, long black trench coats, black hats, just as Mrs. Saltzman described them. None of them had a face. The one on her left tilted its head as if studying her. The one on the right raised a glove and tightened it into a fist.

  “Are you...the doormen?” The word “Hollower” came into her head, though she couldn’t fathom why.

  “We are death,” the one in the middle told her in a string of interwoven voices.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “We thought that was apparent,” the one in the middle answered. “We want you to suffer, and then die.”

  “Why?” Hot tears spilled from her cheeks. She wanted get away, but still, her legs wouldn’t move.

  “Because,” the right one said, opening its fist again, “it sustains us.” Immediately there was a moan from the bed. She turned, and then there was the form of Mrs. Coley, pale and naked, trembled uncontrollably on the bed. A torn mess in the stringy flesh where the mouth should have been parted to release another long moan. The figure sat bolt upright in bed, eyeless craters fixed on her.

  The jolt was too much; the world dissolved in gray and then black, and as hard as Lauren tried to swim against that tide, it overtook her. She collapsed in a heap in the doorway.

  In the other rooms on the second floor of Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital, the real world resumed. Patients snored and moaned and shuddered in their sleep. In the vacant room of 205, nothing but Lauren’s ragged breathing and a strange chorus of faint maniac laughter broke the silence until Mila came and found her on the floor.

  ***

  Ian couldn’t go back into the house just yet. He’d spent the night in his car and the better part of that day out, and as a result, his neck and back ached and he wanted a shower and a change of clothes. But he couldn’t quite work up the nerve to go into the house, to see his mother’s bedroom door and remember what had opened up beside it.

  His gaze trailed to the glove compartment.

  Once, it had made him proud when people said he had a mind like his mother. She had been so brilliant. Now, he was afraid his mind was more like hers than ever before.

  Even his train of thought was similar. He glanced at the glove compartment again.

  It wasn’t fair. He wanted to be happy. He might never be great with women or the life of a party, but he had a small group of intimates he was happy to call true friends. He’d never be rich, but he loved the classics of literature and enjoyed teaching them to honors students at Bloomwood County College. He had so much life before him, and it didn’t seem fair that the one thing that had gotten him by all his life, from talking his way out of getting beaten up by bullies to job interviews to spirited discussions that had solidified his relationships—that one thing, his mind, now seemed to be turning on him. It had begun showing him things that weren’t there, giving him ideas he shouldn’t have. It wasn’t fair.

  The gun in the glove compartment had been his father’s. It still worked; a month or so before, he’d taken it into the woods and shot a few cans off of rocks just to make sure. He didn’t want to go out like his mother had, but he refused to waste away into a blithering idiot, either. When he came right down to it, he’d rather die with the memories and thoughts and knowledge he loved still somewhat intact than live on in a world of confusion and disjointedness.

  He opened the glove compartment and took out the gun, turning it in his hand in the scant moonlight that came through the car window. It was amazing how such a small thing could do so much damage to a person. One shot—that was enough to obliterate someone permanently.

  Reluctantly, he put the gun back in the glove compartment. He looked at the upstairs windows. No one moved behind the outdated curtains. Nothing in the house seemed to be moving now. He opened the car door and got out, shuffling toward his front door like a man on his last mile to his execution.

  He had left the front door unlocked; it swung easily inward and he stepped inside.

  So far so good; nothing came to greet him. No laughter. No voices. No slithering, slimy things from deep lightless abysses. Just his front hallway.

  He climbed the stairs to the second floor hallway and followed it to his mother’s bedroom door.

  “Those aliens at the bank—see there, it’s right there in the mail—they want this house. They want to take it away from me, baby, but you and I, we won’t let them, will we?”

  A painful knot formed in his throat as he paused at the door.

  He’d read up on schizophrenia and how it caused sense and logic and simple peace and security to deteriorate in a person’s mind.

  “No! Leave those alone!”

  “But ma,” he’d told her. “All these cans and stuff aren’t sanitary. You have to—”

  “They keep the men from the other dimensions from getting through. Those, and those.” She had pointed to the plaster bones and horns sticking out of the wall in odd arabesques. “Trust me.”

  That had been the problem, hadn’t it? He couldn’t trust her. She couldn’t trust herself. And he had always felt guilty for knowing that, and being frustrated by it—by her.

  He’d been angry at her for being crazy. He felt terrible about that now, but it was true. And the night she’d killed herself, that night she’d called and told him about the alien men without faces, the ones spying on her thoughts and eating her feelings, he’d hung up on her.

  Now he thought she might very well have been pleading with him to help her with a very real problem. And he hadn’t listened. The stack of papers to grade, including the one he thought he was going to have to submit to the dean as possibly plagiarized—that had weighed heavy on his thoughts. His electric bill, which he was about two weeks late in paying had been on his mind as well. His flat tire, the drip in the upstairs bathroom faucet, and Carryna’s advances (where they advances, or had it been wishful interpretation?)—those things had all been on his mind. And after an hour of talking to his mother while juggling dinner and hearing her talk about monsters because she had started refusing again to take the “poison pills” the nurses at the Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital gave her, he got frustrated and angry. And he’d hung up on her.

  And so, feeling alone and helpless to fight those things, she’d disfigured herself (so they would find no use in taking her face, her doctor had assumed, based on counseling sessions), and then she’d hanged herself in the basement of the hospital.

  He eased open the door and stepped into her bedroom for the first time since the funeral.

  The room was as he remembered it, as it had been when she slept there. The white molding and trim had dulled and grayed along the edges. The light blue bedspread and pillows and a rug of blue patterns entwined with cream were faded, stained in irregular patches by God only knew what. The newspapers taped to the windows cast a sepia hue on the room as the sunlight filtered through them. On the wall across from the bed and the walls to either side, elaborate symmetrical symbols in plaster reached out like long white fingers toward the center of the room. They meant nothing to Ian; they were just a part of her fevered delusions, a language of shapes only she understood. Identical sculptures reached down from the wall toward both night tables flanking the bed, where soda can towers strung together with copper wire sat like miniature Mayan temples, collecting a fluffy layer of dust.

  He lifted the lid of the small box on her dresser in which she kept her jewelry, thumbed through the pictures of his father home from Nam and his parents at their wedding. The pictures of himself he scooped up and tucked beneath the jewelry box. It bothered him to see pictures from a time of security taken too soon away from him.

  The large brown box of her possessions sent to him from the hospital sat on the bed where he had left it, still sealed with packing tape. A velvet-thin layer of dust coated the top.

  What he needed, he supposed, might be
in there.

  That his mother had had schizophrenia was undeniable. That she was a danger to herself and others had been proven fact. That she might not still have been right, in spite of her illness, about her hallucinations of faceless figures spying on her thoughts and eating her feelings, faceless figures he thought he was now seeing himself—well, that bore looking into.

  He opened up the box and poked through the contents. He took out her hairbrush, her folded blue terry-cloth robe, her ID and hospital papers, and some underthings and set them aside on the bedspread. There was a small hand mirror which he also set aside on the bedspread. Beneath that were some of her drawings from art therapy, a few newspaper clippings, and a journal.

  The art pictures were actually not bad; there was a finger painting of a clown, a watercolor landscape with a red sky, pinkish clouds, and severe-looking distant mountains layered pink and gray like the Grand Canyon, and a pastels rendering of the hospital and grounds which made somewhat surreal use of the white highlights and gray shadows. There was also a pencil drawing of a faceless humanoid figure. On the back was a date, and the word HOLLOWER written in careful block letters.

  He studied the figure in the picture. It was exactly like the three he had seen outside—the blank oval of a head, the black fedora hat tipped low, the black featureless clothing. He tried to remember if she had said anything about these—he flipped the paper over again—these Hollowers, anything that might have colored his own hallucinations. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t think she’d ever used that word before, and he knew he had never seen this picture. But there is was, a tangible illustration that matched what he had seen exactly.

  Looking at it captured on paper like that made it real. Neither of them had hallucinated at least that much. The Hollowers were real.

  He set aside the drawing for later and looked through the rest of his mother’s things.

  The newspaper clippings seemed random and mostly innocuous, at least at first glance—an ad for Pantene Shampoo was folded in half and poked through with little holes the size of a sharpened pencil point; a Family Circus comic strip had been partially colored in with colored pencils; and a Hints from Heloise about getting red wine out of silk had exclamation points drawn in the margins and random words underlined, double-underlined, or circled. There were a couple of actual news articles, too—one about a detective’s promotion to Detective Lieutenant, although the name (Corimar) was unfamiliar to him, one about the disappearance of another man (Kohlar) who Ian had never heard of some four years ago, but none of those seemed connected, so far as he could to tell, to her experiences with Hollowers. He found an article about a missing little girl from over a decade ago that looked promising; he skimmed it, but it didn’t mention anything about the Hollowers. He found some magazine pictures she had clipped and taped together on the back to form a kind of collage. He knew they did a kind of art therapy with newspaper clippings, where they chose pictures at random for their room that helped them express themselves. It showed a clipping of leather-bound books lined up on a shelf, a daisy in the sunlight, a fluffy little puppy. There was another picture of daisies, a bouquet (they had always been her favorite flower), a picture of the Egyptian Pyramids, and one of the Sphinx. Across the bottom of the last two, she had scribbled “Library” and “Knowledge is the drink that quenches the thirst of the soul.” There was a picture of a silhouetted couple standing on a moonlit bridge under a canopy of stars and a mother hugging her young son, under which she had printed in round letters: IAN. It made him sad to look at the collage. It was like some part of her knew what a brilliant mind she had once had, and how it and so much more had been taken away because of her illness. On some level, she knew she wasn’t right in the head, and that she mourned the life her insanity forced her to leave behind.

  He also found one other news article about a house for sale on River Falls Road, on the other side of town. That last one puzzled him the most. He couldn’t imagine why she was interested in a property other than her home; her desire to protect her own real estate exceeded the level of obsessive, as do all consuming notions in a schizophrenic’s mind, and he’d already had an apartment he was content with, so he doubted she had been looking at houses for him.

  Beneath the papers, he also found a roll of tape.

  “Get me my supplies! Hurry! Get me my tape.”

  His mother’s wide-eyed rant just before she cut him played back in his head.

  “Ian, I need my tape. Hurry. They’re coming. They’ll get in through the windows. Get my...you’re not Ian. Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?”

  Ian closed his eyes for several minutes, waiting for the anger to pass. It didn’t. He threw the tape across the room and it bounced off the wall below one of her hateful plaster outcroppings.

  At daemon, homini quum struit aliquid malum, pervertit illi primitus mentem suam.

  Strangely disappointed at the largely fruitless effort so far, he flipped open her journal, hoping to find something in those pages.

  He spent the next two hours reading, and when he was done, he set off for Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital.

  Chapter 7

  Erik answered the door to Mendez, wild-eyed and disheveled, a cranky toddler bundled and gripped tightly against his left shoulder.

  “She’s gone,” he breathed, and his eyes shined wet with unspilled tears. “They took her.” He pushed in past Erik, lightly bouncing Cora in his arms to soothe her. He looked frantic.

  “Who?” Erik already knew. He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want it to be true, but he knew.

  “Anita,” Mendez confirmed. “She’s gone. Erik, what am I gonna do? I have to get her back.”

  “Okay, calm down and let’s figure this all out. Come this way.” Erik led Mendez, by way of the kitchen, where he grabbed a beer for Mendez and a Coke for himself, into the den. They sat down on opposite chairs. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know.” Mendez’s voice was low and shaky. He took a big gulp of the beer. Cora snored lightly in his other arm.

  Erik frowned. “What do you—”

  “She’s gone, Erik. They took her,” he repeated. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “But...but they don’t—I mean, they can’t—”

  “They did.” Mendez looked down at his daughter. “They were with Cora when I got home. I don’t know what I would have done if....” His voice trailed off and for a moment, Erik thought those tears he was holding onto were finally going to fall.

  Looking at her, Erik said, “You want to put her down somewhere?”

  Mendez considered it for just a second before shaking his head. Instead, he put the beer down on the nearby coffee table. He wrapped both arms around his baby in a protective embrace.

  “Anita’s tough,” Erik said after a moment. “She’s strong. She wouldn’t have let them trick her. What, exactly, did they say to you?”

  “They told me she was ‘where the monsters live.’ That they had ‘given her to pets’ or something.”

  “What the blue fuck does that mean?”

  Mendez’s voice sounded strained. “Was hoping you could tell me. You’re the expert.”

  Erik ran a hand through his hair and sighed, leaning forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know. Like I said, I can’t imagine where they could have brought her. Sally was a different story.”

  “Sally Kohlar? Your friend Dave’s sister? They took her?”

  Erik nodded. “We found her at the Feinstein place. I guess when the Hollowers have to retreat somewhere in this dimension, they go to where they opened the rip. The only person I know of them ever actually taking was Sally, and it made sense, I guess, for it to have taken her to that house. That’s where it was hiding out. That’s where its rip was.”

  “How do you know? Where their current rip is, I mean?”

  Erik shrugged. “We started where the killings started. Two for two, that worked.”

  Mendez shot up out of h
is seat, startling Cora in her sleep. “Well, let’s go, then! It’s got to be the Feinstein house. That’s where Jake Dylan and Dorrie Weatherin were found.”

  At the mention of their names, Erik felt a pang. To Mendez, he said, “Now hold up a minute. We can’t just go charging over there.”

  “Why not?” Mendez’s impatient tone echoed his hurried glances toward the door.

  “Lots of reasons. First, there’s no way you can bring her. No way.”

  “Maybe Casey could watch her,” Mendez cut in.

  “Second, we don’t even know if Jake’s and Dorrie’s...deaths...were the first this time around.”

  “Well, where else? I can’t think of anything. I mean, I’m the police. I’d know if there were other deaths connected to this.”

  “Would you?” Erik asked softly. “If you didn’t know to look for a pattern, would you?”

  Mendez paused, sinking slowly back to the chair.

  “We don’t want to waste time going somewhere Anita isn’t,” Erik continued. “So think about it for a minute. You have any weird cases prior to Jake’s and Dorrie’s? Anything you put in those—what do you guys call them? The Weird NJ files?”

  After a few minutes, he said, “A suicide.” His voice was so soft that Erik barely heard it, but it was there. Mendez had something.

  Erik prompted him for details. “Whose? Where?”

  Mendez looked up at him. He seemed to be remembering something now. “Her face,” he finished the thought out loud, and then for Erik’s benefit, said, “A fifty-something patient over at Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital. Collridge...no, Coley. Coley. She mutilated her own face before hanging herself in the basement.” Mendez swallowed hard, his tanned cheeks grown pale. “She was a schizophrenic. Her son said she used to claim faceless demons were trying to cross dimensions to get her. God....”

  Erik was reminded of that old saying: Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Out loud, he said instead, “There will be a lot of red tape at a psychiatric hospital. Can we get in and look around?”