She said very little, getting a beer for Bennie and a Diet Coke for her husband as he explained how the first Hollower, called a Secondary, had tried to drive him back to doing coke. It had been using his shaky sobriety to tear him down, to make him doubt himself and fear the future. He told Bennie how Dave had been separately seeing the Hollower, as had his sister, who had some kind of mental wrongness Erik was never quite able to get a name for. In Dave’s case, it used his sister and what Dave felt were his failings as a brother to hurt him. And there were others: their bartender, Cheryl, who was reminded over and over of a childhood trauma, and the boy Sean, who used to live across from the Feinstein house and who just missed his father very much. He remembered how good it felt just to find out he wasn’t alone. It was coincidence (“Or fate, or design of some other power,” Erik had said in a thoughtful murmur) that had brought them together and revealed their common enemy. They had realized they were stronger together. Together, they had a chance to fight back.
Anita, Erik told him, had become involved because she was handling Dave’s sister Sally’s missing person case, Cheryl’s intruder break-in case, and initially, the Feinstein suicide. Much like Steve, she had put the clues together and had seen that all of them were connected, not just to each other, but to other cases, as well. Bennie knew that in her spare time, she had always liked to try to tackle the cold cases in the file downstairs, especially the weird files that the rest of Lakehaven PD was more or less able, in time, to put out of their heads. It made sense to Bennie; she had gone out to Feinstein’s house the night the rest of them had gone to battle the Hollower because of the connection she found between those cases and many of the weirder, more unsettling cold case ones. There was undoubtedly a connection, Bennie thought, among all the victims of the Hollowers, past and present.
He was familiar with the ones Anita had been looking into. He had, in fact, cleared them off her desk when she went on maternity leave. Those file names sprang to his mind. He hadn’t even known he knew them, but there they were: Carrington, Savannah—Homicide; Henshaw, Deborah—Homicide; Peters, John—Suicide; Feinstein, Maxwell—Suicide. And there were the new ones: Weatherin, Dorothy—Animal Attack; Dylan, Jake—Animal Attack. The picture that it drew, Bennie thought, was only a corner of the full picture, a mural of death, mutilation, and horror.
Erik told Bennie the Hollower had been strong—incredibly strong (Erik had scars on his arm to prove it) and it had nearly killed them, but in the end, they brought it fully into this world and Dave had taken it down. An injury, Erik noted pointedly, to its head—to where the face would have been.
The second Hollower, a Primary, had hunted in much the same way as the first. Anita was pregnant and Sean’s mother had moved him far away; for some reason, the Primary didn’t or couldn’t get to the boy. Mendez remembered that it had tried to get at Anita; once she had bled and they both thought she was going to lose the baby, but it had been a trick. Anita hadn’t slept well after that for most of the rest of the pregnancy.
The Primary, Erik had told him, was even stronger than the Secondary, though. Its hate fueled horrible attacks on the rest of them. Jake’s family and relationship history drew him in. Dorrie had body issues, from what Jake had told him, but Jake loved her—he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. He and Dorrie had both lived on Cerver Street, near Cheryl’s old house. They had found each other before Erik could reach out to Jake to help him. He hadn’t wanted to get involved again, but...he’d sighed then, and looked Mendez in the eye. Mendez understood. There were times in life where one couldn’t avoid getting involved, because to do so would strike against the core of a person that makes him or her human. Erik, at Casey’s insistence, had sought Jake out and offered what he knew.
Steve had become involved for many of the same reasons Anita had, but with the added incentive of wanting to stop it from trying to kill him, too. His struggles with his sexual orientation were the prime focus of his attacks. When Steve had seen the old files that oddly coincided with his experiences, when he saw the reports of Sally’s and Cheryl’s deaths and new reports by Dorrie of an intruder, he went looking to Dave for information. Dave, Erik explained, had always been their center in this. He never wanted to lead them, but he seemed to go by gut instinct, and that instinct always proved right.
It was Dave again who had tackled the Hollower, the both of them tumbling back through the rip in dimensions it had opened up. That had resealed it. Dave was gone. Erik, Steve, Jake and Dorrie were the only survivors.
Now, this new group of three had killed Jake, Dorrie, and Steve. If the other Hollowers’ behavior was any indication, the three would pursue the rest of them relentlessly. They wanted to bring death and pain. And likely, they weren’t alone. Erik had been willing to bet a kidney that other victims right now were suffering and in danger of being murdered just as they were. Just as Bennie likely was, Erik pointed out, if he was able to see them, and they were able to sense him back.
Bennie suspected there was more, that Erik was holding something back, but for now, he didn’t push. What he had disclosed, much of which seemed to be crossing Casey’s ears for the first time as well, was enough to swallow for one day. She sat and listened quietly, but Mendez suspected there would be one long and serious talk after he left.
As Bennie drove home, he fished in his glove compartment for any stray Marlboros. He’d quit years ago, and then again for good when Anita had gotten pregnant. But a dios, did he need one now.
It was an incredible story—monsters, dimensional portals, manipulations of the environment. But what Erik had told him jived with what little he could glean over the years from both Anita and Steve. And he’d had those unsolved case files for a while, too. Everyone in the department had taken a crack at them one time or another; just because they had been able, eventually, to put them out of their heads doesn’t mean they hadn’t ever entered in the first place. The trick was not to dwell. He thought (and he considered himself counted in this number) that most of the cops of the Lakehaven police department had looked through them out of curiosity, recognized a road ahead of fruitless obsessing, and put them back. Those files—the department had come to call them the Weird NJ files, because someone had been a fan of the magazine—had elements that made it so that no rational explanation would ever fit. The officers on the scenes of these cases had spun the events with as much “real-world” as they could, signed off on them, and filed them. This method of handling whatever was wrong in this particular area of New Jersey had been passed down from senior to rookie for decades. It was only questioned until that rookie landed a case for the file him- or herself.
His hand closed around a small tube—but it was a pen, not a cigarette. The next one felt more papery to him, and excited, he withdrew it from the glove compartment. It was bent, the tobacco stuffing protruding from the break like straw from a tiny decapitated scarecrow. He frowned, snapped off the broken part, and stuffed the filtered end between his lips.
That the number of Weird NJ files was growing was also something no one talked about. Even Hollowers couldn’t account for all that bizarre death, all those missing people. And that, Bennie suspected, had something to do with what Erik hadn’t told him. But Bennie was a detective first, and he had been taught to follow the leads he actually had first. He would see to tying up loose ends after.
He didn’t see the shambling thing in the road until he was almost too close to stop. The nub of cigarette unlit and forgotten, he flinched, wide-eyed, muttered a curse in Spanish, and slammed the break. The back end of the car fish-tailed a little but the front bumper stopped short of the hairy hide of the beast in the road.
He was pretty sure he hadn’t hit it, but it wasn’t darting away like the usual local wildlife did, either, high on adrenaline and fear, sensing how close it had come to death. In fact, it wasn’t moving at all. Bennie put the car in reverse to put some space between him and the animal and get a better look at it.
He bi
t back a shout. The thing in the road was unlike any animal he’d ever seen. It had a massive, hairy head with wide, fur-covered plates for cheek and snout bones that fanned out toward the front like an axe blade. The head hung from a thick neck whose jagged vertebrae sprouted from the growth of wiry brown hair all the way down its back in a bony ridge. It had no apparent eyes or ears, but what looked to be a number of noses, deep nostril pits opening and closing as it swung its head in front of the car. Its stout, thick legs upheld a compact, shaggy-haired body that arched up in the back and ended in a bobbed tail. Its paws were massive, front and back. Long black talons scraped at the asphalt. It picked up its head and roared.
Bennie’s first instinct was to hit it over and over again with the car. He wanted to; looking at the thing filled him with revulsion. He was afraid its massive head and up-curving bulk would damage the front end, though, and he’d need the car to escape. It looked solid, the kind of animal that killed with pure brute strength. He felt sure, although he had no reason to at the time, that as slow as the thing was now in exploring the front bumper, it could be fast if it wanted to. If it were chasing prey, for example.
He backed the car up a little more, very slowly.
The massive head swung in his direction. The heavy lower jaw dropped and Bennie could see rows of thick ivory teeth. From between them, a long red tongue, barbed on the tip, stretched lazily outward. The many nostrils flared. Then it screamed, high and loud, and charged the front end of his car. The thud jarred loose an immediate headache. It charged again, and this time, the whine of crumpling metal spurred him to action. He slammed on the gas and the car, still in reverse, leaped backward.
The thing swung its massive head from side to side as if shaking off the impact with the car. Bennie took the opportunity to turn the car around, hoping it wouldn’t decide to charge him while the car was sideways. It roared again from down the road. He swung the car around so the thing was behind him, threw the car into Drive, and checked in his rear view mirror.
It was galloping after him. For such stumpy legs, it was moving surprisingly fast.
Bennie let out a little choked cry and hit the gas again. The car shot forward.
The back road he was on, like many in Lakehaven, was flanked on both sides by tall and densely packed trees. The road itself wound through the trees and around the small hills and pockets of water connected to the greater lake. He’d been called out plenty of times to scenes where kids had been taking those curves too fast in the dark and had folded the front ends of their cars around nearby trees. Bennie took them now at 55, even 60. The thing behind him, galloping and growling and huffing, never slowed. The road dipped and his car lifted into the air, landing hard and throwing back gravel. He swung around a turn and came within inches of the guard rail. A quick glance in the rear view showed the beast was still following him.
Finally he shot out onto the main road, narrowly avoiding a gray Sedan that honked and swerved around him. He glanced back toward the side road.
The thing was gone.
He slowed down, looked behind him, and looked in the lane to his left, but there was no sign of the thing. Whatever had been there had either turned back to the safety of the backwoods gloom or had simply disappeared.
Erik had warned him that hallucinations were a tactic of the Hollowers. “Except they aren’t hallucinations, exactly,” he’d said. Others might not be able to see them, but they were real and could do real damage.
He thought he ought to call Anita and check on her when his cell buzzed in his pocket. He reached for it, noted the home number, and pushed “Accept.”
“Anita?”
“No,” a mingling of voices from the other end said, bordering on hysterical with glee. “She’s with us, but we called to talk to you.”
Immediate panic seared his stomach. He thought of Cora and Anita corralled by those things, and helplessness burned into anger. “Stay the fuck away from my family. They haven’t done anyth—”
“First we’re going to wring tears from those swollen orbs in their heads. Then we will crack them open and feed on them. Then, we will come for you.”
Before Bennie could respond, the connection went dead.
He cursed, slamming his fist against the steering wheel and picking up speed. If they had hurt Anita and Cora, he’d never forgive himself. He couldn’t live without his girls.
He floored it, checking occasionally in the rear view to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
***
It had been a tough decision for Anita DeMarco Mendez to decide not to go back to work after maternity leave at the Lakehaven Police Department. Growing up, Anita had never played with baby dolls. She wanted to be a police woman like her father, not a housewife like her mother. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother or respect her for all that she did; she just saw how exhausted her mother seemed to be, cooking and cleaning and picking up, doing the wash and checking her homework. Her father was tired, too, at the end of the day, but Anita didn’t see the day-to-day minutiae of his job that got him there. She didn’t see the hours of phone records to pour through, the hours of legwork knocking on doors and trying to wrestle kernels of information from reticent witnesses. What she imagined her father exhausting himself doing was fighting crimes, catching bad guys like on TV. And she wanted to be just like him when she grew up.
If either of her parents had discouraged her, it might have been a bumpy road. But her mother beamed with pride that she wanted a career as a police woman—as a detective, like daddy—and her father, never one to extinguish the light in his little girl’s eyes if possible, taught her little tips and tricks to help her sharpen her case-solving skills. Both parents watched her draw careful little chalk outlines around her Barbies on the driveway, or around a fallen elephant or floppy dog, and then interrogate a row of stuffed animals. They watched her line up her brother’s GI Joes and Star Wars action figures and ask his Million Dollar Man which of the line-up had hit him with their car. As she got older, her father would set up little crime scenes for her, hiding clues throughout the house for her to find that would lead her to the culprit.
Anita had loved being a detective and was good at it. But she had found, somewhat to her surprise, that she enjoyed being a mother as much as she had ever enjoyed being a detective. The pregnancy had been discovered during their second year together as husband and wife; it had been unplanned, but Bennie had been so excited, so proud, that it went a long way in allaying her fears about it. He meant to take care of her and the baby. Although she was not a woman accustomed to or comfortable with the idea of being taken care of by a spouse while she assumed a role of housewife and mother, Bennie could and would assume the role of sole provider if Anita needed him to. Their captain was an old friend and flexible enough that whenever cases allowed, he could give Bennie extra hours or ease up on the work load to accommodate both he and Anita being new parents. And he had unwavering faith that she would be an excellent mother. The same gut instincts, he’d tell her, that made her a good cop would make her a good mom.
And she’d tell him, only half jokingly, that if their infant was a homicidal maniac, then sure, she was ready to rock. But otherwise, she wasn’t sure how the two could form a parallel at all.
Bennie would laugh, the soft, warm chuckle he had for intimate moments with her, and tell her their baby would be fine and strong and good, and that the instinct—knowing when to protect, knowing when to follow up, when to check on a detail, a little thing, and when to believe—all those where things parents all over the world wished they had the innate ability to do. Her natural instinct as a cop, that ability to observe, assess, and act accordingly, would make her just as good a mother. And her big heart, her compassion, would bond her to that child and its needs in a way unlike any she had ever experienced. And he had been right.
That Bennie Mendez could be a smart hombre when he wanted to be.
Being a mother wasn’t about hunting a predator. It wasn’t about s
olving the little threads of mysteries that braided themselves into a larger mystery in an open case to be solved. It might be in ten or fifteen years, or hell, maybe even in four or five before parenting got to be like that. But for now, it was often about observing a little person unable to give information crucial to its survival and well-being, other than by little non-verbal cues. And as she observed this little person and interacted with her, the subtle nuances of those cues—the kind of cry at night or the gurgle during the day—became clues to help her know when to feed the baby, change the baby, make her warm or keep her cool.
Plus, the baby had been breathtakingly beautiful, if she did say so herself.
From before she had ever met Cora, Anita had loved her. Once she was born, Anita fell in love all over again. She loved the little blue eyes, the soft and sweet-smelling wisps of hair, the teeny-tiny fingers and toes, the way she smiled (Anita preferred to think of it as smiling, even at that young age, rather than gas). And the oath to protect and serve had whole new meaning now.
When she did have occasion to miss grown-up conversation, even the bawdy talk of the guys at the department, she could consult. That made the decision to stay on permanent leave a little easier. So did Bennie’s unflagging support in whatever she decided. But the final sway was that little Cora had two parents who were cops. That meant the possibility of losing both parents, both of whom had been field detectives. Lakehaven was not a hot seat of crime, but it could certainly be a bed of weird, and in the end, Anita didn’t want Cora to ever worry that she could lose them both. She could assure that, barring acts of God, at least one parent would be safe.
She couldn’t have accounted for the bloody mess under the sink, and what it meant to their safety inside the home.
She had just gotten Cora down for the night, and the baby monitor on the counter captured and reported the reassuring little snores and coos. As she moved toward the pile of dirty dishes sitting in their foamy pool in the sink, she noticed the mess on the door of the cabinet beneath.
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