The Triumvirate

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Stop who?” Mendez asked with a sidelong glance at Erik.

  “The Hollowers.”

  “Whatever you’re looking for,” Lauren added. “We’re going to help. We have to.”

  ***

  Erik snorted. “This would be easier with the video.”

  Ian and Lauren sat on the bed in the room that used to belong to Mrs. Coley, and Mendez sat in the guest chair next to it. Erik, who had been pacing, trying to figure out where to begin his part of the story, leaned up against the windowsill.

  Ian had explained that ever since his mother’s death, he had been haunted by these three faceless phantoms who seemed hell-bent on making him suffer, and ultimately, trying to kill him. He explained how he had been afraid he was going crazy like his mother, but then he’d found her journals. He told them about how amidst all her delusions, she had written about experiences with beings very much like what he had been seeing. He said she’d mentioned both Mendez and Erik as if she had known them, specifically in connection with her other entries in which she talked about creatures she called “Hollowers.”

  Lauren had related her own experiences in the hospital, the bad dreams she had, and what Mrs. Saltzman (a name Erik recognized but for the life of him could not remember why) had told him about the “doormen” from another dimension.

  Mendez had explained to them that Erik had survived ordeals with two different Hollowers and had managed to kill them both (“With help,” Erik had pointed out), and that he knew more than anyone alive about the Hollowers. Something about the wording of that bothered Erik—“more than anyone alive”—but he supposed it was true. And so he felt compelled then to share with them what he knew.

  He had no idea where to begin. It really would have been easier with the video.

  “Huh?”

  Erik explained. “My friend, Dave. When this all first started, he’d gotten a video in the mail from a guy named Max Feinstein who knew more about the Hollowers than any of us. The first of the Hollowers came through a rip in his house, we think. Anyway, he had been fighting it off a long time. He told us what we were up against in the video. He warned us.”

  “Well, let’s go talk to him, right?” Ian looked hopeful.

  “We can’t.” Erik shook his head.

  “Why?”

  “He’s dead,” Bennie said. “Suicide by shotgun, right after the video was made.”

  Ian paled. “Oh.”

  “What did he say in the video?” Lauren asked. “What the hell are we up against?”

  Erik had only ever seen the video twice, and still he thought he could recite the better part of what Feinstein had said from memory.

  “It feeds on its victims’ sense of unreality,” Feinstein had said. “On their surreality, if you will. People’s confusions. Their insecurities. The Hollower is sustained by impressions and perceptions and points of view. Its greatest protection is its anonymity and androgyny. How does it find you on such vague terms, you ask? By ‘smelling’ your most skewed thoughts. By ‘smelling’ your irrational feelings.” Erik fought an internal shiver, the words of the dead man still echoing in his head.

  “Well, he said Hollowers were intangible beings. That where our senses stop, the Hollowers’ senses start, and continue way beyond psychic powers. So they don’t see you or feel you exactly...they sense you. And he said they feed on our emotions, our fears and insecurities and skewed perceptions. They look to confuse us and heighten those emotions by creating a sense of unreality from the things we want to love and trust. Hollowers can sense whatever you most want to hide from the world, especially if you feel it makes you weaker.

  “He also said that since they have no real physical form here, they can collect identities and voices at will and use them against you. They hurt people the way people hurt themselves—by making it so you can’t trust the people you know and love, or trust yourself. They make it so you worry that a secret might get out or a weakness, or that an addiction might overpower us. They remind us of the worst we have ever done and ever been. And like Feinstein said, little else shakes our faith in ourselves so much as self-doubt, however off-kilter or misplaced.”

  “Did he tell you how to kill it?”

  Erik looked away. “No. Each time we’ve had to kill one, it was done differently. I don’t know if there is one sure way to kill them. And I don’t know if the same way will work twice. They hate physical bodies, and making physical contact with them hurt them, but it hurt us a lot worse. Our best defense, I guess, had always been the strength and self-confidence we found in being together. That seemed to make it harder for the Hollowers to find us. They couldn’t ‘see’ what wasn’t distorted and scared. Despairing. Terrified. We could slip under their radar when we could muster up enough courage to fight back.” He paused, then added, “But we’ve never dealt with three of them at once. I didn’t even know they hunted in packs.”

  “I don’t think they do,” Ian said. They turned to look at him. Ian looked at them almost apologetically. “I mean, my mother didn’t, at least so far as she wrote in her journals. She didn’t have as much information as what Erik told us, but she did say something about how ‘only the Triumvirate can close doorways forever,’ and ‘only the Triumvirate can see and gather.’ I don’t know exactly what she meant, but it looked to me like she believed the rare occasion of three Hollowers at once indicated a special situation. In all her other writings about them, it was always singular—‘it’ came through, ‘it’ wants to kill her, that sort of thing.”

  Erik said, “I saw them once before, as three.” They watched him, waiting for him to continue. “Now that I think about it, when we killed the first Hollower, the one called a Secondary, it called to them. As it lay dying, it called and a rip opened up and three Hollowers came to take the body. It was one of those three—a Primary—that came for us the second time. I guess maybe it wasn’t as strong without the other two.”

  “So, this group of three—they’re all Primaries?” Lauren shifted on the bed. She still glanced at it from time to time like something poisonous lay under the tightly tucked sheets.

  “That would be my guess, yeah,” Erik said. “And from the sound of it, if Ian’s mom was right, they’re much stronger as this special group of three than they are alone.”

  “It would explain the injuries,” Mendez said, “to the victims we’ve found—our friend Steve, and Erik’s friends, Jake and Dorrie before that. Their attacks were different, more animal than other Hollower attacks. It was something Ian said before, about only the Triumvirate being able to see and gather. Think about it. They seemed able to sense me, but told me they had no business with me. If they can see—or sense, or whatever—beings from other dimensions even outside the scope of a normal Hollower, then they could have limitless access to any creature of just about any dimension. And if that were true, the fact that they can’t touch us doesn’t matter. They can call on other worlds’ worth of monsters to do the things they can’t. To provide a real physical threat as well as a whole bunch of mental ones. They can destroy us inside out, or outside in, whichever is more convenient at the time.”

  There was a long pause as the group considered this. What they were up against was outside the realm of anyone’s experience, even Erik’s. He remembered that once the boy who had been with them originally, Sean, had said that everything had a weakness, even monsters, and that it was just a matter of finding it. Erik couldn’t imagine, though, what possible weakness they could find in creatures who could push and pull dimensions and the creatures living in them at will.

  Finally, Mendez got up. “We can’t sit here. They have my wife.”

  “They have your wife?” Lauren looked horrified.

  “Yes. I came home and she was gone. They weren’t. I need to find her.”

  Lauren got off the bed, too, and Ian followed. “We will,” she said. “We will. And I suggest we try looking in the basement now.” She looked at her watch. “Mila’s got a half a night off tonight and I
don’t have to give the patients their meds for another half hour, so no one should bother us about looking in the basement for a while.”

  “I think that’s a good place to start,” Erik agreed.

  Lauren led the way. They took the staff elevator at the end of the hall, the only one which went to the basement level. It was there that the Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital’s morgue and assorted storerooms were. It was also there that a lot of the surplus medication was kept. Lauren explained that one needed the passkey and a code to get the elevator to work, which had made it all the more baffling that Mrs. Coley had made it down to the basement. Erik noticed Ian’s expression as he eyed the floor buttons and the elevator wall adjacent to them, and felt immediate sympathy. Something in the boy’s eyes showed that he had been in this elevator once before—probably after his mother’s suicide—and it was bringing back some pretty rough memories now.

  The elevator door opened on a rough-hewn concrete cave beneath the hospital, lit with dim bulbs of a sickly yellow and marked throughout with painted signs to KEEP OUT and keep alert. Everything neat, clean, and thoroughly efficient about the hospital above was absent here. Down here, the last of comfort and security crumbled away.

  Mendez, Lauren, and Ian had all been in the basement before. They had all been present, evidently, when Mrs. Coley’s body had been found. Erik followed them as they made their wordless way to a spot some fifteen feet away from the elevator door, under a thick gray pipe, beneath which the cement flooring had been stained a dark brown.

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren said, squeezing Ian’s shoulder.

  Erik assumed she had been talking about the blood stain, but Ian replied, “It wasn’t your fault. You can’t...you can’t always stop people from dying.”

  “None of us can,” Erik said, and his voice was so soft he wasn’t sure he’d said it out loud.

  “What does a rip look like?” Ian asked.

  Glad for the subject change, Erik said, “Well, it looks—”

  A low, sharp growl reverberated among the concrete beams, its source impossible to determine. Erik felt his chest grow cold and heavy. He looked around.

  The growl came again, this time closer. It was coming from behind the morgue door.

  “Jesus.” Mendez was looking at the floor. From beneath the door, a small surge of blood was spreading outward toward their feet.

  “That can’t be possible,” Lauren whispered.

  The blood formed a pool in the center with four long rivulets reaching ever outward, as well as one shorter one to the side. The formation gave the distinct impression of a hand with long fingers, clawing at them, threatening to draw them back under the door and into the vaults of the dead.

  “Oh, no fucking way.” Erik looked at Lauren. “Tell me that door is locked, and that you don’t have a key.”

  The heavy steel door grunted open on its own, once, twice, and once more so that the space beyond was enough to let them in.

  “Guys, you know, maybe we should have started with my mom’s room—”

  The door opened again, and a voice from inside said, “Bennie? Is that you out there?”

  Mendez’s eyes grew big and hopeful. “Anita?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but rushed toward the door.

  “Mendez, wait—”

  Mendez wasn’t listening to Erik. He was shouldering the door further open. Erik ran after him, and the others followed. Last inside, Lauren flipped the light switch and blazing fluorescents illumined the room.

  “Shit!” Mendez looked deeply pained to find no one else but them were in the room. “You sons of bitches—”

  Anita’s laughter rained down from the overhead lights. Around them, the cold chambers lined the walls like filing cabinet drawers, all closed. To one wall was a small table with a metal tray of instruments. In the center of the room was an empty gurney with a sheet crumpled up on it. Erik shivered.

  Behind them, the door slammed, and they jumped. Ian cried out. Lauren’s hand fluttered up to her chest to steady her heart.

  “Mendez,” Erik said. “I don’t like this.”

  “This room is off,” Lauren said. “It’s not right. It’s not—”

  One of the cold chamber doors opened on a squeaking hinge. Inside, the pale and bloated face of Dave Kohlar filled the space.

  “Well hi there, Erik! Long time no talk, buddy. How’ve you been?”

  Erik held the face of his dead friend in an even gaze. “You’re not Dave.”

  “And you’re no fun. What happened to you? You used to know how to party.” The face made a sniffing sound that caused Erik, even after all that time, to blush.

  “You’re not Dave,” he repeated, his voice a little weaker than before.

  “And Bennie Mendez! How’s Anita? Dismembered by the kind with a thousand mouths? So unfortunate. How about your partner Steve? The same? Well, how about your little girl? Oh, don’t answer that. While you all are here, we’ll be there to see for ourselves. We’ll devour her, and Erik’s skinny little piece of ass wife, too.” The head jerked to the right. “Lauren Seavers. Well, aren’t you some nurse? Helen Coley, dead. Mrs. Saltzman, crazy as a shithouse rat and getting worse. Some caregiver you are. You don’t give a damn about them. Just like your poor little cousin Dustin. So young, to want to die.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.” Lauren’s eyes filled with tears.

  “And Ian,” Dave’s face said, jerking again to get a better look at him. “Your mother says hi. She’s right here, where you left her. Where you abandoned her. She’s right here with us.”

  Ian closed his eyes. He looked as if he might be sick.

  Lauren charged the cold chamber and slammed its door. The metal thwang! echoed even in the small room.

  From first one, then all of the cold chambers, there came a sound indistinguishable as laughing or crying, a noise that rose in pitch and volume until it was deafening. Erik thought he might be screaming but couldn’t tell.

  Suddenly, the space between them and the cold chambers sizzled as a bolt of black lightning cut through the air. The bolt folded in on itself, seeming to indent the very fabric of the reality around them in a jagged, crackling cut. It spread to about six feet from top to bottom and then pulled itself open. Beyond the fluttering edges of the rip, a gaping inkiness yawned. The smell of ozone was cloying.

  All sound ceased in an instant.

  The four of them stood staring into the illimitable emptiness. Erik said, “That’s what a rip looks like.”

  “Yes,” the multi-voice behind them confirmed. They flinched and collectively wheeled around.

  The Triumvirate stood between them and the morgue doorway. They looked imposingly tall, crisp with arctic hate, stark with their luminous blank heads and black clothes.

  “Found you,” the one on the right said, and giggled.

  “Where’s Anita?” Mendez demanded. “If you hurt her—”

  “We warned you not to interfere,” the one on the left told him with a placid flick of a glove.

  “She’s someplace else. We may toss the baby there, too,” the middle one said, and with a tilt of the head to Erik, “And your Casey.”

  “Shame, about the air. The water. So many poisonous things to such fragile bodies.” The left said “bodies” as if the word itself caused pain.

  “I’ll kill you myself if you hurt any of them,” Mendez said.

  The left one said, “You can’t kill us. We won’t die. We are not like the others.”

  “We’ll find a way,” Erik said.

  “You can try,” said the leftmost one.

  “And fail,” added the middle one.

  “We will absorb your Despair.”

  They took a step forward and instinctively, the group took a step back. Behind him, Erik could hear the cosmos churning eternally in the void, and he was acutely aware of how close he stood to the edge.

  “What are you?” Lauren screamed.

  The middle one tilted its head toward her. “We are the end,”
it said, “to everything. The end to you.”

  It raised a glove in a wave, made a fist, then made a gesture like it was throwing seeds to the wind. Erik felt a hard shove against his chest and for just a moment, the thought that he was going to fall straight off the earth eclipsed all others.

  Then came the startled cries of his friends and the tug at his back and he was falling backward in lightlessness, neither hot nor cold, neither breathing nor suffocating. Liquid black poured all around him, crackling in his ears. He couldn’t see the others but he could feel them falling, too, and before senselessness obscured even that, he wondered for a moment if this was what it had felt like for Dave to die.

  Chapter 10

  When the crackling subsided and the liquid black sluiced away, Erik found himself outside. He checked on the others. Bennie was getting to one knee with a groan. Ian sat up, rubbing his neck. Lauren lay face-down. She wasn’t moving.

  Panic hit hard and fast; maybe being forced through...whatever they had passed through had killed her. Ian had already seen her and crouched by her side, shaking her shoulder. Erik went to her and turned her over on her back.

  “Lauren? Hey, you okay? Lauren?”

  She didn’t move. Erik lightly tapped her cheeks. “Lauren! Come on, Lauren, wake up!”

  Her eyelids fluttered, and when she saw where she was, she jumped and skittered away from Erik and the others. “Oh—oh God. Where are we?”

  “Good question,” Erik said, looking around.

  The landscape before them contained, to varying degrees, elements of physical wrongness somehow. It was hard at first to pinpoint specific examples of that wrongness, but Erik felt it. Wherever they were, Erik felt in his bones that it was not obligated to obey the laws of physics that existed on Earth or its surrounding universe. The world they had been thrust into was alien in ways they could only imagine.