The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy)

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “They look like animal bites. Like, what, a wolf? Dog?”

  Eileen shrugged, casting a concerned glance at Steve, who still hung back, still silent. “Looks like. Wounds definitely have the ragged edges of teeth—not human teeth, either. But wounds consistent with animal attacks generally involve damage to the other soft parts—limbs, stomach, intestines, that sort of thing. Jugular maybe, to take the prey down, but otherwise, animals eat where the meat is fullest and fattest. There are no other wounds anywhere on the bodies.”

  “Hmmm.” Mendez looked around the room. Steve did, too. The house, minimally furnished and covered in a snowfall of fluffy dust, had stood abandoned since the death of its prior owner, Max Feinstein. There was the debris of neglect, but no real signs of struggle—at least, nothing that indicated the kind of animal attack that could kill two people. There were no signs of animal presence, either—no fur, no droppings, no splatters of dried saliva. The dust that formed a thin film on parts of the floor was undisturbed by paw prints or sweeps of a tail.

  Steve’s gaze kept returning to the mangled faces of his friends.

  “Looks to me,” Mendez said after a time, “like they didn’t live here, at least not legally, and nothing in the room except the blood would suggest they were killed here, but then...nothing in the house suggests this is a dump site. So...what happened?”

  Eileen winked at him. “That, you sexy hunk of brains, is your job.”

  “The bodies haven’t been identified?”

  “I know them,” Steve said quietly.

  Mendez and Eileen looked at him. “He speaks,” she said, but the humor was swallowed up by the concern in her voice and on her face. Mendez watched him expectantly.

  “The girl,” Steve said with a shuddery sigh, walking to within inches of the drying blood, “is Dorothy Weatherin. Her boyfriend there is Jake Dylan. They lived together in a house on Cerver Street.”

  “Any idea what they would be doing here?” There was an element of caution in Mendez’s tone, as if he expected the question might set Steve off somehow.

  When Steve said, “No. No idea,” he spoke the truth, or thought he did. Any reason to be in this house had been killed four years ago, and it was the belief of those who had survived that night—he and Erik, Dorrie and Jake—that places like this house on River Falls Road and Oak Hill Assisted Living could and should become the stuff of repressed memories.

  ***

  It had become a kind of weekly thing for Steve to meet his friend Erik McGavin at the local bar in Lakehaven, a long log wood building called Olde Mill Tavern, on Wednesday nights. Steve usually had the day off on Thursdays, and Erik, an ex-coke addict, sponsored the newly recovering and ran an N.A. meeting on Wednesdays. He didn’t drink alcohol—he’d told Steve once that it felt too close to cheating on his own sobriety—but he sat at the end of the bar, people-watching and drinking Diet Cokes. The low lights and noise and activity of the bar seemed to soothe him, to make him feel connected to the rest of the world. After their friend Dave Kohlar’s death a few years before, Steve had taken to joining him. Gordon liked Erik, but he never went along on these nights. He knew that Steve and Erik and Dave and others (Jake, for one, and Dorrie, for another) had shared a painful, scary experience once, one Steve didn’t talk about and Gordon seemed to know better than to ask about. He accepted that the experience was a kind of bond that needed periodically to be acknowledged by company, and by deliberately not being verbally acknowledged at all.

  That Wednesday night, when Steve sat down at the bar on the empty stool next to Erik, his friend studied his face a moment, and in his quiet, unobtrusive way, said, “Want to talk about it?”

  Steve ordered a beer and when the bartender had turned away, Steve sighed and said to Erik, “I’m not even sure where to begin. Two deaths, likely animal attacks except for some odd aspects that don’t quite fit.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Yes. The bodies were found,” Steve said, taking a deep breath, “in the upstairs bedroom of 63 River Falls Road.”

  Erik’s expression changed very little, but the color drained from his cheeks.

  Steve’s beer came, and he drained half of it before adding, “The bodies were Jake and Dorrie, Erik.” He chanced a quick glance at his friend. Erik closed his eyes and seemed to be counting to himself. He opened them slowly.

  “You said it was...animal attacks?”

  “With odd circumstances.”

  “Odd how?”

  Steve’s voice dropped and he looked at Erik pointedly. “Their faces. Just their faces were torn up. And their necks. All the damage was concentrated there. No sign of animals having been anywhere in the house.”

  “Their faces?” Erik sounded hollow and weak.

  “Yeah.” Steve finished off his beer.

  It seemed like a very long time before Erik said, “Please make it mean something else.”

  “What?”

  Erik looked at him. The normally stoic facade was slipping around his shining eyes. “I know it sounds selfish, but...we killed it. We killed two of them, for chrissakes. I don’t know if I have it in me again. So please, please tell me it’s anything other than what it sounds like.”

  “Erik—”

  “Use forensics or fingerprints or...or paw prints or whatever. Hair. Fibers. Something real—”

  “Erik, I—”

  Erik grabbed his arm. His grip was strong. “Please, Steve. I can’t. I just...can’t. Not again.”

  Steve didn’t answer. He wished he could, but in the face (or lack thereof, he thought with grim and sour amusement) of the evidence, it sure seemed like that unspoken answer between him and Erik was the right one. He wasn’t so sure he had it in him to face another one, either. The last one had nearly killed him.

  The two finished out their evening in relative silence, both of them thinking but not quite able to express their certainty that somewhere, somehow, a rip between dimensions had opened up again. And a predator, a new Hollower, had started stalking and feeding in this world.

  ***

  When Steve got back to his apartment that night, Gordon was already asleep. That was okay; Steve didn’t feel much like talking. He made his way across the darkened living room to the long hall. He could hear Gordon’s light snoring and beneath that, the buzz of the TV. Gordon set it on a timer; he liked the voices to keep him company on those nights when Steve had to work late.

  Steve passed the bedroom, whose door was slightly ajar, and made his way to the bathroom. After relieving himself of the last of the beer, he washed up and looked in the mirror. The face staring back at him was tired. It was a strong face, a square-jawed, handsome face, but the eyes... the eyes looked sad. Scared. Exhausted. He sighed.

  In the bedroom, he shut the TV off in passing and undressed in the dark, feeling over the pile of clothes for the black sweat pants he usually slept in. In the bed nearby, Gordon’s breathing was reassuring, real. He had come to find it comforting, just as he had come to find the warm existence of him in bed next to him reassuring. Gordon seemed to find it funny: a big, strong cop like Steve finding comfort and security in Gordon’s slighter presence. But Steve had seen things since he’d been a cop in Lakehaven that made him, for the first time since childhood, recognize the importance of having something—someone—real and steady to hold onto.

  He looked at the dark silhouette in bed and decided to tell Gordon in the morning that he’d go to the family reunion—that he’d be honored, in fact, to go. Gordon loved him, and he was pretty sure he loved Gordon back. Steve knew he was incredibly lucky to have someone like Gordon in his life. He could tune out a few homophobes over hamburgers and hotdogs and, God-willing, a lot of beer if that would make Gordon happy.

  Steve was just about to climb into bed when he heard a faint, high sound like a siren in the distance, followed by a thump and a moan in the hallway.

  He glanced at Gordon, who remained sleeping. He reached for the gun he’d left in its holster on top o
f his stripped-off pants. He could feel his heart thudding against his chest as he crept through the dark toward the hall, but he refused to admit the thoughts that crept around the corners of his mind. It was not, could not, would absolutely NOT be a—

  In the den at the other end of the hall, a den he would have sworn was empty when he’d passed it less than half an hour before, a blue-gray glow and inaudible mumble of voices suggested the TV in there was on. Despite the jarring suddenness of that idea, the clamp around his heart and lungs loosened a little. A thump and a moan echoing down the hallway made sense if some electrical surge or fried TV wire had caused the thing to turn on. An arbitrary channel pouring its surreal and graying glare of once-removed reality into his very real den could be explained that way, unspun by any ill-fitting forced logic. Just the TV. Just a wire short-circuiting. He lowered the gun, moving with more confident steps toward the den.

  He stopped short just in the doorway, the clamp tightening down hard again on his heart and lungs, because the noises weren’t coming from what was on TV. They were coming from what was tugging and wriggling and lurching its way out of the television.

  Where the screen had been there was a space like a window; beyond the wriggling thing in the foreground, Steve could see glimpses of a dark purple sky punctured all over with alien stars. From the other world embedded impossibly into the circuitry of his flat-screen television, the thing struggling to pull itself through looked encased in sausage skin; it was slick with some fluid that seemed to be rapidly drying and crumbling off the surface at its exposure to the air of the den. Beneath the slickness was a mottled black and pink skin, thin over spiny vertebrae that writhed out into Steve’s world in long, tapered appendages. These tentacles seemed randomly connected to a round mass of the same color and greasy appearance. The mass opened and closed a series of gaping holes around the tentacles that sometimes threw up obsidian orbs like eyes, and at other times, thin cactus-needle teeth. It had a rank moldy, swampy kind of smell, like organic things left out in the rain too long. It moaned again, retching from one of those sometimes-mouths a black fluid onto the rug that smoked and sizzled in little patches.

  Steve had forgotten himself completely in staring at the atrocity stuck halfway in and halfway out of his television. However, the tension holding him up was starting to strain his muscles, and he could feel his legs weak and shaking beneath him. His grip around the gun seemed dreamlike, its usually cool and reassuring solidity now completely without weight or substance.

  “Oh shit,” he whispered, unable to take his eyes off the thing. His brain willed him, screamed at him to raise the gun, to fire, and following that was the absurd argument that in doing so, he’d wake up Gordon. So what? Shouldn’t Gordon be awake? Shouldn’t they both be running like hell out of the apartment?

  The desire to protect Gordon finally overrode his paralysis and he lifted the gun and fired into the squirming mass which had wrapped a tentacle around the leg of the coffee table and had hefted most of its bulk free of the TV. It roared, ostensibly in pain, and flopped to the floor.

  The television had been a 60-inch flat-screen, and the creature on the floor in his den had filled the bulk of that. Now that it was free, Steve could see that the central mass extended outward behind it in a tail reminiscent of that of a lobster, sheathed in the same greasy, mottled skin. There, though, no eyes or mouths opened, but rather, a number of thin, jointed insect legs slid its bulk forward. The tentacle that was wrapped around the coffee table leg splintered the wood, and the flat top crashed forward onto the floor in front of it. It roared again, and Steve thought the sound was more anger than pain. All the slits in its body opened in unison, revealing numerous black, hateful, soulless eyes which focused their rage on him.

  Steve fired at it again and again, emptying his clip into it until the gun clicked uselessly in his hand. He dropped it at his feet. He was about to run for the bedroom when a familiar laugh riveted him again to the spot. It was an entanglement of voices both male and female, discordant and cold, like a music box smashed hopelessly off-key.

  That voice muttered words in a language Steve couldn’t place, a language whose context suggested layers of sinister meaning. Then, in English, the voice said, “Now, you die.”

  Steve turned slowly in the direction of the voices, and the last of his strength gave out. He sank to the floor by his empty gun.

  Three identical Hollowers stood in the kitchen, so close that they nearly blended in and out of each other. They had taken on the form so hideously familiar to him now. They each stood about six feet tall, humanoid in shape, their hairless heads each wearing a black fedora hat. They were clothed in black featureless clothes beneath long black trench coats, with black gloves and black shoes simulating hands and feet. These clothes had a surreal cast over them like a frost, a kind of quality that suggested their presence only half in this world, their consuming hunger and hate a biting, stiff, skin-cracking frigidity. Most terrifying to Steve were the flat, perfectly blank expanses of white where faces should have been, still capable of expression but utterly devoid of emotion or anything close to resembling pity or empathy.

  The first of them raised a glove and tipped its hat to him.

  Before Steve could scream, something hot and strong as steel wrapped itself around his neck and yanked him forward. The pain was immense, the tight band around his neck digging a hundred tiny spikes into his skin, the pressure choking off the air. He clawed at the tentacle but couldn’t get a finger hold to loosen its grip. The creature yanked him forward again and for a moment, the world went out of focus in a bright, sharp cloud of pain. He could feel the pressure and heat building up in his face, his mouth working in futile and soundless gasps to try to draw in air. He struggled to get his legs in front of him and kick at the body of the thing now that it was within his range. His foot sank into the damp sponginess of that alien body. For a moment, the grip around his neck loosened and again Steve saw the world through twinkling of fuzzy pinpoints of light, his bruised throat rasping for air, before the tentacle tightened again.

  The last thing Steve saw before both worlds in his view went black for good was the series of slits swallowing those terrible empty eyes so that myriad teeth could sink into the flesh and bone of his face.

  Behind him, the Triumvirate had already gone.

  Chapter 2

  It had been a fear of Ian Coley’s ever since his mother’s suicide that he would inherit the insanity that killed her. Every time he momentarily forgot the name for something, every time the dreams seemed a little too real and he woke up confused, every time the anxiety defied any real sense of rationality or logic, there was a quick flash of panic that he would end up like her. For the last few years of her life, she had hated being confused, hated that twilight state that had held her in a fever-dream of her own mind.

  Ian’s father had died when he was three, and he had very little memory of the man beyond a bristly dark mustache and the scent of Old Spice. His mother, he knew, had loved his father very much, and even after the schizophrenia had begun to set in, even after the voices and the newspaper duct-taped to the windows and the precise arrangements of soda cans and the complex symbols in bas-relief built up and out from the walls in plaster—even after all that, the one thing that could rally her sense of logic and reality was mention of his father. Ian wondered sometimes if his death was the beginning of her unraveling.

  He wondered sometimes, too, if her death might have been the beginning of his.

  It wasn’t just the bad dreams that made him worry—everyone had bad dreams—or the anxiety that seemed to wrap its icy fingers around the better part of a day’s thoughts. It wasn’t the whispering he thought he caught from the corners of rooms, or the multi-voiced laughter he sometimes heard in a bar or restaurant or on the street. He could write off all these things if he had to, package them into neat little parcels of anxiety tied tightly with logic and fact and carefully over-thought reason.

  The men witho
ut the faces, though—that he couldn’t explain. And that, he was sure, was the first truly undeniable sign that he had inherited his mother’s insanity. That scared the hell out of him. If a guy lost a leg or an arm, he understood it felt horrible, at first. The phantom itch, the phantom ache, followed by rebuilding one’s sense of self and relearning to function without the limb or appendage. But what itched or ached when a guy lost part of his mind? How did one go about mentally restructuring one’s thoughts and feelings? How did one learn to function as a normal person in a world encroached on by things others couldn’t see or hear?

  Sometimes in the dark that went beyond the thickest part of night, when these thoughts threatened to bury him alive and alone, he could begin to see why his mother had chosen an even deeper darkness, a final quieting of fears and a simple oblivion peace.

  He’d taken over her home on Franklin Avenue once she’d been admitted to the hospital, since she’d been so adamant that “those alien bastards with the human masks” who ran the bank not get a hold of her home and possessions. He’d kept most of her things, having little possessions of his own beyond an Ikea Grono lamp from his dorm room, some clothes, and a small TV, and having no money to replace what was already furnishing the home. He’d had to take apart all those copper wire and soda can structures she claimed kept the men from other dimensions from getting through. He’d chipped off the plaster symbols on the walls and painted over them. He took the newspapers down from the windows and he’d cleaned the hard, gray layer of neglect off the surfaces of the kitchen and bathrooms. But he’d kept her bedroom exactly as it was, newspapers, plaster symbols, soda can towers and all. Her jewelry, what little there was, lay in a small box on her dresser, along with pictures of his father just after Viet Nam and at their wedding. There were baby pictures of him, too, and one he assumed was sent to her from his graduation, although he couldn’t recall anyone being there in the audience who knew either him or her well enough to send her pictures. When she died, he’d kept the box of her possessions sent to him from the hospital, unopened, on the bed in that room as well.