The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy)

by Mary SanGiovanni

  He supposed when he really thought about it (which wasn’t often), there was a part of him that had been waiting for her to get better and come back, to reclaim that home and those possessions she seemed to hold so dear. After her death, the pervasive thought that he had somehow failed her, failed to protect her from the monsters she saw everywhere, prevented him from clearing out the bedroom of those same precious things. If he thought even deeper about it (which he almost never did), he would have to admit that some part of him thought that by keeping it all, by some day working up enough courage to really examine the shrines to her madness, that he might be able to understand her. And maybe, he could understand himself, and what might happen to him....

  He’d started seeing the men without faces about a week or so after his mother’s funeral, a month or so before. He had been taking advantage of the unusually warm mid-May weather, reading on the porch of his mother’s home, when he’d felt he was being watched. He looked up, but no one was there. He looked as far as he could strain his neck down either side of the street, but still, no one was there. His gaze quickly swept the porch. Still no one. He went back to reading.

  He hadn’t heard approaching footsteps or noticed any movement, but that feeling of being watched had been strong enough to lift his head again. Across the street, three figures stood close together. The near-luminous white of their faceless heads stood out against the crisp black of their clothes and hats. The first one tilted its head as if in quizzical thought, while the third raised a black glove and pointed at him. That pointer finger made slow, small circles in the air between them.

  Ian frowned, setting the book aside, tented on the table next to his bench. He opened his mouth to speak then closed it, unsure what to say. There was a certain air of surreality about them, as if they were in a layer of space resting against this world instead of moving through it, but he was fairly sure—both brain and eyes in agreement—that they were there. And yet, he felt just as sure that nothing else in the environment around him knew of their presence but him. Even the sidewalk beneath them and the air around them were oblivious to them.

  Which was a crazy thought, he knew. Crazy, even for him. Crazy, like his mother. But true.

  In the middle of the street between them, the air wavered. The sizzling smell of ozone coated the back of his throat. It looked as though waves of heat were rising from the pavement to distort it. In the center of the bright, rippling spot, a shadow began to form, smoky at first but gaining more definite darkness. As Ian watched, the spot took on an oily quality that reflected swirls of color and seemed to pull in on itself, forming an indent, a kind of hole that tugged at the space in front of it.

  “Oh wow.” Ian rose slowly, his mind and body in agreement once again that he should move away from that swirling black. Instead, he moved closer, hovering at the top of the porch steps. The whirling spot made him think of black holes, pulling and sucking light and color and the very fabric of the universe into it, deeper, dragging it through and out into someplace alien, someplace cold and deadly and—

  Ian shook his head, feeling confused and a little dizzy. Crazy, yes, but those weren’t his thoughts. They were—

  He looked up at the figures beyond the building vortex. Their voices swirled like the colors, in and around and through each other, around his ears, in and out of his head, male strains and female strains, a terrible chorus of hate.

  “You are going to die,” they told him, “just like your mother. Die. Die. Just like your mother....”

  Ian squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears, blocking out the vortex, blocking out their terrible voices. He could feel the tears slip beneath his lids and wet his cheeks, sudden and unbidden, and a terrible panic seized his chest. No no no no no....

  Their laughter was jarring, like breaking glass. He opened his eyes slowly. The three figures were gone, and so was the dark vortex they had opened up. No trace of either remained. Ian stood where he was for several minutes after, focusing on his breathing, willing his heart beats to slow down. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them twice more, as if wringing the things he’d seen like dirty water from his mind.

  “Just like your mother....”

  The trail of painkiller bottles she’d stolen somehow from the hospital supply cabinet (they’d never found the key she used) sprang to his mind’s eye.

  He closed his eyes. Squeezed. Opened them.

  The smears of blood on the staff elevator’s shiny metal sides and on the floor buttons.

  Closed his eyes. Squeezed. Opened them.

  The bloody hand-print on the basement’s rough wall. The smear across the morgue door. The matches.

  Closed his eyes. Squeezed.

  The razor and the ceramic bowl in which she’d burned what she could manage to cut off her face before the blood-loss and painkillers made her woozy.

  Squeezed.

  The smell. The irregular pools of blood, black in the dank basement, swirling (like a black hole) with dirt and plaster dust. Her crumpled body, dangling. He’d been there. They knew she’d only come to him if she were having an episode, and they’d called him. They’d let him join the search. He was there when the hospital staff found her. He’d seen it all, taken it all in, and he didn’t think he’d ever be able to squeeze it all out of his mind for good, for ever.

  He opened his eyes, and when he did, his vision was blurred with tears. He sniffed, and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

  He backed slowly toward the bench and picked up his book to bring it inside. He was about to close it, the contents forgotten, when he noticed the red from the corner of his eye. He looked down at the page he had been reading. In thin, spidery red script across the black and white of the printed page, someone had written:

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

  He dropped the book, wiping the fingers that had touched it on his jeans.

  His mother had taught Latin once among other ancient languages, when her mind was still good. Her mind had once been very good. She had taught Ian all kinds of things, given him a love of literature and music, of science and logic, but most especially of languages. She had once been a woman possessed of a bountiful wealth of knowledge, and she’d passed as much of it as she could on to Ian, who had shown a remarkable ability to absorb and remember anything so long as he could visually see it.

  That had especially included ancient languages, which had formed the basis of secret conversations between them.

  He understood the words in the spidery red script.

  But the devil when he purports any evil against man, first perverts his mind.

  ***

  For over a decade, the number of patients in the Sisters of the Holy Rosary Hospital’s mental health wing had been growing too large in proportion to the funding and facility space to house them and the staff to take care of them. Bloomwood County saw the scandals of Greystone Hospital and heard the rumblings of budget cuts and subsequent poor care in several of the large asylums along the east coast, and decided that a new facility should be built to house the overflow of patients. This was suggested for altruistic reasons and funded for practical ones, not the least of which was avoiding investigation of mistreatment of patients at SHRH due to lack of staff and space.

  Built on a private pond connected by a river to the main lake itself, Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital rose two stories from the surrounding woods. The staff members were, for the most part, courteous and caring individuals, highly qualified and sufficiently experienced. The patients transferred from SHRH were mostly harmless. So it was difficult for one to pinpoint what made the hairs on the back of the neck rise while looking at the place, or made one shiver even on the warmest of days, but it was impossible to deny. It had been built with what had ostensibly been considered soothing gray stone. However, its dark turrets, massive oak front doors, barred windows, and rather unforgiving facade suggested a sinister history before it had time to have gathered one. The plac
e looked daunting as much for its sterile, brand-new, equipment and thorough efficiency as for its contrasting patina of age—the uneasy understanding that lingered in every well-lit corner between insanity and consequence for that insanity.

  Lauren Seavers, RN, believed something was off in the very building itself. She had never been bone to find hospitals scary—her job testified to that—and it had been years since the patients themselves could really shock or frighten her. But LPH, with its new-building smell, its bright walls and even brighter lights, had begun, over the last month or so, to make her uncomfortable. She wouldn’t have admitted it out loud for fear of sounding ridiculous, but she suspected it was causing the bad dreams.

  Lauren had worked the night shift for the last three months. Since Barry had broken up with her, she found she couldn’t sleep well anyway, so she had volunteered. It kept her busy, kept her mind off of the distinct lack of his phone calls and texts, his arms, and his presence in the bed beside her. And the shift in her sleep schedule didn’t make too much of a difference at first. But as it caught up to her, she found herself sensitive to suggestion about the place, and that found its way, magnified and distorted, into her dreams.

  In those dreams, she was in a house somewhere in the suburbs, a place she didn’t know in real life but seemed to know in the dream. She was not alone. There was a bone-thin blond woman, a tall, dark-haired woman with long legs in tiny shorts, and a blond man holding a drink. There was also a couple, a zaftig young woman and her boyfriend. None of them had faces. They stood in the shadowed corners of the room as if watching her with those empty and glowing expanses. They pulled away from her if she tried to touch them, and if she talked to them, their heads would twitch and vibrate rapidly, or turn suddenly from side to side as if they were looking for something in the room. She’d follow their blank-faced gazes toward what she thought they might be looking at, and invariably, there would be a tunnel. Sometimes the mouth of it would appear in a wall, or from the hallway, or once, where the window had been. And without fail, she’d feel compelled to follow it and see where it would lead. Often in the dreams, the tunnel would lead her through catacombs where carved rock would curve around and over her, making her feel buried alive and miles from anywhere safe. That feeling would drive her forward, that barely contained panic that if she didn’t, she’d be stuck down in those catacombs forever.

  Sometimes there would be voices in those catacombs, close to her ear. Male and female voices intertwined, they would whisper horrible things to her, things about death and rape and dismemberment, about her cousin, and about a patient she had recently lost. Talk of her cousin and her patient, Mrs. Helen Coley, bothered her more than the sum of other horrible things they said, because they weren’t generalities of horror, but real and specific. The voices blamed her, accused her, told her all the suffering both her cousin and Mrs. Coley were subjected to that she could have stopped. She hated that part the most.

  In those dreams, the tunnels and the voices always led her to Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital.

  As she crossed the threshold from the rock tunnel to the sterile tile of the second-floor hallway just before the nurses’ station, the voices would break off as if someone had cut off the transmission. She’d be alone.

  Only, that wasn’t quite right. She knew that the same way she “knew” the house where she had started. She wasn’t alone.

  The patients’ rooms looked empty as she passed them, one by one, the bed sheets turned back and rumpled impressions on the mattresses and pillows where patients should have been sleeping. Windows were open, and cool breezes brought noises like voices and crying from the outside. When she reached the end of the hallway and looked in the last room, there was a complex symbol on the wall, branches and diagonals of which extended outward. Blood dripped from its sharp, upturned limbs and formed a blackish puddle on the floor.

  That was when she heard the sirens. One long, low wail was joined by another and another, strange cries from unseen patients, in the rooms she had just passed. And as she tried to run, her legs felt like lead moving through water. She couldn’t count on them to move her fast enough or take her away from those rooms; they took her instead toward room 205 which, in the waking world, had once been Mrs. Coley’s room. The sirens had seemed to start from that room. When she reached it, there was no one there—at least no one that she could see. The walls were wallpapered with drawings and clippings from magazines, interspersed with old photographs. Streaks of blood were smeared across it all. On the bed, the sheets had been drawn up again over a humanoid shape. Before she could move into the room, the sheets would burst into flame, the shape beneath writhing and screaming. Long, slick black appendages like spiny tentacles lashed out frantically from beneath the sheet as it turned black, burning through cotton and flesh and deeper, into meat and blood.

  She’d wake up sweating, heaving out breaths that had tried desperately and failed to be screams.

  Those dreams had started about a month ago with Mrs. Saltzman and her talk of the “doormen.”

  Mrs. Claudia Saltzman of room 211 had seen her fair share of psychiatric wards, having been transferred from Sisters of Mercy to Sisters of the Holy Rosary, and finally, as with many of her fellow patients, to LPH. She had moderate dementia which seemed to wrap her up in a fragile little cocoon of near-catatonia at times. She wore a neat blue and pink floral dress over a body endlessly creased with age and pale, papery skin. Her hair, cobweb-fine and sterile-white, she wore bound in a loose bun atop her head. When the oubliette of her mind opened on occasion to let rationality shine down, she could be incredibly smart and funny. It was hard to tell, though, from the gray-blue eyes, slightly cloudy with cataracts, what kind of day it was going to be; it was more apparent in her speech, and the expressive and delicate little ribbon-mouth.

  She was old and smelled like mint and antiseptic, but Lauren liked her. She suspected Claudia Saltzman had been one wild, sexy woman in her youth—the kind who never would have stood for a man like Barry, or taken the lies and cruel words over and over. Lauren thought Mrs. Saltzman had once been, in her youth, the kind of woman Barry would have left her for—the kind that knew her body, her power, and her charm over others as a simple matter of course, and if others didn’t like it, she just didn’t care.

  There were a great many things Mrs. Saltzman seemed not to care about these days. It wasn’t so much that she had forgotten them. It was more like reality, to her, was a paint color into which someone (or something, if one were to hear her tell it) had spilled tendrils of alien colors. They changed the color of her own reality where they mixed, and as time wore on, less and less of that pure original color from this world was left unblended by her new world-view. For the most part, the old woman seemed okay with that. Trouble was, the pure colors fading from that world-view contained the parts of life that reminded her to eat and sleep and bathe. So LPH tried to pour traces of that pure color back into her life through pills and nursing care.

  A particularly bright odd hue of Mrs. Saltzman’s new spectrum, the doormen, had been old when this world was young, she told Lauren. This time they had come through a hole in space that she thought but couldn’t say for certain might be located in the elevators that went up to the Electroconvulsive Treatment floor. Mrs. Saltzman was in the Geriatric Psychiatry wing south of that elevator, and claimed to see them in the hallways late at night sometimes. She claimed to often see them going in and out of room 205.

  Lauren supposed that Mrs. Saltzman’s hallucinations were a way of explaining what she at least marginally knew about ECT and the attendants that prepped, delivered, and returned patients undergoing such treatment. It was her experience that many of the patients who were cognizant enough of their situations and diagnoses initially feared ECT, and with Mrs. Saltzman’s situation, it was likely that truths were mixed with her hallucinations. The old woman would claim that sometimes the elevator doors would open and she’d see flashes of light and see the doormen coming and going with
a patient from Mood Disorders. She’d even stated they had taken Mrs. Coley with them in their comings and goings a few times.

  Sometimes she’d hear sounds like sirens.

  “That’s how they talk to each other,” she told Lauren one night. “It’s their language.” It was about a month after Mrs. Saltzman said they first crossed over through the elevator and the bad dreams had started—three nights after she claimed they had begun “pinching the Convergence,” whatever that meant, and killing and feeding. She was sitting in a chair by the window, a crocheted blanket of red, orange, and yellow folded neatly over her lap, and her hands folded neatly on top of that. She was a small, graying thing, dust dervished up into a person for a time, her hold on form tenuous. The clouds of her cataracts reminded Lauren of clouds in a blue sky.

  “How who talks, Mrs. Saltzman?” Lauren flipped on the small light near the bathroom—sometimes flooding the patients with bright lights during these night hours only served to agitate them—and moved across the room to her patient. She handed the old woman her capsules of Memantine. The old woman took them and swallowed them. Both knew the capsules would do little to separate those colors of her reality, but they did seem to help slow those colors from mixing entirely.

  She took the old woman’s blood pressure, checked her eyes and throat, and asked her the perfunctory questions of well-being and comfort, before Mrs. Saltzman replied, “The doormen. You know, from the elevators. The siren sounds—that’s how they communicate. I think it’s how they pronounce the sculpture words.”