The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy)

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Judging by the expression on the detective’s face, though, he could see Mendez wasn’t there to see him on a social visit.

  He opened the truck door and slid out. “Hey, Bennie. How’ve you been?”

  Erik noticed the slightest of tremors in the detective’s hand when he brought it up to slide off his sunglasses. Mendez looked pale and tired, bruise-colored circles cupping his onyx eyes.

  “Erik, it’s Steve.”

  Before Mendez could even elaborate, Erik saw the world swim out of focus. He closed his eyes and began counting, concentrating on the hard earth beneath his boots.

  Three, four, five.... Erik opened his eyes. “Is he okay?” he asked, knowing he wasn’t.

  Mendez’s face confirmed it. After a moment, the detective said, “Gordon found him this morning in the apartment. He wasn’t...we’re not....”

  Erik slumped against the side of the truck. “How?”

  The detective looked at him helplessly. “Nothing conclusive,” he said softly. “Looks like strangulation, but there was nothing at the scene to indicate what was used.”

  “How did he look?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His...body,” Erik said impatiently. “The shape he was in. The shape of the apartment.”

  Mendez shook his head, and Erik could feel his hands clenching.

  “I deserve better than the police runaround, Bennie, and you know it. What happened to Steve? He was strong. He had a gun. Gordon was in the goddamned apartment, for chrissakes! Tell me what was off about the scene. Tell me what you won’t put in the police reports.”

  Mendez looked somehow relieved to be able to say it out loud. “He—his face—”

  “Fuck.”

  “Just like Jake. Just like Dorrie.”

  Erik closed his eyes, counted, then opened them.

  Mendez paused, then: “There are some things I need to know, man.”

  Erik shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Yes you do. You asked about the state of his body for a reason. You know.”

  “I don’t know anything that can help you.”

  “Erik, look—”

  “I know where this is going. Ask your wife.” He started to turn toward the house.

  “You and Steve were close. I thought you’d want to help.”

  Erik turned back to him, suddenly angry. “I can’t help!” he growled. “I couldn’t help Jake or Dorrie or Dave before that, or Sally or Cheryl or anyone else, and I couldn’t help Steve, when it came down to it. Nothing I could tell you matters, because there’s always another one waiting. Don’t you get it? No matter what we do, the door keeps opening.”

  Mendez replied in an even tone, “I talked to them.”

  “Them?” Erik frowned.

  “There were three.”

  The world swam away from Erik for a moment. He thought he might be sick on the driveway. He swayed a little where he stood. “Three? You saw them? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “We’ve only ever seen one at a time. A Secondary and a Primary. They hunted alone. And both nearly killed us all on their own.” Erik walked back to his truck, mostly to have something to lean heavily upon while he thought about what Mendez had said. “Three?”

  “They didn’t try to attack me, but they threatened to if I didn’t stay out of their way. I could hear them and see them, but no one else could. And they barely seemed to notice me, let alone anyone else. But they told me that they’ve come to bring death.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they do. They sense everything, all your fears, your secrets. That’s how they find you. And they use what they know to destroy you. I–” Suddenly, Erik felt the panicky need to get away—from Mendez, from the conversation, all of it. He started back up the driveway again. “I can’t do this, Mendez. Count me out. Talk to Anita, look it up on the internet, scour Steve’s desk, whatever you want, but for God’s sake—”

  “I talked to Gordon, too, after most of the other officers had left,” Mendez said. Erik kept walking, and the voice behind him continued. “He wanted to apologize to me. Can you believe it? Apologize for not being there when Steve needed him.”

  Erik paused by the front door, listening.

  “He said he never heard Steve being...attacked,” Mendez continued. “Never woke up at all. He thought the officer that took his statement might have thought he was lying about that, but I believe him. I saw those fucking things, Erik. And they messed Steve up pretty bad. Gordon found Steve’s body by the television in the living room. Huge bruises on his neck—which, by the way, was twisted in a way necks shouldn’t be. Something had taken off half his face, too. You’re right. Steve is—was—a strong guy. A guy with a gun. All I want to know is how those things could have taken him down like that, without anyone else even hearing.”

  Erik turned slowly. Something wasn’t quite right. “Did the wounds look self-inflicted?” At Mendez’s frown he hastily added, “I know, I know he didn’t do it himself. But did the wounds look that way?”

  “No,” Mendez said, confused. “His bottom jaw was missing.”

  Erik felt the world slide out of focus and he closed his eyes and counted (a trick his sponsor had taught him to get through the urges to use coke) down to three before he could speak again. “That doesn’t sound like their kind of damage. They can’t physically touch you. They can’t see you, hear you, smell you. They don’t have senses like us. They can kill—they do it well—but the deaths usually look self-inflicted like suicides or like accidents. Not like ripping off jaws and destroying faces.”

  “Tell me what else you know about them. Is there a way to kill them? Is there even a way to figure out who they’re going after next?”

  Erik shook his head and looked down and away. He didn’t know. Didn’t have any fucking idea what these new Hollowers were like. Didn’t want to know.

  Softer, Mendez said, “I deserve better than the runaround, too, Erik. You know damn well what they did to Steve and all those others. You of all people know what they’re capable of. But this isn’t just about them anymore. These things aren’t done, and that means this could affect Anita. My son. You, too—and maybe your wife.”

  Erik knew he was right. He stood there, unsure of what to say, and Mendez took advantage of the pause to press on.

  “I know you all went through something I can hardly begin to understand. I know that whatever these things are, these Hollowers, they scare the hell out of Anita. They killed Steve. I get that you’re scared. But I’ll be damned if I let anything happen to my wife.”

  Erik could understand that. He loved his own wife, and if she were in danger—

  A terrible thought occurred to him then. Three...there had been three that first time, when the dying siren wail of the Secondary had brought them through to claim its body. Three...and at least one of those had been a Primary, bent on revenge. Those three had opened and closed the rip between his world and, ostensibly, theirs. And that thought led to another: if those carvings in that tunnel had been right, the Hollowers weren’t the only things that crossed through into other worlds. If these new Hollowers were somehow stronger than Primaries, could they be the ones who made it possible for things to cross over? Did they open and close rips in dimensions at will, and manipulate any of the lifeforms of alternate worlds? If so, just about anyone could be in danger, especially those closest to the humans who had dared to kill Hollowers in the past.

  Erik sighed. “Okay. Okay, come on in. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  Chapter 4

  No matter how Lauren turned it over in her mind, the plain facts were that Mrs. Saltzman’s “doormen” couldn’t know anything that Mrs. Saltzman didn’t know. Insanity didn’t give people psychic powers. And while patients talked, and it was possible that details of Mrs. Coley’s death could have made their way, however distorted, back to Mrs. Saltzman, there was no way she could have known anything about Lauren’s cousin.

 
; No one in her current life knew anything about that. No one.

  “They killed Mrs. Coley. They know about your cousin and what he did. And doormen want you dead as they are. They want to watch you die.”

  So what had the old woman meant? Lauren meant to find out—had to. Had to.

  She had tried all that day to get some sleep by squeezing the memory of her cousin from her mind, but that just made the images and the accompanying anxiety stronger. She turned from side to side to back, flipped her pillow to the cool side, tried more blankets then less, and found that sleep just wouldn’t come.

  Sighing in frustration, she had fished for the remote on the night table beside her bed and turned on the TV. Then she propped herself up with pillows to watch.

  A home movie played on the screen, a little girl with blond pigtails and a Cabbage Patch Dolls t-shirt and pants. She frowned, changing the channel. The movie played on that one, too. She jabbed random numbers and pulled up another channel, then another and another. The same home movie, the same little girl waving to the person behind the camera (her dad), running across the back yard, laughing, tugging on the arm of a shy little dark-haired, hollow-eyed boy turned in on himself, refusing to look at the camera.

  She recognized the little girl. It was her. And the boy next to her was her cousin Dustin.

  She didn’t want to watch, but she couldn’t help it.

  The home movie went grainy for a moment, and when it cleared, it was black and white. The camera, held stationary, was likely set on a tripod, and focused on a bed where the little dark-haired boy she knew to be Dustin sat in his underwear. He looked small and scared, dwarfed by the pillows his legs almost long enough for his feet to touch the ground.

  “Good, good....” a familiar voice said. Lauren hadn’t heard that voice in years. After what happened to Dustin, none of the kids in the family did.

  She pushed the Power button on the remote but the television stayed on. She leaned over her sheets and pushed the button on the television manually, but still it stayed on. She cursed softly, the picture blurring in front of her, and leaned back.

  The little boy’s cheeks were damp with tears. His skinny little arms wrapped around his narrow chest. “I don’t want to do this,” he whispered, barely looking at the camera.

  “I’m teaching you to be a man. You want to be a big, strong man, don’t you? Like me?”

  The little boy on the television hesitated, then nodded quickly.

  “Then do it. You know how.”

  The scene cut quickly to little Lauren and little Dustin sitting in their favorite hiding spot under the weeping willow tree in her backyard. She couldn’t imagine where the camera might be or who would be filming it—in her memory of that day, they were alone.

  She pulled the blanket tighter around herself, suddenly very cold.

  “Fire would be the worst, no doubt. I also think I’d hate to drown,” she said. They were at that age then of kids beginning to understand the violent world around them. They had been talking about ways to die with the morbid fascination and pseudo-boldness that children talking about forbidden or grown-up things so often had. Dustin, when she thought about it years later, had been more than harmlessly interested in the topic, and a part of Lauren always felt like those talks had maybe given him ideas in which way to end things.

  “I dunno. I think it might be kind of peaceful, once you got past the struggling part. Me, I’d hate to get stabbed. You see people get stabbed on TV, and they always have this look like they swallowed this big sharp rock and it’s rolling around inside them.”

  “Ick. I can’t even get a paper cut without freaking out. I’d hate that.” A pause, then the little blond head tilted in thought. “I think the way to go is something quick. Falling, maybe. You just break your neck or your back, and you’re gone. You never even feel it.”

  “I think you’d feel it. Come on, landing on rocks or something? I think it would hurt. I wouldn’t want it to hurt.” His voice was soft. The camera focused in on his face, the faraway gloss of his stare, the thin lips tight to keep the sadness in.

  “I’m telling you, you wouldn’t feel it. My dad says once you break your neck, you can’t feel anything.”

  The little boy didn’t answer. He shifted his position on the rock and winced.

  The little girl, knowing and not looking at him, said, “What do ya wanna play?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Wanna play hide-and-seek?”

  “Nah.”

  She picked up the fuzzy caterpillar she had been watching inch its way across a rock, and she pet it gently. “We could play Donkey Kong.”

  “Can’t. It’s at my house. My dad is home.” The little boy said this with the slightest tremble of disgust in his voice. He shifted again and grunted like an old man.”

  “You up late again last night?”

  “Yup.”

  “He’s a monster.”

  “Who?”

  “You know.”

  “No, he isn’t. You can kill monsters with sunlight and fire and stuff. I can’t kill him.”

  The little girl looked up from the caterpillar. “Does it hurt real bad?”

  The little boy turned his head away, but not before a close-up shot showed his eyes were filled with tears.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You should tell. Tell Aunt Maggie.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Tell my parents!”

  “No! And you can’t tell, either. Promise me.”

  “Dustin—”

  “Promise me or I’ll never talk to you again.”

  The little girl looked uncomfortable on the screen, but nodded. “I promise.” She put the caterpillar back down on the rock. The little fuzzy body didn’t move. “But if you don’t tell, it’s gonna get worse.”

  The scene cut away again to a small, rocky canyon not far from Aunt Maggie’s and Uncle Mark’s house. A tiny broken doll lay across the jagged rocks at the bottom. The camera flashed to an orange pill bottle with Aunt Maggie’s name and address on it and Diazepam written on the label, then back to the aerial view of the body. A slow close-up showed the doll to be Dustin’s broken body. The bones had been knocked loose with impact, as had his right eye, which sat drying out on his pale cheek. Trickles of blood ran from his nose, his ears, and his mouth. His shoulder was dislocated, and one of his legs was twisted up under him in a way no leg should ever look. A rib protruded from the striped shirt he wore. One of his sneakers, knocked off, was wedged between two rocks.

  Overhead, the clouds raced by, indicating time. The scene darkened and lightened quickly, three times, and each time, Dustin’s body looked worse. Animals had chewed on him. Bugs had landed, burrowed, laid eggs. Blood on the surrounding rocks was baked brown in the sun, and looked like spilled ink in the moonlight.

  It had taken three days to find him when he’d gone missing. He’d left no note. The pill bottle was what the police had used to determine his death was a suicide—he’d only taken a few of the pills, but hadn’t taken them as a means of killing himself, the police surmised—he’d only wanted enough in his system that he would have been drowsy enough to fall, or high enough to jump and just not care about the sharp rocks at the bottom.

  He’d had a closed coffin at the funeral. Lauren had wanted to see him one last time, to say good-bye. No one had ever told her about the condition of the body, and she’d never thought to ask.

  The broken, mangled figure on the rocks sat up then, and Lauren let out a choked little squeak of terror.

  “Look what you did to me. I’m going to find you, and I’m going to do this to you, Lauren. Things are gonna rip pieces off of you when you’re too broken to get away. Things are gonna lay eggs in you and chew their way out. I’m gonna find you, Lauren.” The TV went dark.

  She’d run out of the bedroom and had flown down the stairs, then cried on the couch until she’d fallen into an uneasy doze. In it, she waited for something thin and rotting to d
rag its skin bag of broken bones up her driveway, to reach a half-rotted hand to the doorknob, to pull itself up her stairs, the protruding rib knocking against each one. In the dream, the broken corpse of her best childhood friend would let in death in hideous forms to chew and tear her up. She woke with a start. She left for work early. She had to know what Mrs. Saltzman knew, and how.

  If Mrs. Saltzman’s doormen knew something about all that, then she wanted to know how and why. She wanted to know what they wanted, what it would take to make them stop.

  The following night was a Friday—the weekly staff meeting for the night shift was the first fifteen minutes’ priority, but afterward Lauren made her way down to 211. She found Mrs. Saltzman sitting, as usual, in a chair by the window with her blanket over her lap. She was looking up at the stars. She didn’t turn when Lauren entered, but her humming broke off and she said, “Little pieces of the world at a time.” She laughed, a high, hysterical, off-key sound, and finally turned to Lauren.

  Lauren thought her facial features took a moment to swing around and match up with her head. She blinked, shaking her head slightly. The lack of restful sleep was catching up to her.

  Mrs. Saltzman didn’t seem to notice. She was back to humming, and Lauren suspected it was not going to be one of her lucid nights. Lauren spoke to her anyway. A nurse who had overseen her work when she first started had stressed that it was important to do that. Obviously, just because patients might be in a vegetative state, that did not make them vegetables; they were still human and deserved human compassion, dignity, and respect. Conversely, no matter what quirks or tremors or sudden outbursts or utter, eerie lack of those things might happen, she was still simply in the room with another person, another human being and no more. They were no more demons than vegetables. Small tricks for re-humanizing them served to keep that in perspective when natural empathy and compassion were difficult to summon during long, dreary, lonesome shifts. In psychiatric wards, these proved especially valuable lessons.