The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy)

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Mendez rocked Cora, who was mumbling tiny unhappy half-words in her sleep. He wondered briefly if toddler-nightmares were enough for the Hollowers to sense. He hoped not.

  To Erik he said, “I have the card of the night nurse on duty that night in the file. We can talk to her.”

  “Good. Stay here the night, then. Get sleep. Tomorrow night, we’ll go.”

  Mendez frowned, the protest all over his features. “Why not tonight? Anita—”

  “We need a plan. We need rest. We need a safe place for Cora. Anita would never forgive you—or me—if you went half-cocked without seeing to those things first.”

  Mendez, still not thoroughly convinced, nodded anyway. “Can we stay here?”

  “Wouldn’t suggest anything but,” Erik said.

  ***

  Lauren was brought back to the world by the sharp odor of ammonia. She opened her eyes to see Mila above her, waving a smelling salt under her nose. She found herself lying on the empty bed of the room in whose doorway she had lost consciousness. She assumed Mila, with the help of one or two of the orderlies, had found her, picked her up off the floor, and put her on the bed. Standing next to Mila, mirroring her look of vague concern, was Dr. Stubin, who was on call that night.

  After shining a quick light in her eyes and asking her a few questions, he pronounced her okay and said, “You fainted. Mila found you by the door there. You been sleeping okay?”

  “Actually,” she said, “I haven’t.” Her head hurt, she guessed from impact with the floor, and her face hurt—her cheek, just below the left eye. She felt jarred all over. “Why?”

  “You mumbled something about nightmares just now. And if you’re not sleeping or eating, that could have caused you to pass out.”

  She sat up, which sent a sharp spike of pain through her head. She winced. “I’m okay. Just some bad dreams, is all.”

  “Would you like glass of water?” Mila asked in her stilted accent. She was tall, well put together, with hair dyed a coppery red. Her face was pretty but mostly inexpressive. She watched Lauren expectantly.

  “No, thank you—I’m fine. Really. I just—”

  Just saw monsters in here, and a dead patient, writhing and mutilated, on this bed.

  At the memory of the latter, she suddenly found lying down unbearable. She struggled to get up. “I just need to get back to work.”

  The other two let her aside, their expressions conveying that they didn’t quite believe she was fine at all.

  “I’m fine,” Lauren repeated, ducking her head. As she walked away, she could feel their eyes on her back.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to go home?” Mila touched her arm. Her concern, seemingly lacking in her face and voice, was evident in her touch.

  Lauren stopped to consider it; the thought of hours of watching the patients’ bedroom doors, hours of waiting for something else to happen, for the hallways to change and for corpses to call to her and monsters to threaten her, almost made her crumple to the floor again. But then she thought of going home alone, of the empty quiet of her apartment, and of Barry’s clothes neatly folded and piled with his boxed-up things, and she shook her head.

  The rest of the night was quiet, aside from Mr. Turner having a bad dream and Mrs. Meyers complaining the dead people wouldn’t stop shouting from over some non-existent suburban fence and were keeping her up and didn’t they know what time it was? Lauren wanted to answer that the dead that afflicted the people at LPH had no compunctions about making themselves heard, so keeping up little old ladies wasn’t a big concern, but she didn’t; when a nurse started holding conversations with patients about their perfectly reasonable delusions involving the noisy dead, it was time to check into a room there herself.

  When she left early the next morning, there was a man waiting outside the doors to the main entrance of the hospital, clutching a large spiral-bound notebook. Lauren was aware of him out of the corner of her eye and vaguely recognized him, but her mind was elsewhere. She passed him without a second thought.

  “Ms. Seavers?”

  Startled, Lauren turned, hesitating. She didn’t think it was wise to stop for strange men at such an early hour, but he had a kind face, young enough to look innocent, and a slight build that she assessed she could take on if she had to (provided, that little voice in her mind told her, he didn’t have the strength of the hopelessly and criminally insane).

  “Do I know you?” Her body tensed as he approached. He seemed to sense that, and stopped a few feet away.

  “I’m Ian Coley. I think—I mean, I understand you were one of my mother’s nurses when she was a patient here?” This was presented as more of a question than a statement; Mrs. Coley’s son had not visited often, and stayed just under an hour on the occasions when he did visit, so it was no surprise to her that he might not know the staff well who had cared for his mother.

  “Yes,” she told him, trying to keep her voice even. “Yes, I remember your mother. I’m so sorry for your loss. She was a sweet woman.”

  The young man looked down and away from her. “Thanks. Uh, I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about her stay here. And about her things—I mean, the things you packed up from her room and sent to me.”

  Lauren hesitated again, and Ian said, “Not here, I mean. I could follow you to a well-lit and well-populated diner, if that would make you feel better.” He offered her a weak smile which faded as he seemed to realize something. “And, I mean, if you’re not busy—”

  She nodded tightly. “No problem. Follow me.”

  ***

  During the lightening, the Triumvirate pulled back to the Convergence to decide on the place called Earth. They did not need so much sustenance as any individual member of the Likekind, their union giving them strength, but they had nonetheless fed in that world. In spite of the noxious physicality of the place and the bombardment of assaults on crude senses, in spite of the appallingly commonplace practice they had of touching each other, the meats of that world made good prey. The Triumvirate understood the Secondary’s and the Primary’s preference for hunting there—those meats had complex and conflicting sensations and notions wrapped often in their mindsounds, complicated emotions that for a time could keep the twisting and churning inside them at bay. It was necessary to cultivate a number of them at one time, to learn words, those foul utterances of sound, in order to dig out sustenance from those awful fleshy shells, but the output was satisfying.

  The oddity the meats thought of as “baby” the Triumvirate could not quite understand, other than observing how the implication of harm to it produced greater amounts of Terror and Guilt in two of the meats. It was somehow connected to a range of useless emotions the Triumvirate did not understand and did not care about. They found it difficult to sense “baby,” but gathered it was something more important to use as leverage than to destroy. They thought they had used it effectively to that end, and in doing so, had catalyzed their decision regarding the others.

  As for the meats who posed a threat to the Likekind, the solution seemed simpler than initially proposed. They could pinch the Convergence as they had done with the one and send those specific meats elsewhere. There were other places where even the meats’ meager abilities would not save them, they could feed on them, and then the kinds that inhabited those places would make quick work of them. They could observe and reap the delicious Fear, Insecurity, Anxiety, and Pain for themselves.

  There was rarely dissent among the Three, and this decision was no different.

  The meats were, during the lightening when they thought they were safe, making plans to find the Triumvirate, to come to them during the next darkening. This was acceptable.

  The Triumvirate would wait, and when the meats came, the Vengeance of the Likekind against them would span dimensions.

  ***

  The surreal aspect and events of only a few hours before seemed to lose some of their hold as the sun broke soft over a pink horizon. Lauren and Ian sat acro
ss from each other in a booth at the Lakehaven Town Diner, each with a cup of coffee in front of them—Lauren’s with milk and sugar, Ian’s black. Neither of them had ordered food, having no appetites, Lauren supposed, for their own personal reasons. Ian had made a few attempts at initiating his reasons for wanting to talk to her, but their conversation became hushed with the approaches of the waitress or the passing of other early-morning patrons. Ian’s demeanor gave the impression of tightly reigned-in irritability at being interrupted, and so after the first cups of coffee were served, the waitress gave them wide berth.

  “It’s about my mother,” Ian began, almost as if he were picking up where he was in his thoughts. “She was a patient at Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital for a while.”

  “Yes,” Lauren said, sipping her coffee. “So you mentioned. I remember her. She was a nice lady.”

  An expression crossed Ian’s face that Lauren couldn’t quite read. “She was...unwell.”

  “Most of the people who come to us are,” Lauren answered softly.

  Ian took a few sips of his coffee before continuing. “What I’m going to say is probably going to sound as...unwell, I guess, as the things she used to say. But it’s important for me to establish to you that I’m telling you about something real. I thought I was going crazy, too—I really did. But I’ve recently begun to believe that it may not just be me. And my mother may have been accurate about some of her perceptions.”

  Lauren wasn’t sure what to say to that. Faced with hereditary insanity, Ian could be trying to justify his own onset of symptoms. Or he might be trying to force a reasonable explanation of his mother’s hallucinations and behaviors where reason just didn’t fit. But beneath these logical first impressions, Lauren’s gut instinct told her she knew where this was going. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.

  “My mother,” Ian continued, exhaling slowly, “believed a number of paranoid delusions. She thought the people at the bank who collected her mortgage were ravenous creatures made mostly of mouths and fluttering wings but disguised as human beings, who wanted to devour her home and her belongings. She thought the government had put airborne microchips into the heating system for her to inhale that would help them track her. She thought she could keep out cancer-causing rays from alien satellites by pasting newsprint over the windows. And I never once questioned those things because I believed they were clearly delusions. Even as a little kid, hearing those comments she would make that would be just slightly off, just slightly skewed somehow, even then I knew her perceptions were wrong, that the world didn’t quite work the way she thought.”

  He took another long sip of coffee, seeming to collect his thoughts and order them. At last, he seemed to gather enough courage to continue. “Lately, I’ve had...experiences which I can’t explain. Experiences which seem to coincide quite closely with one—only one—of her delusions. Closely enough that I finally went into her room and went through her things. I hadn’t been in there, see, since the funeral. And the box LPH sent after she...after her death was still sitting on the bed.”

  “What experiences were you having?”

  The waitress came by and refilled their coffee cups. When she had moved a safe distance away, Ian said, “I’ve been seeing bad things. Bad people. Well, not really people. I mean, they don’t have faces and—”

  Her reaction to this must have been obvious, because his face suddenly filled with concern and he reached out to touch her hand. “Are you okay?”

  She opted for the glass of water beside her coffee and took several long swigs before nodding. “Please, continue.”

  Hesitantly, he went on. “I started seeing them after my mother’s funeral. I don’t know what they are or where they come from, except what I feel about them, which is mostly hate—very cold, very dark hate—and what I read about them in my mother’s journal. She called them ‘Hollowers.’ A lot of what she wrote in that journal was tangential theories—the delusions, blooming into other delusions, decaying into obsessive thought and rebuilding themselves as new ideas. It was hard to follow. But I read the parts about the Hollowers a couple of times each. See, in those passages, there was coherence and consistency. Those passages...well, they made sense.

  “In her journal, she described decades’ worth of death and disfigurement, complete with seemingly incidental newspaper clippings taped inside. I missed those clippings at first because she’d separated them from the other ones loose in the box and taped them to the back cover of her journal, then marked them. A1, A2, B16, that sort of thing. And throughout the entries regarding the Hollowers, there would be these little inline references: ‘Ref. A1.’ And A1 would be about a woman discovered dead in her back yard with her face cut up and her neighbors baffled. I mean, she really had a pretty detailed cross-referencing of her information. You’d almost have to believe....”

  He sipped his coffee and continued. “And she also referred to individuals, mostly by initials, who she claimed were having the same kinds of experiences with these Hollowers as the people in the articles were. As she was. She was terrified of them. She wrote that they weren’t from this world, weren’t even fully in it—but that they could act on it in terrible ways. That they knew things, and could show you things. Horrible things. She wrote that they’re dangerous, they’re ageless, and they’re unkillable. I think...I think they killed my mother.”

  From his body language, it looked like he was bracing himself for scorn and disbelief. Instead, Lauren took a chance and told him the truth. “I’ve seen them.”

  Ian looked stunned. “What?”

  Lauren, her stomach roiling now with coffee soured by the grave information he had given her, said, “At the hospital. In your mother’s old room. They threatened me tonight—I think they were going to kill me.”

  Ian’s eyes narrowed. “Are you humoring me because you think I’m crazy?”

  She leaned over her cup to meet his gaze. Her voice was low and level. “There are three of them. Black hats, gloves, and clothes. No faces. Voices like a chorus in hell.”

  Ian swallowed, nodding slowly.

  “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know,” Ian said. “I think they just want to kill us. I think they’re just pure evil. I don’t know if they have a reason—if they even need one.”

  “Was there anything in your mother’s journal about how to stop them?”

  “No,” Ian said. “But I sought you out tonight because she wrote that there were others in the hospital who could see them. I thought you might be able to tell me who. And she wrote they passed into and out of this world through ‘doors that weren’t doors’ in her room.”

  “The doormen,” she murmured, and when he asked her to repeat herself, she shook her head. “You’re right; at least one patient can see them, besides me. And that was just something she calls them. They don’t seem to bother her, but she knows about them. She can see them.”

  “So...can you get me in tonight to see my mother’s room? I’m sure there are answers there. I can’t imagine what we would find that you wouldn’t have already come across, but...I just need to see for myself. I need to know. If there’s some kind of doorway that lets them in, maybe we can shut it and keep them out.”

  “I can get you in,” she said. “Meet me at the front entrance at 10 p.m. That’s when I go on break. I can get you past security that way.”

  Ian breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you Ms. Seavers —”

  “Lauren,” she said.

  “Lauren. Thank you so much.” He smiled at her.

  “What would you have done if I didn’t believe you? If I had thought you were crazy?”

  Ian thought it over a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew you wouldn’t. I knew I could confide in you. I felt it.”

  “Same here,” she said. “I knew...I knew I could trust meeting up with you.”

  “Maybe,” Ian said, “there’s something in the universe that protects us from the evils of
other universes.”

  “It’s a nice thought,” Lauren replied non-commitally.

  ***

  “Don’t leave me,” Casey whispered into the pillow. It sounded like she wanted to say something else, but didn’t.

  They were lying in bed, her back against his chest, his arm around her. He could smell her hair, feel the lithe curves of her and her warmth. He never wanted to let her go.

  “Baby, I’d never leave you. You’re my wife. I love you more than anything in the world.”

  There was a pause. “You’re leaving tomorrow with that detective.”

  When he began to explain, she cut him off gently. “I know you have to. I know these...things...are back. I just worry that...that they’ll take you from me. I just...I finally have you back, after so much. I don’t want to lose you. I want to hold you and kiss you and make love to you. I want to share things with you and take care of you. I want to know that you’ll come home to me in the evenings. I want to have a family with you....” This last she said hesitantly.

  “I want those things, too,” he said into her hair.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  There was a pause and then she said, “I had no idea how much you went through, with those...things.”

  “It’s okay. I’m all right. Everything’ll be okay.” He wasn’t sure what to say to her or what she needed to hear, and he didn’t like that. He wanted to make everything better.

  “These things really mean to kill. And there’s no changing their mind. I...I guess I understand about the baby. I didn’t before, but I guess I do now. I...I don’t know what I’m trying to say, really, except that I love you, and no matter what you need to do, I support you. I’m just scared. I’m really scared.”

  Me too, he thought, but out loud he said, “I’m going to make it right—for good this time. I want a good life with you. I don’t ever want you to regret marrying me.”