The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy)

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Well,” Mendez said, running his hand under the water, “the water works.” He cupped his hand beneath the stream and drank from it, then backed away so the others could do the same.

  “God, that tastes good,” Ian said, splashing the water on his face and neck.

  After Lauren had washed out her arm wounds, she said, “I’ll be right back with some pain reliever and bandages. You guys wash out your cuts and scrapes.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Ian said, and when she smiled at him, he added with a blush, “I don’t think you should go alone, not until we figure out what’s going on.” The two went out and down the hall to the supply cabinet.

  “You know,” Anita said, drying the water off her face, “ it is kind of weird, us being sent back here, just like that. Why did they send us home?”

  “Maybe they aren’t done with us yet,” Erik answered, but at that moment, he didn’t really want to think about it. The cold water from the sink felt good. It tasted good. Even the sterile, antiseptic hospital air tasted good. What he really wanted was a long, hot shower, followed by a big steak and a cold Diet Coke. Or a warm bed, with Casey in his arms. His body was tired and sore, but his mind was exhausted.

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “They could have just killed us in the other world. Why bring us home?”

  “Are you sure we are home, sweetheart?” Mendez asked from the doorway.

  Before she could answer, Lauren and Ian were back with the pain relievers, which she gave two of to each of them, and bandages, which she set to work wrapping on Ian first, then Erik.

  “You always took the brunt of all this rough-housing,” Anita said to Erik with a sad little smile as Lauren wrapped his arm. He returned the same smile, remembering a backyard of razor blade grass and the pounding a Hollower could give when angry, hurt, and forced into solid form.

  As Lauren administered to Anita’s and Mendez’s less serious injuries with Hydrogen Peroxide, Ian reiterated Anita’s concern.

  “What I don’t understand is why they’d just let us go. Why send us home again?”

  The pain relievers kicking in, Erik found he could focus again. He said, “They’ve done this kind of thing before. They give you this false sense of security, let you put your guard down. Then bam! They’re back to messing with you. I think they do it to make you give up in despair.” He sat on the bed, looking out the window. It was still dark out, but the inkiness was fading to blue. The sun would be up in another hour or so. Erik couldn’t believe all that had happened had taken only a few hours. Time, he supposed, worked differently in other dimensions. He thought about the situation for a moment and then added, “My guess is, they don’t plan on just killing us.”

  “What do you mean?” Lauren asked.

  Erik turned to look at her. “Well, it was something they said before they sent me through. They told me, ‘You are anathema.’ I don’t think they meant just me. I think they meant us—all of us, as a race. See, the last time we fought a Hollower, we were in these catacombs, these tunnels underground. We got separated. They do that—try to make you feel weak because you’re alone. So I found myself in this tunnel with all these carvings—kind of like what we saw, remember, Mendez?”

  Mendez nodded.

  “Those carvings have stuck with me ever since. I tried to forget, to push them down, but...well....” Erik paused. Those carvings had seemed intimate, a message meant specially for him. It made him feel naked somehow to be talking about them now. “Anyway, these carvings showed alien races—maybe even the races whose worlds we saw tonight. I don’t know. And these races were slaughtered. Completely wiped out. And...it wasn’t just Hollowers doing the slaughtering, either. There were others. Other monsters.”

  “What are you saying, Erik?” Anita asked softly.

  “I’m saying those extinct beings on that red world might not be the only race the Hollowers and others like them have wiped out. And the Hollowers might not be the only beings that can come here. If we’re an anathema—that’s like a poison, right?—if that’s the way the Hollowers see us, then...maybe we’re next.”

  The others exchanged worried, thoughtful looks. He could tell in their eyes that the thought had crossed their minds, but that his saying it out loud brought it home, so to speak. It made very real a possibility they had hoped to leave on a distant world in an entirely alternate universe.

  Erik continued. “They aren’t done with us. Already there are little signs.”

  “Like what?” Mendez asked.

  “Like, shouldn’t there be another night nurse? A doctor, maybe? A noisy patient? Where is everybody? They aren’t here, because here is...home, but it isn’t. Not quite. It’s like River Falls Road, or Oak Hill Assisted Living. We’re in an underlayer, or an overlayer, I don’t know which. We’re here, but not entirely here. There’s the Hollowers’ influence between us and home.” He looked out the window. The sky was still the same eerie blue. It should have begun to lighten already. He listened, and there were no sounds whatsoever in the hospital wing except those made by the others in the room with him. “Hear that? Nothing. No sound. No footsteps, no snoring, no creaking of beds, no machines. Not even the hum of the lights. Nothing.”

  “I don’t know if I can take much more,” Lauren said. She shook her head slowly. “If we don’t get rid of them, they’ll never leave us alone, will they?”

  “They’ll drive you into the ground,” Erik said. “If they don’t first turn this world into a playground for every nightmare imaginable—and probably a bunch of unimaginable ones, too.”

  “Then let’s go find them,” Mendez said.

  “How?” Lauren asked. “Are they here somewhere in the hospital?”

  “I suspect they’ll find us,” Anita said. “They always do. But I say we go meet them head on.”

  “And then what?”

  “We send those fuckers home,” Ian said, patting his pocket. “For good.”

  ***

  The group moved into the hall. Lauren was aware of how thunderously loud their footsteps were in the still hallway. They backtracked to room 201, where Mr. Skolnik should have been sleeping peacefully on his side, snoring a little. The bed was empty. Mr. Fiorelli was missing from 203, as well. There was no Mr. Idelmann in 202 and no Mrs. Espinoza in 204. They weren’t surprised. Empty rooms were a sign of the general wrongness, but not an immediate cause for concern; she was fairly sure that wherever those sleeping patients really were, they were a hell of a lot safer than she was right now. Empty rooms were a go to keep moving. It would be occupancy, in whatever form it took, that would signal danger.

  They continued down the hall: no Mr. Turner in room 206; Mr. Ketelburgh missing from 207, check; Mrs. Giamatta missing from 208, check; no Mr. Woo in 209 and no Mrs. Meyers in 210. The beds were empty, made neatly, pillows fluffed. Personal effects of the room were untouched and unremarkable. So far, so good.

  As soon as they got to 211, Lauren saw there would be trouble. The room wasn’t empty; a silhouetted figure, its back to them, loomed and shrank with breaths of sleep in the bed. It was hard to tell with the blankets and pillows whether it was Mrs. Saltzman. Shadow-figures sat in the guest chairs around her bed, but none of the chests rose or fell. No limbs shifted. Their heads were bent as if dozing. They all wore fedora hats.

  “Are they sleeping?” Ian whispered.

  “I don’t think they sleep,” Anita whispered back.

  The suddenness with which the Hollowers appeared in the doorway caught them off guard. With startled shouts, they stumbled away from the three, further down the hallway.

  Lauren looked to Ian to get out the artifact, but didn’t have a chance to speak. The heads of the Hollowers snapped in unison toward room 212, where Mendez and Anita were standing in the doorway. As if shoved by unseen hands, the couple jerked backward into the room and the door slammed. Lauren could hear them banging on the door, jiggling the knob to try and get out.

  The heads snapped to 213, and a long a
rm, the flesh black and flaking, grabbed Erik’s shoulder and yanked him inside. The door closed on him, too.

  Lauren backed into Ian’s arms as the Hollowers turned their attention to them.

  “What do you think is the worst way to die, Lauren?” the middle one asked, its voice including a distinct strain that sounded like Dustin, sandwiched amidst its multi-voices. A line of fire sprung up between them and the Hollowers. The intense heat hurt her cheeks, and she turned her head away. She and Ian backed up as the fire flowed in little rivulets across the tiled floor toward them. They had just crossed over the threshold of room 214 when the door slammed shut. In the hallway, Lauren could hear them moaning in ecstatic glee, and it was more awful to her than the siren noises or their laughter. They were feeding one more time, and it was terrible.

  ***

  Erik struggled to shake free of the charred arm and found it gone—no trace of it dangling from above the doorway, and no fingers dug deep into the meat of his shoulder to pull him in. But the situation did not sit well with him; the next two things Erik noticed after the hospital room door slammed shut were that he was no longer in a hospital room, and he wasn’t alone.

  He recognized the basement of St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church on Byram Avenue. He recognized the cheap folding chairs that creaked every time a body shifted weight. He knew the folding table with the paper table cloth where the coffee machine and foam cups were. He knew the gray tiled floor, the white popcorn ceiling and stucco walls, and the periodic placement of pictures displaying the smiling faces of volunteers juxtaposed with lions and lambs, crosses, and saints. He recognized the faint smell of incense and paper and the faintly metallic smell of holy water blessed and cupped in coppery bowls on the floor above.

  He did not recognize the people sitting motionless in the folding chairs with their heads bowed. They had a distinct smell, too—one of spoiled meat, left out in the sun.

  It had been a long time since he’d felt the temptation to get high; it wasn’t a part of his life anymore and he was glad for that. But he’d taken being a sponsor to Jake very seriously. Jake, who had trusted him. Jake, who had needed him.

  He scanned the bowed heads for anyone resembling Jake, but no one stood out. It was a group of boys like any N.A. meeting. Some were there because they wanted to see for themselves the degrees of addiction beyond their experience, so they could convince themselves they didn’t really have a problem because it wasn’t as bad as the others’. Some were there because the courts had made them; it was either N.A. or jail. Some were there because they had lost too much, and they wanted something to go right and have something good to hold onto for once. Erik had been in that third category, but that hadn’t made it much easier to stay clean.

  As he really looked at the unmoving forms in the chairs, he noticed what was wrong with them. His stomach curled in on itself and he felt light-headed and panicky.

  One guy had a needle still hanging out of his arm. His skin puckered and had turned black around the needle. The rest of his skin looked freezer-burned; pink overlayed by white and blue dead tissue. Another guy had white powder on his fingers, but the whole front of his shirt was soaked in blood, and blood from his nose covered the bottom half of his face. It had started to clot and coagulate, congealing in rubbery strings running from his nostrils to his lap. A boy in the back had a festering, gangrenous patch of rotting skin near the crook of his arm. It oozed, and the thick greenish-yellow fluid slid in gobs down his arm. One after the other, all around the room, the bodies were the same—one holding a handful of his own bloody teeth, one with black, rotting open sores along both his arms, guys with skeletal bodies, lesions, gouges. If they were to pick up their heads, Erik knew he’d see swollen or sunken eyes, black and rotten teeth, lines and wrinkles and that dead-eyed, empty-hearted look so many never quite recovered from.

  Erik stood before a folding chair at the head of the group, where the person who ran the meetings usually sat. It occurred to him that maybe the Hollowers really had opened the door to Hell, because this was as close to it as Erik could imagine.

  He was afraid to move. He didn’t want to wake the motionless forms. He didn’t want to see their faces or watch those limbs, beaten to damn near useless by their substance of choice, shaking blood back into circulation. In a way, this was worse than when the Hollowers tried to tempt him, cover him, drown him in coke, because these people here were what he could have been. He had learned to say no to coke. He was still working on saying no to the guilt, to the part of him that demanded he never forgive himself for wasting so much of himself, his life, and his time away. He had almost lost Casey because of coke. He had lost friends. He had lost money. Mostly, he had lost self-respect. He had managed not only to salvage but better his life with his girl, and the rest had come as a matter of due time and hard work. But the part of him that mourned the lost time and the lost him couldn’t bear to look at the weak, half-human things that filled the folding chairs.

  Erik glanced around the room. There was a door on the far side, beyond the semi-circles of chairs. If he was careful, he could probably back out of the circle and around the outside of the group to the door and maybe those things wouldn’t even stir.

  He glanced behind him then back to the circle and frowned. There were more guys in more folding chairs, widening the circumference of the circle. It was a small basement area, and with that many chairs, he wasn’t sure it would be any easier to go around the circle than right through it. He glanced down to make sure he wouldn’t trip over the chair as he inched around it and when he looked up again, he was sure. There were more bodies in more chairs, essentially filling the basement with concentric rings.

  He cursed inside his head. He’d have to step over people to get around them now. The only clear spot on the whole floor was dead in the center of the circle, and even that area had shrunken with the sudden, silent influx of recovering dead.

  Erik assessed the situation for several minutes and decided it was inevitable. The only way to get to that door was to go straight through the assembly. The thought made his skin crawl. He’d have to keep his eyes on the door, was all. Just keep his eyes on the door. He could make it.

  He took a cautious step toward the circle’s center. His footsteps made a muted scuff, but no one in the chairs stirred. He took another step and another, his gaze fixed on the door.

  He was in the center of the circle. The dead men around him didn’t move.

  He took a deep breath, let it out as quietly as he could, and moved forward again. At the edge of bodies, he recoiled. The stench of rot and of unwashed hair, clothes, and bodies was overpowering. He would have to pass in between them.

  Eyes on the door. Four, maybe five rows of chairs and then the door. Eyes on the door.

  He inched carefully between two of the bodies, aware in an almost physical way of their proximity to him. He shuffled to the left and moved between two more bodies. Turning sideways, he crept around one whose bony legs were sprawled out and whose scarecrow arms dangled to either side. He took great care not to trip over the leg nearest him, but had a moment of horror and revulsion as one of the dirty-nailed fingertips brushed beneath the hem of his jacket. He waited, his heart pounding in his chest, for the body to move. It didn’t. By degrees, fear released its death-clutch on his chest and he inched along.

  He was one row away from the door when the tinkling of a bunch of tiny things falling and bouncing off the tiled floor made him nearly jump out of his skin. He turned to look and saw teeth rolling along the floor.

  As if responding to the cue, the bodies in the rows closest to the center of the circle started twitching. It spread like germs to the rows behind until all the bodies were spasming violently in their chairs, bony arms and legs flailing, heads lolling on weakened necks.

  Erik turned and bolted for the door. He thought he felt dirty, sharp-tipped fingers tugging at his jacket, but he ripped free, yanked open the door, and dove through.

  The hallway
on the other side creaked when he stepped into it. Gouged tiles on the floor left irregular holes that fell away to nothing. The paint on the walls peeled like badly burned and blistered skin. The gloom engulfing the end of the hallway drew back like a curtain, and at the far end he could see a door. As he walked down the hall toward it, he wondered if something in his brain chemistry, some embedded code that dreams read and functioned on, told on him as having a fear of never achieving a goal. He had read somewhere that tunnels and hallways symbolized that. It sure captured how he felt about then, tired of working toward the goal of surviving. It had never been an easy goal, long before the Hollowers came. It was damn near impossible now.

  He felt watched as he entered the shadowed area of the hallway, and he supposed he was—supposed he had been the whole time. It wasn’t just the Hollowers he felt, though. It was tough to get his mind around, but it felt like the walls themselves were watching, that something in and through them was watching. It made him feel cold and damp with anxious sweat across the back of his neck and under his arms.

  He was tired of being watched. Tired of being swung at and growled at and tossed through doors and dropped on hard ground. He was tired of feeling nauseous and sore and scared and guilty. He had worked hard to reclaim a normal life, a secure life. He wanted all those things she’d said she wanted—to be held, to make love to her, to hold her hair when she was sick, to count himself lucky every time she took his breath away in a beautiful dress or in sweats, to celebrate their joys and console each other in their sorrows. He wanted a life with her. A family with her. He was tired of fighting and tired of running.

  He was very, very tired.

  He reached the door and a kind of calm settled over him that he had never felt before. One way or another, this was going to end. If he couldn’t have all those things he wanted with her, then he wanted to make sure she had a chance, at least, to have all those things for herself, without ever having to worry about the Hollowers taking it all away again.