The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy)

by Mary SanGiovanni

Chapter 18

  Erik emerged through the door, his eyes growing wide as they took in the thing on the operating table.

  “Help me,” Lauren cried. There was a long, bloody wound on her thigh and slashes around her ankles, as well as a nasty cut across her cheek. A band of hickey-like bruises encircled her upper arm.

  “Fuck,” Erik muttered, joining Ian against the far wall. Ian slid off his other shoe and threw it at the beast. It bounced off a tentacle and rolled to a stop near Lauren.

  “Distract it,” Ian said. “I’ll grab her.”

  Erik nodded. As Ian prepared to make a run for her, Erik shouted at it.

  “Hey! Hey, over here!” He jogged sideways along the wall away from Ian and Lauren, hoping he was out of reach. The beast shifted its bulk on the table and uncoiled a tentacle in his direction. He tilted his head back and the tentacle whisked past his hair, narrowly avoiding his face.

  Ian, meanwhile, had skidded to a crouch beside Lauren and, with his arms under hers, had hoisted her to her feet. The monster started to turn its attention to them, but Erik shouted again.

  “Come on, motherfucker, over here! Over here!” He flipped it the bird—it wouldn’t understand, but he didn’t care. It was a little act of rebellion and it felt good.

  Ian and Lauren ducked and ran back to the wall, out of reach while the monster lashed out at Erik. This time, it connected with Erik’s chest, splitting open his shirt and the skin beneath in a diagonal line of beading blood. A flare of pain across his chest set his heart pounding. He staggered back toward the wall.

  A moment later, Mendez and Anita appeared at the little door, taking in the monster with the same repulsive fascination as the others. Anita rushed to Lauren, shouldering her under the arm as Ian had in order to help her walk. Erik tried to rejoin them but the beast snaked out a tentacle to block his way.

  Mendez, who Erik figured by now had come to the same conclusion he had, looked at the monster with abject hate. Without the Hollowers to force it to focus its rage on just the face, it was attacking at will. It, or one like it, had killed Steve. It or one like it had killed Jake and Dorrie. The knowledge for Mendez might have been based on forensics, matching the wounds he remembered to the murder weapons flailing wildly around the room. But Erik suspected Mendez knew for the same reason he did; it was one of those invasive thoughts that was not their own but just as real, like dream knowledge of things that are certain but for no easily traceable reason. The knowledge that a beast like this had killed Steve, Jake, and Dorrie had been shoved into their heads the same way they had been shoved from dimension to dimension. The Triumvirate wanted them to know.

  Mendez drew his gun on it and emptied the rest of his clip into the writhing thing on the table. It roared and screamed at the first two shots, but then it stopped moving, other than where the impact of the bullets made its flesh dance in tiny explosions.

  He and Erik approached it with cautious steps, watching for signs of life. So far as Erik could tell, no part of it breathed. Nothing moved. The openings of the central mass had all settled on half-formed slits through which a random eye or point of a tooth was visible. The dark curves of the eyes had begun to lose shine and shrink to hard little knots of dark gray. Along the tentacles, the last of the slime that had, Erik guessed, kept the skin lubricated had dried away, and the mottled skin looked like tiny sheaths of torn up paper tacked on to the spiny bones beneath. The little spikes that lined the undersides of these tentacles, visible now with proximity and the limbs stilled, looked like loose teeth, sagging in their sockets and occasionally landing on the operating table with tiny metallic pings. It reminded Erik, wildly, of the pine needles falling off Christmas trees after Christmas.

  Mendez nudged it with his gun and more spikes fell off. He nudged it again to be sure, and that seemed to catalyze the decomposition. The mass in the middle collapsed in a papery heap and puff of swampy odor, the tentacles and spidery legs folding in toward the middle. Layers of skin blew off, landing on their clothes and in their hair. They recoiled, trying to brush it off. It smeared like ash, but felt oily on their fingers. Within minutes, the whole of the beast was a fluffy white lump, a giant lint ball with the occasional bone poking through. They backed away from it. Erik had a strong urge to kick the table over, to send the foul thing crashing to the floor to break into dust, but he resisted. It was dead. That was enough.

  They trudged back to the little door and opened it, piling out into the hallway.

  The door swung softly shut behind them, and then everything began to change. A sharp crack like lightning, followed by a boom of thunder, preceded a violent trembling of the hall. The vibrations were strong enough to make the group stumble around to keep balance. Erik and Mendez led the group forward, stopping short when a tearing sound signaled the fall of a huge chunk of ceiling.

  “Whoa! Shit!” Erik looked back at Mendez, motioning for him to get the others to back up a little.

  “What the hell is that?” Lauren’s voice was high and hysterical. She pointed to the space where the ceiling chunk had been. Beyond it was an ocean, upside-down. The waves crashed against some inverted shore beyond their field of vision, and water sprayed down on their upturned faces.

  Beneath them, the floor tiles cracked, and little pieces fell away, down into a blue sky smeared with clouds.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Erik muttered, but no one heard him. Beneath his feet, chunks of floor tile were falling down into the sky. He jumped when he felt a rumble beneath his feet, moving out of the way just as the floor space beneath him broke in half and tumbled out of sight.

  Anita cried out and he turned around. Mendez had caught her arm, but her leg had sunk with the tile below into the hole up to her thigh. Erik ran to her side and took her other arm, and the men hoisted her out of the hole. Just then Mendez tumbled back. Anita and Erik grabbed his arms and kept him from pitching backward into a patch of cloudless sky.

  “Thanks,” he said to them.

  “No, thank you,” Anita said back, and kissed him quickly.

  A crack opened up at the far side of the hallway, beyond the door they had come through, and jittered toward the center above their heads. The roar of waves above it was deafening.

  Erik noticed that the center of the hallway had remained more or less in tact, so he tugged Anita and Mendez toward it. “This way,” he said to Ian and Lauren. “Stay in the middle. It seems pretty sturdy.”

  A piece of ceiling to the left of the crack crashed down and, with a creak, fell through the floor. A wave smashed against the hole left in the ceiling, pouring murky water through the room and out the hole in the floor. Erik could see the sky changing to an uneasy, undecided storm color.

  Then the walls started to pull apart. Explosions of plaster and paint sent chunks of wall flying outward toward the flipped horizon line. Exposed support beams creaked and splintered under the pressure. More of the floor fell away, leaving only a jagged strip of tiles over a graying sky. High tide above their heads sent foamy water splashing down all around them, soaking their clothes and hair. The water smelled swampy, like the monster they had killed, and Erik wondered if they were twisted up in the Hollowers’ half-way place on Earth, or someplace else. Another chunk of ceiling fell, and then the water began pouring in, coating the remaining tiles, pouring off their uneven sides into a sky that had knitted together angry brows of storm clouds.

  There was another flash of lightning below them and a clap of thunder, and the ocean pouring down in front of them washed the ceiling chunk right off the side of the tiles. With the obstruction gone, Erik saw that the hallway continued indefinitely in front of them. No Emerald City at the end of that road, he thought grimly.

  He turned back to Mendez, who was clutching his wife. “We should move!” he shouted over the din. The water in front of them was pouring in faster, washing toward them.

  “Which way? The water’s coming down too hard!”

  “If we wait any longer, it’ll get worse! It�
��ll wash us right off this thing!”

  Mendez considered it a moment, then nodded. “Everybody, grab hands!” he shouted back to the other two.

  Ian took Lauren’s hand, who took Mendez’s. Mendez had Anita’s and Anita reached for Erik’s. Again, Erik was leading the way. He put thoughts of slipping off the side out of his mind, and instead put one foot in front of the other, one at a time, nice and easy. There was a roar above his head and he froze. A rush of water poured down in front of him, and every muscle in his body tensed. He could feel Anita’s grip tensing, too. Erik closed his eyes until the rush of water stopped, then moved forward again, hoping, begging, praying to the Higher Power that another spout of water didn’t crash down on the middle of his chain of people. He considered picking up speed, but decided against it. They couldn’t afford a misstep, literally. Slow and easy.

  About two hundred feet or so ahead, he noticed the ceiling stopped, but the tile pathway kept going. The water dribbled and drooled off the edge onto the pathway with the rhythm of the waves, but it didn’t look like it came down too hard. A light curtain of waterfall, that was all. They could manage that. He noticed, too, that the sky at that point ran 360 degrees around, a vista of grays and blues, cloudless and clear. No sandy shore to fall and bury them alive, which was good. If they could make it that far, they might be able to pick up the pace unhindered.

  A scream from the back of the chain froze his heart. He stopped, bracing his legs, looked back, and did a quick headcount. Anita, Mendez, Lauren, Ian, check. It was Lauren, he assumed, who had screamed. A spout of water had poured down behind them, drenching Ian, and had deposited with it an odd fishy creature easily as large as an ottoman. The thing had a long body covered in iridescent silver scales and tiny black eyes. Its mouth, which worked open and closed silently, featured row after row of shark teeth. Black spindles and smaller spikes ran along its back bone and the tapered edges of its fins and tail. It flopped and the back end of the chain flinched. Ian gave it a good kick and sent it sliding off the water-slick path.

  “Everyone okay?” he called back.

  Ian looked anything but okay, eyes haunted, blond hair plastered to his pale face, but he gave Erik a nod and a thumbs-up.

  Erik turned his focus back to the path ahead. Slow and easy. He moved forward again. They were approaching the edge of the ceiling. He fought the urge to tug the chain of them into a run. He kept moving forward until he got to the curtain of water, then plunged through. He felt a muscle in his back strain from the tension of waiting; he thought the water would rush down at any minute, washing the whole lot of them into a Hollower-created oblivion. He emerged on the other side, soaking wet, his nerves strung tight, but okay. He kept moving forward, listening for the little puff of breath or sigh that indicated each of them made it through.

  “Clear!” Ian yelled from behind, and Erik’s body released some of that tension.

  Cleared of ocean splashes, he felt more sure of his footing on the tiles, and picked up the pace a little. He didn’t want to move too fast. It was likely they could be surprised yet by something trying to catch them off guard, and it was still a fairly narrow path. He refused to look down. He’d never really considered himself afraid of heights, but it seemed prudent not to get distracted, if possible. Slow and easy, keep following the path. He imagined Casey was waiting at the end of it for him, and he didn’t want anything to keep him from getting to her.

  A light breeze blew across him as he put more and more distance between the chain of people and the remains of the hallway. It felt good, cooled the tension sweat on his skin. He couldn’t help but notice from his periphery that the blue of the sky all around them was deepening. The path ahead was harder to see, swathed in shades of purple inkiness. However, it looked to him like far up ahead was an archway. Beyond that, he couldn’t make anything out. Still, the Hollowers were big on heralding change with landmarks, and he found himself bracing for it.

  “Archway up ahead!” he shouted back, and Anita squeezed his hand in acknowledgment.

  The breeze picked up, a chuffing sound in his ears, and this time it made him shiver. He kept on, picking up his pace when another gust of air, chilly this time, blew across his face and made his eyes water.

  The archway drew a little closer. The path over nowhere seemed to be widening a little as well, and he chanced moving still a bit faster—not quite a jog but almost a power-walk. The others kept pace with him.

  A big gust of wind brought him almost to a stop. It was powerful, that wind—strong enough to tug him toward the edge while his foot was raised. He knew that ideally, he should lower his center of gravity, but it would be difficult. He couldn’t bend into the wind, either, since it was blowing from the side. He’d just have to keep on, hoping the wind wouldn’t pick up tornado momentum. He moved with wide, deliberate steps down the path, focusing on the archway, turning his trunk when he could to offer the wind as few bodily surfaces to push against as possible.

  The arch came into view, and now he could see it, and what lay beyond it draped in dusk, more clearly. The arch itself looked like two bent bars of metal. Weaved between them was thin wire from which dangled severed fingers on little snips of ribbon. This struck him as one of the most disturbing things he had seen yet, simple and awful, the trophies of a grisly, efficient trio of killing machines. Beyond the arch was a broad plane of what looked to Erik like fiberglass, over which was painted a lattice of glowing purple. The dusk below them showed through the clear diamonds in the lattice. Beyond the plane, there was nothing—no door, no random floating window, no mouth of a tunnel. There was just dusk, deepening to endless, starless night. He didn’t need to worry about falling off the pathway into oblivion; they were already there.

  He led them under the arch and onto the lattice before letting go of Anita’s hand.

  “Where the hell are we now?” Ian asked, exasperated.

  “Nowhere,” Erik said. “Literally. I think we’re actually nowhere.”

  Ian slumped a little where he stood. “Why?”

  Erik gazed at the illimitable gulfs of emptiness all around them. “When the Primary came, it sent us all over the place. Every time we thought we’d conquered one place, we’d end up someplace else. It’s a tactic they have for trying to break us. Like I said, they want to push us to the point of giving up.”

  “Well, guys, I think I’m just about there.”

  “Me too,” Lauren said, her voice hoarse. “I just don’t know if I can take any more of this.”

  Anita and Mendez kept silent. They all looked at Erik.

  “I can’t,” he said softly. “I can’t give up.”

  “I don’t know if we have much of a choice, brother,” Ian said. “Look around us. We’ve literally reached the end. Of everything.”

  Erik felt a pang of hurt in his chest. The kid was right. They really were at the end of everything, and yet Erik still couldn’t let go. He couldn’t just close his eyes and pitch back into that comfortable nothingness and let it all go.

  To the others, he said, “Look, I know how you feel. Believe me.” he took a deep breath, exhaling slowly before continuing. “When I was a kid, my dad used to drink. Case of beer every night, sometimes hard liquor. And he was a mean drunk. He was a mean son of a bitch sober, but drunk, he was even worse. And when he’d hit me, I’d just give up. Let my mind go blank, shut down. Then, I discovered coke, and at first, it was like I’d found a way to wake up again, to feel alive again. But it wasn’t. It was only another way of giving up, of not caring.”

  The others said nothing. They looked at him with empathy, maybe with pity. He wasn’t sure. Only Mendez looked at him differently. His was an expression Erik couldn’t quite make out, but it was the only one that didn’t make Erik feel weak and unequal; that was the best way Erik could describe it, that Mendez’s expression didn’t make him feel less like a man. He didn’t fault the others for their sympathy or even pity, if that’s what it was; he appreciated it, but didn’t want it.
Still, he continued.

  “I’m not telling you this to guilt you into keeping on, or even to get you to feel sorry for me. I’m trying to make a point, and it’s this. When I met Casey, my wife, she gave me a reason to want to fight—my addiction, the world, everything. Fight to keep her. Fight for a better life. I quit drugs for myself, to be a better man. But I wanted to be a better man for her.”

  He looked down at his shoes, puddled in the gloom between the crosshatches of purple. “I made a promise to my wife before we left for the hospital that not even hell could keep me from her. So you see, I can’t give up. I can’t let down the person who taught me not to give up on me. I just can’t do that. I’m going to get home to her, or I’m gonna die trying.”

  “We’ve got your back, man,” Mendez said, and held out a fist.

  Erik bumped it with his own fist. “Thank you. Seriously. Thank you.”

  Lauren went over to him with shining eyes and gave him a hug. Ian clapped his shoulder—lightly, as if unsure if it was okay.

  “We’re behind you,” Ian said. “We’ll see you home to your wife.” He turned to Mendez and Anita. “And you both to your little girl.”

  “I appreciate it, man, I really do,” Erik said.

  In the growing dark, it was harder to read expressions, but when he looked at Mendez, he thought he saw approval there.

  “Okay,” Erik said. “Let’s look around—but be careful. And we should stay together.”

  In the center of the latticework plane, there was a metallic post like an old street lamp. Erik frowned. He was sure that hadn’t been there a few minutes before. He walked toward it and the others followed. A gleaming orb perched on top of the post caught the colors of the lattice and distorted them. As they approached it, both the post and the orb above it loomed much larger than they had from several feet away.

  Affixed at about eye-height on the post itself was a simple black light switch and surrounding plate.

  Erik looked at the others. Their hair and clothes were wet. Although the blood had washed off, scratches and bruises dotted and lined their face, arms, and bodies. They looked scared and tired. They had been through so much.