Hollow

by Rhonda Parrish

  “I hope you’re friendly,” I whisper when my heart leaves my throat and returns to my chest cavity. “Because right now, you’re all I have.”

  Finally, after what seems an eternity stumbling around in the darkness, there is no wall beneath my hand. I pause, turn and test. Yes. It’s the steps up to the psych ward.

  My hand finds the handrail and, with the bird shifting its weight from one leg to the other on my shoulder, I begin to climb.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  AS I ASCEND out of the basement and onto the psych ward, the quality of the darkness shifts. It’s no longer the oppressive kind which pushes against the edges of my mind, driving me toward panic and making my heart pound against my ribs. It’s lighter. I still can’t see well, but I can see some. And some is better than none. What’s more, the walls aren’t pressing against me. The air feels more open, less stagnant. Which is funny because the sharp odour of urine and old booze still assaults my nostrils, but it feels less dense than it had been.

  Entering the main area which houses the rows of rooms, I look up to where the row of boarded-up windows leer down at me from the upper part of the wall, close to the ceiling edge. I see trickles of light coming in around the edges. On one side of the room the light is tinted orange, obviously from a streetlight, while from the other side it’s the cold white-ish blue of the moon. I rub my upper arms, shivering against the cold. “Sure could use some feathers,” I murmur, but the magpie doesn’t respond other than to take several steps, like it’s marching in place on my shoulder. “Fine, be all quiet now.”

  I walk down the main aisle between the two rows of rooms. As soon as I step into the space I regret it. The light can’t penetrate here, so the tiny bit of visibility I’d found by being in the large open room is lost. What’s more, the cells contain shadows within shadows. I have to force myself not to run between them, to get out as quickly as possible. If I do, if my courage breaks and I run, I won’t recover. I’d run and run and run until I smashed into a wall or escaped back out into the night.

  I can’t do that.

  Every scary movie Sevren had chosen for us to watch had told me the key to saving the people I’d photographed, and Sevren too, is here. Somewhere in this hospital. Probably in Dr. Woods’ office. I have to be brave. So, though each room feels like a gaping black maw ready to pull me in, or worse yet, spit something out at me, I make myself walk past, not run. My shoulders are stiff, my fingers curled into firsts, and if it weren’t for Ghost’s comforting weight on my shoulder I’m not sure I could make it.

  Somehow, I do. And when I step out from between the rows of rooms, into the open space of what must have been a common area beyond, the magpie rewards me by leaning over and pulling out several strands of my hair.

  “Ow!” My voice doesn’t echo in the room, it falls dully into the air and lays there like some dead thing. “Ow,” I say again, much quieter, rubbing the sore spot on the side of my scalp. “Thanks for that . . .”

  I stare at the doorway. The one Ghost had been standing on, the one Sevren had wanted to go through earlier. I hope the magpie was standing on the door frame before to guide me here because he knew it was where I’d find answers. Then I wonder when I started seeing the magpie as my guide. “My Patronus,” I say to the empty space, and then giggle nervously.

  It’s just a doorway, an empty doorway, the frame completely scorched with smoke stains all around it, especially at the top. It leads to Dr. Woods’ office, where they found him skinned alive after the riot in the psych ward, where the fire started two years ago. I know all that without knowing how I know it. Probably from your research, the rational part of me says. Probably from all the scary movies Sevren makes you watch, another part counters.

  Doesn’t matter how I know, I guess, I just do. But still, it’s only a doorway. My heart has no reason for all this stuttering, my mouth no cause to be this dry.

  I step through and debris crunches beneath my shoes. There is light in the burned-out hollow of an office. Though the holes in the ceiling open up into the darkness of the upper floor, an orange glow from a streetlight streams in from the larger gaps in the back wall. Whatever I’d expected to find isn’t here. It is a burned-up room in an empty ruin. There’s no magical door, no flashing neon lights to point “This way to save your friends!”, nothing. Ashes, charred wood, and busted-up plaster.

  I stumble back, let my backpack slip from my shoulders to the ground beside me, and press my spine against the wall. I slide down it until I’m sitting on the floor, cupping my face in my hands. “Damn it.” I hear the tears in my voice though they don’t escape my eyes. “Damn it.”

  I’d so desperately wanted the answers to be here. The solution, the doorway, to be in this room. It made sense. All the horror movies I’ve ever watched, every scary story, they’d all pointed to the fact this would be where I’d find it. The evidence, the clue, the final piece of the puzzle that would tell me how to reach Amy and all the other people I’d photographed. How to get them back the way they used to be before it was too late. Before it’s too late to save Sevren.

  “Damn it!” I say again, slamming my fist backward. My knuckles scrape against the floor, the back of my fist bangs into the wall, displacing some of the plaster above so it rains down on me and Ghost. The magpie lifts up, a flurry of wings and angry keks, flapping around my face before settling back down at my side. It looks up at me, holding my gaze with its unblinking eyes, then deliberately rubs its beak on my backpack, on the bulge from the camera.

  The freaking camera.

  I pull the camera out, and the magpie takes off, landing in one of the holes in the wall, its body outlined by the faint orange light which trickles in around it. It perches there, shifting, his tail flipping up over his head while he tips forward, then settling back down behind him once more as he finds his balance. He watches me, watches me as though he’s waiting for something.

  I wrap my fingers around the camera. Its plastic case is warm. Strangely warm. I lift it over my head. I’m sitting on the ground, but still, with enough force I can shatter it into a hundred pieces, send it back to wherever it came from.

  My phone rings.

  Impossible. The battery is dead.

  But there it is again. Sevren’s ring tone, the theme from Halloween sounding especially creepy under the circumstances.

  I fish my phone out of my pocket. It, too, is warm to my touch, but the screen shows nothing but my own face reflecting back at me from the mirror-like surface.

  “What the hell?”

  I must be imagining things, I think, but as I’m about to put it back in my pocket, it rings again.

  I feel sick to my stomach. My reflection blurs in the phone’s glass as my fingers tremble ever so slightly. I stare, mouth open, at the smart phone’s empty face for what seems like a long, long time, but is actually only the blank space between rings. When the theme from Halloween sounds again, I lift the phone, which suddenly feels heavy as a brick, to my ear. “Hello?”

  My voice is shaking to match my fingers.

  “Morgan?” Sevren’s voice, breathless and excited. “Morgan? I’m okay, Morgan. They let me go.”

  “Sevren?” I frown. Too many questions. I have too many questions.

  “Of course, silly. It’s me. They let me go.”

  “Why?” I should be relieved, but a fist of disquiet, of fear, grips my chest and squeezes. Tighter.

  “I don’t know. I guess they had their fun? But I’m okay. It’s okay.”

  Sevren’s voice, but not Sevren. Sevren’s voice coming at me from a dead cell phone, a phone with no power but which feels warm. Sevren’s voice, but not Sevren.

  “It’s not okay,” I say. Sevren would never say it was okay. After what Keith and his cronies did to him, Sevren would not call me up and sound this . . . elated. He wouldn’t. He would be upset, upset to say the very least.

  “Morgan?” the voice says, and now that I’ve realized it’s not Sevren, I can hear how hollow
it sounds, how vacant. It’s not Sevren on that phone. I jerk it away from my ear and go to press the button to end the call, but of course, there is no button. The phone isn’t on.

  “Morgan?” the not-Sevren voice says again. “Morgan, it’s me. It’s all right. It’ll be all right.”

  How do you turn off a phone that isn’t on? How do you make it stop?

  I throw the phone, as hard as I can, against the office wall. It doesn’t splinter into a thousand pieces as I’d hoped, but it does land with a crash and the screen shatters. More importantly, the voice stops, or at least I can’t hear it anymore.

  Throwing the phone flicked a switch in me. Instead of feeling desolate and lost, cold with despair, anger flares through me, hot as flame. Whatever had caused this, whatever had put the camera in my hands, it had used me as a weapon and impersonated Sevren. For whatever reason it had stolen his voice and called me to pretend everything was okay. Why? Why?

  Ghost glides down beside me. His wings cut a nearly soundless path through the air as he lands beside the camera once more. He pecks the top of it with his beak. A hollow thunk fills the silent room, and then another as he pecks again.

  I pick up the camera, lifting it above my head. The bird makes a pleased sort of gargling noise deep in his throat and hops back up to his perch in the hole on the wall.

  I stand and slam the camera down onto the concrete floor with as much force as I can manage. Its plastic shell shatters, ricocheting and skittering across the floor, but it’s the air right above where the bulk of the camera landed that holds my attention.

  It begins as a slight shimmer, like the heat lines I sometimes saw on the highway in summertime when we drove down to see my grandmother, but it quickly becomes something else. White smoke takes shape, roiling and bubbling, moving to fill some sort of invisible cube.

  “What the?” I watch the smoke move, becoming thicker and thicker. It doesn’t spill out into the space of the room but is contained by something I can’t see. Tentatively I put out a hand, but whatever the barrier is, it isn’t physical. My hand slips right through it, into the smoke up to my wrist, and vanishes from my sight until I pull it back. It returns safe and sound.

  The magpie lands on my shoulder, and I jump in surprise and look at him. He gives a little tail flip, catching his balance, then moves his feet up and down on me like he’s doing a little dance. I look at him, and he looks at me. He tilts his head to the side, stares at me a second longer, then turns his attention to the rectangle of fog in front of us.

  “All right, already . . .” I mumble. “If you’ve gotta go down, go down fighting.” The sound of my voice gives me courage, and with one last look at the bird, I take a deep breath and step out of the real world and into the white.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I’M FALLING, FALLING. It doesn’t feel out of control at all, much like Alice when she falls down the rabbit hole, except I’m not wearing a fluffy blue skirt. I land bottom-first on a single bed with a thin mattress. Before I have a chance to get my bearings, something crashes into the other side of the wall in front of me. The bottom half of a Hollywood Undead poster lifts with the force before fluttering gracefully back down. I scurry backward, away from the noise, get tangled up in the mussed sheets, and tumble onto the ground, a bundle of flailing limbs and fabric. Shouts erupt in the next room.

  “Fucking whore!” a man’s voice slurs as clear as if he was in the room with me. Fear twists my belly, and I feel my heart pulsing in my chest all the way up to my throat.

  A woman makes a noise of protest in the next room, and I realise the man isn’t yelling at me, of course he isn’t, he can’t see through walls. He doesn’t know yet that I’m here. Yet. My pulse doesn’t slow, the twisting in my belly, the trembles in my fingers, they don’t steady with the realization. Whoever is on the other side of the door is not someone I want to deal with. Not in any sort of way. Not ever.

  I crab-walk backward, kicking the clinging sheets off my legs as I go.

  “How many goddamn times do I have to tell you?” the man shouts.

  I look around, seeking escape. I don’t recognise this room. I’ve never been in it before, yet something about it is very familiar. Ghost is perched on the curtain rod over the sole window. A pale blue fitted sheet is draped over it in place of a curtain and the magpie is marching back and forth across it, his head bobbing like a chicken’s.

  The walls are white, well, white-ish. They don’t look like they’ve been washed in a very long time, if ever. Posters of rock bands and swimsuit models are scattered across them, each held in place by a single strip of yellowing tape across the top. The furnishings are sparse. The single bed I’d landed on and an old nightstand with a clock radio on it that flashes 12:00. Over and over. I’m sure I’ve never been here before, so why is it so familiar?

  It is, I realise, the smell of the place that I know. It smells like Keith. Like his particular mixture of cologne and sweat.

  Disengaging myself completely from the last of the bedding, bedding which, now that I’ve identified its owner, feels insidious and clinging, I scuttle backward until my elbow bangs against the half-opened, hollow closet doors. The sound of them rattling at my touch is lost in a woman’s scream from the other room, followed by a heavy thud and crash. I close my eyes and wish it all away, as someone’s hand wraps around my wrist.

  I jump and scream but a second hand covers my mouth and pulls me backward, into the darkness of the closet. “Shhh . . . they’ll hear you. You don’t want them to hear you.”

  Keith’s voice so near to my ear, his hand over my mouth, the cloying darkness—it’s all too much. I jerk forward, thrust my elbow straight back, and feel the satisfying and somewhat painful connection of it and Keith’s ribs. “Let me go!” I hiss through clenched teeth.

  Keith falls backward, deeper into the closet. I hear him sputtering and choking but his face is lost in the shadows. “Don’t you touch me!” I say, raising my voice as loud as I dare without risking the fighting couple hearing me. “Don’t you ever touch me again!”

  God it feels good to say that.

  “I’m sorry,” Keith gasps, and I think I hear tears in his voice. Tears in Keith’s voice? That doesn’t make sense. “I’m so sorry,” he says again, leaning forward out of the shadows, the telltale shimmer of tracks on his cheeks.

  This is wrong. It’s all wrong. Keith would never apologise, would certainly never cry.

  “Who are you?” I ask, pressing my back against the wall at the other end of the closet.

  “It’s me,” he says with a pathetic-sounding sniffle. “Part of me, anyway.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What do you mean?”

  The magpie flutters into the closet, his grey feathers almost glowing in the half-light which spills through the opening. He struts back and forth, nonchalant as you please, then lifts off and perches on the rod above us. “Kek kek yek!”

  “Please,” Keith says, his eyes wide and pleading. “Please make your bird be quiet. I don’t want them to hear it.”

  “I—it’s not my bird,” I say, then repeat, “What do you mean, part of you?”

  “I’m not all bad, you know?” he says, seemingly ignoring my question yet again.

  “I’m not convinced of that,” I snap. Keith’s voice, his real voice, sounding in my mind, so you like it rough, eh?

  “I’m not. I’m really not. This me isn’t, anyway. That me . . . the one out there, the one with your friend. That me? He might be all bad. He might, but not me.”

  I don’t care. All bad or not all bad, Keith did what he did to me, and this boy, this not-Keith is part of that. I can’t deal with the implications of all that, not all at once, so I fasten on to the crumb that matters the most. “My friend? Sevren? You know what’s going on with Sevren?”

  “The me out there hurt him. I’m sorry. I—I tried to stop myself, but I wasn’t strong enough—” He’s interrupted by the woman in the next room screaming, then a thud which shakes the walls
of his bedroom. Even without being able to see, I know his mother has been thrown into the wall by his father. The sound of her body sliding down the wall, coupled with ragged sobs, comes through the walls as if they are made of paper.

  “I’m never strong enough . . .” Keith mumbles, his eyes unfocused but staring out of the closet, to the spot on the wall his mother had impacted with. “Never strong enough . . .”

  “Hey!” I say, as loud as I dare, and snap my fingers in front of his face. “Hey. Snap out of it. I need answers and you’re the only one who can give them to me.”

  I’ve started to think of him as Un-Keith because though he looks like Keith, he certainly isn’t acting like him. He blinks, like someone in a cartoon, and his eyes refocus on me. “Sevren,” I say. “How badly is he hurt?”

  “His nose is broken. I think. It’s bleeding a lot and I felt it crunch. I don’t know besides that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He’s crying—”

  So is Un-Keith’s mother. I can hear her sobbing in the other room. Begging. Please stop, she says, please don’t.

  Though I’d never said those words when Keith hurt me, I’d thought them. Thought them over and over and over again.

  Please stop.

  Please don’t.

  Hearing the other woman pleading through the walls brings it all back to me again. My fear. My pain.

  “Why did you do it?” I snap at the Un-Keith. “Why?”

  He doesn’t feign misunderstanding, which is good because I don’t think I could keep from screaming if he did, and that would draw attention from the other room. Un-Keith’s chin quivers and more tears spill from his red-rimmed eyes and down his cheeks. “I’m sorry.”