The Hollows, page 2
The next day the familiar hurt returned, fastened to the new sensation of open wounds on my naked back and wrists.
“You’ll want this,” Joan smiled.
“We expected someone less ordinary.”
Morning came with the smell of Joan’s tea. Richard ate breakfast and made corny jokes at the table. The day was new, sunlight washing away the sins from the previous day.
When night returned, I ran.
I ran the vaguely familiar blocks towards an old street with old signs and old buildings. I ran to an old door that sat behind an old fence on an old lot, downtrodden by the lack of state-sponsored public systems.
I did not find DeMarco as I had hoped. Very few people were willing to talk to a little girl covered in blood, but according to the block, DeMarco had been arrested a year before with an ounce of cocaine and two bottles full of ecstasy, blue dolphins to be exact. It was enough to put him away for two to five years in Juvenile Hall. The sun fell that day along with tears, showing the foreboding red in the clouds through blurred vision, and the night tasted like a mixture of salt and metal.
Unwanted flashes of what lay behind the Charpiot’s stain-glass door flickered as I sat on an empty stoop. It wasn’t the lashings or the biting or the cutting of the rope that had hurt the most. It was not the unwanted sex or the iron that cut my wrist that ripped another piece of my youth away from me, or the sickening ghost of Richard Charpiot’s tongue saliva on my neck.
It was the gruff, elderly voice of Joan saying the list of sounds that made words that made sentences that made a paragraph that broke apart everything I had left.
“We thought you’d be different, honey. Someone as simple looking as you can only hope to someday have what Richard and I have. You’ll understand if you pay attention,” Joan said, the voice of a loving mother attempting to teach her daughter the harsh ways of the world.
“Don’t cry, honey, don’t struggle,” Richard interrupted.
Joan continued, “We were hoping for someone less ordinary, less homely. No one wants you, darling, you are just too commonplace. You are just too plain. This is for your own good; we are teaching you, instructing you, molding you. Soon you’ll see that this is what you’ll want. This IS what you want.”
There was nothing in me anymore, and I had nothing left to give, nothing left to be taken. They had stolen from me my body and my virginity in both exploitable possibilities and strangled my youth with coarse twine.
Six months passed…six fucking months, long and hungry, living in old houses and abandoned warehouses. There were nights I couldn’t steal food so I had to work for it. DeMarco’s older cousin contributed to my well-being. He gave me enough product to sell so I could eat; a dime bag here, eventually an eight-ball there. I sampled, of course, and got bored with the things that allowed me to remember. Alcohol became a normal crutch. Weed became nothing but something you smoke when you were bored. I found myself not being able to handle anything inhaled through my nostrils. It burned and I sneezed, blowing hundreds of dollars of white mist off the table, which earned me a broken nose. Needles that held his heroin was much easier. I had to earn it, though, by any means necessary. But it helped me forget for days at a time; it was a luxury I happily embraced.
I ate decently some nights, and slept long and hard, foregoing meals and sometimes emptying entire contents of my stomach. In the end, it allowed time to fade. My emotional lithium.
Then dusk crept up on a night that was darkest, the moon shadowed by threatening clouds and stars unseen due to looming rain and city lights. It was a night I could not quite remember how to get home through waves of haze and uncertainty. After an hour or three of wandering, I tore a fresh new hole in my vein and sat there on a stoop waiting for my world to dwindle again.
The night’s shadows were at their densest, just before the morning would show its face. In the fog, barely standing and stumbling back home, I saw blue and red flickers of bright light. It took me longer to comprehend that it was DeMarco’s cousin’s house that the lights were shining on. I watched from a short distance. A body being brought out on a gurney; the forensic team not even bothering to zip the body inside the black, coroner’s bag like on television. DeMarco’s cousin still had foam around his mouth, dried to his skin.
The police were extracting blocks and bags of the cousin’s collections; my own stock included. There it went, my only source of income, of food, and of comfort being taken through the old doors, past the old lot, and through the old fences, and away for good.
I tried to cry, but there were no tears. I tried to run, but my feet could not move. I tried to forget, which was the easiest of all, but there was nothing left in the syringe. I could do none of those, except stare at the concrete and sit on the ground while my high kicked into overdrive. The ground was still cold under my skirt on my bare cheeks.
My head hung heavily, being pushed by an invisible weight on the back of my neck as I let some saliva slip from my mouth onto my belly ring. I lulled there forever, drifting. Through the smog and the mumbled sounds, I never heard a door open. I never heard a knob turn. Yet, even though I had not heard any metal disengage, I found a figure standing in front of me. My head lifted lazily to take in his full, blurred black outline of his trench coat.
His face was shaded, even though no light passed behind him.
And when he spoke, it was smooth, silky, and threatening.
“By the time this is over, I’ll ask you three times if you wish to return. I’ll ask you thrice to make way back to reality, your reality, if you can call this real.” He motioned to the chaos of police cars.
He held out his hand and told me to swallow that which he gave me. He said it was new. He said I’d feel things I had never felt before. He said it was a drug like nothing I’d ever experienced.
He said it would make it all better; help me grow numb. He said it would help me forget.
When I awoke, I was in near complete darkness. The smell of smog was gone, replaced with something sharp and metallic that burned my nostrils. With me was something else; I came to comprehend after a time of adjustment. It stood immobile, towering over me and the shadows around us.
It had seven eyes and seven hands. It gave me seven choices.
And I was to choose which equaled truth.
Chapter 1.5:
As One Awakes, So Does Another
As one girl woke, so did another.
Pain. Too much pain, throbbing and pounding, pulsing with bright lights visible behind tight eyelids and straining through each vein in her neck. She wondered if she fell, or was knocked unconscious. Who would have hit her, though? No, that couldn’t be it, but regardless, it hurt. It hurt a lot. It was enough to reflexively pinch the bridge of her nose between her fingertips and wince.
Open your eyes. No, she didn’t want to see.
When she finally decided to, they shined.
The hard ground hurt her back as she stared ahead, attempting to sober herself, wishing the throbbing would cease. For a moment, she wondered if she had opened her eyes at all. The deep black ahead of her went on forever.
Get up, get up, get up. The desire to stay lying there fought with the frantic notion of nonunderstanding.
Her breathing quickened; the night seemed darker.
Lying there in the middle of a room, grime covered concrete surrounding all four corners. They shot up towards the sky with no end in sight. She pushed herself to her feet with sudden acute awareness. Not knowing what else to do she walked, her hands felt the three solid walls that lacked opening. So solid. So permanent. She slapped the wall, listening to the echo, praying for an echo of hollow walls on the other side. Completely solid. So permanent. No. No.
Her hands investigated, fingering the angles of the room. Circles, round and round, wall after wall. First wall again. No that’s wrong. The second wall felt wrong too. The third wall, though. She pressed her ear to it and waited. Yes, this wall, there was something different about this specific wall. It wasn’t warmer, no. It was colder. Colder than the rest. With her ear flat to its face, she heard it hum just before she tensed.
Something flapped at the edge of her sight, a small winged animal stressing against the airless surroundings. The girl saw the moth come closer and land on her shoulder, fluttering before coming to a rest. It opened its patterned wings and then opened them softly, waiting. Instinctively, she exhaled, blowing a stream of air at the bug. It spread its patterns again and took off from her shoulders, flying in small circles before coming to rest on the dust at her feet. When she looked down at it, the earth trembled again. The moth felt the disturbance and raced away.
The hard ground beneath her cracked.
Vines punctured the dirt, sprouting claws that climbed the walls from her feet as she jumped away, watching as they latched and ascended with a furious entanglement. They grew, so fast, so tall, stretching and pulling as if scraping out of a wrongfully buried grave.
“No. NO!” she wasn’t even aware she was screaming until the sounds bounced off the stone and then echoed the last syllable to silence. Her eyes darted from vine to vine as they grew curiously still.
This was wrong. This was all wrong. The ground and the walls do not act like this. They do not feel like this. The girl shook her head, trying to swing the confusion from her ears.
The girl took several deep breaths, letting in the cool air and lowering her heart rate. Panic would not help her find an explanation or escape. Things slowed, became momentarily peaceful. She took another glance around the room, taking in the corners, lines, and details surrounding her.
The vines vibrated.
She watched, more out of a curiosity than shock, as the vegetation on the walls began to shiver. The veins grew, stretched, and thickened. They were being overextended beyond what they could contain as small sounds of popping and cracking precluded the slits across their vines. Small gray liquid bubbled up in the crevices, pooling and dripping down the wall onto the broken floor into oozing puddles of muck. The gray pond was wrong, too. She felt it. The texture and the movement, all wrong.
The sound was something from her nightmares, little screeches and patters. The sound hit her ears as understanding made her throw her body backward. The puddle of mixed textures folded over itself in small waves as thousands, no, millions of small insects clawed their way out. What was worse, their beady little eyes shined without the smallest of light to reflect. They trickled out of the puddle, out of the vines, collectively crawling and swarming, spilling down the walls and covering the floor. Varying in size, the spiders came large and small, all desperately scattering. Some only a pen tip thick, others a thimble, some a fist, all reaching and snapping and swarming.
Her voice was caught in her throat. All that she could muster was some indiscernible and inhuman gasp as she backed away from the oncoming gray mass. She knew what was behind her. Four walls, all solid. No way out, no escape. And spiders, all spiders, all hungry. Why did they have to be spiders?
She felt pressure on her back. The completely solid wall behind her barred her from moving away any further. Her fingers slapped the stone behind her, but this time, there was no solid sound of concrete, but a hollow slap of wood. Her head whipped downwards at the newly formed brass knob connected to the wood. A door. Oh, thank you.
She swung it open and stepped out into the void, closing the door behind her, closing herself off from the swarm. The girl waited, staring at the wooden door, hearing the tickles and scratches of the millions of spiders consuming the wall she once stood against.
Four solid walls, she thought. Looking at the door, her new-found appreciation turned to a fearful study. Doors sometimes appear from nowhere. That could be normal. But it did not feel normal. Nothing about that place felt normal. Not the smell, or the creatures, not even the type of darkness in the sky. She looked up again, this time seeing a ceiling, brown and rotten.
There was an empty space, an empty room, stone walls and dirt floors. The light was difficult to come by, she knew. But she let out a small sigh of relief as a single flame danced from a stick at its center. But the smell was still there. She looked back at the door and all that stood was the solid concrete. No door in sight.
No, definitely wrong. Oh, God.
She knew a lot about this place before she was ever sure where she was. They were rumors, mostly, but ones with kisses of truth attached to each venomous lip.
Slowly her body turned back towards the new room she resided in. The girl’s mind brought back the whispers of this place. Along the other three walls were three doors. Three doors equaled three separate entrances. It didn’t matter which she chose, she’d be lost. Desperately, she turned back to whence she came, to still find nothing but solid wall; her shadow being cast on the area where the door should have been.
The labyrinth had her.
“No, no I didn’t do anything wrong!” The girl screamed. With shaking hands, she touched each individual door. She swallowed deeply, not wanting to make the choice. If she just stayed in this room, she might be safe. Maybe they would realize their mistake. She should not be there, they had to know that!
They, who, exactly? She couldn’t answer.
Inhaling a shaky breath, she knew she would eventually be forced to choose. If the rumors were true, the Labyrinth wouldn’t allow you to stand there forever without making a choice. The floors were already beginning to give a low, slow, tremble. But once in the labyrinth, according to the tale, she would be lost forever. Pebbles on the soot hopped and skipped as the vibrations intensified.
The doors were identical.
Markings, markings, she repeated to herself, needing to find something different about the doors, but here was nothing distinguishing one from another, nor knowledge of where she’d end up after going through. Did it matter? Even if one door differed from another it could not communicate where she would end up. She wished doors could talk. She would listen, and listen respectfully. You never knew what doors could tell you about what has happened behind them.
The single candle light in the center of the room started growing dim. Circling around it frantically was the moth. The winged insect was drawn to the light, making loops and rings around it. The insect was scared. But then again, so was she.
Shadows sweeping from the solid wall behind her, slowly creeping over her shoulder and making their way to the light to swallow it out.
Candlelight meant warmth. It meant visibility. It meant something to hold on to. So as the shadows crept over the ground towards it, she could not keep the apprehension out of her eyes. As the darkness touched the table beneath the flame, the simple rays of light slowly dimmed, twitching against some unseen breeze, desperately trying to survive on the wick. The girl wished she could help the flame, save it, whisk it away from this horrible place so it could grow. So she could use it. She turned her back to the nearly useless flame, not wanting to watch it die. Once it became nearly black, she lost the moth in the shadows. She turned back to her three options, taking into account the devouring nature of the room, slowly masticating away at the time she valued until her decision could no longer matter.
The low, slow, tremble of the ground grew to a growl at her feet.
Small cracks formed along the concrete wall behind her; she could hear them spider-webbing their way across the floor to less than applicable description of a ceiling. The dark sank in a downwards prowl towards her head. With the candle now unable to exploit the murk, she felt frozen in place. Her heart jammed against her chest violently.
And then the blindness came, darkness slamming down from the ceiling to the ground in a sudden rush of thick sand.
She felt the ground on her bare feet, cracked beneath the padding of her heels. A liquid seeped through, thick and reaching. It didn’t leave a moist residue on her skin, but slinked and slithered past, a snake circling the room waiting to consume.
The girl’s mind snapped back to a woman’s face, loving and warm, saying, “If you’re ever too afraid, just close your eyes and count to ten.”
The liquid was rising around her ankles, feeling icy and leathery.
One. She closed her eyes tightly. Two.
The ground underneath the liquid tilted, pushing her forward towards the center of the room.
Three.
Four.
The leathery liquid was just above her knees now. She looked down to see it tickling the bottom of a dress she couldn’t remember putting on.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
It pulled her like a magnet. Her body was not her own as she slipped through the liquid on the tilted floor, slowly towards the center door. She pinched her eyes closed.
Eight.
Nine.
She was no longer moving.
Ten.
Daring to open her eyes, she was inches from the door as a wave crashed against her body from behind, throwing her chest first into the wood with a thud.
The door gave way. With a thud, a clouded puff, and the crackling sound of dried bone, she landed hard. The door slammed shut, leaving her in the bare candlelit halls made of stone and, her hand was resting inside a now shattered ribcage. The small pile of dry bone cracked as her eyes set on what made up her earth, the remnants of the once petrified and lost.
She screamed. She screamed, and she screamed, and she screamed at empty pale sockets as her voice echoed down the long, infinite corridor.
Scrambling and scraping, she scampered to her feet, sending soundless breaks of a spine beneath her whimpers. After the reverberation of her shrieking echo subsided, shock turned to tears in a thunderous silence.
She could hear them. Hear them all, screaming and crying, pleading for someone. For anyone. She put her hand to her mouth to stifle her sobs.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” The girl choked out. Those empty eyes stared back at her in the answer. They watched. They waited. Thunderous silence pounded in her ears, a silence of vengeful pause, waiting for her body to be next to theirs, jealous of the breath that still resided in her shaking lungs. The moth that followed landed on a cracked, shrieking skull.
