The Hollow Ones(51)

Three and a half hours later, the Phantom pulled off the highway in the city of Providence, Rhode Island.

“Almost there,” sang Mr. Lusk, his porky hands gripping the ivory-colored steering wheel in the front seat.

Underneath the elevated highway, they turned near the industrial waterfront, rolling along a decaying part of the city replete with crumbling brick factories and strip clubs. Mr. Lusk pulled the Phantom up outside a tattoo parlor with a hand-lettered sign over the door reading ANGEL’S.

“You’re kidding me,” she said.

Mr. Lusk lifted his bulk out of the driver’s-side door and came around to open hers. Odessa stood out on the sidewalk smelling the salt air, looking up and down the vacant block beneath the highway. The front window was mostly blacked out.

“Seriously,” she said.

Mr. Lusk walked ahead of her to the door. He pressed a buzzer and waited. The door was pushed open by a large, well-inked man with a flared brown mustache.

“Come in, come in,” he said, his voice deep and Mexican-accented. Odessa and Mr. Lusk entered, and the tall man closed and locked the door behind them. The walls were decorated with tattoo designs—nothing hip, all low-rent—everything from Warner Bros. cartoon characters to pissing Calvin to tramp stamps to a single, perfect rose. Variations on MOTHER. Every branch of the armed forces, cartoon renderings of naked women and men, and multiple alphabets in various forms of Gothic script. Also for sale were knives and Zippo lighters, in displays near the front counter.

“I am Joachim, the proprietor.” Joachim stood six feet, six inches, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans under a full-length brown duster. He shook Odessa’s hand, his palm dwarfing hers. “Here he is,” he said to Mr. Lusk, shaking his hand as well. “I expected you half an hour ago.”

Mr. Lusk said, “We were delayed leaving the city,” apparently meaning her visit with Agent Solomon.

“No matter,” said Joachim.

Odessa scanned the ink sleeving his arms. Symbols and sunsets and religious iconography: as careful and complete a mosaic as she had ever seen on any surface. Guernica on flesh.

“You here for a tattoo?” said Joachim.

Odessa shook her head, checking with Mr. Lusk.

Joachim chuckled. “I’m kidding. But if you ever want one, you come to me.”

Odessa nodded, still reading his skin. One face on his forearm caught her eye, looking familiar. Was it…?

Joachim saw her looking at it. “You like this one? Pretty good likeness, no?”

Odessa looked back and forth between the tattoo and Mr. Lusk. The attorney smiled pleasantly, nodding. Yes—it was Mr. Lusk’s face.

“Really captures his spirit, I think.”

She scanned the other faces, wondering who and why and what…

“Check out my newest one, here.”

Joachim stepped to the counter, turning on a bright lamp and flexing the arm to focus on his midsection. He lifted his T-shirt up to his pecs, revealing more inked flesh, much of it radiating off a large cross in the muscled center of his chest, sunlight or divine light shining from behind it. A small bandage covered a patch of skin on his left side near the bottom of his rib cage. He peeled back the adhesive, revealing red, swollen flesh around a raw impression roughly the size of an extra-large egg.

It was a woman’s face.

It was Odessa’s face.

She stepped back. She looked up at him, smiling down at her.

“Not a bad likeness,” he said.

Odessa was speechless. He covered up the new ink and lowered his shirt on the living mural.

“Come on in back,” said Joachim. “He’s waiting for you.”

“How did you…?” She was too mystified even to finish the sentence. Get a picture of my face?

“Right back here,” he said, staring ahead of her.



Joachim led them through the back office and another door, down a narrow hallway to a locked door leading into an adjacent factory.

Stepping inside, she felt the wide-open, high-ceilinged space more than she saw it. It was dusty and dark. The floor was grimy, the sound of her shoes upon it carrying wide into the room.

Hugo Blackwood walked out of the shadows, wearing the same dark suit, or an exact replica, that he had worn before. “You’re late,” he said.

Odessa was still shaken, speechless.

Blackwood nodded to Joachim, who stepped back to the wall near the door, pressing a small switch.

Lights clanked on along the high ceiling, light raining down, dust motes swirling lazily. Parts of the ceiling had crumbled away, exposing the next empty floor, high above.

In the center of the room, arranged in a diamond, were four clear polymer cylinders, running floor-to-ceiling. Each one was eight to ten feet in diameter, and easily twenty-five feet in height.

A circle of coarse sea salt surrounded each cylinder.

Small, black-feathered creatures—they were roosters—stepped around the inside of the cylinders, pecking at the bare feet of hunched-over, aged beings, their flesh the glistening pineapple yellow of human body fat.

Each had the wrinkled body of a three-hundred-year-old man. Eyeless, earless—seemingly featureless—but when the nearest being, tormented by the roosters, twisted around, Odessa saw its entire face flap open and reveal a mouth, yawning in hunger.

Much like a lamprey, the mouth was made of concentric circles of vibrating flesh, lined up with cartilaginous protrusions, not properly teeth, but barbed nubs.