The Hollow Ones(53)

She was still catching up mentally. “I saw nothing like these things leaving Walt Leppo’s body. It was waves of heat, almost. I smelled—”

“Burnt solder. I know. I’ve smelled it. As I said, these are their visible forms. Similar to water expressed in solid, liquid, or gaseous state. There is only one way to tell if a person is inhabited by a Hollow One. Their telltale mark is a sigil on the base of the neck, just inside the hairline. It is a raised-vein mark in the shape of a compass. It goes without saying that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to examine the hairline of someone possessed by a rampaging larva.”

“That goes without saying,” she muttered. She touched her temples, her go-to move now. Why did she get into that Rolls-Royce?

“My guess,” said Blackwood, in a manner that made clear it was not a guess at all, “is that a misguided ceremony attracted the fourth one. Palo most likely—in the last few years there has been a streak of grave robberies in New Jersey, widely documented in the news.”

“Is there any way we can go back to before I walked in here and just…forget the whole thing?”

Blackwood looked at her as though uncertain if she was serious or not. “You wanted answers. You wanted to know what happened to the agent you shot dead. Why he would attack that girl suddenly.” Blackwood stepped in front of her, making sure he had her full attention.

“It wanted you to shoot. It wanted to be killed—to be blasted out of that body. And it wanted you to do it…”

“Why me?” said Odessa.

“Through no fault of your own. It probably sensed your affection for that man,” said Blackwood. “His—and your—suffering would have added an extra flavor to the thrill.”

She realized that, in his own strange way, he was trying to absolve her of shooting Walt Leppo. But every answer begat another question. “Then why didn’t one of these mouthy monster things…I don’t know, jump into me?”

“I think it would’ve. Perhaps a moment of hesitation was sufficient for others to enter the room. Also, as pleasurable as the sensation of being thrown is, I think it loses its jolt if it is performed too many times in succession.”

Odessa looked at him. Was he relating it to an orgasm? That was a question she did not want to ask.

Blackwood said, “I need to find and capture the fourth before it can realize its objective. They crave chaos above all, and the ultimate chaos would come from inhabiting a human being of great power and prestige.”

Odessa said, “You want me to help you catch one of those things.”

“It is not a matter of want,” he said. “It is a matter of great necessity. We need to trace back everyone that went in and out of your crime scene in the half hour after your partner was shot.”

Again, he was delicate enough not to make her the active shooter in the sentence.

“Half an hour?” Odessa said. “Why the time limit?”

“The fourth one had already jumped bodies. Its time in the open would have been reduced to that, or less.”

She couldn’t believe that she was even considering this. “I need to know things. If you want my help, I need to know who you are…who all these people are. And how you know these things…”

“All in time.”

“The time is now,” she said.

Blackwood tipped his head slightly to one side. “Yes, of course,” he said, to her surprise. “You need to know everything there is to know about the Hollow Ones. Starting with how these elemental beings were released into this world…”

“And who did it,” said Odessa.

“Oh, that one is easy,” said Blackwood. “I’m afraid it was me.”





1582. Mortlake, Greater London.



In the days following the séance inside John Dee’s library, strange occurrences began happening in and around barrister Hugo Blackwood’s home.

The plantings shriveled and died, leaves crumbling like rust, as though all the water in the soil had been turned into bad iron. Holes appeared in the turf as though dug by small animals, except that the soil was piled as though something had dug its way out of the underground, rather than in.

Scratching on the wall. Shrieks in the night, waking him, baying cries from the direction of the Thames. Blackwood had a dream where a shadow on the wall assumed form, dropping down onto the floor of his bedchamber, slithering onto his bed next to him, feeling cold and wet. He woke without breath, falling to the floor until, at once, his throat opened with a great, groaning gasp, and he breathed.

A haze had settled over the entire parish. But most troubling to Hugo Blackwood was the behavior of his dutiful wife, Orleanna, a raven-haired, doe-eyed beauty. After a day of acting distant and appearing unnerved, she had taken to her bed in sickness. On the advice of her physician, he hired a nurse to tend to her while he was away at court. After two days, the nurse refused to treat Orleanna any longer, but would not explain why, leaving shaken. Blackwood, when he visited his wife’s bedside, found only a woman in confused distress, beseeching his help. So sudden, the light gone from her eyes, her chest heaving to draw breath. Tormented and feverish, she spoke to people who weren’t there.

“Can nothing be done?” he said, sponging at her brow with a cold compress. “My love, my love.”