The Hollow Ones(79)

Earl Solomon lay in his hospital bed, fighting sleep. The television was covering the hostage taking at the Santander bank, which apparently had ended in a police raid and the shooter’s death. That was what the words beneath the news anchor said, but the screen swam a bit in his vision, and he wasn’t sure. They had no camera at the scene, and kept looping the same footage of police vehicles and traffic cops pushing people back.

The television was on mute, no sound but the whirring and beeping of his machines, and his breathing, which went in quiet but came out loud. Solomon wanted to reach the television remote control wired to the wall behind his bed. But his arms were numb. They didn’t move as well as he liked. It was easier just to lie still.

Sirens wailed outside, pretty much an all-day occurrence, but these ones sounded close. He heard a crash that seemed to reverberate up the building, as though the foundation had been shaken. Or maybe it was all in his head.

Now they had cell phone footage from somebody in one of the buildings across the street. Two flash-bangs that Solomon saw but did not hear, followed by a tactical entry. Fuzzy because of the distance of the phone owner from the bank…or maybe because of Solomon’s vision.

Goddammit. He was tired of all this waiting. The bed had him now. He didn’t think he’d ever get vertical again. That was a sorry thought. What was the point of waiting? What was the point of being a man in a bed who was never getting out of it again? Maybe it wasn’t his vision drifting, maybe it was his mind.

All the things he had seen in his days, all the things Hugo Blackwood had shown him. Challenging his presumptions at first, shaking his view of the world and beyond. But even still, like any person, he never truly focused his attention on what was at the end. He knew there were other things out there. He had seen them. And most of what he’d seen was dark and malicious. But maybe there was something else. A peaceful place.

He thought back to Blackwood releasing the possessed boy in the graveyard that night so many years ago. Young Vernon Jamus, and how Blackwood stood over him, cleansing his soul. Freeing him. But to what? That was what Solomon wanted to know. This was one mystery Hugo Blackwood could not help him with, one case the occult detective could not solve.

There was no peace for Hugo Blackwood in this world, but maybe, just maybe, there was for Earl Solomon in the next.

Blackwood.

Solomon heard a familiar voice not his own.

Hugo Blackwood.

Solomon closed his eyes to purge the voice from his head. But it wasn’t in his head, it was there in the room with him. Solomon squeezed his eyes tightly shut, wanting it not to be true. He turned his head, rolling it on the pillow until it was blindly facing the hallway door. And then he opened his eyes.

His vision was split, doubled, and took a moment to come together and focus on the boy standing inside his door. Little Vernon Jamus. Solomon was afraid, as the boy came into his sight, that he would be the evil Vernon, possessed by the demon that used him as its instrument of conjuring to raise the spirits of the dead Mississippi Delta slaves.

But it was cleansed Vernon who had come for him. Bare-chested, wearing the same pants he had almost sixty years ago.

Solomon’s memory had summoned the boy. Invoked his spirit. Solomon’s waiting was over.

Vernon had come to take him away.

But if so…

Why was he saying Hugo Blackwood’s name?

As Solomon stared, a heavyset man turned the corner from the hallway into his hospital room. He wore a bright-blue shirt with a medical patch on the sleeve, and a cap with the name of an ambulance service on its crown. Below the brim, a thick trail of dark blood ran from underneath the man’s hat down his cheek to his chin. His eyes were vacant, hollow.

Solomon’s body seized up in terror.

Without another word or change of expression, Vernon Jamus simply disappeared, the ambulance driver stepping into his place.





The Phantom arrived at the NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital to a chaotic scene. An ambulance had crashed into a building support pillar just outside the emergency room entrance. The nose of the van was punched in, the front hood buckled, the ambulance tipped to one side on the curb.

Hospital staff attended to the accident scene. Odessa and Blackwood raced from the Rolls-Royce, pushing through the crowd of onlookers. The back doors were open. An ambulance attendant was being strapped onto a spinal board, unconscious, her neck and head in a cervical collar. The stretcher was on its side, empty. The body in the front seat was covered with a sheet, deceased.

Odessa showed her badge to one of the attending emergency room doctors to facilitate questioning. “Where is the patient who was in the back of the ambulance?”

“That’s her,” he said, pointing to the driver’s cab. “Impact of the crash sent her into the front.”

“Dead?” said Odessa.

“Dead on arrival,” said the doctor. “They said the ambulance was doing fifty and gaining speed when it shot through the parking lot and rammed the building. Driver must have lost his mind.”

Odessa had an image of the wounded bank customer attacking the driver in the front seat and taking the wheel.

“But if that’s the patient…” said Odessa. She looked at the ambulance again. “Where’s the driver?”



They rode up to Solomon’s floor, Odessa imploring the elevator to rise faster. The doors opened and she ran the short distance to his room. A red light over his door was flashing.