All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(57)
It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t a shadow. It wasn’t anything I could see or feel or hear. But something loped past me, and I knew it was there even though I couldn’t see or feel or hear it. Something feral, something from a dark place, where sun and moon had never shone, where whatever grew and lived was twisted and blanched and could only be glimpsed sideways, in nightmares.
And then Salerno grunted, and something warm sprayed across my face. Staggering, his knees buckling, Salerno collapsed forward. The gun cracked against the pavement and skittered away. No movement. Nothing. Then Salerno quivered, head to toe, and went still again.
With one shaking hand, I wiped my face. My fingers came away black, and the black turned to red as I crept forward into the light from the car. Bending down, I grabbed Salerno’s shirt and heaved. He flopped onto his back.
I have to look, I told myself. I have to look, I have to look, I have to look.
An invisible pair of claws opened Salerno’s throat at an angle, slicing up towards his face and tearing away lips, nose, and his left eye. I trembled, and fat black drops trembled on the tips of my fingers and drip-drop-dropped onto Salerno’s shredded face. His remaining eye stared at me as I broke and ran.
By the time I’d cleared the alley, the blonde in the car was gone, and Lawayne Karkkanew’s body was gone, and the bloody tiles had started to turn the color of rust on the edges. I ran all the way home, and it wasn’t until I was inside the apartment with the door locked and my back pressed against the splintered wood that I took what felt like my first breath in hours.
I flicked on the lights, and by then the blood had dried, so the yellow switch stayed yellow, and the dried blood stayed on my hands. Dad wasn’t home. I let out a shaky laugh that threatened to turn into a sob, because what the fuck did it matter if Dad was home or if he wasn’t home? I had just seen a man torn apart by something I couldn’t see. By the beast, my mind said, by the beast from your dream. By Mr. Big Empty. How he could do something like that? How was it even possible? Again and again, the image of Salerno’s savaged face flashed in front of me, and all I could think was, at least Dad’s not home, at least Dad’s not home, at least he’s not home.
Somehow, with an effort that seemed impossibly huge in hindsight, I dragged myself away from the door, even though I was still convinced that at any moment it would be battered down and something invisible would leap onto me, slashing and tearing, ripping out my throat, and I would never see it. It could be hear right now, it could be behind me, or in front of me, or—
I splashed water on my face in the bathroom, and it drained down my face and splattered the porcelain in pink swirls. Staring at my reflection, at the dried blood—Salerno’s blood—softening on my face and leaking down, diverting around my mouth and settling into the creases of my lips until I sprayed out a huge breath, and the pink droplets misted across the wall. I laughed again, and it felt like the laugh was a handful of gravel rattling inside a tin can. Oh, Jesus, I thought, because all of the sudden I remembered the shots inside Sage and Sarsaparilla, and Lawayne’s shocked expression as the red circles opened across his shirt, and the way his hand had scraped at the metal work table as he fell.
Ok, I thought. I’m ok. I’m alive. He didn’t hurt me, he didn’t get me. Splashing more water, I scrubbed until my face and hands were clean, until the skin was raw. Then I peeled off my clothes. The sweater Becca had leant me was ruined. So was the blue button-up. I rummaged through my dirty clothes and came up with a gray t-shirt, and then I kicked off my pants, which had somehow escaped destruction, and I crawled onto the sofa and pulled a blanket over my head. I left the light on because I knew if I turned it off, the fear that I had trapped inside me would start throwing itself against the bars, would go wild, would break free, and then I might never be able to cage it again.
At some point, I fell asleep, and when I dreamed, it wasn’t an ordinary dream. I was back in the alley, and Salerno was dead on the ground, but now everything was illuminated by a harsh overhead light, bright and uncompromising. The colors were too vivid, larger-than-life, like the colors off a seventies sitcom, and everything had a flat, painted feeling to it. I had the feeling that if I walked too far to the right, I’d see that everything was just cardboard: Salerno, and the alley, maybe the world. This was one of Luke’s tricks, pulling me into a dream he had manufactured. It’s too bad he wasn’t very good at the manufacturing.
When I turned around, he was there: just the blurred shape of a man looming over Salerno, and over me, and over the alley. My neck craned back as I tried to take him in, but he was just too big. This was his dream, after all.
“Geez, Luke,” I said, gesturing at his enormous projection. “Some people might think you’re overcompensating.”
When he turned his attention to me, it was both insubstantial and heavy, like sunlight at midday in the desert. The weight of it made me want to droop, but I stiffened my shoulders.
“That body,” he said, his voice booming like a Hollywood God blasting his commandments over a studio sound system, “could just as easily have been you.”
“Why’d you stop Salerno? He was about to save you the job of killing me.”
“You can’t see it,” Luke—Mr. Big Empty—said. “You can’t hear it, or see it, or taste it, or smell it. When I want, when I’m ready—” An invisible set of claws raked the building next to me, gouging deep lines from the top to the bottom. Fragments of brick tumbled down, and clouds of dust spilled through the alley. “You could be in school, or in church, or asleep in your bed. You could be fucking your new toy.” Again, I felt him rifling through my thoughts the way someone might flip through a discount DVD bin. “You could be opening a pack of razor blades in a dirty bathroom stall—”