All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(86)

“Jesus,” I said, my heart pounding.

“Jesus,” Becca agreed. “Do you think he—”

I swallowed, not willing to respond. Instead, my mind flicked to the timestamp. 23:27:14. “It was eleven-thirty.”

Becca glanced at the frame. “So?”

My heart started to pound harder, and all of the sudden I was back in Lawayne’s torture room, hearing those terrible screams, seeing that compacted column of light surrounded by so much darkness. “Eleven-thirty,” I said. “Becca, you said he called you on the way home. You said he was screaming, and that’s how you knew, that’s how you knew something terrible had happened to him. But it couldn’t have been him. You were walking home at nine-thirty. Maybe nine-forty-five, maybe ten. But not eleven-thirty.” Jesus, I thought. Is someone playing games? Was this another of Mr. Big Empty’s tricks to set me on this trail? I didn’t think so. Something in my gut told me no, this was something else.

Becca, eyes wide, asked the question we were both thinking. “If it wasn’t River, then who did I hear screaming?”

“And,” I asked, plucking at the denim jacket that I now wore. “Whose blood is this?”





We didn’t come up with a satisfactory answer, but after an hour of talking circles, we still only had one solid conclusion: River had called Becca while someone was screaming. Someone, we were both sure, who wasn’t River Lang. At that point, Becca called it a night. She stole more clothes from her brother’s room, but when she offered to get a sleeping bag from the garage, I stopped her. I’d slept on the floor plenty of times in my life, and I wouldn’t sleep much anyway.

But I did sleep. And I did dream. And again, the dream was one of Mr. Big Empty’s making: the vibrant, too-bright colors, and the flatness of everything in my peripheral vision, as though I stood on a stage with rather cheap set decoration—say, a TV show from fifty years ago, something like that. As always, Mr. Big Empty loomed against the sky, and as always, he was inky black, like an enormous shadow that had swallowed half the world. And, as always, I had that peculiar sense of emptiness when I faced him, as though he were even less substantial than a shadow. As though, the thought darted through the back of my mind, he were a hole, one of those bottomless holes that sometimes cropped up in bad movies that ran over and over again at two and three o’clock in the morning. I’d watched plenty of those back in Oklahoma, and I recognized that type of bottomless hole. People fell into one and they fell forever, just on and on, and if they came across a table and chairs that had fallen into the hole too, well, they could just sit down and keep on falling, maybe have a cup of tea and a chat, but the fall—the fall went on forever. He was that kind of empty, I thought, and it made me dizzy.

“Is it tonight?” I said. “Is tonight the night you kill me?”

Mr. Big Empty swelled, blotting out everything in front of me, but still there was that hollowness to him. “Not tonight. Not yet. I’m not ready yet. You have so much more to lose.”

“You’re afraid. I’m getting closer. I found your hound, I found your little stray dog that you’ve been walking around town. I know who you’re using, and now I can stop you.”

Mr. Big Empty swelled again until there wasn’t a world anymore, no dream, nothing, only the blackness, only that eternal emptiness. Out of that emptiness, his laughter echoed up to me. The laughter went on and on, tumbling up with a fierce velocity, like someone standing at the bottom of a well and tossing stones over his shoulder. It crawled inside my ears, tickling like ants, and that tickle grew and spread throughout my head. It was enough to make me want to rip the skin from my face, chisel through bones, plunge into a lake of fire. Anything to stop that maddening itch.

And then it stopped. “You have no idea,” Mr. Big Empty said, and even through the projection of shadow, even speaking as a ghost, he still sounded a little like Luke: the boy I had wanted to help, the boy who had needed a friend, the boy who carried darkness inside. “Sometimes I forget, sometimes I think you must be smarter than you seem, and then you go and say something like this. Something so incredibly foolish, so unbelievably naive. Vie, you’re a child, lost and alone in a world that will not forgive mistakes.”

“We’re the same age, Luke.”

“You can change your mind. You can let me help you. Let me show you what you can do, what your power can do. You’ve wasted it your whole life. You’ve let it ruin any joy you might have had. And still, for all that sacrifice, you can’t do anything more than a sideshow psychic at a third-rate carnival.”

“I stopped you once.”

“You didn’t stop me, Vie. You were a witness to my transformation because I allowed it. Because I hoped you would understand. You can’t stop me. No one can stop me.”

“No,” I said. “You tried to frame Austin. You tried to frame Emmett. You would have kept using Tony if I hadn’t caught you. Samantha led me to you—”

“Yes,” he cut through my words, his voice harsh and angry. “That bitch interfered even after death. Haven’t you wondered, though, Vie? Haven’t you even thought about it?”

“What has changed? What is different this time? Your powers are growing, but have you given up something? Have you lost more than what you’ve gained?”