Page 130 of The Corruption of Hollis Brown

Hollis rolled their eyes but let Walt continue the sacrament. He didn’t tease him. Not when he could feel the echoes of Walt’s fear.

He opened the audio file Yulia had sent him with, and her voice filled the room, soft and sure.

“Ilẹ mo pe o! Dá mi l’óhún!”

Walt moved restlessly from their stomach to their chest, down their hands and up to their face.

Settle down.

Hollis, I’m scared.

Don’t think about it. Focus.

Yulia’s voice stopped, and to their surprise, her father cut in and finished the rest of the incantation. His voice was strong and for the first time Hollis could tell that he was very upset. He wondered what it cost Yulia to ask him for this. To open that door from a past he’d closed so firmly.

Hollis started to say something else to calm Walt down, but he couldn’t.

He finally was able to understand what Walt meant, why he was scared. Hollis felt heavy now, unsteady. Like he was at a great height or beneath a very large tree.

Redwood leviathan, old as fern.

There was no breath on the back of their neck, but it felt like someone was standing behind them. First at a distance and then—with a crack—so close that Hollis wanted to flinch forward away from it.

But he couldn’t move.

He couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t shift Walt to the surface, couldn’t scream, couldn’t sweat. And the worst part of it all was how familiar this felt.

It was like there was a miasma over Rose Town. He breathed it in while he picked fruit, thin enough to walk through, diluted. Strange enough to raise Annie’s hackles in the car, but light enough that everyone could play games in it, light fires in it.

But in the basement in Walt’s house, it had concentrated to this one spot. Like a man-shaped black star, and Hollis knew that outside this place, Rose Town was safer than it had been in a hundred years.

Hollis couldn’t move his eyes, but he could see a shadow of it, blurring and moving at the bottom of the wall. Like it was struggling to hold shape.

Walt came to the surface slow. Wrapped his arms around Hollis and buried him inside. Deep enough that he didn’t have to see, that he could barely hear, where it was warm and safe beneath his own heart, and Hollis looked up at the candlelight like looking at the sun underwater.

The instant Walt hit the surface of Hollis’s skin, the room imploded. Shards of wood and rock, sharp and heavy, jutted in toward the middle of the room. Horizontal the way they never should be, like a great lamprey’s mouth, all the way up to the edge of the circle and around the rectangle on the wall.

The noise was indescribable. A roar organic and mechanical, musical and discordant, the press of a thousand voices, a howl like the wind during a house fire.

Hollis knew Walt was screaming only because their throat hurt so bad and their lungs cramped with the pressure.

Then it touched them.

Walked over Yulia’s protective charms and spun them around, and Hollis knew it wasn’t because she failed them.

Look away.

Hollis wasn’t a coward. He stared harder. Looked at this thing that was pulling in the candlelight. So heavy it belonged in space, not the basement of a house.

It didn’t have a face, but it left the impression of one. The way Hollis knew where things were when he was going downstairs in the pitch blackness to get a cup of water.

Walt was talking now. Apologizing, trying to explain. Tears and sweat stained their clothes as they shook. But the thing wasn’t paying attention to Walt. Somehow Hollis could tell that it was looking at him instead. Head tilted to the side.

Walt changed tactics. He covered their chest where Hollis was hidden and began begging. He scooted back to the edge of the circle to try to escape it, but it moved toward them, relentless as orbit, reaching forward.

Hollis screamed alongside him when it connected with their chest. When it reached inside, parting veins and tendon and muscle to close its fingers around the back of Hollis’s spine and begin to tug.

It placed a hand on their shoulder, gentle, and leaned forward close enough to kiss, then tore Walt out of Hollis’s body like a poison.