The Hollow Ones Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

  Cover design by Will Staehle. Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors’ intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the authors’ rights.

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  First Edition: August 2020

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  LCCN: 2020933579

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-6173-1

  E3-20200610-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note from the Authors

  PRELUDE: The Box

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  EPILOGUE: The Box

  Discover More

  About the Authors

  Also by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

  CH:

  For Richard Abate

  GDT:

  For Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and Arthur Machen

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  Tap here to learn more.

  Astute readers may recognize in our main character’s name a tribute to one of our most admired authors and the originator of the “occult detective” subgenre, Algernon Blackwood. While some religious rites detailed herein have been embellished for dramatic effect, any errors of fact are unintentional. We would like to note, however, that grave robbing in New Jersey, for occult purposes, is not at all fiction or a thing of the past. It’s happening. Right now.

  PRELUDE: The Box

  Wedged between two buildings in the Financial District of Manhattan—namely 13 and 15 Stone Street—exists a sliver of a property that officially stands as 13½ Stone Street.

  Roughly four feet wide and composed of a colonial stone running the space between the buildings, capped off at thirty feet above the ground, this property serves no apparent purpose but to hold an unremarkable cast-iron Edwardian mailbox.

  The Box has no ornaments, no distinguishing characteristics other than a large envelope slot, and there is no door or key to retrieve the mail once it is deposited.

  Behind The Box, a solid wedge of stone and mortar.

  The deed on this minuscule urban mystery dates back to Dutch colonial times, and the taxes on it have been punctually paid by the firm of Lusk and Jarndyce since 1822. Before that time, its property records exist only in reference, but all are in perfect legal standing.

  The oldest recorded mention of The Box goes back indeed to a pamphlet published in what was then named New Amsterdam. The most complete narrative of the vicissitudes of Jan Katadreuffe and his Final, Virtuous Elevation to the Kingdom of Our Lord.

  In said pamphlet—published by Long and Blackwood, 1763, Folio, four pages—a wealthy spice merchant makes a deal with a demon in order to secure the arrival of his ships and cargo.

  The ships are delivered, but henceforth a foul spirit runs amok and tortures the merchant—every nightfall—biting him savagely, scratching his back, and riding his body like a jockey while the wretched soul screams in abject misery and commits sinful acts of great violence.

  In the drama, a layman, trying to help, tells a learned priest of a possible solution:

  “…The iron box on High street, your woes is there to greet. Sealed letter bears the Blackwood name. And in a forthnight thee shall meet…”

  The priest praises the Lord and the sacraments as the only solution to pursue. Katadreuffe pays for a litany of masses and is liberated from his torment only hours before passing away, purified.

  A small, unassuming gravestone memorializes the passing of Katadreuffe. On the Rector Street side of Trinity Church, the tombstone reads:

  HERE LIES THE BODY OF JAN KATADREUFFE, LATE MERCHANT OF SPICE AND WOODS WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE THE 16TH DAY OF OCTOBER 1709—AGED 42 YEARS. BEHOLD AND SEE THEE PASS BY. AS THEE ARE NOW, SO ONCE WAS ME, AS I AM, YOU SOON WILL BE. PREPARE FOR DEATH AND FOLLOW ME…

  Over the centuries, 13½ Stone Street has withstood many a litigation: zoning, corporate, and otherwise. Every one of these legal battles has been won at great expense. And so The Box stands: a mystery standing in plain sight. Most people pass by without even giving it another glance.

  A decade ago, a large insurance company across the street installed three security cameras. A dedicated observer could attest that, even though a few letters arrive to The Box—approximately one every three weeks or so—no one ever picks them up, nor does the mailbox ever overflow.

  Of this small mystery, one thing has been corroborated time and again over the decades: Every letter that arrives at The Box is a letter of urgent need—a desperate call for help—and every single envelope carries the same name:

  Hugo Blackwood, Esq.

  2019. Newark, New Jersey.

  Odessa set down her menu and looked around the Soup Spoon Café for a list of specials. She found it, a whiteboard near the hostess station, written in block lettering with a red marker. Something about the handwriting triggered a long-forgotten memory of her days at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

  A Behavioral Sciences lecturer drew up homicide definitions with a squeaky red dry erase marker on the big board in the front of the auditorium.

  The differentiation, the lecturer explained, had nothing to do with the homicides themselves—severity, method, or manner—but rather the cooling-off period in between.

  The Serial Killer’s hallmark is their cycle. Weeks, months, or even years may pass between homicides.

  The Mass Murderer kills in one setting, within a fixed time frame, totaling a minimum of four homicides committed in close succession with little or no downtime in between.

  The Spree Killer murders in multiple settings, usually over a brief period of time, the duration lasting anywhere from one hour to several days or weeks. Rel
ated: a Rampage Killer, a single person who murders multiple persons in a single homicidal event.

  The last two classifications allowed room for overlap. One case that was difficult to properly classify—and was generally considered to be the first rampage killing in the United States—had occurred just seventy-five miles south of the café in which she now sat.

  On September 6, 1949, Howard Unruh, a twenty-eight-year-old World War II veteran, departed his mother’s house in Camden, New Jersey, dressed in his best suit and a striped bow tie. He had argued with his mother over breakfast, prompting her to flee to a neighbor’s home, frantically telling them she feared something terrible was about to happen.

  Unruh walked into town armed with a German Luger pistol, carrying thirty 9-millimeter rounds. In a twelve-minute span he shot and killed thirteen people, wounding three more. Locations included a pharmacy, a barbershop, and a tailor. While the desire to murder was proven to be premeditated—Unruh was later found to have kept a list of enemies in a diary—his victims were a mix of preferred targets and people unfortunate enough to cross his path on that clear Tuesday morning. Victims and eyewitnesses alike described the look in Howard’s eye that morning as trance-like, dazed.

  To anyone other than a law enforcement professional, the classification of the crime matters little. The only truly important fact of the matter was that, for more than sixty years, Unruh’s shooting spree stood as the worst rampage killing in New Jersey.

  That is, until the night Walt Leppo ordered meat loaf.

  “Is it cooked fresh?” Walt asked the young server after his return from the men’s room.

  “Oh, absolutely,” she answered.

  “Would you do me a favor, then?” he said. “Could you look and see if there’s maybe a slice or two left over from the lunch rush? Preferably set under a heat lamp for a few hours? Really dry with toasted edges?”

  The server held his gaze for a few moments, as if unsure whether or not she was being put on. She was a student probably, likely at one of the nearby law schools. Odessa had put herself through her third year of law school in Boston waiting tables, and she acutely remembered the uneasy feeling she got when certain male customers made vaguely creepy, borderline fetishistic food requests—usually loners, men who she suspected wished that they could order women off menus, not just food.

  The server glanced at Odessa sitting across from Leppo. Odessa offered an encouraging smile, hoping to set the fellow young woman at ease.

  “Just let me check,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, closing his menu and handing it to her. “By the way, I prefer the end pieces.”

  She left with their orders. Walt added to Odessa, “We used to call the end pieces the heels.”

  Odessa nodded as though fascinated. She said, pleasantly, “Serial killer.”

  Walt shrugged. “Because I like my meat loaf the way my mother used to make it?”

  “Oh God. Add one oral fixation.”

  “You know what, Dessa? I got news for you: Everything can be sexualized. Everything. Even meat loaf, apparently.”

  “I bet you like your toast burnt, too.”

  “Like a slice of charcoal. But didn’t you get the regulation about rookies not being allowed to profile veteran agents?”

  Both their heads turned when the first drops of rain began tapping at the other side of the picture window at the front of the Soup Spoon Café.

  Leppo said, “Oh great.”

  Odessa checked her phone. The weather app radar showed a mass of precipitation in shades of jade and mint approaching Newark like a cloud of toxic gas. She turned it around so that Leppo could see. Her umbrella happened to be locked next to the Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun inside the trunk of their car, parked half a block up the street.

  “Jersey rain,” said Leppo, unfolding his napkin. “Like hosing down a dog. Everything gets wet, nothing gets clean.”

  Odessa smiled at yet another “Leppo-ism,” looking outside as more drops strafed the window. The few people outside moved more quickly now, with a blurry sense of urgency.

  Things speeding up.

  At the very same moment Leppo was asking about meat loaf (as later chronologies would bear out), a dozen miles north of Newark, Evan Aronson was on hold with his health insurance provider, listening to soft 1970s rock while waiting to question a surcharge for a recent emergency room visit. At his ten-year Rutgers reunion a few weeks before, Evan had torn his left biceps during a re-creation of his Greek brothers’ traditional late-night porta-potty leap, as he attempted to catch his former fraternity house roommate, Brad “Boomer” Bordonsky, despite Boomer having packed on a solid thirty pounds since graduation.

  While enduring another one of Styx’s greatest hits, Evan looked up from his desk in the Charter Airliners office at Teterboro Airport and watched as a late-model Beechcraft Baron G58 taxied out of the nearby private aviation hangar. The pilot, tall and in his fifties, climbed out of the cockpit of the million-dollar twin-engine piston aircraft. The man wore gray track pants, a long-sleeved pullover, and sandals. He disappeared back inside the hangar, leaving the aircraft engines running outside. A hangar attendant exchanged a few words with him and then moved away.

  Moments later, the pilot returned holding a very large wrench.

  Pilots, but especially owner-pilots, do not perform their own aircraft repairs. Not with the plane’s twin three-hundred-horsepower engines still on, propellers rotating faster than the eye can track. Evan stood out of his chair to get a better look at the pilot, standing there with his left arm in a sling, his right arm holding the telephone receiver, connected by a cord to the base on his desk due to airport radio frequency regulations.

  Under the whine of the turbine, Evan heard a loud pop—and a simultaneous crunch.

  He heard it again, struggling now to see the pilot, who was apparently working behind the Beechcraft’s fuselage. The tall man came around to the near wing, and Evan watched as he swung the large wrench at the running lamp—popping the seal on impact, crunching the red plastic casing, pieces of which fell to the tarmac as the lightbulb went dark.

  Evan gasped audibly, so obscene was this act of violence against an aircraft worth millions of dollars. Evan stretched the phone cord to full length, the soft ballad “Lady” providing a weird counterpoint to the sight of a plane owner vandalizing his own property.

  These high-end private jets were both babied like pampered pets and rigorously maintained like race cars. What this man was doing was tantamount to putting out the eyes of a champion racehorse with a screwdriver.

  This couldn’t be an owner at all, Evan decided. Someone was causing thousands of dollars of damage to this aircraft…and perhaps stealing it.

  “Mr. Aronson, I have your file in front of me…” came the insurance representative’s voice—but Evan had to drop the receiver, letting it clatter against the floor, its cord recoiling to the desk. He rushed out the office door straight into the needle-sharp drops of cold rain, looking left and right, hoping someone else was seeing this and could help him.

  The tall man finished with the last lightbulb, the aircraft now cloaked in darkness. A small emergency light backlit the scene.

  “HEY!” yelled Evan, waving his one good arm. He jogged a few steps toward the scene, yelling “HEY!” a few more times, both at the tall man and in either direction, hoping to rouse somebody with two working arms.

  A hangar attendant approached the pilot, trying to stop him. Three downward wrench blows caved in the right side of the attendant’s head—the attack lasting only seconds. The attendant collapsed on the ground, rattled by death spasms.

  The pilot crouched and went to work on the rest of the skull, like a caveman finishing his kill.

  Evan froze. His mind could not process such violent terror.

  The pilot tossed the wrench to the side with a great clanking and walked perilously close to the left propeller, rounding it, climbing up onto the wing, settling inside the glass cock
pit.

  The aircraft jerked forward and started rolling.

  The only light in the plane was that of the cockpit avionics, a cool green-blue LCD Garmin G1000 display. Evan thought it lit the pilot’s face like an alien’s.

  He was transfixed by the dead look in the man’s eyes.

  Mechanically, the man reached for something in the cockpit beneath Evan’s line of sight. Suddenly there was an explosion of sound and flame, shattering the right-side window. Rounds from the AK-47 semiautomatic rifle ripped into Evan’s body like hot nails, buckling his knees, his body collapsing, his head smacking the tarmac, knocking him instantly unconscious.

  As the darkened Beechcraft turned toward the taxiway, Evan bled to death peacefully.

  Odessa had the steak salad. No onions, because she didn’t want the taste in her mouth all night. She ordered coffee because it was the middle of their shift and that is what FBI agents drink.

  “Did you know,” Leppo said after the server left, “there is more trace amount of human feces on menus than anywhere else inside a restaurant?”

  Odessa brought a tiny tube of hand sanitizer out of her bag, setting it upon the table as though she were attacking on a chessboard.

  Leppo liked her, she could tell. He had a grown daughter of his own, so he projected and understood. He liked taking her under his wing. There were no assigned partners in the FBI. He wanted to show her the ropes, teach her “the right way” to do things. And she wanted to learn.

  “My pop sold kitchen supplies everywhere in the five boroughs for thirty years until his pump gave out,” he said. “And he always said—and this might be the most important lesson I can teach you as a third-year agent—that the hallmark of a clean restaurant is its bathroom. If the bathroom is hygienic, orderly, and well maintained, you can be assured the food prep area is safe, too. Know why?”

  She had a guess, but it was better to let him pontificate.

  “Because the same underpaid Chilean or Salvadoran immigrant who cleans the restrooms also cleans the kitchen. The entire food service industry—and you could make an argument for civilization itself—hinges on the performance of these frontline workers.”