The Hollower (11 page)

“It’s better that way.”

“Yeah? You think so? I don’t know about you, dude, but I don’t think being alone is better at all.”

“I’m sorry,” Dave told him, and he was. He wanted to spare this kid and Cheryl any further pain, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t take on any more broken clocks in his life. He couldn’t live with failing anyone else.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and drove away.

Sean stood in an alley, but he wasn’t himself. He was taller, with delicate hands, like a girl’s, and wisps of blond hair that kept drifting out of place into his eyes. He looked down, aware of breasts and the desire to giggle over them, and at the same time, not surprised they were there.

The sensation of cold came on suddenly, and he shivered.

The sharp wintry breath of the alley whispered a name he couldn’t understand. It chilled his blood.

He was afraid, but he wasn’t sure why. Help, he needed help with something, but what? He sprinted off down the alley and the sound of his footsteps—light girl-footsteps—echoed between the buildings.

In response, the high-pitched chatter of a thousand bug legs closed in around him, the stink of
trash and bug-meat heavy in the thick darkness collected in the corners between the garbage cans.

They sound like they did when they were in that balloon
. . . .

Sweat trickled from his pores and turned cold, but he ran as fast as those skinny little girl legs would carry him. The chirp of the bugs grew louder, closer, more insistent. A crunching from the ground behind him grated across his nerves, and he imagined the bigger bugs surging up over the littler ones, crushing them in their wild frenzy to push forward.

He opened his mouth to scream, but the voice was not his—weak and afraid, it was lost in the noise around him. He dove into a boxy corridor of shadow, and turned just in time to see (
oh, shit, oh no, oh no
) the thing from across the street bearing down on him full force, only there was no trench coat, no hat, no semblance of anything human at all. Just a mess of tentacles and claws glinting in the moonlight and a crinkling of the white, featureless head into a snarl of hatred. . . .

It pulled above him, drowning out the feeble light, and Sean screamed in the girl’s voice again. The Hollower (
the girl knows it, knows what it is
) crashed like a wave into the wall before them, breaking up over Sean’s (the girl’s) body in a shiny insectoid rain.

The dream-him (her) sank to the ground beneath the oppressive weight of the bugs’ sheer numbers. Needle legs sank into the soft, skinny girl arms, the breasts, the thighs, the stomach, cheeks, forehead, over the lips, inside the mouth, the tongue, which promptly swelled. They stole the air. Their chattering rose and melded into a wail like a teakettle. He clawed beneath them, fighting to pull them away, to
pull them off, to breathe even the heavy rot-choked air of the alley, to breathe anything at all but them.

With a sharp breath he woke up. The remnant scream leaked from his lungs in little huffing whimpers, the stipple of a thousand spindly legs fresh on his skin.

Wiping sweat from his forehead with the cuff of his pajama sleeve, he listened. Silence, unbroken, reigned from the other side of his door. No bug chatter, no scrabble of legs on the floor or the walls.

His head sank back to the pillow.

“Fuck.” He whispered it, a word still too reverently adult and powerful to be spoken aloud yet. He didn’t use that kind of language often, but saved it for occasions where no other word would do. It made him think of his dad. While his mother never allowed either of “her boys” to use that kind of language in the house, Sean often thought words like that were shared between grown-ups. Men, especially. And maybe if his dad had lived to see Sean become a man, they could have drunk beers and watched football and swore about those “fucking Giants” and their chance at making it to the “fucking Super Bowl.”

In the wake of his thoughts, he heard a faint strain of whistling from outside. Sean frowned. The storm window was closed and usually blocked out all sound. He sat upright in bed and looked at the window. He recognized the song vaguely somewhere in the back of his head, attached to memories of the front yard at tricycle-height. A male voice broke occasionally from the whistling to sing lyrics:

“
I love you, and you love me, and I’ll tell ya the way it’s gonna be
. . . .”

He could almost smell the scent of fresh-cut summer lawn clippings and the organic rot of kitchen garbage leftovers stuffed tightly into Hefty bags on their way out to the curb. That song . . .

“
I know we were meant to be, ’cause no one knows you quite like me
. . . .”

It’s Dad’s song
. That was unmistakably his father’s voice. It had been five, almost six years since he’d heard it, but Sean remembered that voice, and that song. Sean’s father used to sing it when he took out the garbage, mostly, or when he worked on something in the garage or the shed. He had always thought his father might have made up some of the words, because they changed from time to time, but the melody was always the same. The very melody he could hear clear as day now from outside.

“Dad?” The tentative whisper hung in the foreground of his room while the whistling continued lightly out of view.

The silent pounding in his chest sent a pulse he could feel all the way up in his head.

Dad. It had been so long. A lump of pain stuck fast in his throat, threatening to choke off all air to his lungs. Dad. It couldn’t be . . . could it?

His father’s death had been sudden—a heart attack—and Sean missed him fiercely. He thought he was mostly okay with it now; he was a brave boy, and tough, like his dad had been. He’d accepted early on without any real concrete understanding of death that he had to take over as man of the house. But sometimes, more so since the thing across the street first reared its vacant head, Sean wished he didn’t have to be so tough. He was scared. And sometimes he wanted to be scared and be able to go
to someone braver and tougher to tell him everything would be okay. It was then that he missed his dad the most.

The thought of facing his dad as a ghost scared the hell out of him. And it had to be a ghost whistling and singing after all, because as much as Sean sometimes wanted to believe otherwise, he knew it wasn’t possible his father was alive. That faint hope had been put to rest when he was seven, and Eddie Myers, the town mortician’s kid, told him and a few of the guys what he’d seen his dad do to bodies that were brought in to the funeral parlor. Even if the hospital had made a mistake, Sean’s father would never have survived the whole embalming thing. It had turned Sean’s stomach to think of anyone doing that to his dad, but it ended the worrying and waiting at the window for his father to maybe return.

“
Don’t say it begins where it ends
. . . .”

Sean blinked and shook his head.

“
Lovers can’t end up as friends
. . . .”

The words deteriorated into whistling and then into humming. Sean peeled the covers away from himself and the air of the room chilled the damp, sweaty skin of his underarms and the back of his neck. Dangling his feet off the side of the bed, he inched his backside to the edge of the mattress, then met the cool floor with the soles of his bare feet.

The whistling abruptly broke off.

Sean’s brow crinkled, something inside tearing away, leaving a mild pang of loss.

“Dad?” he croaked into the night. “Dad?”
If it
is
you, don’t go
, pleeeease
don’t go yet
. . . .

He crossed hurriedly to the window and peered out.

His father stood on the sidewalk by the curb, near the garbage cans. Mostly obscured in shadow, the details of his face and body were difficult to make out, but Sean knew it was him. The build, the shape, the way he stood—Sean knew. Just like old times, down to the Hefty bag dangling from one massive hand.

“Dad?” The word condensed on the cold pane of glass. He refused to let the tears blur his view of his dad.

Why didn’t he come inside? What was he staring at?

His father gestured for him to open the window. Sean pointed to the pane and shrugged, mouthing the words “It sticks” with exaggerated clarity. His father motioned more insistently for him to push up the pane. Sean reached out to touch the cool wood. Then, sucking in a sharp breath, he braced himself and pushed upward with all his strength. With a loud scrape of wood against wood, it flew upward and a cold gust of air smacked Sean in the face. He blinked several times into the wind, affirming that he was truly awake. Awake, with his father, however impossible that seemed, standing on the street below.

They stared at each other for several long seconds in silence before Sean managed, “Why are you here?” He wasn’t sure he’d spoken above a whisper, but his father tilted his head and waved.

“Hi, son.” He spoke in a low voice, too, but it carried clearly up to Sean’s room. No puff of breath came from his lips when he talked, but Sean figured that was probably normal for ghosts.

“Why are you here?” Sean repeated dumbly.

“I wanted to check on you and your mother.”

Something in Sean’s throat twisted painfully, forcing
the tears to the corners of his eyes again. “I miss you. Are—are you a ghost?”

A smile on his father’s face. “Something like that.”

He studied the outline of his father’s form. The moonlight skewed around it, as if afraid of coming in contact with it. Sean’s gaze shifted to the garbage cans near his father. They caught glints of moonlight, as did his mother’s car in the street in front of them. His father looked like a cutout pasted to the wrong background. Sean frowned, turning his attention to the Hefty bag in his father’s hand. A pool of something spread out beneath it slowly, toward his father’s shoe, fed by droplets that leaked from beneath the bag.

“Taking out the trash?” Sean asked softly. The overripe smell of garbage carried on a night breeze to his nose.

“Yeah. Wanna come out here and help me?”

Sean frowned. “Don’t you think Mom will—”

“Your mother won’t mind. C’mon out, son, and let me get a good look at you. It’s been so long . . . you must be a giant by now.”

Sean hovered uncertainly at the window. A part of him was tempted to bolt down the stairs and out the door and fling himself into his father’s arms. But something was wrong. People didn’t just come back from the dead to take out the trash. If that was, in fact, his dad, Sean thought he should have been overjoyed at the second chance to see him and talk to him again. But was it his dad? How could that be? And why was he hanging back outside? Why didn’t he just come in, if he’d come all the way from the Great Whatever to check on them?

“Does Mom know you’re here? Should I go get her, too?”

His dad stepped backward off the curb and into the street. “How about you and I spend some father-son time first, before waking your mother? Whadda ya say?”

Sean’s eyes narrowed. If his father had the chance to come back to his family one more time, nothing would have kept James Merchand from barreling through that front door and scooping up both his mom and him in those muscular arms and holding them tight. Sean was sure of that.

“Let me see your face.”

“What?” His father sounded startled.

“I want to see your face—to see if it’s really you.”

“It
is
me.”

“I wanna see.”

His father took several steps forward from the shadows and moved full force into the moonlight.

And James Merchand ceased to have a face.

Sean bit down hard on a scream and leaped away from the window like the sill was on fire.
Fuck
. His heart thumped in his chest. He was acutely aware of it. For a moment, no sound reached Sean’s ears except that of the blood pumping in his head. He tottered, then leaned against the side of the bed for support, squeezing his eyes tightly shut.

The thing from across the street, good Christ, the thing she called the Hollower
. . .

The Hollower. It was trying to trick him, to lure him outside.
That motherlicker
, Sean thought fiercely.
Pretending to be Dad
. . .

The soft strains of whistling, mournful against the background noise of the wind in the thinning trees,
floated up to him through the still-open window.
Don’t say it begins where it ends
. . . .

Sean sat on his bed.

With shaking hands, he made three circles around his face, drew an X into the air, followed by a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the comforter.

The whistling stopped. Sean sat a long time without moving, silencing even the sound of his own breathing.

No whistling, no singing, no humming—nothing. He tiptoed to the window and peered out. Nothing down below on the curb but the garbage cans. His mom’s car sat in the shadows of the street alone, reflecting moonlight off the windshield. He raised his eyes slowly to the window across the street. It was dark and vacant. The Hollower was gone.

A loud crash from downstairs thundered through the house, and Sean jumped, his heart pumping with a new shot of adrenalized speed.

“Jeezus H. Christ!” he muttered into the empty room, and ran to the top of the steps.

“Damn it!” his mother’s voice carried up from downstairs.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

“Oh yeah, sweetie, I’m fine. You can go back to bed. I dropped a lamp—ow! There are some sharp pieces, and I want to get them up off the floor.”

“Need any help?”

“Are you wide awake now?” She sounded frustrated. He could imagine her standing there amidst the broken pieces, frowning at them the way she frowned at him when he and Chris got “too rowdy.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Some of the tension in his
thin frame eased, and he smiled. “You got a flashlight down there?”

“Got one right here.” A narrow beacon of light waved from the living room.

Sean jogged down the steps, and as the living room came into view over the side of the railing, he saw his mom’s bathrobed, fuzzy-slippered form crouched on the floor. Her head was bent over a pile of curved pieces of ceramic, her face obscured by strands of her hair. A cold feeling slid sickly down the back of his throat and into his stomach.
Can it pretend to be anyone? How would I ever
. . .