The Hollower (15 page)

“Hello?”

“Dave?”

“Oh, hey, Georgia.”

“What’s going on?” She sounded concerned.

“My sister. She’s—the hospital’s having some trouble—” Dave eyed the package on the table.

“The articles were done and on Crinch’s desk at ten after eleven. But he’s angry that you left. I mean, I thought his skin would steam off his bones.”

“Uh-oh . . .”

“I covered for you. But he wants you in his office tomorrow morning at eight.”

“Georgia, you’re a peach.” When he said this, she usually giggled. Not this time, though.

“Don’t be late. I don’t want to have to miss that handsome face of yours around this office.”

There might have been a smile in her voice that time—he thought he could hear it, although it was grudging.

“I’ll be there. Promise.”

“You better. See ya.”

He hung up the phone, stricken by a sudden loneliness. Was the total of his life so easily summed up as two real jobs, one of which he was on the verge of losing, three serious relationships, none of which existed now, and one coworker in the place a real friend should occupy? One solitary member of his family remained (if she was, indeed, remaining, and he quickly reaffirmed to himself that she was). And that was all he had.

And, of course, one supernatural stalker. Couldn’t forget that.

His body felt at that moment much heavier on his bones, a kind of drain he imagined to be the feeling of age catching up to him. Thirty-three years, even thirty-three guilt-ridden years, wasn’t supposed to feel like that.

Then again, seventeen years of steady drinking might feel that way. A few years of fearing his mind was pickling in his skull and causing hallucinations, maybe. A couple of hours possessed of the knowledge that a monster from someplace where they didn’t need faces had kidnapped his sister, most definitely.

His gaze came to rest on the box again. Had Max felt that kind of drain, too? Had it gotten to be too much for him?

Snatching scissors from the nearby drawer, he snipped the twine and it fell away onto the table. One hand slid over the package, the texture of the brown paper rough beneath his palm. He paused a moment longer to consider the possible contents before he ripped it open.

And he discovered them to be somewhat anticlimactic—a small mirror in a burnished brass frame and a videotape.

Dave frowned. Rising with the videotape in hand, he crossed into the den to his video/DVD player and popped in the tape.

He saw first the blue screen, followed by a flash of static, and then a huge hand shadowing the frame. When the hand pulled away, Dave could see Max sitting behind a desk, hands folded over a forest-green
blotter blanketed in Post-it notes. On the tape, Max smiled.

“Uh, hi, David. Hi. Or maybe I should call you Dave. I hope you’ll forgive me for taking the liberty of informality here, but I believe we share a common affliction.” Max straightened his tie, reached out a hand as if to adjust the camera angle, then drew back, evidently deciding it was fine where it was.

“I hope you can see and hear me okay,” he said, leaning into the lens and confirming Dave’s supposition. “I have so much to tell you.

“Sally tells me you’ve seen the Hollower. Worse, the Hollower has seen you.” He chuckled. “I suppose ‘seen’ isn’t the right word. It doesn’t see you the way you or I might see each other. No,” he said, shaking a finger at the camera. “Oh no. It’s a different beast entirely.”

From off-camera, Max pulled up a bottle of scotch and a glass of ice, poured two fingers of it, and set the bottle down off-camera again. It was as he poured that Dave noticed Max’s hands were shaking. He tipped the glass as if toasting to Dave’s health, took a gulp, and swallowed loudly. “I’d offer you some, but obviously, I’m not in a position to do that. I’m not a drinking man—never have been. But this is a special occasion. Today . . .” His voice trailed off and he took another smaller sip.

“Today is the last day.”

Oh, damn
. Dave shifted uncomfortably on the faded tan love seat, his elbows resting on his open knees.

“Dave, let me see if I can explain this thing as I have come to understand it. See, the Hollower is an intangible being. Where our senses stop, its senses
start, and continue above and beyond the range of even the most psychic of our kind. The Hollower is not quite physical here, but it seems able to act on this world. As far out as all that sounds, I think you know this much. This . . . being, this monster—it feeds on its victims’ sense of unreality. On their surreality, if you will. People’s confusions. Their insecurities. I know that’s vague, but it’s the best way to put it, believe me. The Hollower is sustained by impressions and perceptions and points of view. Its greatest protection is its anonymity and androgyny. How does it find you on such vague terms, you ask? By ‘smelling’—on the video Max made finger-quotes around the Hollower’s concept of smell—“your most skewed thoughts. By ‘smelling’ your irrational feelings. These evidently carry their own musk, their own meaty scent that clings to us. Think about it, about those wonderful, awful dating years, and how you just got . . . vibes, I guess you’d call it. Feelings about people. The strongest scents set off red flags about their neediness, their stalker potential. So maybe we do possess a glimmer of that sense it uses to ‘see’ us or ‘smell’ us.” He smiled at the camera, and Dave was struck by how tired he looked, how worn—like old fabric rubbed smooth, its most distinctive features faded. Max took a sip before continuing.

“It collects identities and voices at will and uses them against you. It’s the perfect weapon—the perfect disguise. Few things can hurt us more than the way we can hurt ourselves, am I right? Little else shakes our faith in ourselves so much as self-doubt, however offkilter or misplaced. And few things are more dangerous than misconceptions about the world around—”

Max suddenly sucked in a sharp breath. His eyes widened as four or five quick footsteps drew closer to the mike and then receded. Dave leaned farther inward toward the television. Something was wrong.

Soft, sexless chuckling caused Max to grow stiff in his chair. There was a flash of static and the chuckling became soft blots of sound like wind blowing into a microphone. Then they stopped dead.

“It knows. It’s here, I think. Outside,” Max continued in a terrified whisper. “Watching. It’s always watching, waiting.” Another pause, followed by his own laughter, tinny and forced, which preceded his resolution: “It isn’t going to torture me again. I won’t let it. I—I won’t be made a weapon against myself.”

He took several large draughts of scotch and relaxed visibly on the tape, settling back into his chair. But his expression had changed. The terror spent, a strange, somehow more chilling tone of emptiness replaced it.

“I’ve told you all I know. All anybody knows. I daresay, that may be all anyone has ever known about the Hollower. And I can do no more.” He sighed. Static skewed the picture on the screen for a moment and peppered out Max’s image for the next, and for less than a second—barely even enough time for his brain to register it—Dave thought he saw a figure, a trench coat, a blond sweep of hair, a pale, featureless face. Then Max was back, the tape clear again.

“I left you something. When the time comes, I think you’ll know how to use it. Think what it’s for, what it shows people, and you’ll know. I’m too tired now and
I can’t bear it—I can’t do what needs to be done, or what comes after. But you can. I know you can.”

He leaned over and smothered the camera angle with shadow, and then the tape snapped off.

Dave rose and ejected the tape. It felt warm, almost alive in his hands, and he felt an immediate sense of relief when he broke contact by putting it down on the table. He picked up the mirror and his eye caught a folded article at the bottom of the box. Laying aside the glass, he picked up the paper. It was old, and he unfolded it gently.

Hyattstown, New Jersey had made the front page of the
Holston-Hyattstown Gazette
on October 5, 1952, when a man by the name of Krellbourne—Charles Krellbourne—was indicted on sixteen counts of murder. Over the course of nine months, he had strangled children ranging in age from eight to fourteen and left their bodies under blankets of leaves and dried grasses in shallow graves.

Max had taken care to underline certain passages with a red grease pen. Krellbourne stated to police that he’d attempted to remove the children’s faces to find “the beast underneath.” He claimed he’d seen through its deceptive incarnations, and had witnessed the beast’s “true and faceless form.” He spouted self-defense on the stand, but his official plea, entered by his public defender, was “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Dave wasn’t sure what he thought was more horrible—what Krellbourne had done to those children, or that he might have been right in why he did it. But considering either for too long made his chest burn.

It destroys lives. It destroys every life it touches. Krellbourne’s, Max’s, Sally’s . . . mine
.

Mrs. Claudia Saltzman had been absolutely right. It wanted them dead—all of them. And it didn’t matter if no part of it ever touched this world. It didn’t have to. It destroyed lives just by being in and near them.

The sudden, shrill ring of the phone trumpeted into the silence, and Dave flinched.

“Georgia?” he asked the phone, but it answered only with another blast of sound, louder and stronger than his own small voice. He grabbed the phone in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“Sally’s brother?”

Dave frowned. “Claudia? How did you—”

“There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

There was a rustling sound, and then, “Davey?”

Dave’s heart flittered in his chest. “Sally. Oh, thank God! Where are you? Where have you been? Are you back at the hospital?”

A giggle. “No.”

“No? Are you—is Mrs. Saltzman with you?”

“Mrs. Saltzman is one of you. I didn’t know before now. I couldn’t find her.”

“Where are you? I’ll come get you.”

“You can’t get me now. You can’t take me back from here.” She sounded delighted, almost gleeful.

“Sure I can, Sally. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come get you, and everything will be all right. You’re not in any trouble or anything. No one’s mad. We just miss you, and want you to come home.”

There was a sniffle from the other end of the phone, and a sudden change in tone from glee to
childlike terror. “I’m scared. It’s cold here. So very cold. I don’t like the cold. . . .”

“I know. It’s okay. I’ll come get you. Just tell me where you are.” A vague memory tugged at his heart, a recollection of frantic pounding on the front door and a frail form carried through it on the breath of the winter wind to collapse into his arms. Sally did hate cold.

“I’m scared. No one looks at me or talks to me. No one has a face. And every clock gives a different time.” Her voice quivered, distorted as if filtered through something mechanical or something liquid.

He blinked hard to bring the kitchen back into focus. “Is . . . the Hollower with you?”

“Help me, Davey,” she answered, on the verge of tears. “Please. I’m so cold. I don’t think I’m alone.”

“Damn it,” Dave said into the phone. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me where you are.” Anger, fueled by worry, stiffened his fingers around the receiver as he pressed it close to his ear.

“I told you,” Sally answered, but her voice melded into something deeper, something infinitely more sinister than Sally would ever be capable of producing in that slender, fragile throat. “I’m someplace where it wants you all dead, dead, dead as a doornail, dead as a coffin lid, dead as poor old Max, dead as Krellbourne’s kiddies.”

Dave pulled the phone momentarily away from his ear to stare at it. He felt cold, too, an unpleasant tingle across his whole body. He brought the receiver back to his ear and whispered, “Leave her alone.”

“I’ll play with her,” it responded with delight in
its dual strands of voice, “until the tiny coils that hold her together simply snap.”

Dave squeezed his eyes shut and whispered nonsense words to drown out the giggling until the operator’s electronic disconnect message finally made its way to his ears.

Erik drove the landscaping truck home through the quiet streets of his neighborhood. He thought a single late-afternoon moment in Lakehaven, caught and framed by a windshield, would look like this: a row of boxy summer homes that lay quiet, collecting dust along the uneven shore of the lake. The gray-green outline of Schooley’s mountain encircling most of the water, tapering into the stirred-up clouds. The 1971 Chevy Malibu, parked within view of Erik’s house, radiating a liquid heat and white-gold shine. A ball cupped by the lawn, left untouched in the shadow of a large maple. A pair of roller skates that had made their escape toward the curb and hit the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, one standing upright, and the other lying flat in defeat next to it.

That moment saddened him. It seemed flimsy, a cheap knockoff representation of reality, too shiny and perfect to be either real or his.

The night before, he’d had a dream. The beginning
found him and Casey on the shore of the lake, walking hand in hand through a warm sunset much like the one now. Mournful bird-cries echoed across the water. It was still warm on the shore in the early orange hours before twilight, and he smiled. Nothing ached, nothing felt lost to him. He was with Casey, and she was beautiful; the wind carried her hair playfully around her head, across her face, and carried the light scent of her perfume to him. She gazed at him with unwavering love and trust. With that certainty that only dream-selves have of events past and present, he knew things were better. Perfect, even.

He saw at times through his own eyes and at others as an omniscient observer. The sun sank slowly over the mountains and the sky took on a pale cast, a smooth and featureless white like the coming of fog, or a snowstorm. He and Casey looked up, surprised but not yet alarmed.

Small chunks of gray and colorless cloud-matter rained from above, carrying weight and substance with jarring little pings. They struck Casey from the clouds’ gray underside, melting to rain, flattening first her hair to her head, then the cloth of her T-shirt to her breasts.