The Hollower (16 page)

She started to back away. With growing horror, Erik watched as his girl smeared and dribbled into the ground as if she were made of ink. The visible drain of color from Casey’s head down to her feet carried away with it that trusting look.

“
How could you?
” she mouthed with soundless hurt. “
How could you let it get me?
”

Her eyes grew wide as if she were suddenly caught in the grip of a deep and convulsive pain.
Her fingers, locking into claws, reached for him. Paralyzed by fear and confusion, Erik stood very still, his breath held in his lungs. He couldn’t reach out to her, couldn’t do anything now, because he knew it was too late. . . .

With a silent shriek, her body shriveled to a dry husk that fell at his feet. Wind carried sprinkles of crumbling skin up to the now trench-black clouds. Erik whimpered where he stood, unable to close his eyes against Casey’s decay.

Her voice from far across the lake finally tore him from the pile of bones at his feet. He turned and found himself in the next instant in a residential area he didn’t recognize. Schooley’s was beyond his point of view, as was the lake. The deserted rows of bi-levels stood lightless and cool, their neat curtains drawn, their doors shut in grim distaste of his presence. A street sign farther down, too far in real life to see clearly but close enough in dream logic to be visible, read
RIVER FALLS ROAD.

On the porch on one of the nearby houses, a semicircle of wicker porch chairs had been arranged around a small card table. Mannequins with their faces rubbed off occupied each of the five seats. One reminded him very much of Casey—the hair, the body type—and the others were vaguely familiar, too. He thought he recognized one with coarse, bristling gray hair. It was the tattoo that looked familiar, stenciled on the plastic shoulder in black and gray, a Confederate soldier corpse astride a skeleton horse rearing on its hind legs.

They were posed as if engaged in spirited conversation with each other, but none of them moved. He took a few hesitant steps toward them and frowned.
Blood seeped from the seams at their wrists and neck. A white dust covered the table between them. He leaned toward it.

And the arm with the tattoo slammed down on the table.

Erik went to scream, but found he couldn’t. No sound came out. Hands shaking, he brushed his fingers across his face. His lips were gone. He felt nothing but smooth, featureless skin. In a panic, he felt upward across a flat expanse where his nose should have been. And the porch blurred as the wind carried his eyes away.

He’d woken up from the dream that morning breathing hard and feeling sick. He hadn’t felt right the whole day after.

It was the dream that he thought of as he pulled into the driveway. Everything in his life lately had that cast of flimsy reality and deviation from safe, solid normalcy. As he climbed out of his truck, he felt heavy. Tense and tired, as if he’d been standing on tiptoes for hours.

He found Casey in the bedroom sitting with her long legs tucked under her on the bed. She had a magazine open on her lap, but the look on her face suggested that she hadn’t been reading it.

She was waiting for him. She looked up, started to rise, then reconsidered, when she saw him. “Hi.”

“Hey.” Erik stood in the doorway, uncertain whether to sit.

“Can we talk?”

He nodded, inched into the room, and sat across from her at the foot of the bed.

“I need to ask you something, and I need you to be straight with me.” A pause, where she gently laid
the magazine on the night table beside her. He noticed tears glistening in her eyes and found it hard to look at her. Her lower lip trembled slightly. She folded her arms beneath her breasts—not defensively, he thought. More like she wasn’t sure what to do with them. More like she was trying to warm herself, or console herself. “Are you doing coke again?”

An ache began beneath the bridge of his nose, radiating outward toward his sinuses. A similar one started up in his chest, over his heart. He clenched and unclenched his fists—aches had begun there, too. “No, baby.”

She returned a hurt expression, sucked in a breath, and let it out very slowly. “I really want to believe you. I do. I love you. I think I know you well enough to know when something’s wrong. And, baby, something’s wrong. I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. I can see something’s bothering you.” The hands slid back to her lap. “You swear it isn’t another girl. You swear it isn’t the drugs. But if you don’t tell me what it is, then what else am I supposed to think?”

Erik’s gaze dropped to the floor, focusing on the iridescent pink of her painted toenails. “I know. I know, and you’re right, but it isn’t easy to explain.”

“If we’re sharing a life together, then we ought to be sharing everything—good, bad, important, trivial, crazy. That’s one of the things I’m here for.” She scooted toward him, cupping the back of his neck with her hand. He looked into her eyes. Even with the gloss of tears and the soft charcoal smear of her eyeliner, her eyes were beautiful.

“Whatever it is,” she whispered, “tell me. I’ll understand.”

The ache urged him. She would make it stop. She would understand. But—

“Casey, I can’t—”

“Please.” The word barely stood on its own. It seeped from her like a shallow breath, nearly drowned beneath the tears she fought to hold back.

Erik took a deep breath and let it go. “Okay. Okay.” He closed his eyes, opened them, and took her hand. “The truth is weird, but if you want it . . . baby, if you want it, it’s yours.”

He continued when she nodded. “There’s this . . . this guy, in a hat. Well, guy’s not the right word. It—I think it can be both. Either. Or neither. I’m not sure. Anyway, this thing in a Bogart hat and black trench coat follows me sometimes. It has no face. No joke. Looks like someone took a giant eraser to its head and rubbed out anything remotely human.”

Saying it out loud, and seeing her silent reaction in her expression, drove a stab of guilt into Erik’s chest. “I told you—”

“I believe you. Go on.”

Erik sighed. “It does things—bad things—to try to confuse me. Hurt me. I think it wants me dead.”

“A psycho? If you’ve got some nut—”

“No, it’s not like that. This thing isn’t . . . a person. Not like what you’d think of as a person. It changes appearance and voices. It hiccups the world around it and—” He thought a moment, then settled on an analogy he thought fitting. “It’s like when this thing is around, you’re looking through warped glass. Everything you see through it is a distorted, inaccurate version of what it really is. Only, I think for that period of time, that distortion is the reality. I think if it could just convince me what it was showing me
was real, those distortions would hurt me. Maybe kill me.”

“I don’t understand.” She shifted on the bed.

“I call it Jones—you know, because it seemed like it was always trying to get me high. I couldn’t tell you about it. Couldn’t tell anyone. I thought . . . I thought I was failing you. Failing myself. I thought I was seeing this thing because I just couldn’t cut being sober. And I couldn’t face you like that. I didn’t want you to think . . .” His voice trailed off. Didn’t want her to think what? That he was a failure? A loser? Didn’t want her to think that he’d rather get high than anything else in the world? That he’d risk losing her just for one more time?

He found he couldn’t say those things out loud to her. He didn’t have to. The hurt in Casey’s eyes and the turn of her lips in grim understanding was enough for him. She never had been able to hide what she thought. It was always in her eyes.

“It isn’t only me, though. The other night, I found out that at least two other people can see this thing, too. Probably more. And it’s trying to do the same thing to them. It’s trying to ruin our lives. It wants us dead and it’ll do whatever it takes to lead us to that end.”

“You realize how that sounds. I believe you,” she added quickly. “I mean, I believe you’re really seeing this . . . whatever it is—”

“Hollower. I’m told that’s what it’s called.”

She frowned. “Hollower, then. I could maybe believe that you see it. But I’m having trouble swallowing why. I mean, come on, Erik. You’re telling me this thing, this ghost or monster or alien or something, is trying to kill you. It’s showing you hallucinations
that can actually hurt you. It’s lying to trick you, and for some reason, it’s trying to get you high. You’ve got to understand that sounds paranoid. It sounds—”

She didn’t finish her sentence, but he knew where she was going with it.
It sounds like something you’d say when you were high
. And he didn’t have the strength to argue that. Because actually, it
did
sound like something he might have said when he was high.

“It’s not,” he said, his voice low and defeated. “Look, I know this is hard to believe and a hell of a mouthful to swallow. Could we just leave it at my need to explore my reasons for my shaken belief in my own sobriety? Can we think of it as at least a step forward that I’m aware of the problem this is causing and I need you to bear with me as I try to figure out how the fuck to fix it? Please?”

Tears blurred his vision, and with the hand not holding Casey’s, he mashed them away. She pulled his head to her neck and stroked his hair, and he wrapped his arms around her. He suddenly wanted very much to be pressed close to her, their skins touching, to be inside her. He needed her not only near him but a part of him, and the need made him hard and hungry and shivering.

He kissed her neck. He hadn’t realized how tense her body was, too, until she relaxed beneath his lips, beneath the fingertips that wanted to feel the heat of her and the breath that wanted to catch the scent of her and hold on to her forever. She let him ease her onto her back on the bed. They fumbled silently, somewhat awkwardly with clothes, but they exchanged soft, single words of comfort and
encouragement, and giggled into each other’s necks and hair.

As the flimsy gold of the dying afternoon gave way to cool, solid night, Erik found Casey again, and as he made love to her, he thought he would never let her go.

Dave arrived at the Olde Mill Tavern just after the sun set. Monday nights weren’t usually too busy at the Tavern, and Dave hoped to find Cheryl relatively alone.

Erik had been right. Maybe there was safety in numbers.

Dave pushed open the door, and the warm glow of the bar’s interior greeted him. He saw some of the regulars leaning over quiet dinner drinks, but didn’t see Cheryl—or anyone else, for that matter—behind the bar. For a moment, he panicked.

Then she came out through the kitchen doors. Dave exhaled in relief. She scowled at him as he approached the bar, but before she could unleash whatever anger she had for him, he held up a hand and said, “You’re right. And I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry.”

The glare softened. “How do you know what I was going to say?”

He chuckled. “Because I’m a dumb jerk about most things. Law of averages, really.”

She smiled. “The usual?”

“If you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

She poured him a drink. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re here now.”

The smile faded from his face. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. But not here.”

“Then where? When?”

“Tonight after work?” He downed the shot of tequila.

“We close at midnight.” She poured him another shot.

“I’ll be back then. With Erik, if I can find him. He can see it, too.” Dave knocked back the second shot, put fifteen dollars down on the bar, and rose.

“His name’s McGavin—he’s in the book.”

Dave nodded. “I’ll find him.”

“What is it, Dave?” she said, barely above a whisper.

“It’s called the Hollower. Good a name as any, I guess.” He glanced around the nearly empty bar, then fixed her with a cool stare. “Trust your instincts. If anything happens tonight, get the hell out of here. Otherwise, I’ll be back at midnight. I promise. And I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Should I be scared?” She wiped the bar in little circles with the rag.

Dave thought of Sally in the dark, in the cold of wherever the Hollower had taken her. “Yeah. You should. But at least you won’t have to be scared alone.”

She looked up at him. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You’re not going to like what I have to tell you.” Dave headed for the door, then called over his shoulder, “Midnight?”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she replied, tentative.

Dave pushed the door open and headed out to find one Erik McGavin.

Dave got back in his car and locked the doors. He didn’t turn on the headlights or start the engine. Some part of him was vaguely aware of being watched. He stared through the windshield of his car to the woods
across the road, waiting. It wouldn’t want him to call Erik, he thought. They were each weaker apart.

Dave had had a girlfriend once, a blond with long legs and little inclination to ever wear a bra beneath her tank tops. She was light and sweet and dumb as a post. The most insightful gift she had ever given him was a cell phone that he never went anywhere without. He kept her number still in there, more as a nod of gratitude for the gift than any fond recollection of the deer-in-headlight eyes or the way her breasts bounced when she stamped her foot in disagreement. But he silently thanked her the time his car had broken down off Route 202, the times he was late for work and needed Georgia to cover him, and the times Sally had an emergency and needed him to come fix it. He had come to think of the cell phone as lucky.

He pulled it out now and prayed luck would hold out against the Hollower long enough. He got the information for an Erik McGavin in Lakehaven, New Jersey. Then he dialed the number. So far so good.

No movement from the trees, he noticed. Also good.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end sounded sleepy and distracted.

“Erik McGavin?” Dave scanned the trees across the street for signs of movement.

“Yeah? Who’s this?”

“It’s Dave Kohlar. From the Tavern?”

A pause, then, “Dave Kohlar?”

“I need to talk to you about the Hollower.” Dave thought he saw a flash of white in the dense shadows of the woods, but in the next moment, it was gone. “If you tell me where you live, I’ll come pick you up. I’ve got to meet Cheryl at midnight. I think
you’re right. About it being safer with all of us together, I mean.”