The Hollower (20 page)

She looked up when DeMarco knocked on her half-open door, smiled warmly, and waved her in. “Anita, how are you?”

DeMarco nodded. “Not bad. Yourself?”

“Fine, fine.” She gestured for DeMarco to sit in the
chair across from her desk. “Sit, sugar. I’d offer you coffee, but the pot’s broken. . . .”

DeMarco waved that it was okay.

“Tell me how things are down at BPD.”

“Ehhhh, the usual, I guess. Freaks, crazies, boozers, and wife beaters. And we’ve got all kinds of perps, too.” She grinned, and May laughed. “Seriously, though, the guys are good. Keeping busy. Frankie had his operation—went fine. He’s back and grousing already about the coffee. Nina had her baby. She told me after that gunshot wound a year ago, she thought no pain would scare her. Until her mama told her about giving birth, that is.”

“It went well, though?”

“Smooth as silk. She had a baby girl, seven pounds, nine ounces. Named her Julianna Maria. She brought in pictures. My God, what a beautiful little girl.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful! I’m so glad mother and baby are well. And I’m glad to hear Frank is okay. I know he was worried about the surgery.” She paused, then added, “How’s Bennie?”

DeMarco rolled her eyes playfully. “Fine, I guess.”

May arched a quizzical eyebrow. “Don’t tell me the stallion’s gone tame on you?”

“No, that part’s still good. I just wonder sometimes if it’s worth keeping something going that isn’t going anywhere, you know?”

“Do you want it to go somewhere?” May had an uncanny ability to ask the most pointed, direct questions without being intrusive. Usually, she knew the answer anyway before she asked the question.

“I don’t know. I think he does. He doesn’t push. Doesn’t even bring it up, really. But it’s in his eyes,
sometimes, or the things he says when we’re together.”

May smiled. “I thought you didn’t trust anything a man said to you during or right after sex.”

“I don’t. It’s what he says to me before.” DeMarco shifted in her seat. “Anyway, I could shoot the shit here all day, May, but I should probably talk to you about the warrant.”

“Oh yes, for the Feinstein residence. Wasn’t he the suicide not too long ago? What’re you looking for?”

“I’ve got a tape Feinstein made on the day of his suicide. And I’ve also got two cold case homicides, a disappearance, and a report of stalking that I have reason to believe Mr. Feinstein knew something about.”

“Give me something I can take to the judge, sugar. Sounds like cop hunch to me.”

“Yeah, yeah, it is, partially.” She put the files on May’s desk. “But these say it’s more than a hunch.”

May took the files and scanned them, the smile fading slowly from her face. “I’m not sure I understand, An.”

“It makes more sense after you’ve seen the tape.”

“All right. I’m due for court in an hour, but I’ve got some time around lunch. I’ll watch it first thing.”

DeMarco rose. “Thanks, May.”

While her secretary made copies of the notes to the files, May gave DeMarco the latest update about her older sister’s daughter Nadia in Ohio. “Evidently that young man she cares so deeply for has a daughter.” May shrugged. “It won’t be an easy situation any way you turn it. But the young are ruled by heart and instinct, am I right?”

DeMarco chuckled. “I wouldn’t know. Bennie and I are usually ruled by something else entirely.”

May smiled. “You live by instinct, friend, and you’re ruled more by heart than you know.” Her secretary came in and handed her the copies, which she put on her desk, and the originals, which she handed over to DeMarco. “Frankly, An, I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

Later that afternoon, DeMarco’s phone rang. “Lakehaven Police Department. This is DeMarco.”

“An, it’s May.”

“Hi there. Have you watched the tape?”

“Yes, and I’ve reviewed the copies of the notes to the files again. You’ve got yourself a warrant.”

DeMarco made a silent victory fist. “Thanks.”

“The coincidences are disturbing, to say the least.” Her voice sounded clipped and tense. Not angry, but . . . something else.

“You okay?”

“Just tired, I guess. Tape got to me a bit. Did you see the part after? There are several minutes of static after Mr. Feinstein stops talking, and then—”

“A part after? No, I don’t recall—I’ve seen the tape a few times and I never saw anything after Feinstein stopped talking.”

A sound like a sigh, or maybe the intake of breath, came from the other side of the phone. “Watch it again—give the static a few minutes. It’s . . . just please do me a favor and watch it again, okay?”

“Sure. Absolutely.”

“I’ll be in court until four thirty but I’ll bring everything by right after, if that’s okay.”

“That’s perfect. I’ll see you then.”

“Anita?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful in that house, okay?”

DeMarco frowned. She’d been in far more dangerous places than the empty house of a suicide victim before, and May knew that. “No problem. Hey, are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. I’ll see you around four thirty.”

“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.” On the tape, Max Feinstein sighed. A moment of static followed, and then Feinstein’s image cleared 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.” Feinstein leaned over, ostensibly to shut off the tape, and the picture went gray and scattered.

DeMarco watched through the static, leaning forward in the hard interrogation room chair, fists clenched in her lap. The static continued.

DeMarco waited five, six minutes before leaning back, surprised at the tension that dissipated from her hands, her teeth, when nothing else appeared on the tape. She watched the static for another couple of minutes, too satisfied—too relieved—to question right away what it might have been that May saw.

Static. There was nothing else there on the tape. She rose to shut it off.

Up close, her finger poised on the Stop button, she
heard the voices. That close to the television speakers, they sounded agitated, whispering to each other in a frenzy of words she couldn’t make out. She could feel their meaning, though—the implication in the tone. She heard fear and pain and confusion.

She thought she heard her name.

DeMarco backed away from the set and sank back into her chair. The static wavered, and she thought she saw an inky sleeve, the skewed brim of a hat. The picture blurred, and the sound caught. A hiss drew out, thinning the voices into a shrill, stretched scream. Then both the sound and the static froze.

A moment later, the peppering pulled back to the corners of the set and DeMarco found herself looking at Feinstein’s desk, the one from which he’d filmed his message for David Kohlar. A black-gloved hand passed across the lens and then moved away, and the view jostled a moment and then rose. The camera made a steady progression out into the hallway and bounced lightly up the stairs. At the top, it turned the corner and angled down as it crossed a threshold into a room. DeMarco thought she saw the toe of a black shoe.

Suddenly, the camera stopped. When it panned upward, DeMarco felt that tension return, tightening her jaw, her neck, her stomach.

From the doorway, the view passed a window and dipped down to a bed. What was left of Feinstein’s head bled out onto the bedspread around his body. On the wall behind the bed, a blood-burst of red splattered the wall.

“Oh my God.” DeMarco leaned nearly out of the seat, chewing her thumbnail thoughtfully. “Bastard’s in the house.” When the police had found the
camera, it had been empty, sitting on the desk where Feinstein had left it. The tape hadn’t been inside. Had the person (he/she/it) who videotaped this part gotten the tape out, filmed this, then put it back where Feinstein had left it?

The camera began to tremble, just enough to wiggle the picture, and DeMarco heard the dry rustle of a chuckle from behind. The black-gloved hand reached around the lens toward the blood splatter. The fingers waved and drew back, and for a minute, the blood writhed on the walls, pulling together in tribal-looking shapes and then squirming back into nondescript splashes.

The picture blacked out for a second and then flashed back to the desk, where it lowered slowly to the position in which Feinstein had left it.

Close to the camera—a whisper in the ear, really—a sexless voice full of mirth said, “That part was for you, not Dave. That part was just for you.”

Immediately, the tape went black.

At the end of the dark period, the Hollower found two of them in the transportation object, and followed them without intrusion to the gathering-structure, a place where the beings put physical liquids inside them and dulled their crude senses even further. There, the female retrieved a false skin with a strap and a jingling set of metal. This far away, it couldn’t remember the names, the
sounds
the beings used as names for those things, and it didn’t much care. That information and more was always available when it went close to them, translatable from the ugly light and vile smells and sounds and awful heat of them, as outward as the false shells they covered parts of their solid, fleshy bodies with.

The black-hole spaces inside its own body tugged and pushed and stretched at its shell. It had hunted them long enough. It was time to move close enough for the kill.

Such grotesque skins had to contain such delicate meat.

It followed the male as he drove the female to another structure, then drove himself to yet a third, where it stayed until the shade came back. That structure was riddled with sound, diseased with noise. The being boxed into a corner of the structure came out to him when he arrived and yelled in anger.

It knew anger. It knew rage. It knew hate fueled by disgust. It recognized the thin overlap of its consciousness and theirs, like the brushing of walls between worlds. They ate lesser physical beings and it imagined there was overlap between senses cruder still in the most basic understandings of life and death. It had tried those lesser beings and found them for the most part not only unpalatable but barren, devoid of any real sustenance. They mostly lacked something their greater masters had in abundance—aberration of thought.

It had taken in millennia of thoughts and feelings constantly churning behind the beings’ physicality, and nothing sustained so well as their aberrations. These were nearly powerful enough to change their physical senses, to alter the light and the sound, to recharacterize them. With these and only these did it find satisfaction, a quelling of the shifting spaces inside it, and moments of respite from the alien hostility of their world.

They had whole structures dedicated to containing beings with various aberrations. Often, though, other beings it couldn’t always find gave them liquids or solids to put inside them and after, it couldn’t find them, either. They also cut into each other sometimes and afterward, it would lose them.

Not so, the ones who hadn’t recognized the aberrations
in themselves. True, the meat came in smaller quantities, but it made up for that by pursuing more of them.

It was delighted to find the other male crossing worlds, his body on top of an oblong and covered by a thin white skin. It knew that place they went to, the Point of Convergence between the dimensions. It found him there, and hurt him.

It pulled back a bit to scan for the little one. It found him in a structure surrounded by other little ones, pushing thin cylinders over flat surfaces bound together. It drew close enough to feel the full spray of their world head-on, and it collected the voices and faces and words it needed. It waited until the boy looked out the window, and it waved. The boy grew pale and looked away. It bent the school, and gave the boy a taste of what was to come when the night took over again.

When it had finished with the boy, it pulled back, back farther, back to the place just before the Convergence, right before the membrane to its home. There, its will draped in layers over the structure where the older male had snuffed his aberrations forever. In that place, it had taken in the older male’s dying misfires of thought and feeling and maybe caught up a little of the essence that meant to carry itself to the Convergence.

In that structure it pulled close and armed itself with colors. It showed the woman awful colors. One they called red, which it splattered all over the house the way the fluid in the older man’s head had splattered against the back wall. She cried for her brother. The woman was fragile, nearly broken. The sweetness of her welled up to the surface. It could crack her, if it tried hard enough.

She feared pain, the concept of which interested it—perhaps the only physical sensation that did not disgust it. Down in the basement, it talked to her through the furnace. It told her all the bad things it was going to do to her, all the ways it would make pain throughout her body. When the dark came, she was broken.

Then something changed. It pulled away when it felt them. They were together. Blurry. Angry. Scared. Not pinpoints but a mass. They had melded into a solid thought, a bouquet of feelings bound by a base idea. They were coming.

It would not need to collect them. They would deliver themselves up together.

It pulled back just a little more, to wait.

Dave Kohlar hadn’t returned DeMarco’s calls and since the car registered to him wasn’t in the driveway when she drove by, she decided to do the Feinstein place first, then try him again after.

She glanced in the rearview mirror at the squad car behind her. Bennie and Rubelli hadn’t seen the tape, but they had read the files, and agreed to serve as backup, in case the gloved hand and the possible killer that wielded it were still in the habit of visiting the Feinstein residence. She wasn’t generally given over to getting the creeps, even in the face of confronting potentially dangerous people, but she was glad all the same to have them watching her back.