The Hollower (22 page)

Free of the house, Sean felt less pressure to be quiet. He jogged through the shadows across the street. Being outside at night without his mom knowing thrilled and kind of scared him. It made him feel grown-up. Like he really was man of the house. Like he could handle fighting off the Hollower.

A car sat outside the Feinstein place—the same car he’d seen not too long ago. His spirits lifted a little. The man who’d come running out of the Feinstein house the other day got out of the car, followed by another man and a woman, all of whom moved around to the back of the car. Then the man opened the trunk, and Sean thought he knew what the man was getting. He felt the bat in his hands, solid and secure. They were going inside Mr. Feinstein’s house to fight it. They were going after the Hollower. The weight in his stomach eased, and he brightened, smiling.

And damn, he was glad to have the grown-ups there, too, even if they were strangers. He’d be safer with them. No one who was fighting a monster like the Hollower could be a bad person.

He heard the man say, “We can beat this thing,” and that put to rest any lingering doubt he might have had.

Sean said, “I want to help,” and the others turned around.

The kid with the baseball bat looked familiar. Dave recognized him from the day he went searching Feinstein’s place at Sally’s insistence. He looked smaller in the sea of darkness around him, the bat oversized and heavy-looking in his hands.

“What are you doing out here, kid? Your mom—”

“I’m going in with you to fight the Hollower.” The boy’s expression, serious without imparting that defiant rebellion so many kids wore nowadays, reinforced his words.

They exchanged glances.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, little dude,” Erik said. “We’ve got some pretty dangerous work to do and—”

“And I’m coming with you. You can go ahead and threaten to tell my mom, but I’ll tell her what you all are planning to do, too. You might as well count me in, because nothing you say is gonna make me go away. I want to kill it. And if you want the same thing, all the better. No one has to go alone.” His voice quivered a little, as if being so assertive with adults was new to him. It probably was. He struck Dave as a good kid—a smart kid. In spite of what he said, Dave was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to upset his mother. But other adults—especially cops, if his mother thought them trespassing—would bode ill for them.

His eyes, Dave thought, pretty much defeated all argument. He
had
seen it before, and knew exactly
what he was getting into by vowing to fight it. Dave saw in those little-boy eyes the same tortured restlessness, the same resigned certainty, the same weary awareness that he’d seen in Cheryl’s eyes, and Erik’s.

“Look, it came after me today. In school. I saw it first out the window, and I thought if I looked away, if I pretended not to see it . . .” He shook his head. “But it didn’t matter. It was already inside, changing things. Mister, I saw my teacher’s face melt, like she was a candle and someone lit the top of her head. I saw her skull through her cheek and forehead and she kept talking about dinosaur bones. And worse, while she was talking, these bugs fell out of her mouth. I mean, she was up there crunching some of them between words while the rest spilled out the hole in her cheek and down the front of her blouse. They moved fast, too. Came across the tiles and up the legs of the desks and into everybody’s laps. And then they dug into the kids.”

The boy looked pale and kind of nauseated. Dave imagined a classroom fronted by a melting head yattering on about a lesson while black barbs dug into skinny arms and flat chests, probing for warm openings to fill and nest in. The picture in his head made him feel a little ill, too.

The boy continued. “The other kids didn’t notice. They all kept taking notes and whisper-buzzing to each other and I saw one girl, Carly Friedman, pass a folded-up piece of paper to Amy Melnichek, and it had these antennae poking out from between the folds. And those girls hate bugs. They screamed one time when we had a giant spider in the classroom, and they pulled their feet up on the chairs.

“Anyway, they didn’t come near me, the bugs. But it was worse, I think, seeing them crawling in and out of everybody else. It made me feel like puking. So I asked to go to the nurse, and the teacher nodded, and all these bugs fell out of her hair. I bolted.”

He looked up at Dave, his little hands tight around the handle of the bat. “I can’t do it again. I can’t go back to school and sit in that classroom if something like that could happen even one more time. I’ve seen that thing, same as you, and it’s seen me. It’s not going to go away.”

“Sweetie, you’ve seen it? You’re sure?” Cheryl asked. “You know what it is.” It was part question, part challenge. But Dave could tell by her face that she already knew. They all did. Nothing they said was going to dissuade this boy—in fact, Dave figured the boy had planned to come over here whether they had ever shown up or not.

“Yeah. And I know that man’s seen it, too.” Sean indicated Dave with the tip of the bat. His gaze traveled up to one of the upstairs windows. “It’s definitely hiding out in there. I think it knows we’re coming.”

“You’ve seen it in there?” Erik asked.

The boy nodded. “In the room that used to be Mr. Feinstein’s.”

It unsettled Dave, the idea that the Hollower was using a dead man’s bedroom and suicide chamber as a lair. It struck him as irreverent. Not surprising, but appalling nonetheless.

“It’s dangerous,” Cheryl said to Dave. “Dangerous for a boy.”

Erik gave Dave a meaningful look. “No one should be alone, though. He’s got a point. Safety in
numbers, right, man? The kid’s worse off now if we send him back.”

Dave nodded. “I’m not thrilled about bringing a child into that house—”

“I’m eleven years old,” the boy muttered in a touchy voice, frowning at him.

“Even so, I think Erik’s right,” Dave continued. “It’s probably safer for him to stick with us.”

The boy’s frown softened. “Thank you,” he said, and Dave could tell from his tone that he meant it. “I’m Sean.”

“Dave, and this is Cheryl, and this is Erik.”

“Nice to meetcha,” Sean said. He smiled at Cheryl, and in a voice he’d borrowed from a grown man, he said, “And very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

She giggled. “The pleasure is all mine, fine sir.”

“Well,” Dave said, turning toward the porch. “Should we go in?”

“Guess we should,” Erik said.

They followed Dave onto the porch. The door opened easily into blackness. Dave gripped his knife and led them inside.

Dust and dark had worked themselves into the interior of the Feinstein place, casting a filmy tint over everything that made Dave think of hazy nightmare places, half remembered. The living room, as he recollected, lay off to the left. The dining room and hall closet lay to the right. Ahead, at the end of the hall, another door faced them. Dave assumed it was the study where Feinstein had filmed his videotape.

Immediately before them, the staircase stretched upward into gloom.

“
Davey
. . . .” He remembered a throaty laugh and a metallic chatter echoing down from the top of those stairs. He cleared the discomfort that caught in his throat and turned to the others.

“How should we do this?” he asked. In spite of his best effort otherwise, his voice still carried in the utter stillness.

“I think we should stick together.” Cheryl rested a protective hand on Sean’s shoulder.

“Hell yeah,” Erik replied. “Screw that splitting-up
sh—” He caught himself, in front of the boy. “Stuff. Safety in numbers, man.”

“Works for me.” Dave moved forward. “Should we try upstairs first? Sean, you said you saw it upstairs, right?”

Sean nodded. “In Mr. Feinstein’s room.”

They moved as one group toward the stairs, then followed Dave single file, with Erik bringing up the rear. Dave clicked on the flashlight with reluctance, sure the beam of light would shatter any hope for an element of surprise.

That ship sailed long before you walked into this place
, the voice inside told him.
It knows you’re here
. He gave a little wave of the flashlight beam. Nothing much but a pale wall and a turn at the top, as well as a closed door to the left.

At the landing, Dave moved forward and said, “Okay, folks, stick together. We ought to be ready for anything.”

When no one answered, he turned around.

He was alone in the hallway.

At the top of the stairs, Cheryl, holding on to Sean’s shoulder, saw Dave move forward. She heard him say, “Okay, folks, stick together,” before there came a faint chattering in her ear like teeth on a cold day, and the flashlight snapped off.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized Dave wasn’t in front of her anymore. She turned on her own flashlight, splashing the upstairs hallway in radical, panicked arcs. There was no sign of him.

“Cheryl, what happened to Dave?” Sean pulled back against her, his baseball bat tight to his chest.

“I don’t know, sweetie. Dave? Where did you go?
Dave?” She fought to keep her voice from cracking. Holding on to Sean, she took a few steps toward the nearest door, to their left. It was open slightly. Had it been before?

Cheryl hesitated at the door, her hand hovering above the knob. “Dave, are you in there? Erik, I think we lost—”

She turned and stopped midsentence. Erik was gone, too.

“Maybe they went into one of the rooms,” Sean offered. He didn’t sound like he believed it, though. He sounded like he was quite sure a gaping maw in the wall disguised as a door had opened up and swallowed them whole. Cheryl considered it a possibility.

She turned back to the door. She thought she heard someone call her name from inside, soft and urgent. “Come on. Let’s check this one out. I think I heard one of them.”

Erik heard Cheryl call Dave’s name. He saw a brief arc of light followed by darkness, and thought he saw movement down the hall. He turned at the top of the stairs to follow them, and flipped on his flashlight. A small hall table stood outside one of the doors, an unplugged phone curled up like a sleeping cat on top of it. A linen closet door stood partially open beyond that. But he saw no sign of Cheryl, Dave, or the boy.

“Uh, guys? Cheryl? Dave, where the hell are you?”

Erik snorted. So much for sticking together. He moved past the linen closet. The door creaked open and he jumped as towels fell with a muted thump to the floor at his feet. He chuckled, turning down the flashlight on them.

They were crusty, stained with something that might have been blood. The chuckle died in his throat.

Erik moved forward again, the hand clutching the crowbar tightening into a fist. The door at the far end of the hall stood wide open, but movement from within drew his attention. Someone’s shadow. Someone just out of his line of view.

“Dave?” He knew in his gut that it wasn’t. The voice that answered him confirmed it.

“Erik? Is that you? C’mere, you little shit. Where the fuck you been all this time?” A belch followed that made his heart skitter. Hot liquid panic seared through his chest.

No. No, no, nononono. One, two, three, four, can’t be. No way in hell. Can’t be. Five, six, seven, the dead don’t come back
. . . .

Erik tucked first the flashlight, then the crowbar under one arm while he wiped the sweat off his palms. It wasn’t him,
couldn’t frigging possibly
be
him
, but Erik moved forward anyway, toward that awful stale-beer-and-smokes smell, that sweaty heat from the underarms of the black T-shirt, the rough elbows and the three-day stubble and the massive arms that had always seemed so, so intimidating and so inescapably strong.

His father sat in a beat-up pea-green easy chair, the only piece of furniture in the room besides a tiny television, which cast a spectral blue-gray glow across his wind-burned features. Gray hair bristled off his head. The dead Confederate soldier tattoo sized him up, its dead horse rearing over the movement of his father’s biceps.

At his bare feet sat a case of Michelob, overturned
bottles the fallen soldiers of his evening’s marauding. He’d won so many battles before finally losing that particular war.

The laugh track from the sitcom on the television made Erik flinch. He felt six years old again, busted for something that might or might not have been his fault. He eyed his father’s belt, half smothered by the large stomach, with unease.

“You and those lowlifes out joyriding again?” his father asked without looking up from the TV. Sixteen, then, and not six. Little between him and his father had changed in those years between, except the belt had been replaced by the convenience of fists, or whatever else lay within handy arm’s reach.

“No, sir,” he mumbled, and wished he could sink into the floor.

Or . . . better yet, that he could be high. The old man was so much easier to tune out then.

“So, where you been? Out with that Kohlar boy? Or that little slut, what’s her name—Duffy? You been hanging out with them, have ya?” Without taking his eyes off the screen, his father reached down between his legs and pulled out another beer. “Or maybe you’ve been out getting high, is that it?”

Erik swallowed several times and shook his head no, more to keep the world in focus than in answer to the question.

His father finally looked up. “Look, I know you stole money from me. Don’t bother denying it, you little shit. The money’s gone, and you took it. Either spent it on that bitch, or on drugs. Either way, I’m gonna take it out of that scrawny little frame you call a body if you don’t cough it up right now.”

“I don’t have it,” Erik whispered. He closed his
eyes. He’d paid his dues to the man. He was done answering to him. Had given that up when the old man died.

“You’re lying. I don’t like liars, Erik.” His father had a way of saying things sometimes where the tone suggested more threat than any words he actually used. What his father liked and didn’t like had always simply been a precursor to something more destructive. Sometimes he beat him up. Other times—and Erik often felt that these “life lessons,” as his father called them, were worse—he scared the hell out of him. Simply drove any sense of security Erik had away not by the act, but the threat of it—the implication of a violence that wouldn’t stop with a couple of punches to the stomach or a well-timed kidney shot. A camping trip turned hunting trip. Countless fixer-upper experiences with power tools. Driving lessons.