The Hollower (26 page)

Dave gaped at her. Erik exchanged a glance with Cheryl and said, “You . . . how did you . . . ?”

“Call it a cop hunch. Or an instinct for connecting jagged pieces of a puzzle. And a very nasty run-in somewhere I couldn’t have been with people I couldn’t have seen. Well, people, such as they were.” A dark expression passed over her face for a moment, and then she looked down at Sean. “Sweetheart, I’m willing to bet your mother doesn’t know
you’re in a dead man’s house this late at night. You do know that a sensible, respectable cop would march you right back home and into your mother’s custody, and probably spend a good hour ranting about what a terribly stupid and dangerous idea it was for you to have come here in the first place.”

Sean started to protest but DeMarco held up a hand. “As it is, the sensible, respectable thing isn’t going to work here.”

“What do you mean?” Dave rose.

“I almost lost your sister once—when I went to step out into the hall. I heard the sound of footsteps. Yours, I suppose, but I didn’t know that then. I meant to check out the situation.” She cast a wary glance at the door. “But the second I set one foot through, the hallway out there changed. I happened to have a hand on the door frame still, and managed to pull myself back into the room and close the door. That wasn’t the first time part of the house changed. And frankly, I don’t believe it will be the last. I can’t in good conscience risk letting the house swallow any of you up if I can help it. So it’s an all-or-nothing situation for me. Assuming I could find the front door again, I’d either have to escort all of you from the premises at the same time, or risk losing those I left behind, possibly forever. Of course, if I did force you all to leave together—”

“You’d have to shoot us first,” Dave said. “We’re not leaving until we take down that thing, or it takes us down.” He heard the finality in his words, and his resolution felt good. Being sure felt good.

DeMarco gave him a resigned smile. “And I figured as much. Given what I’ve seen the last few days, I can’t much say I blame you. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was scared as hell for you. And me too.”

Dave could see it then, the exhaustion creeping around the edge of her features, the tension in her mouth, the carefully reined-in terror in her eyes. And he felt more comfortable, more safe with her than he had felt in a long time with anyone. She felt real and honest, and those things made her endearing.

She took a step toward the boy. “All that being said, kid, you stick with me, okay?”

The boy glanced up at Cheryl, and at her gentle nod, replied in kind to the detective.

“So, I think if I’m to help you, I should know who you all are. I’m Anita.”

“Call me Dave.”

The cop acknowledged it with a nod.

“And Cheryl.”

“Sean,” the boy said in turn, and gesturing, added, “And that’s Erik.”

Erik offered an awkward grin and a half wave. Dave suspected that with his drug history, cops probably made Erik nervous.

As if to confirm that, DeMarco smiled and said, “Erik, yes.”

“How’s Detective Mendez?”

That same darkness passed over DeMarco’s face, and she answered in a tight voice, “Was fine, last time I saw him. He moved out of Narcotics two years ago.”

“Was he . . . one of the people you thought you saw?” Cheryl’s expression was a strange mix of confusion and realization, as if she had a working picture of something almost too awful to look at fully with her mind’s eye.

“Beg pardon?”

“We’ve been fending off the Hollower’s mind games for months. Warps in our everyday lives.
Wrong places, a wrong face. But before, you said ‘people.’ You said ‘people you couldn’t have seen.’ ”

DeMarco looked genuinely sympathetic. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like. I can certainly understand your resolve now.”

“You said ‘people,’ ” Cheryl repeated.

“Not sure we follow,” Erik said.

Cheryl looked down at Sally. “None of us have ever seen more than one figure at a time, have we? None of us have ever seen ‘people.’ We’ve seen one—the Hollower—pretending to be someone else.” She looked up at Dave and there were tears in her eyes. “God, what do you think more than one means?”

The others were silent. Sean drew close to Cheryl, who put an arm around him.

DeMarco stepped toward the door. “Could simply mean it’s strong enough now to split off into other figures. I have no idea what the limits of its capabilities are, if it has any at all. But given that it’s invited me into your little circle, and given that obvious escalations have drawn you here, I think it’s probably safe to assume that this thing is kicking up its tactics a notch. We have no real reason yet to believe this splintering of figures is anything more than a new trick.”

Dave noticed that in spite of everything he’d seen in her face of worry and fatigue, DeMarco still had a way of commanding authority, as if she could bend the Hollower’s world back to her will. He looked back down at his sister, and for the moment he felt stronger, more capable of protecting her. “We can’t stay here all night. We’ll have to try to leave this room. Together. With Sally.”

DeMarco cocked an eyebrow at him.

“We seem to have done okay so far when we stuck together. Not as much change as when it split us up. Maybe it has more trouble moving the earth under us when there are more feet firmly planted on it.” Dave shrugged.

“If you try to leave now,” Sally muttered from the floor, “it will paint you with pain and suffering.” She looked up at Dave. “It hurt me.”

Dave tried very hard not to read any notes of accusation in her last statement. The logical part of him asserted that she wasn’t blaming him, but the rest of him had trouble backing it up.

“You need to get up, hon. We have to go.” He reached an arm down to her to help her up.

“You can’t. If you snip me from the ground I’ll wither and die.”

It occurred to Dave that she meant what she said literally, that maybe somehow she was only still alive in this room, and outside it, she’d disintegrate to a pile of dust and he really would lose her forever.

And he decided in the next moment the idea was irrelevant. If taking her out of the room meant taking the risk, so be it. There was no life in that room, no real life, and no peace in leaving her behind.

“Sally,” he said, maybe more sternly than he intended. “Get up. We’re going.”

She obeyed without a word, rising unsteadily on shaky feet, favoring the bad ankle but refusing his help, refusing even to let him touch her.

“
You want me to die
.” The voice was a light breeze past his ear. He wasn’t sure whether she’d breathed it in his direction or he’d heard it in his head, but he watched miserably as she stumbled past him, her
feet heavy and her body drugged and clumsy. He tried to touch her arm again and she yanked it away.

She didn’t want his help. She didn’t want him to protect her—or else, she finally believed he couldn’t anyway.

Sally stopped when she saw DeMarco and took her hand, like a child. From the corner of his eye, Dave noticed the others watching him for a reaction, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Erik had tucked the crowbar into his belt, and had taken both Sean’s and Cheryl’s free hands while they held on to their respective weapons with the other. Cheryl offered Dave her arm to link his own through. He tucked his knife into a belt loop and took it. DeMarco offered her other hand, and he took that, too.

The detective led them into the hall.

When Erik, bringing up the rear, crossed the threshold back into the basement hallway, nothing happened. Not at first.

Dave had expected the walls to melt, the floor to drop out from beneath them, the gloom to ooze up into something massive and hungry and very deadly. But the solid foundation of the Feinstein house stretched out exactly as it had before.

Maybe there really was something to what Erik had said about safety in numbers.

They pressed forward as one on careful, quiet feet, not speaking, as if to make too much noise would summon the Hollower to them. Which was pointless—it knew where they were, if it wanted them.

Come to think of it
, Dave wondered,
why
hasn’t
the Hollower come after us? If it does know where we are, why hasn’t it confronted us yet?

The answer came so quickly he couldn’t quite be sure if the thought was really his.
It’s waiting. It has
every intention of confronting us, but on its own terms. Its own turf
.

Dave looked around the basement. There wasn’t too much to see; the dark around them ate at the edges of the flashlight glow. The dank smell of concrete holding out the cold, wet mold and moss and dirt was humid, palpable in the air and on their skin. Dave felt Cheryl shivering through his arm.

They passed beneath a curved arch of wood beams and continued down a long, straight passage.

The hall changed. No turn now. Here we go again
.

The air grew heavier, a terrible silky, almost slimy density that slid in and out of his lungs. He found breathing it both difficult and repulsive.

All at once, the flashlights tucked into belt-loops or clumsily clutched between them died out, leaving them in total darkness. Moments later, a chittering sound like nails on a chalkboard came from somewhere a ways off.

Dave froze, the chain of hands to either side of him taut and suddenly cold.

“Oh my God,” Sean whispered. “It’s coming.”

“Where is it?” Cheryl squeezed his hand.

Erik said, “Sounded like it came from back here. Behind us.”

“Let’s move.” DeMarco tugged his hand. “Let’s keep going.”

They moved forward again as one. Dave held his breath until it grew painful in his chest. He couldn’t hear anything other than their breathing and their footsteps.

The basement passage sloped down, an endless black yawn ahead of them, and Dave wondered if
the house had finally swallowed them up. The possibility that they might spend days walking deeper and deeper into the belly of a basement that didn’t exist in his world, walking until they dropped from exhaustion and thirst, inked its way into his thoughts. He felt cold all over, and was quite sure his hands were clammy in the grip of his partners.

“I’d kill for a window,” Erik said. “Just a little moonlight or something.”

A drawn-out
scrrrreeeech
followed by a few quick chirps sent an electric chill through the chain of hands. Their muttering worry came all at once.

“If we run—”

“We can’t see—”

“—is coming.”

“—scared.”

They moved faster, stumbling blind on unsure feet. Cheryl tripped and nearly brought them all down, but Dave managed to pull her to her feet before she broke the chain and spilled onto what Dave could only suspect was a floor. He was sure that if his hold had been broken, he would have lost not only Cheryl, but everyone behind her. The gloom would have surged up like a black tide and washed them away.

Sally giggled. Dave thought it was an awful sound.

“Oh, shit.” Erik’s disembodied voice stopped them once more.

“What?” Dave turned around, and then he saw it, too.

A faint silvery light, and within it, movement—rapid, fluid movement, of many legs and arms scrambling to get at them. From the light—from
behind
the light somewhere—they heard noise. The
sounds made Dave think of great metallic jaws chewing wads of metallic things.
Like gears
was what came into his head,
like huge, rusty gears and cogs tumbling down a long metal throat
. On the heels of this thought were simple panicked impressions; it was getting closer, it was swallowing them whole, it would crush their bones and tear away skin beneath the metal teeth and endlessly whirring, turning, churning gears.

“It’s the Hollower,” Sean whispered.

They broke into a clumsy run, uncoordinated on six pairs of feet, but loping away from the Hollower as best they could. The light picked up speed and grew brighter, blotting out the moving shadows behind it and whatever cast them. Cheryl squeezed Dave’s hand tightly, and he thought he heard her say his name beneath the roar of scraping metal.

The light overtook them, blinding them for a moment. They stood still. The light was worse to Dave than the darkness. And then it blew past and returned to flashlit brightness again, and utter silence reigned in Max Feinstein’s basement in the room where Dave first rediscovered his friends.

“Everybody okay?” DeMarco was the first to let go of Dave’s hand. The others reluctantly followed suit, nodding.

“Okay here,” Erik said. He didn’t sound sure, though.

“Me too.” Cheryl uttered a nervous little laugh.

“Are we back?” Dave glanced around the room. “I mean, really back?”

“Looks that way,” DeMarco said.

Sean’s cheeks looked ruddy and his eyes shone. There was an emptiness about his expression that
concerned Dave. It struck him as . . . hollow. The boy’s voice reflected the same. “We can’t kill this thing. We can’t do anything to stop it. It’s too strong.”

Cheryl crouched down beside him. “Sweetie, it isn’t over yet. We still have a chance, okay? We made it this far, didn’t we?”

“And we’re no closer to killing it than we were when we got here.” Sean kicked at a spot on the floor. “My dad—”

His words clipped off in his mouth.

They’d all heard it. A faint laugh, close enough to be among them, but from no discernible direction. They drew their weapons.

Suddenly Dave felt movement in his hand, as if the knife squirmed against his palm. He glanced down as the blade pulled against his skin. It curved upward, and shiny black poured down over the metallic surface from the tip. Then it reformed into a scorpion stinger. The scorpion tried to gain footing in his palm.

Dave flinched and threw it hard against the wall. The handle grew tiny, spindly legs and skittered away. Behind him, Sean gasped.

Dave turned to see the baseball bat become a python. Sean threw it away from his body. DeMarco drew her gun, but she didn’t need to. When the snake hit the floor, it broke into a trail of dust.