The Hollower (5 page)

“Hello?”

“
Che-ryl
. . .”

A sudden panic bottomed out in her stomach. “Who’s there?” Creeping back to the bar’s edge, she checked the alley lined with ice buckets, coolers, extra bar sips, and menus. Aside from the occasional straw wrapper and a shining nickel, the alley was empty.

“
I’m not behind the bar, Cheryl. But I’m very close
.” The whisper drifted hazy over her head like cigarette smoke.

Heavy, plodding footsteps (
stalker-killer boots
) unconnected to any pair of feet that she could see moved away from the bar. She heard the dull thud of them on the hardwood floor retreating around the corner to the sit-down restaurant area.

She reached over the bar and, with trembling fingers, grabbed the gun.

Bob Mercer, proprietor of the Olde Mill Tavern, had sternly informed his employees that his “beaut of a .22” Luger automatic handgun should only be used under the most extreme of circumstances (
Basically
, he’d remarked,
if a psycho has a knife to your throat
) and only with the utmost care. He’d given each of the girls and his two busboys a crash course in gun basics—where the safety was, how to hold the gun to keep the force of a bullet’s discharge from snapping the wrist backward. Cheryl felt fairly sure that even if her aim was off, a deafening shot in the general direction of the intruder would be enough to scare (
him, her, it?
) away.

It? Where had
that
thought come from?

The gun barrel shook as it navigated the shadows ahead of her. At the end of the wall before the restaurant
area, she took several deep breaths. Lifting the gun, she spun around the corner.

The forest of chair legs, sticky with overturned drinks and the dusty atmosphere of a working man’s night of drinking, spread out before her. Maybe some poor dummy had passed out under one of the tables and was only now just coming to . . . But she found no fetal form curled up against the cool hardness of the floor, either.

“I have a gun.” She felt silly saying the words aloud even before she was finished with them. Clearly, no one was there. Not in the back booths, not by the dark screen of the
Outrun
video-arcade game or the light-tube arches of the four-foot jukebox. Both stood silent, their electronic noise turned off for the night. The thought of checking the bathrooms and kitchen ground unpleasantly against her insides, but she was, after all, the one with the gun.

Still, Cheryl figured she should probably just leave. Bob would have told her to haul her little ass right on out of the bar. Whoever had been calling to her had split—that was obvious. No sense in sticking around, right?

And . . . if whoever it was hadn’t left, what then? It wasn’t too hard to imagine the swift and silent feet of a crazed killer creeping up on her and stabbing her. Outside, though, even if he was hiding in the bushes, she had a shot. She could run, run all the way to town, if she had to. But if she wasn’t alone inside, she wouldn’t have much time to cover the space between her and the bar door.

Against the sheer face of logic, she crossed the restaurant area to the ladies’ bathroom and pushed open the door.

The room fit two stalls and a window, and the window wasn’t even big enough for someone to escape through. She knocked open the stall doors. Nothing out of order there except a lipstick-smudged wad of toilet paper sitting on one of the seats. She swept through the men’s room next, followed by the kitchen, and found both just as empty.

Good
, she thought.
Now I can go
—

She saw one of the knives from the kitchen, handle embossed with the Tavern logo, lying casually on the otherwise empty bar she’d wiped down minutes ago. The blade glinted in a patch of moonlight that filtered in through the window. Cheryl sucked in a breath. Her heart fluttered like a caged bird beneath her chest.

Along the serrated edge of the blade were small chunks of (
oh my God, what the hell
is
that?
) . . .

Paper. Cheryl squinted. Minuscule bits of paper were caught on the jagged ends. Tiny crumpled nibblets of white lay scattered around the blade. She frowned. Why paper? What did that mean?

Then she spied it. A chill like ice water down her back caused her body to shudder. The gun hung limp at her side.

The poster. The Carmen Electra poster. A beer floated above the wrist, across a paperless chasm where Carmen’s hand used to be. Both eyes had been cut out as well as the mouth, and a tiny strip to either side of her head where her ears would have been, if not covered by her hair.

The adage about evil and the three monkeys popped into Cheryl’s head, except the monkeys gave way to the three Budweiser frogs. The implication hung over her mind like a threatening cloud.

Her hands—don’t forget, her hands are missing, too
.

Didn’t killers remove hands to prevent police from identifying bodies?

Oh God. Someone—someone else really
is
in here
.

As she inched around it, Cheryl gave the knife on the bar a wide berth, as if it might leap up and stab her. Or do to her what it had done to the poster. She barely felt her arm yank the door open or her feet carry her to her car. That threatening cloud had condensed into a miasma of fear. It was like she was watching what she was doing rather than doing things herself. The “out-of-body” Cheryl saw herself scrabble to fit the car key in the lock, fumble with the handle, then fling the gun on the passenger seat.

She backed out into the street and then straightened the wheel, then looked up to the rearview. Suddenly, everything became vividly clear.

The outline of a head and upper torso stood several feet behind her car, its black clothes blending with the night around it, a hat perched on top of its head. Something was wrong with its face. No, not the face, not exactly. The lack—
yes
, the lack of features that made a face.

No eyes. No mouth, no ears.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil
. The connection between the poster and the thing standing behind her car singsonged like some childish chant in her mind.

The figure raised a black glove in an almost jaunty wave, and Cheryl had the terrifying notion that the glove floated empty above the sleeve.

A scream welled up in her throat and lodged there, threatening to choke her. Her head snapped
around to the front. She shifted the car into Drive, her eyes straying up to the rearview mirror.

The figure was gone. Cheryl didn’t wait to find out where it went. With a puff of exhaust and a chirp of tires, she sped off in the car.

It wasn’t until she’d put several miles between her and the bar that she felt her heart slow in her chest. She took several deep breaths. She didn’t scream, but she didn’t look behind her again, either.

The icy shrillness of the phone pierced through the fog of hangover sleep. Dave rolled over into a sharp headache that ticked off each ring with a painful jab.

“Hello?” he croaked into the receiver from a tight, dry throat. The bad-taste coating on his tongue felt thick in his mouth.

“Mr. Kohlar? This is Dr. Stevens.”

Dave sat up straight in bed. His insides took a moment to follow.

“What’s the matter? Is something wrong with Sally? What happened?”

“Mr. Kohlar, Sally had an episode. I’m afraid it caused quite an unpleasant stir. Her employers called me and asked me to come and get her.” A pause. “She requested that I call you. We’re at the hospital now.”

Dave couldn’t be sure, but he thought he detected a hint of disapproval in the doctor’s voice. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“I’ll see you then, Mr. Kohlar.”

He arrived at Sisters of the Holy Rosary Hospital
some twenty minutes later, breezing through the open motion doors of the psych ward with a halfhearted wave to the nurse at the station.

“Room 406, Dave,” she called down the hall, and he tossed back a hurried “Thanks” as he swept by.

Both Sally and Dr. Stevens looked up as Dave swung through the doorway and into her room, a neat cube of generic articles of pleasantry like silk flowers in a nondescript vase, clean white linens, tidy right angles of wall and window. Sally had spent time in dozens of rooms like this one, emotionlessly tasteful and simple.

A reproachful frown twitched across the doctor’s thick lips as he hurried to meet Dave. “A word, Mr. Kohlar.” Taking his elbow, the doctor led Dave back out into the hall, a continuation of the tidy green floor tiles and linen-white walls.

“Is everything—”

“I wanted to go on record as saying,” Dr. Stevens interrupted in a tight, forced whisper, “that I understand and respect family business as family business, and I certainly encourage a relationship between you and your sister.”

“What? What are you—”

“Please, keep your voice down. I thought I was making a good deal of progress with her, but frankly, it took us two hours to calm her down at her office. Her employer—a Mr. Dibbs, is it?—said that she’d been brooding all morning. ‘Pensive,’ was the word he used. Then, out of nowhere, she started screaming and she fell out of her chair and crawled under her desk. Anytime anyone came near her, she lashed out with her fingernails. Gave this Dibbs
quite a nasty scratch. A coworker finally found my name and number in Sally’s Rolodex, and I came as soon as I could.”

Dave stared at the doctor’s shiny shoes. Tiny twin distorted Dave-reflections stared back.

“Mr. Kohlar, do you have any idea what she told us?”

Please
, Dave thought.
Please, oh please, God, don’t let it be what I think it is, please don’t
—

“She claimed that this figure you told her about—she calls it the Hollower—was standing out on the sidewalk, watching her. Waiting for her.”

Dave reached a shaky hand out to the door frame to keep the brightly lit hospital hallway from dissolving in a gray dizzy haze. “Dr. Stevens, I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“I’m sure Maxwell Feinstein’s funeral served as a catalyst. But I hope you’ll pardon my saying that stories about ghosts and monsters do her a disservice. This afternoon, she spoke to me of ghosts, Mr. Kohlar. Ghosts now, in addition to monsters. Which indicates to me a regressive step in her therapy.” The doctor’s voice never rose above a “shouted” whisper, but Dave flinched just the same. Dave’s impression of the doctor was that the man wielded quiet authority to demand the necessary attention from patients, family members, and staff alike. His cultured—even sculpted—voice conveyed the disapproval or understanding as he saw fit.

“Ghosts?” Dave spoke more to fill the space than to question. He knew, already, who the doctor meant and the idea lifted the hairs of his arms and the back of his neck with an unpleasant chilliness.

“She was referring to Feinstein. She believes she has spoken to him since his funeral yesterday.”

Dave pinched the bridge of his nose. His head pounded lightly. “Can I see her now?”

Dr. Stevens returned a narrow-eyed glare. Glancing back once at Sally, he answered with his usual decorum, “She’s been heavily sedated. Mr. Kohlar, I feel I should tell you that outbursts like those may better be curbed by admitting her to a facility. If she becomes a danger—”

“She hasn’t,” Dave broke in. “Really. Please, just . . . just let me talk to her.”

Dr. Stevens let out a long, slow breath. Dave felt it indicated not so much a sigh as a dramatic pause. “Fine.”

Dave slid in past him and approached Sally’s bed. Her head lay turned away from him, her hair cascading like a flaxen waterfall over the pillow and down the side of the bed. Under the hospital light, her pale skin had taken on an almost translucent quality, the faintest hint of spidering blue veins beneath the smooth cheek. At the sound of his footsteps, her eyelashes fluttered. She turned a soft smile on him.

He took her hand and gave it a small squeeze. “What happened?”

“I saw it. The thing that follows you around.” She sounded tiny, weak, her body drained of the energy or will to fill out her voice.

“I’m sure it wasn’t—”

“It
was
, Dave.” Her insistence shot outward from her mouth like a little arrow, hitting him painfully someplace right between the lungs. A dull ache rippled outward from the spot.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered miserably. “I never should have told you.”

Her eyes closed and opened slowly in a drawn-out blink, her dry lips peeling apart to speak again. “It hurt me. In the noggin. That’s where it goes after you.” She shook her head slowly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “It knows things. It knows what to show you to make you hurt. To make you afraid.”

Dave glanced back at Dr. Stevens, who stood in the doorway with his arms folded, his mouth pushed up in that same frown. “Listen to me.”

She gave a petulant tug at the restraints on her wrists. Dave squeezed Sally’s hand again. It felt so cold and small in his.

“This—this whatever, this Hollower is my problem, not yours. I can handle this thing on my own. I can get rid of it, make sure it doesn’t bother you anymore. But you have to forget about it for me.”

Her eyes sought his again. “Can you? Can you really make it leave us alone?”

“Sure. But you have to forget it exists. That’s what makes it go away.” Dave forced his lips to form what he hoped was a convincingly confident smile.

“That’s not what Max says.”

His smile faded. “What does Max say?”

Sally turned her head. “He says you can’t kill it. He’s seen it from the other side. It’s ageless, and it won’t die. . . .”

“Max is dead. He can’t talk to you now. And even if he could, that isn’t true. Everything dies.” Dave fought to keep his voice even, but Sally jerked upward, straining against the restraints, searching his face.

“Am I going to die, Dave?”

“Sweetie, don’t talk like—”

“It wants me to, you know. The Hollower wants us both to die.”

“This is absolutely—” Dave caught himself before the word “insane” slipped from his mouth, but her brow furrowed and her blue eyes filled with tears. She settled back onto the pillow.