The Hollower (8 page)

Against a backdrop already dotted with occasional stars, the ex–Feinstein residence stood quiet.

The front door was closed.

“Mister?”

Dave jumped, whirling around on a boy no more than eleven or twelve years old. The boy’s fair-haired head was cocked to one side, his eyes squinting inquisitively over his freckled cheeks. He scratched at a scabbing scrape along the underside of one skinny forearm.

“You okay, mister? I saw you boltin’ outta the ol’ Feinstein place like a bat outta heck.”

“I—I’m fine. Fine. Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.” By degrees, the pounding in Dave’s chest receded. “What are you doing out here?”

The boy jerked a thumb to the house across the street. “It’s curfew now. Was on my way in. Boy, I’ve never seen a grown-up run so fast.” He cast a wary eye at the upstairs window. “Look like you seen a ghost.”

“Why do you say that?” Dave snapped.

The boy shrugged. “Dunno. You know the guy that used to live there? Guy that shot himself?”

Dave exhaled slowly. “Not well. He was . . . a friend of my sister’s. You know him?”

“Not well, either. Friend of my mother’s.” The boy hesitated, as if a question hovered on the tip of his tongue, but he seemed to decide against asking it. “Well, I’m sorry all the same. For your sister, I mean. Her loss, and all. He said . . .”

“What?”

The boy looked at the upstairs window again. “Said he saw monsters or something.”

Dave frowned, but said nothing.

The boy paused a moment before adding, “I dunno. I don’t think a person’s crazy, just for seeing monsters. Do you?”

Dave searched his face. “No, kid, I guess I don’t.”

“My dad didn’t think it was crazy, neither. When I was little and my dad was still alive, I was afraid of these bug monsters under my bed—baby stuff, but I was little then. Anyways, my dad showed me this thing he called a Warding Ritual—”

“Sean!” A woman leaned from the doorway in the house across the street, waving the boy inside.

Sean looked up at Dave sheepishly. “Well, I guess I oughta go, mister. That’s my mom. See ya around.” The boy turned and jogged off toward the soft glow of his house’s interior. He cast one final glance back at Dave and another at the house across the street before he and his mother disappeared inside.

Dave stared at the closed door for several long seconds afterward. If that kid had seen what he had seen—if he’d seen the Hollower—what did that mean? What could it possibly mean?

Reason, cold and clear, splashed Dave in the face. He was reading way too much into an innocent, harmless conversation. Opening the car door, he slipped inside and pulled away from the house.

Sean watched the man’s car drive away until it was out of his line of sight from the bedroom window. He didn’t know monsters went after grown-ups, too, but he was sure the man had seen the thing that had sent over the balloon (Sean shivered inwardly, the sensation of bug legs on his blanket raising goose bumps on his skin). It had been the way the man tore out of the house and the look on his face when he’d stopped by the car—like he was a little sick around the edges, and scared in the middle—that made Sean sure enough to cross the street. Sean knew better than to
talk to strangers, but they shared an enemy; no one the monster would go after could possibly be a bad kind of stranger.

Sean had seen it himself that morning, at first a glowing orb hovering just beyond the curtains in an upstairs corner window across the street.

“That was Max’s bedroom, honey,” his mother had told him when he’d asked. “Why?”

Sean shrugged it off, unsure how to answer. Okay, so that was the bedroom where old Max Feinstein had shot himself. Nothing to be a sissy about. It wasn’t like there were such things as ghosts. But he’d seen something in that bedroom window, all right. Sean was pretty sure it wasn’t a ghost, but it was something. And Sean had started to wonder if Max maybe had seen it, too.

He didn’t think the thing was always there in the master bedroom of the house across the street. In fact, Sean was sure, although he couldn’t say why, that it only visited there to keep an eye on him. To scare him. To watch him, and wait for the perfect chance to—

“Sean, into bed.”

Jolted from his thoughts, Sean turned from the window. His mother stood in the doorway, arms folded beneath her chest. He glanced once more at the house across the street. Dark, empty windows. The curtains hung still.

“Okay.” He hopped into bed, and let his mother tuck him in and kiss him good night (even though he was really getting to be too old for those things). Then she turned out the light.

Alone in the room, eyes glued suspiciously on the window, Sean went through the series of gestures
his father had shown him to keep the bug monsters away. His father hadn’t thought seeing monsters was crazy at all. His dad taught him the Ritual with total seriousness. Three circles around the face, an X, a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the bed. Worked every time. Not a bug monster to be found ever after. And that faceless monster could hide out across the street and wave all it wanted, but the Warding Ritual would keep it at bay. It had to. Sean refused to believe otherwise. Three circles around the face, an X, a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the bed.

That done, he settled into the pillow.

Too bad, Sean thought before sleep overtook him, that he didn’t get the chance to show the man the Ritual. It looked like the guy would probably need it.

“You are not there.”

Erik spoke the words aloud to himself as he stood in the bathroom with the lights off. His heart pulsed a resounding unease that stuck to his ribs. The thinnest slivers of moonlight sliced through the blinds and lined his bare chest, but for all intents and purposes, the view of the street below remained obscured. Erik stared at the blinds and reasoned to himself that there was no harm in peeking outside. After all, there was only so much a guy could be expected to take, wasn’t there? And a quick peek would satisfy that little nagging voice that so stubbornly needed to know.

Erik’s sponsor had told him he’d recover faster if he’d only realize that no one always has control over every situation, and that sometimes a person needs to trust a Higher Power. Erik found the concept difficult to understand, that a person could trust anyone or anything blindly. He wasn’t sure he’d ever put much stock in a Higher Power. His mother had
been a flat-out nonpracticing Catholic and his father was an atheist who never brought up God unless it was to call him a goddamned son of a bitch. But Erik was willing to entertain the possibility that there was probably Something up there looking out over the universe, and he didn’t think that the Something was malicious—indifferent, maybe, but not outright mean-spirited. Erik wanted to believe that this Higher Power, God or whatever It was, could protect him from the Jones. But he’d wanted to believe It could have protected him from his dad and It hadn’t. He wanted to believe It would save him from himself, and It hadn’t done that, either.

Erik figured he could handle the occasional desire to get high. He’d resigned himself to the fact that cravings came and went—for food, drugs, sex. Sometimes a person could satisfy those cravings. Sometimes a person couldn’t, and it sucked all around, sure. Sometimes a person jerked off or chewed gum or bummed a smoke and sat down somewhere to wait it out. He called it the religion of Shit Happens. He could accept its doctrines, and didn’t think a Higher Power wasted time getting in the way of it. Erik could not, however, accept that the Jones was part of the natural order of Shit Happens.

So that night at their regular N.A. meeting, he’d had a talk with Gary, his sponsor.

“Sometimes, you just gotta let go, my friend.” Slouching under the orange glow of the rec center porch light with his toughened hands thrust into worn denim pockets, Gary had squinted at him as the smoke rose into his eyes from the cigarette eternally clamped in his mouth. He’d always struck Erik in general as being the perfect man to wear the shirt—Shit
Happens—and when enough of it had happened to Gary, he’d picked himself up out of the waste he’d made for himself and gotten clean. He’d taken on that bitch sobriety and when she threatened to leave him from time to time, he weathered the threats. That wasn’t ever going to go away.

“It’s more than that. Different. Weird shit, Gary, that I don’t think is supposed to happen.”

Gary raised an eyebrow at that, but Erik ducked his gaze and hurried on. “It’s hard to explain. I’m having more trouble, I think, than I ought to be.”

“Want to talk about what’s been going on?”

Erik considered it, then shook his head. “Not . . . yet. I don’t think I can yet.”

“Well,” Gary replied with a barely perceptible shrug, “I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle.” He glanced down at his Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, then back at Erik.

Gary sighed, suddenly looking very tired. “Sometimes the old feelings come back. You know, like nostalgia. Then they go, simple as that. Sometimes shit happens, but hey, that’s healin’ for ya. You have to remember to see it for what it is.” He paused. “It isn’t some untamable beast, Erik. You’ve seen its true face, and it has no power over you.”

Surprise flopped like a cold fish in Erik’s gut. Its true face? Had he really seen its true face? It was such an odd choice of words. Did Gary see the Jones, too? Did all recovering addicts see it?

He’d been tempted to tell Gary then about the Jones, but others had started filing out of the rec center and he lost his nerve. Along the walk home, it occurred to him that he’d never understood how lonely he really was until the possibility had surfaced
that maybe he wasn’t alone. Well, at least not alone with the Jones.

Erik reached tentatively toward one of the slats. He had to know if the Jones was out there. Actually, he corrected himself, he had to know it
wasn’t
out there.

And yet, his fingers refused to touch the string to draw the blinds. They hovered so close to the window he could feel the cool night air seeping in beneath the slightly open pane, but he couldn’t will them any closer. Dust had settled in symmetric rows along each of the slats. A dead bug carcass lay bottoms-up in a corner against the lower-most slat. The paint had worn thin where Casey had accidentally dripped nail polish remover on the sill, then tried to rub it off. Erik took in each detail, close enough to notice every chip, mark, and dent. He breathed in a musty smell, like old clothes.
Like old costumes
, he thought,
and dead actors awaiting their curtain call with their feet in the air on the paint-worn stage. And once the curtain is drawn, the tragedy and the comedy masks will be hovering outside the window
.

He blinked, swallowed the dry patch in his throat, and wiped sweaty palms onto the thighs of his pants. Those didn’t feel entirely like his thoughts. What the hell did he know about the theater? It was the Jones’s thought.

But it wasn’t going to be out there. Wouldn’t, couldn’t, no way in hell.

And what if it is?

Erik’s stomach tightened as he forced his fingers to pinch an edge of the blinds. Gently, as if disturbing the dust would bring the Jones into being, Erik bent down a slat to peer out the window.

For a moment—just a single moment—a dark
mass loomed at the end of the driveway, and something unpleasantly hot and tingly ricocheted around his rib cage.

Damn, oh, damn, it’s really
—

The mass took on the form of a garbage can. Erik released the breath that had locked in his throat and yanked the cord to pull up the blinds, his eyes scanning the street below for any signs of the Jones. Several other garbage cans lined the curbs, ready for the next morning’s pickup. His car, parked in front of the house, cut a hulking, quiet shape in the shadows. Aside from some debris that the wind urged down the street, all else remained still, everything as it should be.

Erik turned to splash some water on his face, the thudding in his chest growing steady. Then, patting his face with a nearby towel, he turned back to the window.

Still nothing there. Nothing—thank the big H.P., wherever, whatever—was there.

“Erik?”

His skin leaped before his body had a chance to follow. He wheeled around, his heart picking up where it had left off. Casey stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, a confused frown on her face.

“Jeezus, Case, you scared the hell outta me.”

“What are you doing in here?”

Erik found it hard to look her in the eye, and so focused on her nipples, tenting the tank top she wore, and the string of her bikini underwear resting gently on her hips above the waistline of her pajama pants.

“Nothing. Just—just splashing some water on my face.”

“You don’t look so good.”

“Well, you nearly gave me a heart attack.” He looked up at her.

Her thin arched brows had connected in a crinkle. She shook a lock of hair from her eyes and sighed.

“What’s going on with you lately?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t you feel it? Tell me you can actually recognize that something is wrong here. You’re differently lately. Distant. Angry. Sometimes . . .” She slumped against the door frame, her eyes wet with tears. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Sometimes you look so scared. Sometimes I think—”

Erik knew—or thought he knew—what she was going to say.
High, Erik. That’s right, you’ve been acting straight-out
high. Instead she switched gears. “I just don’t understand what’s going on. Are you mad at me?”

“What?” Erik frowned. “No, no, of course not, I just—”

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

“That’s not it either. I—”

“Are you seeing someone else?”

Erik’s eyes narrowed. “You really think I’m seeing someone else? Thanks for the fuckin’ trust there, Casey.” He threw his hands up and shouldered past her into the bedroom, but she was on him.

“What the hell do you expect me to think? For Chrissakes, I’m not the enemy here! If you’re not mad at me and you’re not seeing anyone else, then what
are
you doing?” Her words, thick with accusation, hung heavily between them.