His father’s death had been sudden—a heart attack—and Sean missed him fiercely. He thought he was mostly okay with it now; he was a brave boy, and tough, like his dad had been. He’d accepted early on without any real concrete understanding of death that he had to take over as man of the house. But sometimes, more so since the thing across the street first reared its vacant head, Sean wished he didn’t have to be so tough. He was scared. And sometimes he wanted to be scared and be able to go to someone braver and tougher to tell him everything would be okay. It was then that he missed his dad the most.
The thought of facing his dad as a ghost scared the hell out of him. And it had to be a ghost whistling and singing after all, because as much as Sean sometimes wanted to believe otherwise, he knew it wasn’t possible his father was alive. That faint hope had been put to rest when he was seven, and Eddie Myers, the town mortician’s kid, told him and a few of the guys what he’d seen his dad do to bodies that were brought in to the funeral parlor. Even if the hospital had made a mistake, Sean’s father would never have survived the whole embalming thing. It had turned Sean’s stomach to think of anyone doing that to his dad, but it ended the worrying and waiting at the window for his father to maybe return.
“Don’t say it begins where it ends. . . .”
Sean blinked and shook his head.
“Lovers can’t end up as friends. . . .”
The words deteriorated into whistling and then into humming. Sean peeled the covers away from himself and the air of the room chilled the damp, sweaty skin of his underarms and the back of his neck. Dangling his feet off the side of the bed, he inched his backside to the edge of the mattress, then met the cool floor with the soles of his bare feet.
The whistling abruptly broke off.
Sean’s brow crinkled, something inside tearing away, leaving a mild pang of loss.
“Dad?” he croaked into the night. “Dad?” If it is you, don’t go, pleeeease don’t go yet. . . .
He crossed hurriedly to the window and peered out.
His father stood on the sidewalk by the curb, near the garbage cans. Mostly obscured in shadow, the details of his face and body were difficult to make out, but Sean knew it was him. The build, the shape, the way he stood—Sean knew. Just like old times, down to the Hefty bag dangling from one massive hand.
“Dad?” The word condensed on the cold pane of glass. He refused to let the tears blur his view of his dad.
Why didn’t he come inside? What was he staring at?
His father gestured for him to open the window. Sean pointed to the pane and shrugged, mouthing the words “It sticks” with exaggerated clarity. His father motioned more insistently for him to push up the pane. Sean reached out to touch the cool wood. Then, sucking in a sharp breath, he braced himself and pushed upward with all his strength. With a loud scrape of wood against wood, it flew upward and a cold gust of air smacked Sean in the face. He blinked several times into the wind, affirming that he was truly awake. Awake, with his father, however impossible that seemed, standing on the street below.
They stared at each other for several long seconds in silence before Sean managed, “Why are you here?” He wasn’t sure he’d spoken above a whisper, but his father tilted his head and waved.
“Hi, son.” He spoke in a low voice, too, but it carried clearly up to Sean’s room. No puff of breath came from his lips when he talked, but Sean figured that was probably normal for ghosts.
“Why are you here?” Sean repeated dumbly.
“I wanted to check on you and your mother.”
Something in Sean’s throat twisted painfully, forcing the tears to the corners of his eyes again. “I miss you. Are—are you a ghost?”
A smile on his father’s face. “Something like that.”
He studied the outline of his father’s form. The moonlight skewed around it, as if afraid of coming in contact with it. Sean’s gaze shifted to the garbage cans near his father. They caught glints of moonlight, as did his mother’s car in the street in front of them. His father looked like a cutout pasted to the wrong background. Sean frowned, turning his attention to the Hefty bag in his father’s hand. A pool of something spread out beneath it slowly, toward his father’s shoe, fed by droplets that leaked from beneath the bag.
“Taking out the trash?” Sean asked softly. The overripe smell of garbage carried on a night breeze to his nose.
“Yeah. Wanna come out here and help me?”
Sean frowned. “Don’t you think Mom will—”
“Your mother won’t mind. C’mon out, son, and let me get a good look at you. It’s been so long . . . you must be a giant by now.”
Sean hovered uncertainly at the window. A part of him was tempted to bolt down the stairs and out the door and fling himself into his father’s arms. But something was wrong. People didn’t just come back from the dead to take out the trash. If that was, in fact, his dad, Sean thought he should have been overjoyed at the second chance to see him and talk to him again. But was it his dad? How could that be? And why was he hanging back outside? Why didn’t he just come in, if he’d come all the way from the Great Whatever to check on them?
“Does Mom know you’re here? Should I go get her, too?”
His dad stepped backward off the curb and into the street. “How about you and I spend some father-son time first, before waking your mother? Whadda ya say?”
Sean’s eyes narrowed. If his father had the chance to come back to his family one more time, nothing would have kept James Merchand from barreling through that front door and scooping up both his mom and him in those muscular arms and holding them tight. Sean was sure of that.
“Let me see your face.”
“What?” His father sounded startled.
“I want to see your face—to see if it’s really you.”
“It is me.”
“I wanna see.”
His father took several steps forward from the shadows and moved full force into the moonlight.
And James Merchand ceased to have a face.
Sean bit down hard on a scream and leaped away from the window like the sill was on fire. Fuck. His heart thumped in his chest. He was acutely aware of it. For a moment, no sound reached Sean’s ears except that of the blood pumping in his head. He tottered, then leaned against the side of the bed for support, squeezing his eyes tightly shut.
The thing from across the street, good Christ, the thing she called the Hollower . . .
The Hollower. It was trying to trick him, to lure him outside. That motherlicker, Sean thought fiercely. Pretending to be Dad . . .
The soft strains of whistling, mournful against the background noise of the wind in the thinning trees, floated up to him through the still-open window. Don’t say it begins where it ends. . . .
Sean sat on his bed.
With shaking hands, he made three circles around his face, drew an X into the air, followed by a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the comforter.
The whistling stopped. Sean sat a long time without moving, silencing even the sound of his own breathing.
No whistling, no singing, no humming—nothing. He tiptoed to the window and peered out. Nothing down below on the curb but the garbage cans. His mom’s car sat in the shadows of the street alone, reflecting moonlight off the windshield. He raised his eyes slowly to the window across the street. It was dark and vacant. The Hollower was gone.
A loud crash from downstairs thundered through the house, and Sean jumped, his heart pumping with a new shot of adrenalized speed.
“Jeezus H. Christ!” he muttered into the empty room, and ran to the top of the steps.
“Damn it!” his mother’s voice carried up from downstairs.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah, sweetie, I’m fine. You can go back to bed. I dropped a lamp—ow! There are some sharp pieces, and I want to get them up off the floor.”
“Need any help?”
“Are you wide awake now?” She sounded frustra
ted. He could imagine her standing there amidst the broken pieces, frowning at them the way she frowned at him when he and Chris got “too rowdy.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Some of the tension in his thin frame eased, and he smiled. “You got a flashlight down there?”
“Got one right here.” A narrow beacon of light waved from the living room.
Sean jogged down the steps, and as the living room came into view over the side of the railing, he saw his mom’s bathrobed, fuzzy-slippered form crouched on the floor. Her head was bent over a pile of curved pieces of ceramic, her face obscured by strands of her hair. A cold feeling slid sickly down the back of his throat and into his stomach. Can it pretend to be anyone? How would I ever . . .
She looked up as he reached the floor and Sean breathed a sigh of relief. No, it was her, definitely—her face, her eyes, her smile. “Clumsy me. I went to turn it on and I don’t know, the sleeve of my robe must’ve caught something and . . . crash!”
Sean crossed the room to where his mother stood. “What do you want me to do?”
“Well, I figure at least if I get the big pieces off the floor, we can Dust-Buster the rest tomorrow morning. I’m going to hand the big ones to you—but be very careful, okay? Don’t cut yourself.”
“I know, I know. I’m always careful.” He cupped his hands in front of him as his mother collected five or six big pieces and some medium-sized ones. “Hey, Mom, what were you doing down here so late, anyway?”
His mother dropped the ceramic pieces into his hand so they landed heavily in his palm.
And she laughed with someone else’s voice.
Sean felt a tickle on his palm and looked down. The pieces were wiggling around—writhing, actually, and changing. The shine of the porcelain took on a sickly pale cast, like blind newborn things spawned by the lamp that had held them, and the grinding movement of fired clay against itself took on a new tone entirely as the pieces raised themselves up from his palm on hairy, spindly white legs.
Bugs, oh my God, they’re bugs, but . . . but Mom knows, she knows I . . .
Sean shook his hand like he’d been burned, and the pieces of lamp fell, skittered across the floor, and disappeared into the dining room across the hall. He looked up at the thing pretending to be his mother.
The faceless head hovered above the neckline of his mother’s robe, just beneath her hair. The Hollower.
He ducked past it and ran up the stairs. Behind him, the front door opened and closed, but the light laughter of the Hollower followed him all the way to his mother’s room. She lay sleeping in bed. How hadn’t he noticed when he’d passed her room on the way down? It was like his mom’s bedroom hadn’t even been there.
He shuddered, then crept quietly to the window by her bed and peered out. The Hollower waved at him from the street.
And if it was out there, then the sleeping figure—the figure with his mother’s face, his mother’s scent, his mother’s heat and solid realness in this world—was really his mom. He climbed into bed next to her and pulled the covers over him. In her sleep, she stroked his head and mumbled something he didn’t quite catch.
He shut his eyes. It was a long time before he fell asleep.
Six
Everything about the newspaper office where Dave worked was a study in “organized clutter.” That’s what his boss, Crinchek, said of business: the most efficient ones ran on the fuel of organized clutter. Along the eggshell-white walls of the office hung random articles clipped and framed, collages of the paper’s biggest news stories, and an award or two, generally hanging in a prominent spot above the cubicle of the recipient. The cubes themselves, a static-colored gray, were chest-high and afforded the casual observer a glimpse of computers and printers, the tops of stacked paper, half-eaten working-lunches, the occasional houseplant or picture frame crowded by file folders and binders, and telephones. The phones added their own irregular rhythm to the din of the office, and the excited murmur of journalists following leads filled the remaining space.
All this was in the background of Dave’s mind, the way strangers in crowded elevators or on the subway remained in the periphery of thought. His primary concern was elsewhere.
Dave wanted to write off seeing that god-awful figure as a hallucination—work stress, a bad enchilada, whatever. Sally seeing it . . . well, that was just her nerves, her disorder talking there. But Erik and Cheryl seeing it—that was almost beyond comprehension. Maybe it meant he wasn’t crazy, thank you very much, no gears slipping in his future, but then what did it mean?
It means you’ve screwed them all.
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. His own words, spoken out loud with a volume that inner voice didn’t have, gave him back some control of himself.
He remembered Cheryl’s face, her beautiful brown eyes, the outline of her pleading lips, and he wanted to protect her. But his only thought had been to get away, to distance himself from her, and by doing so, distance her from the Hollower.
I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. That, at least, had been the truth. He didn’t know what it was, or where it came from, or why it was stalking him or anyone else.
Maybe, the internal voice broke in, it’s time to find out.
Dave thought about what Erik had said about being alone and considered going back to the bar to talk to Cheryl. He also entertained the possibility of getting a CAT scan and ruling out tumors or whatever else might be causing visits from strange beings who clearly wanted him de—
“Dave?” Georgia’s voice made him flinch.
A delicate hand flew to the silk valley between her breasts, and she let out a low whistle. “Tense?”
He grinned—tried to, at least, though it fell short. “Sorry, Georgia. Rough night last night. You looking for my write-up on the Bobcats versus Ramblers home game?”
She nodded, and glanced at the clock on the wall across from him. “Crinchek wants the features bundled up and ready to go by eleven.”
“I’ve got it right here somewhere. . . .” He shuffled through some papers without a clue as to where he’d put the article, or, in that moment, if he’d even written it at all. He discovered it beneath some scribbled notes, smoothed out the crinkled corner, and handed it to her.
She nodded. “You know, if you need to pass off your notes to someone else—”
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
“Because Crinch, death, and taxes wait for no man.”
“You’re right, and—”
“And,” she added with a small smile, “he’ll kill you if you’re late on another piece.”
Dave regarded her with an even look. “I suppose he’ll have to take a number and get in line.”
Georgia offered him a weird smile but said nothing. She turned on her tiny pinpoint heels and clicked away. Dave watched her retreating form, swore at the inner voice under his breath, and then turned to his computer screen.
It was close to deadline, and he had an article to proofread and another on a different local college sporting event that he still needed to translate from his chicken-scratched notes to legible, press-ready inches of copy. He didn’t want to do anything but go home and sleep off the remaining tequila in his system from the bottle he’d bought last night on the way home from the bar.
The monitor stared back at him mutely, its blank white Microsoft Word face awaiting his commands. He had nothing to tell it.
Dave jumped again as the bleating ring of the phone on his desk yanked him from his thoughts. He stared at it and it rang again, then a third time, before he clutched the receiver and brought it to his ear.
“Yeah, hello, Bloomwood Ledger. This is Dave Kohlar.”
“Mr. Kohlar?”
“That would be me.” He switched the receiver to the other ear with an impatient sweep.
“This is Dr. Stevens. I’m at Sisters of the Holy Rosary Hospital. We need you to come down here right away.”
Dave sat up in the chair. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
>
“Please come right away, Mr. Kohlar.”
“God, is she hurt? What happened?”
Dr. Stevens cleared his throat. “She’s missing.”
Dave sank back into his chair, the air deflating from his lungs. “She’s . . . gone? Like, gone from the hospital, gone?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Gone. The idea gripped him that somehow, some way, the six-foot trench-coated tumor had broken into the hospital and done something awful to her.
“How could that have happened? Don’t people watch them? How could she have gotten out without anyone seeing her?”
“We don’t know. Believe me, I wish I could tell you. The last nurse to check said she looked in on Sally and her roommate right before the end of her shift, and saw them both asleep. When the night nurse made her rounds later that night, Sally was gone. Now, rest assured, this has the full attention of the psychiatric staff here at Sisters of Mercy, and the police arrived a while ago and are looking into everything. But they would like to ask you a few questions, so if you’ll just—”
“But no one saw her go?”
A weighted pause hung across the phone line.
“Did someone see her leave the hospital?”
“It’s nothing to concern yourself with at this—”
“Who saw her go? What aren’t you telling me?” Dave was aware that the volume of his voice was rising steadily, threatening to crack. He glanced up and several curious pairs of eyes returned to their work as he met them.
A sigh came from the other end of the phone. “One of the patients, Mrs. Saltzman.”
“What did she see, exactly?”
“Maybe the police—”
“Damn it, Stevens, what did she see?” The fringe of his hearing caught polite shuffling of papers from a desk nearby.
Dr. Stevens cleared his throat. “Mrs. Saltzman said that she awoke to see Sally sitting up in bed, free of restraints, talking to someone.”
“Who was she talking to?”
“Mrs. Saltzman couldn’t see anyone else in the room.”
“And?”
“And she said Sally got up and walked out into the hallway. But, Mr. Kohlar—”
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