The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “It’s not,” he said, his voice low and defeated. “Look, I know this is hard to believe and a hell of a mouthful to swallow. Could we just leave it at my need to explore my reasons for my shaken belief in my own sobriety? Can we think of it as at least a step forward that I’m aware of the problem this is causing and I need you to bear with me as I try to figure out how the fuck to fix it? Please?”

  Tears blurred his vision, and with the hand not holding Casey’s, he mashed them away. She pulled his head to her neck and stroked his hair, and he wrapped his arms around her. He suddenly wanted very much to be pressed close to her, their skins touching, to be inside her. He needed her not only near him but a part of him, and the need made him hard and hungry and shivering.

  He kissed her neck. He hadn’t realized how tense her body was, too, until she relaxed beneath his lips, beneath the fingertips that wanted to feel the heat of her and the breath that wanted to catch the scent of her and hold on to her forever. She let him ease her onto her back on the bed. They fumbled silently, somewhat awkwardly with clothes, but they exchanged soft, single words of comfort and encouragement, and giggled into each other’s necks and hair.

  As the flimsy gold of the dying afternoon gave way to cool, solid night, Erik found Casey again, and as he made love to her, he thought he would never let her go.

  Dave arrived at the Olde Mill Tavern just after the sun set. Monday nights weren’t usually too busy at the Tavern, and Dave hoped to find Cheryl relatively alone.

  Erik had been right. Maybe there was safety in numbers.

  Dave pushed open the door, and the warm glow of the bar’s interior greeted him. He saw some of the regulars leaning over quiet dinner drinks, but didn’t see Cheryl—or anyone else, for that matter—behind the bar. For a moment, he panicked.

  Then she came out through the kitchen doors. Dave exhaled in relief. She scowled at him as he approached the bar, but before she could unleash whatever anger she had for him, he held up a hand and said, “You’re right. And I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry.”

  The glare softened. “How do you know what I was going to say?”

  He chuckled. “Because I’m a dumb jerk about most things. Law of averages, really.”

  She smiled. “The usual?”

  “If you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  She poured him a drink. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re here now.”

  The smile faded from his face. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. But not here.”

  “Then where? When?”

  “Tonight after work?” He downed the shot of tequila.

  “We close at midnight.” She poured him another shot.

  “I’ll be back then. With Erik, if I can find him. He can see it, too.” Dave knocked back the second shot, put fifteen dollars down on the bar, and rose.

  “His name’s McGavin—he’s in the book.”

  Dave nodded. “I’ll find him.”

  “What is it, Dave?” she said, barely above a whisper.

  “It’s called the Hollower. Good a name as any, I guess.” He glanced around the nearly empty bar, then fixed her with a cool stare. “Trust your instincts. If anything happens tonight, get the hell out of here. Otherwise, I’ll be back at midnight. I promise. And I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “Should I be scared?” She wiped the bar in little circles with the rag.

  Dave thought of Sally in the dark, in the cold of wherever the Hollower had taken her. “Yeah. You should. But at least you won’t have to be scared alone.”

  She looked up at him. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. You’re not going to like what I have to tell you.” Dave headed for the door, then called over his shoulder, “Midnight?”

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” she replied, tentative.

  Dave pushed the door open and headed out to find one Erik McGavin.

  Dave got back in his car and locked the doors. He didn’t turn on the headlights or start the engine. Some part of him was vaguely aware of being watched. He stared through the windshield of his car to the woods across the road, waiting. It wouldn’t want him to call Erik, he thought. They were each weaker apart.

  Dave had had a girlfriend once, a blond with long legs and little inclination to ever wear a bra beneath her tank tops. She was light and sweet and dumb as a post. The most insightful gift she had ever given him was a cell phone that he never went anywhere without. He kept her number still in there, more as a nod of gratitude for the gift than any fond recollection of the deer-in-headlight eyes or the way her breasts bounced when she stamped her foot in disagreement. But he silently thanked her the time his car had broken down off Route 202, the times he was late for work and needed Georgia to cover him, and the times Sally had an emergency and needed him to come fix it. He had come to think of the cell phone as lucky.

  He pulled it out now and prayed luck would hold out against the Hollower long enough. He got the information for an Erik McGavin in Lakehaven, New Jersey. Then he dialed the number. So far so good.

  No movement from the trees, he noticed. Also good.

  “Hello?” The voice on the other end sounded sleepy and distracted.

  “Erik McGavin?” Dave scanned the trees across the street for signs of movement.

  “Yeah? Who’s this?”

  “It’s Dave Kohlar. From the Tavern?”

  A pause, then, “Dave Kohlar?”

  “I need to talk to you about the Hollower.” Dave thought he saw a flash of white in the dense shadows of the woods, but in the next moment, it was gone. “If you tell me where you live, I’ll come pick you up. I’ve got to meet Cheryl at midnight. I think you’re right. About it being safer with all of us together, I mean.”

  “What made you change your mind?” There was a muffled grunt of effort, like Erik was doing something while the phone was pressed against his ear. Getting dressed, maybe. Dave thought he heard a snap of clothing and what might have been the zifvt of a zipper being pulled.

  “A lot has happened in the last day or so. I’ll explain it all tonight. Thing is, I think you had something, about us standing a better chance together than alone.” His hand slid back and forth in small arcs across the steering wheel and a pause stretched across the phone between them.

  Erik broke the silence with “It isn’t ever going to leave us alone, is it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What time do you want to meet?”

  Dave checked the clock on the dashboard. “It’s almost ten thirty now. Can I pick you up at eleven?”

  “Works for me.” Erik gave him directions, which he scribbled in pen on the only surface available in the car—an old Dunkin’ Donuts foam cup.

  “Got it.” He put the directions in the cup holder.

  “Dave?”

  “Yeah?” Dave switched ears.

  “Thank you, man.”

  Dave didn’t know why these people were grateful. He couldn’t protect them. He wasn’t even sure what he hoped to accomplish by bringing them together. “You’re welcome,” he muttered. “See you at eleven.” Then he clicked off the phone.

  He saw another flash of light in the trees and frowned, peering out into the darkness. A moment later, a deer stepped onto the road, and he let out a short breath.

  Despite the glare of Dave’s taillights as he pulled away, another flash of white went unseen, followed by a looming of black against the shadows, both so intense as to be almost iridescent.

  The chattering of claws echoed softly across the lake.

  DeMarco drummed the pencil against the side of the desk as she perused her notes on the Kohlar woman’s case, chewed on the eraser, then drummed again.

  Something wasn’t clicking.

  Three of her most recent files and two cold case files that instinct had compelled her to pull from the boxes in the basement lay spread out before her. Lakehaven Police Department had been for some time “in the process of converting the contents of
the cold cases to electronic format for reference and storage,” but truth be told, the project was an organizational nightmare and had stalled several times since ’96. It had taken her a good three hours to find what she was looking for. As she sat with the reports and photographs and witness statements fanned out over the small space she’d cleared on her desk, she frowned.

  How could the cases possibly be related?

  DeMarco would have chalked up statements made by Mrs. Saltzman as mostly hazy, useless products of her condition, except that some of them rang familiar in her ear. The old woman indicated that a person unknown had taken Ms. Kohlar from the hospital. She had also said this person could “steal voices.” Maybe someone who could do impressions, like a comedian or a ventriloquist. Not too strange a detail, in itself. But it nagged her, reminded her vaguely of Cheryl Duffy’s case days before. That woman mentioned someone lurking around her house, someone who appeared to be able to throw his voice and call her by name.

  Then there was the face thing. Mrs. Saltzman said this person who had kidnapped Ms. Kohlar had taken her to “a place where they don’t need faces.” Ms. Duffy insisted the figure she saw hadn’t had a face. Both seemed to believe this figure wished to do harm. And yet subsequent investigations of the premises had turned up no trace, no evidence of this figure ever having been there at all.

  It nagged at her, too, that Mrs. Saltzman believed Dave Kohlar—she checked her notes—would understand these things or be familiar with them somehow. The old woman thought he should have known about this place where people didn’t need faces. It would have been easy to dismiss the assumption if it wasn’t for his reaction, and his voice.

  And the doctor—Stevens’s name sparked some recognition, although it had taken her most of the car ride back to the station to place why. Stevens had counseled Max Feinstein, too, and prescribed narcotics.

  All of it tenuously connected by leaps of instinct. Except when she added the info from the Feinstein suicide.

  It had been ruled a suicide by the M.E., but DeMarco hadn’t needed Heddy Blickman to tell her that. She and the other investigating officers thought it odd at the time that there had been no note, but after talking with his ex-wife, DeMarco learned Feinstein attended group therapy sessions and took (or more accurately, according to the inventory of pills and the prescription date, did not take) heavy medication.

  Max Feinstein saw Dr. Stevens, and he ended up taking out the back of his skull. Sally Kohlar saw Dr. Stevens and disappeared from a psychiatric ward of a hospital.

  Was Stevens responsible somehow in either instance? Was that, under the guise of strict doctor-patient privilege, the reason why he hadn’t wanted her to talk to the old woman? But then, if he was the mysterious figure in question, why hadn’t Mrs. Saltzman recognized him? She appeared to know him well enough when they’d questioned her—in fact, seemed to hold the opinion of him that DeMarco herself did.

  And further, why wouldn’t Sally have recognized her own doctor, if that was the case? What could he have done to make Sally suddenly afraid of him, and what purpose would that serve if he was looking to get her out quickly and quietly, beneath the staff nurses’ noses? In fact, why remove Sally from the facility at all?

  So many questions. So many tenuous connections.

  DeMarco realized at length that these connections were more or less secondary to the stranger one, the one that had been sitting on her desk a few mornings ago when she had come in. Brindman & Symmes, attorneys for the estate of Mr. Maxwell Feinstein, had sent her the original copy of a tape that had recently come into their possession. The police hadn’t found it because it hadn’t been marked as anything special, nor had it been with the other tapes. She suspected it was an oversight on the part of Rubelli’s boys, and DeMarco was still fuming about it days later. But given his condition, even watching the tape hadn’t meant much to the Feinstein case. He had mentioned some being, some kind of thing he called the Hollower.

  But given the developments of the more recent cases, the things Feinstein said took on a whole new light.

  “It collects identities and voices at will and uses them against you.” That’s what Feinstein said on the tape. This Hollower collected voices and used them. Just like Ms. Duffy claimed her bar intruder had done. Just like Mrs. Saltzman claimed Sally Kohlar’s kidnapper had done. And DeMarco had a growing certainty that the “Dave” Feinstein addressed on the tape—the intended recipient of his suicide video—was, in fact, Mr. Dave Kohlar. Symmes had confirmed it over the phone.

  The cases looked as if they were tied to Feinstein. A suicide, a disappearance, a possible stalking.

  And the murders. The cold case murders.

  Debbie Henshaw from Plainfield had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and stomach, and most of the skin of her face had been removed. Her eyes had been gouged out as well, and the sockets filled with the ashes of burnt paper. That one had always bothered DeMarco. Her first homicide as a detective, but far from her first homicide, it had gotten under her skin, so to speak, because the vic was so young. DeMarco had seen a picture of the girl’s face once she’d been identified, and the girl had a sweet look—innocent good-girl pretty. Freckles across a tiny nose. Someone’s kid sister. Someone’s high school sweetheart.

  Someone carved one jagged word into the pale skin beneath her breasts: hollow. At the time, DeMarco and her partner suspected it represented the killer’s belief about Debbie’s soul, her person, saying she was hollow inside, a shell without life and so there was no guilt or wrong in ending the shell’s existence on this earth.

  Now DeMarco wasn’t so sure. Feinstein’s faceless Hollower possessed awfully coincidental similarities. Even its name suggested uncanny coincidence.

  The second case equally unsettled, in its own way. Not that any murder wasn’t unsettling if she thought about it too long, but she didn’t. She couldn’t afford to. She wasn’t getting paid to be derailed by sentiment.

  In the second case, a neighbor found a woman named Savannah Carrington dead on her back patio with several shards of glass in her neck, arms, torso, and legs. Her death might have been ruled a suicide if not for the impossible odd angles of some of the shards. The police searched the premises and the yards of the surrounding properties and found nothing with a broken glass surface that might have accounted for her condition. However, small shards lay scattered about her and were also fished from her in-ground swimming pool. She slumped against the sliding glass door, her nightgown splattered with blood. More blood collected in sticky little puddles around her. The door against which her bloody cheek was pressed was intact; the glass hadn’t come from there, either. In fact, it had provided a surface for her to write a message about the one part of her body that was unscathed.

  My face. They thought she had written that after the killer had left, as she slowly bled to death in her backyard. Whoever killed Savannah Carrington (“for Chrissakes, Detective, he didn’t have a face”) gave her the impression that for some reason he wanted to disfigure her.

  DeMarco stared at the photo, at the dried drops of blood on the glass, at the wide-eyed glazed look of horror even death could not relax. She looked at the skinned head of Debbie Henshaw’s corpse, and the blood-speckled wall behind the collapsed body of Max Feinstein. She thought of the ever-widening ripples of sadness, bitterness, loss, and mistrust that these deaths brought to family, friends, colleagues. In essence, all murder victims shared a common injustice. All grieving relatives shared a common pain. All of society shared a loss—of its members, its security and safety, its understanding of itself.

  She sighed, rubbed her eyes, then let her gaze trail over the walls of the department. Most of the desk lights were off and only two other officers remained, poring over cases of their own. Behind one was a map of the Morris/Sussex County area.

  She rose slowly. Scooping up the files, she made her way over to the map and found Feinstein’s house. Then the Kohlar residence. Then the Duffy residence. Then the homes of the two cold
case vics.

  More ripples, with Feinstein’s house in the center and the other properties forming rings around it spreading outward.

  “Late night for you too, An?”

  DeMarco smiled down at Bennie Mendez. “Hey, Bennie. Yeah, late night for me. But I get my most genius deductions done after hours. Going to make a phone call, then go home and rest this brilliant mind.”

  He smiled up at her. “Your modesty rivals only your beauty, Detective.”

  DeMarco laughed. “See you in the morning.”

  “Night, genius.”

  DeMarco turned and walked back to her desk. Picking up the phone, she rang up the district attorney. “May? Anita here. I think I’m going to need a warrant for the Feinstein place . . . Yup, I’ll bring the files over tomorrow morning . . . Right, right. Thanks, May. I appreciate it. Night. . . . Yeah, you too. See you tomorrow.”

  She closed the files and tucked them into a relatively neat stack, then grabbed her keys and called it a night.

  The last of the regulars had cleared out of the Tavern by a quarter after eleven. Cheryl kept glancing at the clock as she finished wiping down the bar. She hoped someone, anyone—even Ray Gravelin, for Chrissakes—would wait until closing time with her. Dave wouldn’t be there for another twenty-five minutes or so, and she really didn’t want to be alone.

  Ray stumbled out at a quarter to midnight, and took the last of the barfly warmth and camaraderie with him.

  She remembered the voice at the bar, not quite male and not quite female, but somehow a chilling strain of each intertwined.

  Cheryl realized that for a long time it had been with her, watching her, close to her ear, a chill breath on her neck not like any breath of this earth. It moved freely in her private places, in her safe spaces, and had for months. It invaded her life, her mind, her sense of security. It wasn’t the first time.

  “It was tall, broad like a man, but the way it moved . . .”