The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Cheryl crossed the bar to the dining area. She began to place the chairs upside down on the tables, her ear tuned to the silence of the bar, listening for disruptions in the after-hours hum of the bar’s appliances.

  As she upended the last of the chairs, it came to her soft and unobtrusive—the tinkling music of wind chimes.

  She straightened and turned, and found she was no longer in the bar.

  At least, not in the Olde Mill Tavern that she knew. The oblong shape of the bar rotted, its rough wood waterlogged and stinking now of lake things left to decompose—dead fish, decaying seaweed, baby doll arms floating in the shallow pools close to the shore . . .

  Baby doll arms? That had been long ago, too far in the past. A past long gone. A past as hazy as the fog that settled low around the now-rotted hull where night after night she served drinks to leering men who talked to her breasts and then went home and tucked their little girls in and swore to protect them from men who might tempt them with dolls.

  She blinked hard. When she opened her eyes, the bar remained, but she could see more of where she stood. She felt the warm grainy texture of sand between her toes and the slight tug of early sunburn across the backs of her bare shoulders. The white legs of the lifeguard stand reached up into the sun glare. From the crossbeam by one of them, the metal chimes knocked around in the midsummer breeze. All around her the sun was dazzling, but she saw a stretch of beach before her and heard the lapping of water against the gray-green wood of the dock a ways out.

  Cheryl stepped backward and cool water splashed the backs of her legs. She cried out, turning in the water. The shimmer of sunlight hazed the world beyond the dock, a far shore lost now, if even a far shore existed out there.

  She remembered this lake. Not a patch of beach in Lakehaven but a shore farther back, farther away. She remembered the ice cream man’s truck came at three o’clock and if you stood perfectly still and no boys splashed loudly nearby, the little iridescent fish would swim right up to your ankles and dart between your legs.

  She turned back to the shore, the rest of the Tavern faded away now into sun sparkle. The water around her calves was cold, colder. She tried to wade toward the warm sand again, but found she couldn’t move. Cheryl looked down. A thin sheen of ice covered the water. A few little fish, keeled to one side and caught frozen, stared up at her with bulging eyes glazed in death. The skin of her legs grew pale, and the water hurt her instep, her toes, and her ankles. The sand slid beneath her feet, slimy and slippery.

  “Hey, little girl. Do you like dolls?”

  Her head shot up. She saw shiny shoes and black-clad legs. A glove floated obediently where a hand should be at the cuff of a sleeve crusted with cold. The glove held a doll.

  The man stepped forward toward the water, which reached the shore by his shoes but seemed to shrink away from actually touching them.

  This time Cheryl was afraid. This time she didn’t want the doll, didn’t want the man with the big towel in his trunk to look under her bathing suit.

  She stood in the center of the ice, unable to move, unable to run, her own breath frost in her throat, her scream an icicle lodged deep, cutting off the air. Fear crystallized through her body.

  Cheryl looked up into the glare of the sun, which had rubbed the features of the man’s face right off his head. She kicked as best she could at the ice that bound her ankles. The skin of her shins split against the sharp edges of ice. The blood felt first hot, and then cold like lake water dripping down her legs.

  The figure took a step closer. Tears threatened to break free from her lower lids and spill down her cheeks in panic.

  “Are you alone, Cheryl?” The man spoke with the voice of the thing in the bar, the thing Dave had called the Hollower. The voice, androgynous and chilly, formed the words of the question as if they were foreign and took a great deal of effort to pronounce.

  Cheryl felt the acceleration of heartbeats in her chest, pounding arctic pain against her breasts.

  “What are you?” she whispered.

  “I am ageless.”

  “Leave me alone.” She closed her eyes, trying to press out the sight of the rotted bar, strewn across the sand like an old shipwreck, and of the Hollower holding the doll out to her and tracing her body with eyes it didn’t really have.

  “You are never alone. I will always be with you.”

  “No.” The word barely made it past her lips, and until it answered, she wasn’t sure if she’d even spoken out loud.

  Its laugh echoed over the lake behind her, and also over the lake that some fleeting part of her mind knew to still be out there beyond the fog, a real lake and a real town of Lakehaven, not a phantasm of the past.

  The Hollower stepped onto the ice toward her.

  Erik was waiting on the front step of a pleasant-looking lake bungalow when Dave arrived. The boy’s hands were shoved into faded jeans pockets, and he wore a leather jacket to brace himself from the wind blowing off the lake. He nodded a hello and jogged down to the car as Dave pulled up to the curb.

  Once in the passenger seat, he said, “I’m not sure what to say. I’m glad you called. That’s something.”

  “I wish I could tell you I had a plan for stopping this, but I don’t.” Dave turned at the end of the road toward the direction of the bar.

  “But you do have information, right?”

  Dave nodded. “Not much. A start. Maybe you and Cheryl will be able to come up with something I couldn’t.” A pause. “I think the Hollower is getting more aggressive, more intrusive. I think it’s done toying with us.”

  Erik’s breath came in excited little puffs of air. “I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare the shit out of me.”

  Dave snorted. “Yeah, you and me both, man.” They settled into silence for a moment, and then he said, “It took my sister.”

  He felt Erik’s wide-eyed gaze search his face. “You’re serious? What do you mean, took her?”

  “I think it . . . changes things. Bends reality, or the way we see reality. Warps our perception. It took her right in front of the night nurses, and no one ever saw a goddamned thing.” Dave shrugged and turned left. “Took her right from the hospital.”

  “Hospital?”

  Dave could tell from the tone that the question was born of genuine confusion. But he felt that ache in his chest, that familiar mix of embarrassment and guilt and defensiveness and sympathy. He slowed to a stop at a red light and glanced at Erik. “It’s a long story. My sister is ill. She sees things. Hears things.”

  The glow of the traffic light flushed their faces through the windshield. Erik took in his words with a nod. “Heh. Yeah. Don’t we all?”

  The ache in Dave’s chest eased. The light changed and he pulled forward again.

  “Anyway, I talked to her roommate, who said she saw what happened. She told us the Hollower chased Sally—that’s my sister—right down the hall of . . . of some other hospital that only she and Sally could see.”

  He wanted to go on, to say he thought it was somehow significant that the Hollower didn’t notice or bother Mrs. Saltzman at all, before, during, or since, so far as he knew. But he wasn’t quite sure what the significance of that was, or how, as a piece of the puzzle, it fit the picture he had so far.

  “I’m not sure I understand.” Erik frowned.

  “I’m not sure I do, either. I think the old lady was saying the Hollower changed the hallway somehow, so Sally never saw the nurses and they never saw her. Like maybe it superimposed its own version of the hallway, a hallway from its dimension, on the one Sally was in. At any rate, the hospital told me the nurses’ station was staffed all night, and no one saw Sally leave. The old lady said she never saw any nurses—not in that version of the hallway, at least.

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought since then. I considered that maybe she was parroting back what Sally told her about the Hollower. I mean, I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that if she was in the hospital with Sally in the first place
, she probably sees and hears things that aren’t there. But I got a phone call, too. From Sally, maybe. From the Hollower. I don’t know which. But it has her. I’m sure about that. And I have to get her back.”

  He felt Erik’s eyes on him again, expectant, full of a question he wasn’t sure he should ask.

  “I don’t know if she’s dead,” Dave answered in a flat tone. “I really don’t know anything, except if I hadn’t been so fucking stupid and unwilling to actually do something about all this before, she might still be safe.”

  “You don’t need to have all the answers. Ain’t your fault, man.”

  Dave gave him a sad smile. “You know that for sure?”

  “I know we go through life beating ourselves up about stuff that we really can’t control, and never could.” Something in the boy’s tone made Dave steal a glance at his passenger, and he noticed Erik’s expression darkened for a moment. “That’s what destroys people. That’s what eats away at them over the years. Guess that’s what makes them empty. Hollow. Ready to be filled with all the bad luck and the accidents and those little slips of sanity that ruin everything.”

  “Susceptible to the Hollower, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, exactly.”

  It made sense. Dave buried everything beneath other people’s baggage, their useless springs and coils and junk of the past he had never been able to change. Obviously Max Feinstein had carried around some pretty heavy pieces of the past—carried them until he couldn’t bear to hold them up anymore. He wondered what Erik beat himself up about, and Cheryl.

  A thoughtful silence settled over the car like a soft snow, muting conversation. But when they rolled into the parking lot of the Tavern, he felt the change almost instantly—a tang in the air, a hum he felt in dull pricks on his skin, a nearly audible hum in his head.

  “Something’s wrong,” Dave said, rolling to a stop in the closest space. He felt a greasy stirring of nausea in his stomach. “Where is she?”

  Erik glanced around the parking lot. “That her car?”

  Dave craned his neck to follow where Erik was looking and discovered an old Ford Taurus. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “So she’s still here, then.” Erik opened the door and got out. “Maybe she’s finishing up inside.”

  Dave followed, but he knew something was happening. “No, something isn’t right. Can’t you feel it? Like being seasick.”

  “I was gonna say, ‘like being hungover,’ but yeah. Thought it was just me.”

  The two made their way to the door and Dave knocked. Several seconds stretched to a minute, then two, and Dave knocked again. “Cheryl?” He tried the door, but the knob wouldn’t turn.

  “Cheryl?” he called, loud enough, he hoped, to be heard through the door. “You still in there?” He tried the knob again, threw his shoulder against it in case it had swollen and stuck, jiggled the knob again. Nothing.

  “Door’s locked,” Dave said, frowning. “Maybe I should call her? Phone’s in the glove box.”

  Erik nodded, and they got back in the car. Dave dialed up the number for the bar, a number his companion seemed faintly amused to discover he knew by heart. Immediately an electronic voice informed him, “I’m sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number, or dial zero for assistance,” in a pleasant simulation of human politeness.

  “That is the number, damn it.” Dave shook his head. “She’s in trouble. She can’t hear us.”

  Erik looked at the locked door and ran a hand through his hair. “Shit. What if it’s in there with her?”

  They became aware, by degrees, of a brightness coming from beneath the door. It looked to Dave like the sun had been captured and poured into the barroom. He and Erik exchanged a look. And then they heard laughter.

  “Honk the horn.”

  Dave leaned on the horn.

  There was a faint bleating sound, like a hurt animal, and at once, the illusion dissipated. Cheryl was back in the Tavern, back on the dusty tiled floors of the dining area, back amidst the forest of upturned chairs.

  Blood from small cuts soaked through the shins of her jeans and dried crusty, adhering her socks to her ankles. Her feet felt frostbitten.

  She made her way with slow and painful steps across the bar and out the door, not bothering to shut the lights or lock up or even grab her purse. Outside, she sank to the step and curled her legs underneath her. For a long time, she breathed in the cool autumn air and let it go in grudging little puffs. All strength had left her.

  She was vaguely aware of Dave jogging from the driver’s side of his car to her, and of Erik McGavin getting out on the passenger side. When Dave touched her shoulder, he said something her mind couldn’t quite wrap around. She looked up at him.

  Then she started to cry.

  Nine

  On the way back to his apartment, Dave cast worried glances in Cheryl’s direction every so often to make sure she was okay. Erik hovered over her from the backseat. She didn’t seem to notice. Slumped against the car door, her arms wrapped around her body as if to keep warm, she stared out the window. Tears glinted in the moonlight.

  Finally, she spoke, so low Dave missed it. She cleared her throat and tried again. “It tried to kill me tonight.”

  “Want to tell us what happened?” Erik patted her shoulder.

  She didn’t look at either of them. “When I was a girl, my brothers used to take me swimming at the lake near where we grew up. Place called Cutlass Cove. I used to love swimming there.”

  Dave noticed fresh tears brimming in her eyes.

  “One day a man . . . gave me a doll. Asked me to come play with him. I was little, seven years old. He said I had a pretty bathing suit but it was all wet and it wasn’t good for pretty little girls to sit in wet bathing suits. He had a big towel in the trunk of his car and said if I let him dry me off, I could keep the doll.” She shook her head. “He touched me. Dried me off. Just dried and touched and dried and touched. For about twenty minutes. Then wrapped me in the towel and sent me on my way. Police never found him. My parents never talked about it. My brothers never knew.”

  Neither Erik nor Dave said anything, but Dave reached out and gently touched her hand.

  “He changed everything,” she whispered, and at first Dave didn’t know if Cheryl meant the man who had molested her or the Hollower. Before he could ask, she continued. “The bar, the whole room, everything was gone. I was standing in the lake—that lake, and I was wearing a bathing suit—that wet bathing suit. And it was there with a doll and it told me”—the tears spilled down her cheeks now and she sniffed—“that it would always be with me. Dave, it’s never going to leave me alone.

  “I think it gets further and further in your head, digs through the layers, and uproots the most buried things.” She wiped at the tears with the back of her hand. “The things that can hurt you the worst.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  She waved away his words. “Just tell us how to kill it.”

  “I don’t know how,” he answered softly.

  She looked at him. “Then tell us what you do know.”

  Across the street, the Feinstein house stood dark and still. Sean knew because he’d gotten up to check a few times, expecting to see the monster across the street peering out at him from Mr. Feinstein’s old bedroom.

  He didn’t. Maybe the Hollower was out for the night.

  After his mother had popped her head in to kiss him good night, he lay for a long time, repeating the Warding Ritual with slow, deliberate motions, over and over.

  It had lied to him. It would have killed him if it could have. Pumped his hand full of venom and the pediatrician he went to wouldn’t have been able to explain Sean’s death to his mom or anyone else.

  Sean shivered and glanced at the window, tempted to sneak out of bed again and check on the house. He felt cold and kind of icky. No one had ever wanted him dead before. It made him feel sick and a little embarrassed, like how he imagined the kids might have felt
in that video they’d watched in school about strangers who touched children or offered them Magic: The Gathering cards or PS2 games if they got into their cars or followed them into dark alleys.

  He’d known a kid in school, a fifth grader the size of a small pony, who liked to threaten and sometimes knock to the ground anyone unlucky enough to get in his way. They called him Pach. They’d always called him Pach, although Sean couldn’t remember why. Sometimes Pach told him he was going to kick Sean’s ass. Sometimes he looked like he meant to. But no one—not even Pach—had ever wanted him dead.

  Sean glanced at the window again. It had to be after midnight, but he wasn’t going to get any sleep. He climbed out of bed and tiptoed to his door. The reassuring blue glow of his mom’s bedroom TV flickered irregularly over her sleeping form. She would probably wake up at some point to turn the TV off. In the meantime, though, the sound of Lifetime’s reruns of old sitcoms made him feel less alone, even from across the hall.

  His hands felt cold and kind of clammy, so he wiped them against the flannel of his pajama pants. His stomach lurched as he crept back to the window. If it was out there—or worse, if his dad was out there again—Sean was fairly sure he would be sick.

  He looked out the window again and scanned the front lawn, the street between them, then his own lawn. Nothing there. The front door of Mr. Feinstein’s house stood open, though. It hadn’t been open before.

  Sean sighed. It didn’t matter, when he thought about it. In the Feinsteins’ house, in the living room, in his own bedroom, even—the Hollower could be anywhere it wanted, anyone it wanted, at any time. He’d never be safe. He’d never be sure.

  Not unless he killed it.

  He’d been told the Warding Ritual could keep the monsters away. Part of him knew what his dad taught him was kids’ stuff, like the Tooth Fairy—and maybe like Santa and the Easter Bunny (which he suspected but was unable and kind of unwilling to prove—some things he just didn’t want to take the chance of messing up). But he’d wanted to believe then—still did, to an extent. In a way, it was like his dad was still looking out for him.