The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Erik swallowed several times and shook his head no, more to keep the world in focus than in answer to the question.

  His father finally looked up. “Look, I know you stole money from me. Don’t bother denying it, you little shit. The money’s gone, and you took it. Either spent it on that bitch, or on drugs. Either way, I’m gonna take it out of that scrawny little frame you call a body if you don’t cough it up right now.”

  “I don’t have it,” Erik whispered. He closed his eyes. He’d paid his dues to the man. He was done answering to him. Had given that up when the old man died.

  “You’re lying. I don’t like liars, Erik.” His father had a way of saying things sometimes where the tone suggested more threat than any words he actually used. What his father liked and didn’t like had always simply been a precursor to something more destructive. Sometimes he beat him up. Other times—and Erik often felt that these “life lessons,” as his father called them, were worse—he scared the hell out of him. Simply drove any sense of security Erik had away not by the act, but the threat of it—the implication of a violence that wouldn’t stop with a couple of punches to the stomach or a well-timed kidney shot. A camping trip turned hunting trip. Countless fixer-upper experiences with power tools. Driving lessons.

  It occurred to Erik that, much like the Hollower, his father hadn’t ever touched him during those life lessons. He hadn’t needed to.

  “You can’t hurt me.” Weak-sounding words leaked out of Erik, but in that moment, he felt that they could be true. He meant them in every sense. It couldn’t touch him, this thing pretending to be his father. Not physically, and not inside his head. Not anymore. He wouldn’t let it happen.

  “Like hell I can’t!” His old man set the bottle down on the floor next to the chair. “I’ll bust your teeth down your throat. I’m not too old for that, and neither are you, asshole.”

  “You’re not real.”

  He heard the sounds of his father fumbling with his belt. “I’ll show you how real I am.” The leather cracked and he flinched, squeezing his eyes shut.

  “You’re not real,” he whispered again, and when he opened his eyes, his father was staring at him nose to nose, the belt stretched between both meaty hands, his breath layers of stale beer and the ferment of pizza garlic.

  Erik swore in the intake of breath but couldn’t move. His father raised the belt over his head.

  “You can’t touch me.” He clutched the crowbar. “But I’d sure as hell like to see you try.”

  “Yes, I can,” the Hollower’s multivoice answered from the father-thing. “In the places that really hurt.”

  Erik heard chuckling and a chattery sound from behind him. He turned, and the whole room changed. He was in his bedroom now, the one he shared with Casey. He blinked, disoriented. Was he home?

  He saw the blood on the bed.

  Creeping closer, he also saw a picture of Casey propped in the center of the bloody sheets. He remembered taking it at a picnic three or four years before. She wore a white tank top and the way the sun lit her skin and hair, she glowed. He loved that picture of her.

  The glass holding it in was cracked, and the eyes and mouth had been scratched away by something sharp. A thin smear of blood streaked across her neck.

  That same multivoice said over his shoulder, “While you’re here, I’ll be there, hurting her.”

  Erik turned again and bolted for the door. He emerged into another familiar room. Another bedroom, he remembered. His picture of Casey was tacked to one of the sparse white walls above a bed made up with pale green sheets. The room held the faint odor of stale sweat, different than his father’s—cleaner, but tangy with frustration and strung-out nerves. He remembered the window behind his bed, reinforced with metal—no jumpers here, no, sir—and the scuffed tiled floor beneath his feet. He remembered it all, every detail he’d focused on as he counted his way through withdrawal. He’d both loathed and loved that tiny rehab room.

  He moved toward the door. There had been one particularly bad night when he’d pounded on it, half on the verge of tears, begging them to just let him go already, while his roommate lay curled up against the wall on his own bed.

  Erik pounded the door with his fist, tried the knob, and found it locked. “Shit. I swear, you son of a bitch, if you hurt her—”

  He stopped when he heard the other bed behind him creak. He wasn’t alone in the room.

  Dave headed down the hallway, figuring maybe Sean had led them to Max Feinstein’s bedroom. How they had gotten ahead of him, he could only hazard a guess. Beneath the gear-turning in his mind, though, he suspected he was alone precisely because the Hollower wanted him to be an easier target.

  But to think that way would start a train of defeatist thought in his mind about the Hollower’s abilities against his own, and he wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. Wherever the others were, he hoped they were together, and safe. If he could draw the bastard’s attention away from them by crashing the Hollower’s new stomping ground alone, so be it.

  A small table lay on its side on the floor. Next to it, the receiver of an unplugged phone rocked gently, its cord wiggling slightly with the movement. He had a strange compulsion to plug it back into the wall, jack and all, and when he did, he thought he heard muffled sound from the earpiece. He crouched and when he touched the phone, it stopped rocking. He brought the receiver to his ear and heard the shuddery breath of someone crying.

  “Sally?”

  “I—I used the towels. They’re ruined. I used them to s-soak up the blood. There w-was s-s-so much. It sh-showed me blood.”

  “Sally, where are you?”

  There was a click, and the receiver went dead in his hand. He dropped the phone and stood up. The door behind the fallen table was open now—wide open—and he could see a king-sized bed. An amorphous stain darkened the wall above the headboard.

  Max Feinstein’s room.

  He stepped inside.

  The room at the top of the stairs drew drafty breath in and out through unseen cracks in the walls. The dry flowered paper of its lungs, peeling away from the Sheetrock in some places, wavered in the slight breeze. Scuffs on the hardwood floor suggested that heavy pieces once furnished the room—a bed and dresser, maybe—but they had evidently since been moved. The vacancy of the room appeared out of place to Cheryl, as if, without life to sustain it, the house were falling to uneven decay.

  She rubbed her arms. “Cold in here.”

  “What do you think happened to the others?” Sean gazed around the empty room, bat clutched to his chest.

  “Don’t know, sweetie.” Seeing his expression, she added, “I’m sure they’re fine, though. Those two can handle themselves. They’re fine.”

  Sean didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on the closet door, which stood open a crack.

  “Sean?”

  “I don’t think that door was open when we came in,” he murmured.

  Cheryl crossed the empty room and took his hand. She knew the Hollower better than to offer the empty reassurance that it was just a closet, or that one of the drafts had urged the door open. Instead, she led Sean to the door and with the nose of the nail gun, nudged it open farther.

  Before them, a long, smooth concrete tunnel lay twenty feet or so ahead, then branched sharply to the left and dissolved into darkness over what should have been the exterior of the side of the house. The tunnel went behind and through walls, taking up space that should have been wood and packed fiberglass and metal and electrical wires. It was round—a throat, an intestine, a soft vaginal place deep in the house that accepted bad things and expelled monstrosities in return. She tried to shake off those thoughts, heavy as they were with a cloying sense of sex and death, and found it hard to disconnect those associations.

  “It might be a way back to the others,” Sean said.

  “Maybe,” Cheryl said, giving his hand a light squeeze. “Or farther away from them. This is all wrong. It shouldn’t be here—can’t exist here, not t
he way this house is built. I don’t think we should go down this way. I think we should go back out into the hallway and try to find them in another room.”

  Sean considered this for a moment, then nodded in agreement.

  Cheryl closed the door to what should have been a closet and crossed back to the door through which they’d first entered. It was closed now. She wasn’t all that surprised, she supposed. But it did startle her when she found the door locked—not the fact of it being locked, so much as the realization that they’d have to find another way.

  Through the tunnel.

  She looked back at Sean. His face was pale. A lock of hair stuck to the dewy sweat on his little forehead.

  Cheryl crossed back and opened the closet door. “Hold my hand,” she said. “And whatever you do, don’t let go.”

  “Believe me,” he answered, “I won’t.”

  Cheryl stepped through and immediately felt movement beneath her feet. Inside the concrete, it reeked less of claustrophobic sexuality, but that idea was replaced by a recollection of one of those funhouse tubes that rotated while people tried to walk through to the other side. It made her feel a little sick.

  The tunnel seemed to bend to her perception then; the concrete turned slowly by the frayed edge of the shadows, and Cheryl’s stomach turned with it in a seasick lurch. “Sean?”

  “I’m right behind you,” Sean said. If he had noticed the motion of the tunnel, he didn’t mention it, but his shuddery breath made his voice tremble. A pause, then, “Are you scared?”

  “Yes. You?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can do this,” she told him.

  They plunged forward into the darkness.

  When DeMarco pulled up in front of the Feinstein place on River Falls Road, the first thing she noticed was a car. Not Bennie’s car, she realized with a twinge of panic. The plate number sounded familiar—Kohlar’s? She tried to run it but she couldn’t get anything to come up on the computer.

  DeMarco frowned. There wasn’t any good reason she could think of why the computer wouldn’t work, but it kept blinking a prompt at her, patiently waiting for her to understand that she was alone out there.

  She glanced at the car again. It was possible that Mrs. Feinstein, the widow, had returned to clean up or maybe go through some of her husband’s old things. At this hour, though, DeMarco didn’t think so. Cop hunch, May would have called it.

  As she got out of the car, DeMarco felt for her gun in its holster. Cool metal beneath her fingertips steadied her a little. She surveyed the neighborhood. It was awfully quiet for evening. No one outside dragging the garbage cans to the curbs, no one tidying up the front yard or coming home from work. Come to think of it, it was awfully dark, too. How long had it taken her to get there?

  A terrible idea struck her—what if she had been in that shadowed spot on the road for longer than she thought? What if it hadn’t swallowed up just space and the cops who occupied it, but time, too? Or what if it hadn’t really been the guys who’d been swallowed up and excreted into some overdark, overquiet alternate version of River Falls Road—

  She closed her eyes and opened them. DeMarco had never been given over to wild flights of fancy, and couldn’t fathom why such an idea might possess her now, except that (“for Chrissakes, Detective, he didn’t have a face”) nothing about the case was normal or right. The whole situation had a fantastic quality to it. At the precinct, under the fluorescent lighting, the facts of her case files made her think of jigsaw pieces laid out on a table—pieces meant to fit eventually, tight and snug and proper. But out here, the house and the faceless maniac that maybe waited inside were ominiscent and menacing in the suburban night. It was almost as if she could hear its secrets through the walls.

  “I used the towels. They’re ruined. I used them to s-soak up the blood.”

  DeMarco drew her gun and moved forward toward the steps. From inside, she thought she heard crying.

  Erik turned and winced. Immediately, he felt sick. The figure on the bed lay curled in the fetal position, its face to the wall. The bony back, each vertebra outlined by the thin graying T-shirt, shook as the figure cried. It wore a grungy New York Yankees cap turned backward. Erik could smell the sour tang of hair oils and dry-mouth and nights sweating out the tension from muscle pain.

  The figure’s scrawny arms covered its face so Erik couldn’t see. That didn’t matter. Erik had seen pictures of himself from back when he was getting high. He remembered well enough that he’d looked like hell.

  And it was that version of him that lay on the bed.

  He fought the gorge rising in his throat.

  “Uh . . . ah, hello?”

  The Erik-thing didn’t answer. Erik reached for its shoulder, hesitated, moved in again. He jumped when the figure bolted upright and turned around.

  It had his face—most of it. The eyes and mouth looked swollen and sealed with crusted blood. Where the nose should have been, there was blackness, and issuing from the hole with each convulsion of the body, white powder tufted into the air.

  He could smell the cocaine, and he wanted it. He knew that the only thing keeping him from shaking the thing-version of himself for its snowfall of head-coke was the simple revulsion at the thought of actually touching it. He wasn’t sure, though, how long revulsion would serve as a deterrent.

  I could do it.

  An ugly thought, but he felt no real guilt. No one around to care, no one able to get to him in this weird alternate version of the Feinstein house, even if someone did want to help. He could get high in peace, in private, and no one would have to know. A little coke to clear his head. He’d be stronger, faster, sharper. He wanted that.

  He closed his eyes and saw Casey’s face behind his eyelids. When he opened them, his alternate self was gone. The night table between the beds had been cleared for neat, long lines of white laid out in soft rows.

  Everything would be better. Even dying high would be better than dying in a place he wasn’t even sure was really there, with no one but that bitch sobriety to see him through at the end.

  He thought of Casey again, and the way she felt in his arms, and of Dave and Cheryl. Of the kid, Sean, who looked terrified and small with his baseball bat. But mostly, he thought of Casey, and the Hollower’s threat to go after her.

  Erik sat down on the edge of the bed where he could remember lying night after night, staring up at the ceiling and counting. He leaned in close to the night table, so close that he could stick out the tip of his tongue and taste the coke if he chose. So close. So close.

  He inhaled a slow, deep breath, careful not to disturb the lines, then blew all the cocaine off the surface.

  Somewhere above and beyond the ceiling, he heard a frustrated wail, and he smiled in spite of the lump in his throat.

  Behind him, he heard a click and the familiar rusty squeak of his door opening. He got up and crossed to the doorway. Beyond it, a dimly lit stairwell, whose walls looked damp and almost shiny, led down to a door. Erik took a deep breath and headed down.

  Cheryl held Sean’s hand tightly as they moved through the tunnel. She had no idea how far ahead the tunnel went, or if it had an end at all. To her left, close to her ear, she heard steady dripping like water (blood) in a cave. She couldn’t see much beyond irregular outlines that seemed to melt when she got close to them.

  The tunnel had a dank, chemical smell, metallic in her throat. She became aware of the sudden absence of the dripping, and stopped to glance back. Cheryl hadn’t heard the door behind them close and wasn’t completely sure it had, but the dark stretched its legs out behind them, the empty room from which they’d come now lost.

  Cheryl reached out in front of her with the nail gun. A flash of purple from below drew her attention. The floor had fallen away from a platform on which they now stood. Far beneath it, blackness swirled in blackness, drawing thin streams of red downward like a drain. Cheryl cried out, momentarily unsteady on the platform, and Sean squeezed her hand. She c
ould feel its heat, the sweat of his palm, even the light, quick beat of his pulse in his wrist.

  “Don’t look down,” he whispered. Cheryl nodded, even though she doubted he could see, and fixed her attention ahead of her. Reaching out the hand with the nail gun again, she inched forward.

  The muzzle of the nail gun eventually brushed with something hard and she exhaled a surprised “Oh!” and accidentally discharged a nail with a small, sharp bang. She felt ahead and determined it to be a length of rough wood. Further search yielded a cold metal knob. She turned it and stepped into a closet. Sean packed in after her. A lightbulb like a bulging eye gazed down at them from the low ceiling, its rusty chain grazing her shoulder. A brass bar ran across the length of the closet about level with her neck, and musty, ragged clothes hung on old wooden hangers. The clothes retained the bulk of breathing chests and strong muscles. They hung tense with that careful, calculated stillness that masks and dolls seem to possess. She could imagine one of those moth-eaten sleeves reaching up and knotting tightly around her neck.

  She felt between them, shivering as their fabrics brushed her arms, for a door on the other side. There was nothing there, nor to either side. She looked up. No trapdoor to the attic, either. She gave the back wall a solid kick and swore under her breath.

  A sleeve reached up to touch her back, and she jumped.

  “Just me,” Sean said with an apologetic grin. “Are you okay?”

  No. No, no, no, she thought. It couldn’t be a dead end, not after all that. If they were in some goddamned maze between worlds, she was pretty sure that they would never manage to find their way back to the empty room. But she’d be damned if she would let them suffocate in some tiny closet quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

  “Hm-mm.” She couldn’t bring herself to say yes.

  “Now what?” Sean asked, breathless.

  She choked on the disappointment. “I guess that wasn’t the way out. We’ll have to go back.”