The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  He cried because they were going to die in that yard, every one of them, because their sole plan of escape rested on him. Their entire plan since the beginning had rested on him, and he hadn’t had a clue any step of the way.

  And when the silent tears were done, he sniffed, wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve, and inched forward again. The picket behind him creaked, then groaned. When it fell, the rush of wind nearly tore him off his spot on the fence. He held on, eyes squeezed shut, until he heard the thud of wood smacking tile. Then he chanced another look behind him. The others came running. Erik held Sally’s hand, tugging her gently along.

  DeMarco grinned at him. “You’re better than we thought,” she said. “Nice bridge.”

  The break was a foot or so off the lawn, creating a slight incline from the tiles to the fence. But its weight rested sturdy on that fence. The others could cross there, and continue out the gate. That is, if Dave could open it.

  “Heh. I’m a regular mastermind up here.” He gave them a grim smile, and jerked his head toward the gate. “Almost there.”

  “Good luck, Dave,” Sean said.

  “Thanks.”

  Dave turned his attention back. The gate was all that mattered now. Three more pickets. Left foot, right foot, left foot. Two more. Cramped hand. Burned calf. Left foot right foot left foot. One more.

  The gate had no noticeable cracks or crevices, other than the keyhole.

  He remembered the odd tool in his belt loop, and wondered. Letting go of the wood with one hand, he reached for it and worked it free. He had the crazy notion then (why call it crazy?) that all of those strange tools laid out on that slab of obsidian were keys, and that whatever lay on the other side of the gate depended entirely on which key one used.

  Dave hoped to God he’d chosen the right one.

  Behind him, DeMarco had one foot on the fallen picket, ready to help him if he needed it. The others crowded close behind her.

  “Hold hands,” he told her.

  “Sorry?”

  “Hold their hands. I think . . . I think things are going to change.”

  DeMarco didn’t question him further. She took Erik’s hand and Sean’s, who took Cheryl’s. Sally looked up at him, tilting her head to the left.

  “Are we going home, Davey?”

  He nodded between breaths. The strength of holding himself up on the fence was starting to get to him. “We’re going to try.”

  “Our home, or its home?”

  “Don’t know, hon. I don’t know.”

  Dave pointed the tip of the key—he was nearly sure now that a key was exactly what it was—and it slid in, glinting burgundy off the gold plate.

  Nothing happened. Dave gave it a slight turn, and it clicked.

  He looked at them, all but Sally paused in anticipation, eyes expectant, each clutching a hand, chests rising and falling, lips chewed and an air of silent prayer hanging overhead.

  Dave wondered for a minute where the Hollower had gone, and why it hadn’t come out after them while they were in the backyard. It occurred to him that maybe it was there, though, all along. Maybe it was the little figure disguised, watching, waiting for them to fall prey to the lawn, waiting for them to scale the fence and sail off into the space between worlds.

  It occurred to him to that maybe by their drawing the Hollower into the physical world, all the deviations and changes and overlaps and wrinkles of reality it had caused, once fluid and subject to the Hollower’s whim, took on physicality, too. In whole or in part, its skewed perceptions had dried and hardened into nightmarescapes. When Dave opened that gate, he’d be unleashing whatever else had taken form from its mind.

  Dave was terrified.

  He thought he heard DeMarco say, “Do it” as he turned back to the gate. Do it, one quick shove, fast and forceful like ripping off a Band-Aid.

  With a grunt, he pushed the gate open, and a giant shark-mouth rushed forward, obscuring all else, roaring humid heat and the stench of rotting meat, and its long black gullet swallowed them all whole.

  For what felt like a long time, it lost them in the maelstrom of hate. It was being pinched and stretched into parts scrabbling for dominance, clawing each other in a race to the same goal. It was spread apart and snapped together, and the dark and empty spaces inside, in between, blinded it to everything else, even to the sense of them.

  They had done this. They had hurt it. Its hold on the reins of both worlds slipped. It could not have meat biting back. It would not tolerate their survival.

  The voids inside it roared. It screamed with them, and fought against them.

  And then it was whole again. Hungry. Angry.

  The Hollower had regained some control.

  As suddenly as they had been swallowed up, they found the long throat and the smell of decay and the thunderous din ceased. Dave found himself facedown on a lawn—the front lawn, maybe—with his arms flung over his head. He dropped his hands to leverage himself up and picked up his head. He moved slowly, aware of the blades of grass. Out front they were smaller, but that didn’t mean they were any less dangerous.

  He pushed himself up on his knees, listened for the angry hum of blackness, and heard nothing. He patted the grass to his right. It felt soft, cool, and a little dewy. Probably safe. The Hollower was done with that particular game, for now.

  In front of him lay the metallic key he’d used to open the gate, and without really thinking too much about it, he picked it up and tucked it into his belt loop. Then he got up and looked around.

  Cheryl lay half on top of Sean as if to protect him from falling debris, her arms curled around his head and back. DeMarco lay somewhat crumpled and awkward on the porch steps. Erik lay on the driveway. A trickle of blood had run from his nose and down the cheek turned to the pavement. His eyes were closed.

  No one moved. For one horrible moment, Dave thought maybe he was the only one left alive.

  Then Erik groaned and stirred, followed by DeMarco, who winced and rubbed her shoulder as she sat up on the step.

  “Everyone okay?” She got up to help Cheryl, who was shaking Sean gently. The boy’s eyes fluttered open. He had a small bruise on his cheek, below his right eye. Dave got up on shaky legs. He didn’t see Sally anywhere.

  His chest felt tight. His throat, made drier by heavy breaths, issued a weak cough when he tried to call her name. He jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  When he turned, he saw Sally standing behind him. She offered him a small smile, and he pulled her into a hug.

  “Thank God.”

  Cheryl squeezed his arm. “She was over by the gate.”

  Dave followed where Cheryl pointed to the side of the Feinstein house, to a normal-looking gate at the end of a normal-looking wooden fence to the backyard. In fact, when he let go of Sally and took a good look around the neighborhood, everything looked as it should. His car was parked on the street where he’d left it and another car, ostensibly DeMarco’s, was parked behind it. The other houses stood still, their doors locked, their curtains drawn, their lights out for the night. Garbage cans lined the curb, and they rattled soft rhythms in the wind.

  “Looks like we’re back.” Dave wasn’t sure how, but there they were. “Back where we started.”

  “I don’t get it,” Cheryl said. “Why did it let us go?”

  “Maybe it gave up.” Erik ventured a grin.

  “Maybe.” DeMarco gave Dave a skeptical look.

  Dave was inclined to agree with DeMarco’s doubt. He was pretty sure they hadn’t killed it. He wasn’t even sure if they’d hurt it that badly. So why had it let them go?

  “Something’s wrong.” Sean’s gaze fixed on the house across the street—his house.

  “What is it?” DeMarco put a hand on Sean’s shoulder.

  “That’s not my house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sean shook his head. “It’s . . . wrong. I don’t know.” He looked down one end of the street, then the other. “This i
sn’t my street. I think . . . I think if we were to go all the way to the end of the street on either side, we’d find dead ends. Or daylight. Or corners of the real world. But not this night, not this place. This isn’t my street.”

  Cheryl gave a suspicious glance around the neighborhood. “How can you tell, sweetie? It looks okay to us.”

  Sean pointed. “See my window up there, on the right? Left of that shutter there should be a scuff in the paint from where I hit a baseball and it bounced off the house. The way the moon’s hitting the house, you oughta be able to see it. And see Mrs. Parks’s whatchamacallit? The thing with the plants on it?”

  “Trellis,” Cheryl offered.

  “Yeah, trellis. There’s nothing wrong with hers. She keeps it clean and grows ivy on it. That one’s chipped, and it’s missing that piece of wood there. And that isn’t like the kind of ivy she grows. Isn’t like any kind of ivy at all, at least none I’ve ever seen.”

  Dave squinted, looking hard at the trellis between Sean’s house and the house next to it. It looked a little shabby, true, but nothing weathering wouldn’t have caused. But then, it was Sean’s neighborhood. He’d probably spent every nice summer day out in that street playing with his friends, soaking up the colors and fibers of his stomping ground. He probably did know every scuffed shingle and every painted trellis. And the kid had a point about the ivy. Now that Dave looked at it, it looked black, snaking through the diamond-shaped openings. It seemed alive with movement—breathing, pulsing, slithering, its leaves curling and uncurling.

  “And over there,” Sean added after a time. “Mr. Porticallo’s house, four down on the right. He’s always had an oak tree on his front lawn with one low-hanging branch. When I was eight, he used to let me and my friends climb it all the time.”

  Dave saw the lawn that Sean meant. There was a maple tree to either side. No oak.

  Sean shook his head. “It’s like the Hollower wants us to see that it changed just enough of this street to still own it.” He made a little fist, his face knotted in anger. “It didn’t let us go. It’s messing with us.”

  “He’s right,” DeMarco said, strolling over to her car. “This isn’t mine. Well, not all of it, anyway. The side mirror is broken. And the license plate—it’s off by two numbers.” She crossed around to the trunk, and tried her keys. They didn’t fit in the lock. “Figures. I have a shotgun back there.”

  “Speaking of numbers,” Erik added, “anyone notice that all of the houses—all that we can see, anyway—are numbered sixty-eight? Like Feinstein’s place, sixty-eight River Falls Road?”

  A breeze picked up, rattling the garbage cans even louder. It threaded through the trees and became dry laughter. It nipped at their clothes and hair, teasing them, and beneath its rustle, they heard words close to their ears, the murmur of a betraying lover before plunging the knife in.

  “Found you,” the wind said. “Found you, found you, found you . . .”

  “It’s here.” Sally shivered.

  Dave followed her gaze up to the roof of the Feinstein house.

  The Hollower crouched above them, its blade-legs digging into the shingles and its facelessness wrinkled in fury. Its chains whipped back and forth like the tails of cats. Up there, it looked impossibly large.

  “I’m scared,” Cheryl said.

  “You too?” Sean looked up at her.

  Dave said, “We all are.” Seeing the boy’s face, he added, “It’s going to be okay.”

  “I hope so,” Erik muttered from the other side of them.

  Dave hoped so, too.

  The Hollower scissor-clipped to the edge, then nailed itself with its own whips—symmetrical blows to the front of its hips. When it tore the barbed whips out again, the skin split, and shiny silver crablike claws broke through. They looked to Dave to be mounted on jointed stalks. When it pinched the air in front of it, the chittering of the hard substances scraping together echoed in the suburban canyon between the houses.

  Dave knew that sound. He’d heard it in dreams, and in the woods around the Tavern. He felt a little sick to his stomach.

  Above them, the Hollower shivered. Then it leaped off the roof.

  Fifteen

  Cheryl cried out when the Hollower landed a few feet from her and Sean. But then something changed in her face. She ushered the boy behind her, standing firm between him and the beast, her chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths. Dave saw her hands clench into fists.

  It occurred to him then that she meant to kill it, or die trying. Essentially, they had all made a pact to do that very thing, by agreeing to come to the house. Without weapons, without a plan, without any conceivable means of destroying the Hollower, they intended to stand up and fight or fall on that front lawn together.

  And Dave felt something change in him, too. A kind of calm settled over him—not one that dispelled fear or tension, but one that simply let him think clearly, without panic dissolving the corners of his confidence.

  Its head twitched back and forth. Beneath the blade feet, frenzied sprays of dirt and grass kicked up. Dave felt the cool blast of its rage, but also something else—a kind of intensity bordering on desperation. The Hollower meant to kill them, too. He had no doubt of that. But from the way the Hollower’s head seemed to focus above and around but not quite on him and the others, Dave got the impression something was wrong with it. It looked as if it sensed the bulk of them, but maybe not each of their individual presences. He wondered if they really had hurt it.

  It swung a whip knee-height in his vicinity, and Dave jumped over it. It swung back and he ducked. The momentum of the swing landed the whip against one of the porch posts. It yanked back, freeing the whip in a spray of splintered wood.

  From somewhere behind Dave, DeMarco fired at its head. The first bullet hit it at about the temple. Tiny veins of black spidered out from the hole. It howled, turned in her direction, and the veins stopped, then receded. The second bullet nailed it in what would have been the forehead. It bellowed again in pain and anger, but absorbed the bullet.

  It backhanded a whip toward DeMarco, and connected with her wrists. The whip wrapped around both of them, binding her hands together. The Hollower flung out a wave across the whip and on the other end, DeMarco cried out in pain. Then it yanked her off balance, and she stumbled forward onto the grass. Her feet scrabbled in the grass, but every time she made a move to roll over or get up, the Hollower yanked her off balance.

  It raised another whip above DeMarco’s spine, and she floundered.

  Suddenly, Cheryl dropped from the porch and dove underneath the Hollower. She plunged a splintered wooden porch spindle deep into its chest, then bolted away from it. The whip intended for DeMarco’s back fell with a heavy thud they could feel in their feet, making a small crater in the lawn.

  The Hollower made a few attempts to pull out the wood with its claw, but it seemed unable to get the proper leverage to keep the blades from sliding off. It untangled its whip from DeMarco’s wrists and tugged the wood from its body with a long, parchment-dry rustle. Its scream shook the trees and echoed between the houses. The claw snapped the wood in two.

  Dave glanced at the detective, who had rolled over and out of the way. He could see bleeding rings around the outsides of her wrists.

  The Hollower tore another whip’s barb out of the ground in a little flying tuft of grass and dirt. It swung the whip out in a wide arc. Cheryl bent backward out of range, lost her footing, and crab-crawled out of the way, toward Sean. He stood frozen, eyeing the monster. His lips moved, but Dave couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  It smacked at Dave, landing a barb in his thigh, and Dave cried out. In a panic, he yanked his leg away, and the pain sizzled down the length of his body. Blood welled up immediately, soaking his pants.

  Dave limped closer to Sean and the Hollower followed. Its hate felt tangible now, a chill that crisped the grass around its legs and crackled like static in the air around it.

  “It’s real,” Se
an muttered.

  It watched him, too, wary of the child for the first time. It snaked a whip out near Sean’s shoes, but didn’t close in. Sean didn’t move.

  “Kid, I think you better get out of the way.” From the corner of Dave’s eye, he could see the others drawing in, afraid to make a sudden move. Sean stood stone still, his little chest rising and falling with shallow breaths, his lips tight as he mumbled through his teeth.

  “My dad told me you fight big monsters differently. You need something special. Some lose their power when you stop believing. But you can’t help believing in something when it’s standing right in front of you. That won’t work here.” His voice sounded hoarse. “He said bravery works, but I’m scared. I don’t think silver bullets or crosses or garlic will make a difference to this thing. I don’t think it has a groin. Holy water, sunlight—it’s all useless. It’s not like killing monsters in video games.” At that point he did look specifically at DeMarco, then Erik. They were bleeding, both of them, and Dave suspected that Sean understood just how deadly the Hollower was.

  It growled low. A shiver shook its frame as it scissor-stepped toward Sean.

  “What are you getting at, baby?” Cheryl moved next to the boy.

  “Everything has a weakness, doesn’t it?” Tears formed in Sean’s eyes.

  “Sean, maybe you should back aw—”

  “My dad thought so,” Sean continued, oblivious of Dave’s words, “but he never saw anything like this, I don’t think. I saw what it did in the house. Its strength is going after our weaknesses.” His voice was flat, hypnotically monotone, as he spoke.

  He glared at the Hollower and said, “But I don’t think it can use our weaknesses against us anymore. Not now. Not all fleshy like that.”

  Sally poked him in the arm and when he jumped, she giggled. “It hates us. Hates this world. We chill it. Blind it. Starve it.”

  Sean nodded. “Being like us is its weakness.”

  The Hollower’s head spasmed, its claws grinding like angry brakes, its whips snapping above its head. It leaned toward them and screamed, and all around it, the property changed.