The Hollower (10 page)

The Hollower.

Its footsteps made no sound on the gray-blue tiles—not a scuff, not a squeak, not an echo. Its stride was confident, determined. She could feel its hate; frigid waves of it radiated from the Hollower’s body—not quite physical, but raw on the flesh inside the nose, like the harsh smell of winter.

It wanted her dead.

Her eyes grew wide, her feet frozen to the spot,
her leg muscles cramped, then weak and threatening to buckle beneath her.

“Leave me alone,” she managed to whisper through chattering teeth.

The whiteness of its empty face grew taut near the bottom in what she knew without a doubt to be a grin.

She willed all the strength in her body into her legs, forcing stiff movement, urging them to run down the hall.

Behind her, a chirp like squeaky sneakers in a gymnasium rebounded in the hallway, echoing. She wouldn’t look. Couldn’t.

Sally concentrated on the neon exit sign to the left, letting her vision fill with the crimson glow. She’d take the fire staircase.

Sally reached the door and pushed it open. It scraped against the tiled floor, sticking a little. She whimpered, but the sound got lost beneath the drawn-out squeals of claws running furrows in the walls.

It wanted her dead. She felt the sentiment cut through the static of noise and chaos in her mind. It wanted her dead, dead, dead, dead, dead . . .

She flung herself onto the staircase and skidded down two at a time, the din behind her reverberating, magnified by the acoustics of the stairwell. It was coming closer, scraping paint from the walls. She felt the vibrations, the shudders of hate, beneath her palms.

As she reached the second or third landing, she heard it over her head. She stopped short, touching the wall to steady herself, and looked up.

All sound ceased. The ceiling above her head was
empty. Her gaze trailed to the staircase. The thing was gone.

She noticed the ragged sound of her own breathing.

Nothing. Nothing there now. But where did it go?

“
I haven’t left you, Sally
.”

She let out a short yelp, and dove headlong down the stairs again, landing with a jump onto the marble pattern of the main floor. Dave! She’d have to find Dave. He’d know what to do. He’d know how to fix it.

She exploded through the side doorway, a tangle of wispy blond hair and flailing arms, into an unusually long alley between the hospital and the doctors’ offices in the next building over. Bars of light and shadow sliced at odd, unnatural angles over the Dumpsters and garbage cans, melding into blackness.

Dave. She had to find Dave. . . .

“
Saaaaaallleeee
. . .” The hollow voice, close to her ear, zipped like a strong breeze around her head. The garbage cans trembled with metallic groans. Her head snapped around, her heart pounding against the fragile bones of her chest.

The Hollower stood at the far end of the alley, between her and the main street. The wind whipped at the tails of its coat, drawing them out like great black wings.

It tipped its hat. A low, guttural sound that Sally took to be a challenge bounced back through the urban valley to her. She shivered.

Then she ran toward the opposite end of the alley. Behind her, the noise like nails on a chalkboard spurred her on.

Please, please, God, don’t let it be a dead end, oh please, oh please, oh please
. . . . If she made it that far to run
up against a brick wall, she knew the Hollower would do horrible things to her—invade her thoughts and bring the bad voices and pictures and hurt her.

Sally maneuvered around Dumpsters and stiff-looking lumps of rags as she navigated the long, long passage between the two buildings. She jumped to avoid a wire-mesh crate with several uneven, extended spokes, but a sharp end snagged the skin behind her ankle and opened a jagged rip. Caught off balance, she landed sideways on the ankle. She cried out in panic as pain shot up her leg.
God, it could be sprained, maybe broken, infected even, and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts
. . . She got up, panting heavily.

The sounds of pursuit behind her ceased.

Extending two wary hands into the gloom, she limped down what could only be another alley. She felt for but touched nothing. Her eyes adjusted only enough to see vague outlines of forms nearly transparent. Some moved out of her way.

Where was she? How would she ever find Dave?

Her hands scraped suddenly against rough brick, drawing cool pain across her palms to match the throbbing in her ankle.

“Sally.” It was Dave’s voice behind her.

Sally stopped. “I’m scared,” she said to it, finally turning.

“You should be.”

“So, Cherry, I heard you had a break-in last night.”

Cheryl wiped the bar down in front of the man, a middle-aged regular in a dirty red baseball hat and flannel shirt. Ray Gravelin, the Olde Mill Tavern’s
somewhat seedier answer to Norm Pederson and the Bloomwood Police Department’s local station handyman. He ran a grease-stained finger beneath his nose as he eyed her up and down, about a sheet away from being six to the wind. Mostly, he was harmless, but when he drank he sometimes gave her a look that could strip whatever dignity she had right off her body like a flimsy dress. At times like that, she took to avoiding him altogether.

She frowned, returned a single “Um-hmm,” and scooped up a tip as she made her way down the bar to the hippie. He looked up gratefully as she approached.

“Hey, there. Can I have a Coke?” His eyes looked red, strained, as if maybe he’d been crying.

“Everything okay?” she asked, offering a smile.

He molded his lips into a lopsided grin. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”

She knew the boy came in here against his own better judgment, against the advice of his N.A. group, and probably against the will of the girlfriend he’d shown her a picture of once. He didn’t drink, but rather soaked up the atmosphere like a sponge, watching people indulge in vices forever out of his reach. Maybe he wanted to live vicariously. Maybe it was a form of self-punishment. Cheryl wasn’t sure. But he was a sweet guy, with sad eyes and a warm smile, and if he chose to spend his time under her semiprotective eye drinking Cokes all night, that was fine with her. There were far worse things he could be up to on a Saturday night, in Cheryl’s opinion.

“Okay, one Coke it is, sweetie.” She smiled at him.

A drunken slur punched into her thoughts.
“Cherry, c’mon! Tell us about this break-in last night! What happened?” Ray swayed ever so slightly on the bar stool. The door opened behind him and Dave Kohlar walked in, taking a seat next to Erik and smiling vaguely at them both.

“Nothing happened, Ray,” Cheryl replied more pointedly than she meant to. “Just some nut messing around.” She forced a smile that felt fake and oversized on her face. “Nothing the police thought—”

“Police?” Dave interrupted, suddenly concerned. “What happened?”

“Cherry had a break-in,” Ray explained, heavy lids blinking several times to bring his eyes into focus. “Some nut with a knife.”

“God, are you all right?”

She laughed uneasily as she filled a chilled glass of ice with soda and dropped a wrapped straw next to it in front of Erik. “I’m fine, boys, really.” Without asking, she filled a shot glass with tequila and put it in front of Dave. He waved away the change from his money, and, tossing him a smile of thanks, she continued. “I thought I heard someone in here, saw his knife on the bar, but I made it just fine out to the car and over to the station. The police checked the bar out and found no trace of the guy. No knife, no nothing.” Her gaze traveled to the empty square of wall where the Carmen Electra poster had been. The police had rolled it up and taken it with them. Other than that, there hadn’t been any evidence to collect. She hoped to God no one noticed.

“No big deal!” Ray shouted, punctuating his comment with an overly boisterous laugh. “If I din’ know Cherry better, I’d say she was pulling their legs.”

“Someone breaking in here with a knife doesn’t sound like much of a joke,” Erik mumbled over his Coke.

“Na-na-no,” Ray replied, shaking his head. “You doan gettit. She”—he pointed a clumsy finger at Cheryl—“told th’ police that some freak—black hat, gloves, trench, the works—talked to her an’ shit, but the man din’ have no mouth. That’s what Jenks and Penn told me. No face, right, Cherry?”

Dave coughed, spraying the tequila in front of him. Erik put down his glass slowly, but the glass tipped once, sloshing soda on the bar, before he caught and righted it.

Ray didn’t notice anything amiss. He kept babbling on about the police report. But Cheryl noticed. She saw pure and utter panic in the men’s eyes. Dave’s hand visibly shook as he put the shot glass back down on the bar, and Erik kept wiping his palms on his jeans, as if trying to rub off evidence. For a moment, the noise of the bar faded out, the picture out of focus everywhere but where Erik and Dave stood.

They know something. They know
.

But how could they possibly? Do they know the guy? Or is one of
them
the knife-wielding freak with the mask?

Erik tried to sop up the spilled soda with bar napkins. “I—I’m sorry, Cheryl, I . . . I’m just—” He offered a tentative look of recognition to Dave, but Dave avoided his gaze and busied himself with fishing his keys out of his pocket. She reached over the bar and put a hand on each of their arms. Suddenly, she felt hot, her mouth dry.

“You know,” she said to Dave, beneath the din of Ray’s story. “You know who I saw.”

His bottom jaw sagged, then worked out a word, soundless. It looked to Cheryl like “I . . .”

“What’s wif you guys?” Ray’s voice carried over through the haze, and the bustle of the bar suddenly burst to life again. As he leaned toward them, his body tilted at a crazy angle off the stool, and his foot came down suddenly in a knee-jerk reaction to keep from falling. Erik flinched.

“Miss? Miss, I’d like a beer. . . .” Some
GQ
-dressed thirty-something and a crowd of his friends huddled around a single empty bar stool near Ray took the break in the conversation as a chance to order drinks. Cheryl only half registered their order.

Dave stared at the door.

“Dave?” When she felt Dave flinch and resist her touch, the breath caught in her chest.

He turned slowly to face her, his eyes vacant, his mouth hanging limply open.

“Who is he?” Genuine fear brushed her neck, her shoulders, a promise of bad things to come. She felt his helplessness. It sank like a chill beneath her own skin and spread outward.

“I—I don’t know. It . . . it’s not—”

“Please tell me.”

“Miss? Hello? Earth to the bartender! We’d like some beers here!”

She turned a fiery glare on them and they collectively shrank back. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she replied through clenched teeth, then turning back to Dave, “You’ve seen the guy? Tell me.”

“I—I’m sorry. It’s my fault, I guess. It . . . it’s not . . . it’s not what you think.” He pulled gently from her grasp and shouldered past a crowd of college coeds coming in on his way to the door.

“Dave, wait! What is it, then? Dave!” She felt tears crest her lashes, blurring his retreating form.

He paused at the door, meeting the gaze of several curious patrons before meeting hers. His mouth was twisted in a grimace, and guilt shone painfully bright in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said. His words were nearly drowned out by the sudden blare of classic rock from the juke box. “I don’t know what it is.” And he slipped out into the night.

Cheryl turned to Erik, but he was already making his way through the crowd to follow Dave.

Dave stumbled away from the bar and toward his car. Behind him, he heard a rise and fall of noisy drunken sound. Someone had followed him out. He didn’t turn around.

“Hey! Hey, stop a minute, will ya?”

Dave kept walking to the car. His hands shook and he had trouble getting the key in the lock. He managed to get the door open and fell into the driver’s seat. Only then did he glance up.

A figure stood by his window and he jumped.

It was the kid from the bar. He tapped on the glass. “Please. I wanna talk to you for a minute. Just a minute.” The voice, muffled by the glass and probably by the tequila in Dave’s head, sounded laced with desperation. With
need
. So much so that for a minute, it reminded Dave of Sally. He rolled down the window.

“Dave, right? I’m Erik. I figured—I mean, we were never really introduced, and, well . . . I’m Erik.”

“Nice to meet you.” The words tasted stale in his mouth.

“So much for pleasantries,” Erik said, and thrust his hands in his pockets. “Look, I’m not sure how to say this, but . . . if you’ve seen that thing, whatever it is, please tell me. I’m not asking for details—whatever your vice is, man, that’s all you, and it’s none of my business. But I need to know. I need to know it isn’t just me.”

“Vice?”

Erik gave him a sheepish grin. “Mine was coke. Been sober five years, eight months. Almost nine.” In the moonlight, his cheeks grew ruddy. “I call that thing Jones, ’cause every time I see it, it makes me want to get high again.”

Dave exhaled slowly. “My sister calls it the Hollower.”

There was a pause as Erik shifted his weight. “So it’s real, then? I mean, a real thing? What the fuck is it?”

“I don’t know—I meant it when I said that I didn’t know.” Dave glanced at the door. “I thought it was only me—well, me and Sally, my sister. And only her because of me. And maybe Cheryl because of me.”

This time, Dave heard that desperation creep into his own voice. “I can’t let it do to Cheryl what it’s doing to me. Or to Sally. I can’t be responsible for one more. It kills people. It tortures them in their heads and it kills them.”

Erik nodded solemnly and shifted his weight to his other foot. “What do we do?”

“Stay out of its way. Stay alive. Maybe stay away from each other.” Dave turned the key in the ignition and they both jumped at the volume of the radio. He smacked at the knob and turned it off.

Erik leaned in the window. He smelled like Right Guard. His face was flushed despite the cold night air. “What if that’s what it wants? Divide and conquer, man. You and I, at least that’s something, some comfort in knowing we’re not crazy. But Cheryl, man—she’s alone.”