The Hollower (14 page)

“Hello.” Her voice was tiny, dried up in her throat so that it did little more than rattle around inside her.

“Hello, ma’am.” DeMarco smiled at her, but the old woman ignored the detective. Her gaze was fixed on Dave.

He glanced back at DeMarco and Dr. Stevens, then put on a smile for the old woman. “Ma’am, it’s, um, it’s good to meet you. I was wondering if maybe you could tell us what you know about Sally. Where she went, I mean.” He crouched down in front of her, his face close to hers. She smelled vaguely minty, and antiseptic.

“You’re her brother?” Each word sounded like a deliberate effort.

“Yes, I’m her brother. I’d very much like to find her.”

“Awfully warm for June.” She turned her head to gaze out the window and sighed.

Dave tried again. “Did you see where Sally went? Who she went with?”

“Yes, I did.”

A pause followed, and Dave could see DeMarco
nodding her encouragement from the corner of his eye. He pressed on. “Sooo . . . can you tell me about it, Mrs. Saltzman?”

She turned back to face him. “Claudia.”

Dave blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“My name is Claudia. Everyone around here calls me Mrs. Saltzman. I haven’t been Mrs. Saltzman in thirty years, and yet, it’s been almost as long since anyone has called me anything but.”

“Claudia, then. What happened to my sister?”

“It came and took her away.”

Dave felt his heart freeze up in his chest, and each beat sent out cold throbs of pain.

Mrs. Saltzman cast him a look that pinched her wrinkles into a frown of distaste before she addressed Dave. “Your sister was talking to it. I heard her. I could hear it, too, only not as well. I don’t think it was using real words, only impressions of words.”

“It? What do you mean?” DeMarco asked.

“I guess it told her to go into the hallway,” Mrs. Saltzman continued, ignoring the detective. “She didn’t seem afraid. She talked to it like she knew it.” A tiny spasm racked her frail little body and she coughed. For a moment, she seemed distracted, her eyes following something none of them could see.

“What happened next?”

She started humming, her voice high and unwavering like a child’s, stronger than the tiny death-rattle she’d spoken with.

“Claudia . . . ?”

The old woman suddenly found her fingers fascinating, turning them in the slice of dust-moted sunlight that streamed in from the window.

“Maybe Mrs. Saltzman needs her rest.” An “I told you so” hung off the tip of Dr. Stevens’s tongue.

“Not any place physical. In the noggin. That’s where it hurts you.”

Dave swallowed to work the freezing knot down his chest. “What did you say?”

For just a moment, Mrs. Saltzman looked up at him, and Dave would have sworn he saw no eyes at all, but instead twin sockets of ash that dusted her cheek when she blinked. The moment passed, though, with the blinking of his own eyes.

She offered Dave a smile. “You can’t kill it. It’s ageless, and it won’t die.”

A silent throbbing began in his temples, his own voice distant to him, muted by the cotton-hazy pulse in his ears. He knew what she meant. Those were Sally’s words. And the voice that had spoken to him—
that was Sally’s, too
.

Neither the doctor nor the detective seemed to notice.

Dave felt a sudden urge to reach out and touch her—no,
shake
her, to see if she was real. Instead, he said, “What won’t die? The person that took Sally?”

Her eyes focused on him and her thin fingers shot out and wrapped around his forearm. Dave was surprised by the strength of her grip; her fingers looked brittle enough to snap off under the force she applied to his arm.

“I followed Sally as far as the door. She was in the hallway, shivering. Shivering. The frost . . . and the cold . . . and she had no shoes, you know. Her toes could have frozen and fallen off. That happened to my uncle Murray—”

“Sally was in the cold? Where?” Dave interrupted. The throbbing in his head had grown to a pain that stabbed repeatedly behind his eyes.

“The hallway, silly. The hallway was cold with frost and ice and Sally looked cold. No coat, no shoes. And she sighed and clouds came out of her mouth. Then she got scared, and she ran to the fire stairs.” Mrs. Saltzman’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, her milky eye darting once around the room. “It was coming, you see.”

“What was?”

Mrs. Saltzman shook her head. “Not really a doctor. Thought it was at first—you know, with one of those face masks to keep the germs out? But it wasn’t a doctor, no, no, no. . . .” She let go of Dave and hugged her arms around her frail little body. “No, it wasn’t. You can bet your buns on that.” Mrs. Saltzman nodded as if to confirm her own story. “Made things cold. It was something from someplace else, someplace far away. Someplace where they don’t need faces.”

From somewhere behind him came a soft cough—DeMarco’s.

Mrs. Saltzman looked Dave dead in the eye. “You know what I mean about that, don’t you, Sally’s brother?”

Dave swallowed, his gaze locked with the filmy lens, the words dying in his throat.
What better place to admit to insanity than in a psych ward?
he thought. The air was heavy with an expectant pause.

“I—I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t. The man—” He choked on the term, as loose as it was to him. “Do you remember anything else about him?”

“Its feet pretended to touch the floor, but they
didn’t. I don’t think any part of it really touched anything in this hospital. It made no footstep sounds that I could hear.”

“I think this has been just about as productive as it can be.” Dr. Stevens gave the old woman a full-blown patronizing smile. “Thank you so much, Claudia.”

“Mrs. Saltzman, to you.” The shriveled bottom lip extended in a pout, and the doctor’s smile faded.

“Yes, well, come along, Mr. Kohlar, Detective. Mrs. Saltzman, enjoy your afternoon.” The doctor moved for the door with the detective in tow.

Dave rose, but before he could turn, the woman grabbed the hem of his jacket and tugged it, looking up at him with a sad sort of smile. “You know something . . .”

“Yes?”

A tear rolled down her cheek, cupped in the deep lines of her face. “It wants to kill you both.”

With some difficulty, Dave disentangled her fingers from his jacket and hurried to the door before she saw his expression. He was sure the grimace of pain from his pounding head wouldn’t be enough to mask the mounting terror.

“Sally’s brother, one more thing.”

He stopped and turned to the woman who, if it was possible, had withered even further as she sat on the bed. “What is it?”

“Now that I think of it—now that I’m remembering clearly, you see—when it spoke to her, it stole a voice. Tricked her. It sounded just . . . just like . . .” She turned her head toward the window again, and finished her thoughts in a barely audible singsong. “Just like you. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Just like you.”

Dave thought that Detective DeMarco looked thoughtful, scribbling away in her notebook as they passed through the doors and halls back to where they’d come from, and for a fleeting moment, he wondered whether he should mention the Hollower to her. If Cheryl and Erik backed him up, if it would help DeMarco find Sally—

But it wouldn’t. He knew that. DeMarco wouldn’t believe that some kind of faceless apparition had rippled the reality around Sally’s room just enough to sweep her up in its trench coat and spirit her away right under the nurses’ noses. No one in his or her right mind would believe that. He’d sound as crazy as . . .

As Mrs. Saltzman?
the inner voice accused him.
Is that where you were going with that? Because, wake up, buddy. Everything that woman said about Sally’s disappearance is true and you know it. You know it because you know exactly how that damned thing operates
.

He couldn’t tell DeMarco. She would never find
the Hollower. But the way she nodded distractedly when Stevens requested being kept in the loop, and her expression when she finally looked up, said something. Dave wasn’t a detective, but he was trained to read people. It was a job skill journalists inevitably picked up if they wanted to get their story. Before moving into the sports department of the paper, he’d done interviews, covered stories at the municipal buildings and the courts, and followed up on news leads, and in that time, he’d learned to pick up on what
wasn’t
being said. And DeMarco
wasn’t
saying that she knew something. Maybe she wouldn’t believe faceless monsters and bleeding clock parts and icy hallways, but she believed something, and whatever it was might lead her to Sally.

He hoped for that.

Otherwise, there wasn’t much else for him to do. He agreed to go home and wait (going back to work was out of the question now), and DeMarco promised to call as soon as something turned up. Dave reluctantly returned to his car and pulled away from the hospital.

The Hollower had done something to Sally and that was his fault.

Except that Erik had seen it, and so had Cheryl. Sally had seen it, too—Dave was sure of that now. And if he could believe Sally, he could add Max Feinstein to the list. That thing was no stress hallucination, and no tumor, either. It was after them (
“something from someplace else, someplace far away”
), and although he wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, there was some satisfaction in knowing what it
wasn’t
.

But the knowledge brought with it a new kind of fear, something almost tangible, sour on the tongue, thick and coppery like blood dripping down the back of his throat. He swallowed with difficulty, his mind another world away from the Mitsubishi Eclipse as it sped homeward. What had that thing done to Sally? Where had it taken her (
someplace where they don’t need faces, maybe
)? And when would it be coming for him? What would it do to him when it found him? Or Cheryl or Erik? Would it be different for each of them?

“
It wants to kill you
.”

Based on what he’d seen so far, that seemed to be a pretty fair assessment.

Dave made a left turn onto Bayberry Street without looking, then cruised through a red light at the next intersection, oblivious of the angry honks in his wake. Mrs. Saltzman had been right—dead on, in fact. It wanted to kill them all. But why? Why them? And if it was so all-knowing, so all-powerful, and it wanted them dead, why bother with the cat-and-mouse game?

He didn’t see the old man until he’d almost hit him. A bent, plaid-flanneled form topped with whipped-cream-white tufts of hair had shuffled out in front of the car about ten feet in front of him. Dave’s foot dropped on the brake, bringing the car to a squealing halt. For a moment, the old man disappeared beneath the hood of the car. Heart pounding in time with his head, Dave flew from the driver’s-side door around to the front of the car where the old man stooped over, an age-spotted hand with wiry-haired knuckles feeling along the ground for something.

“My God, are you okay?”

The old man met Dave’s inquiry with the soft patting of flesh against pavement.

“Sir, are you okay?”

The old man straightened up and jumped when he saw Dave. “Oh, pardon me, son. You gave me a fright.” A shaky hand waved it off, followed by a frightfully lopsided grin composed half of teeth, half of gums. “Dropped my lucky coin.”

Flabbergasted, Dave gestured at the car behind him. “I almost hit you with my car! Didn’t you see me coming?! Didn’t you hear me?”

The old man shrugged. “Can’t say that I did, son.” He nodded, and with a wave, shuffled back onto the sidewalk, heading toward the corner. “Good thing, though,” he added over his shoulder with a papery dry laugh. “Could’ve been wiped off the face of the earth, eh? Lucky for me.”

“Well, okay, then,” Dave called after, more for something to say. Shaking his head, he turned to the open door of the car.

“Too bad Sally couldn’t have been as lucky as me.”

Dave whirled around, eyes wide.

There was no one on the sidewalk.

Dave found the package leaning up against the door when he got home, a rectangular box one foot by half a foot in dimension and almost as thick as a shoe box. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. An affixed label displayed his name and address in bold type, an envelope taped alongside it. He picked up the package, puzzled. The envelope read, in scrolling script, “David Kohlar.”

He unlocked the door, dropped his keys and
jacket on a table in the front hallway, and strode into the kitchen to get a pair of scissors to cut the twine.

Dave set the package down on the kitchen table, studying it a moment before reaching for the envelope and sliding out the formal letterhead inside.

B
RINDMAN & SYMMES, ATTYS AT LAW
was printed in bold across the top, and beneath that, an address in Morristown. The message, neatly typed, read:

Dave frowned, skimming the lines over again for a clue as to the box’s contents. He and Max Feinstein had never reached a bequeathing level of acquaintanceship. Maybe it was the package Sally had been talking about in the hospital. Dave supposed that maybe the lawyers had gotten it off the shelf of Max’s closet before Dave had gotten there that day.

Dave’s gaze trailed to the package again. If it had to do with the Hollower—and he suspected that it did—then he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know what was inside. Yet something, maybe a glimmer of that old journalistic curiosity, drew his hand toward the package.

The sharp, shrill ring of the phone startled Dave. His hand snapped back and grabbed the cordless off the kitchen wall instead.