The Hollower (2 page)

A twinge of guilt flickered just long enough for Max to notice it, then blew out. The Group. He’d miss that damp little basement room with the swinging lightbulb and the folding chairs that never warmed beneath the heat of his backside. He smiled to himself. The memory-scent of hospitality’s coffee and Entenmann’s cookies on the card table lingered, still fresh in his nose.

His friends from the Group were the only ones who hadn’t abandoned him. He wondered if they would see this decision as his abandoning them. He didn’t think so, though. They understood each card in his deck, one loser hand after another. Getting laid off from a job he’d held for twenty-three long years. The physical ailments that kept him from sleeping. Gladys leaving last fall. The throaty winds at night that made wind chimes out of barely audible words. The bills. The Group understood those things.

And if they were the only problems, he might have felt simple comfort in the understanding of his friends. But they weren’t. The far worse problems (
Gladys, they aren’t really
nightmares,
per se
), they didn’t understand. Well, Dr. Stevens certainly didn’t. None of them did. Except Sally Kohlar. And she had assured Max that her brother understood, too. They knew about the faceless thing that haunted him in every facet of his life. And he couldn’t bear to confront
it one more time. Not even once more. Nobody who
understood
, nobody who
knew
—could ever hold that against him.

The blue tie with the black S-hook pattern was Gladys’s favorite. He tied it carefully, smoothing it over his chest.

He felt calm. It was the first time he’d felt that calm in years. He’d even managed to work up an appetite that morning and had cooked himself up a damn good plate of bacon and eggs, if he did say so himself.

After the video, it was like an albatross had dropped from his neck and gravity had dissolved in the cosmos. He was alone with his thoughts, and relieved that he could find that calm again, to hold on to.

The Group members rematerialized before his mind’s eye again, but this time no guilt followed. Their mouths moved without sound and they offered encouraging smiles. They were shouting to him, shouting approval. They knew. Understood, all of them.

He had polished the shotgun the night before. Now, fully dressed, he sat on the edge of the bed next to it, suddenly shy. He felt like he was fifteen again and looking to slip an arm around his girl. The gun would make no protest when he picked it up. The metal felt good in his hands—cool, smooth, like skin on a chilly spring night before the goose bumps rise. His old girl.

With slow and deliberate movements he opened the night table drawer, took out the box of twenty-gauge shotgun shells, and loaded her. The letter to Gladys he produced from his shirt pocket with a flourish aimed
to please no one but himself, and he propped it neatly against the lamp base on the night table.

Then Max wrapped his lips around the gun (
metallic taste, like blood, but cold
) and was surprised how natural it felt. He’d expected it to be clumsy, oversized somehow. But his old girl’s lips were smooth and the barrel slid right in, just as deep as he was comfortable.

The phone jerked him from his reverie and his finger twitched on the trigger. His heart shifted gears suddenly and pounded triple-time to the shrill little bell. He waited, counting off the rings, eyes closed and tongue tasting the sour metal that pressed against it.

Three, four, five
. . . The phone stopped after eleven rings. Eleven rings and then a rush of soundlessness that dampened even the cheerful warbling of birds outside.

Impulse drew his eyes to the window on the left wall. Dark treetops speckled the bottom half of the sky right above the sill. Exhaust-pipe wisps of racing clouds stretched pleasantly around them. From his place on the bed, Max couldn’t see the street. He didn’t have to. He knew
it
was watching, waiting, a pallid oval of nothingness tilted quizzically to one side and up toward the bedroom.

Not even one more time. This was it.

It took very little pressure to squeeze the trigger. It was almost as if another finger pressed against his own, guiding him.

Had Gladys, or anyone else for that matter, still been in the house, she might have heard dry chuckling and the hollow sound of footsteps echoing up from the street below, followed by the soft, drawn-out creak of the front door opening.

Sean opened his eyes and then immediately wished he hadn’t, because the strange shape in the window that both was and wasn’t a face scared the hell out of him.

It’s not the bogeyman. Not again. You’re too old for that and there’s no such thing besides. No such thing, Seanny. Don’t be a sissy
.

And Sean didn’t think he was. He didn’t cry when he got shots at the doctor’s, or when he’d fallen off those railroad ties behind Chris’s house and broken his arm, or when he’d taken that tumble down Schooley’s Mountain and sprained his ankle. Sean was smart for his age—“unusually inquisitive,” he’d heard Mrs. Appleman, who had been his second grade teacher, tell his mom once. And he was brave. He hadn’t met a dare he wouldn’t take. He didn’t have time for bogeymen. At eleven years old, he was the man of the house, with a mother and big sister to look out for. He couldn’t afford to be a sissy.

But that glowing white oval peering in through
the window (
oh my God, it’s coming into the room, it’s coming right for me
) opened a door somewhere inside him, and a weighty dread came through and took over his limbs.

Not in the room—in the mirror. The face is in the mirror
.

Sean wasn’t even sure it could be called a face. Nothing about it was face-like. There were no eyes, no mouth, not even any indents where the features would be. But on top of its head sat a dark hat like the men wore in those old black-and-white detective movies his mom loved so much. And the way it tilted made it look kind of . . . well, thoughtful, somehow. Like it was watching him, thinking deep thoughts about what it was going to do to him.

He closed his eyes and opened them. No one was at the window. Nothing, he noticed, in the mirror, either. The glass stood across from his bed, capturing in reverse the closet door, a battlefield of strewn action-figure bodies by his dresser, the foot of his bed encased in navy sheets and blanket, and a band of the window that looked out over the front yard from the second floor. The empty window.

Sean settled down beneath his sheets, a chill brushing along the hairs of his neck and down his spine. Until that moment, he hadn’t been aware of the thudding of his heart.
Moon, it had to be some type of reflection of the moon or
—

A scraping that he felt more than heard brought his gaze back to the window. His breath shrank terrified into the deep recesses of his lungs.

The heavy storm pane skittered up along the frame. By itself.

By itself
.

A scream died silent in his throat.
Ohmigod, ohmigod
. . .

The screen followed in stiff jerks. A cool breeze blew in. Sean heard the low whine of the wind as it banged the garbage cans out on the curb.

And into the bedroom floated a red balloon—stately, as if the noises on the street below had heralded its arrival. Its string fluttered behind it like a royal train. The balloon bumped lightly along the ceiling, its course set, its purpose decided.

The balloon came to rest dead-center above his bed, bobbing lightly to and fro with the late September night breeze. It was then that Sean really noticed the chirp of friction against rubber and the tiny writhing that stretched the confines of the red bulb.

Something—some
things—
are in there
.

He felt the revulsion as a tingling in his extremities, originating from that single realization in his brain. Something was in that balloon, trying to get out.

“Mom.” The whisper was drowned out by the sound of (
what, legs? Claws?
) things stretching, expanding . . .

The balloon burst with a pop that thundered through the little room like an explosion. A black rain fell from it onto his blanket. The drops dispersed with a din of angry chatter, spreading outward like fallout and spilling off the bed in wave after wave.

It took only a moment for Sean’s mind to wrap around what was happening. Hundreds of spindly legs and barbed stingers dug into the blanket for purchase, propelling bloated black bodies forward in the race toward Sean.

The chirp of the bugs’ skittering legs over legs sounded loud in his ears. Just as they crossed the border between blanket and pajamas, Sean dislodged the scream from his chest. Flinging the blanket off, he leaped from the bed and flew to the door. His feet landed once on several crunching obsidian shells before he launched through the doorway.

The light in his mother’s room flicked on before he even reached it. Her legs kicked off the blankets and she swept toward him.

“Sean!” She cupped his chin in her hands. “My God, baby, are you all right? You’re shaking—”

“Bugs,” he whispered, the word dry and hard in his throat. “Millions.”

She searched his face for several seconds, concern and confusion in her eyes. Then she led the way back to his room. Sean, hanging a safe distance behind, ran a pale hand through his bed-fluffed brown hair. When her arm reached around the door frame for the light, he had a terrible vision of a writhing black wall of insect bodies swarming from the switch plate down her arm. He could see it, a black sleeve of their polished backs and needle-legs. He opened his mouth to say something to stop her.

The switch clicked, flooding the room with light. His mother didn’t scream. She crossed her arms—her bare arms—over her chest, then drew them tighter around her body as she stepped through the door.

“Sean, it’s cold in here. Why did you open a window?”

Sean peeked around the door frame, his eyes panning the room. The blanket hung crumpled off the side of the bed. His pillow still supported the dent where his head had pressed it in. Nothing chattered,
nothing scrambled over the wrinkled sheets toward the headboard. Nothing on the floor, either. No bug carcasses crushed into the carpet by flying feet, no smears of bug guts or blood. Nothing on the walls. Swiveling around, he examined the light switch. Bug-free. The whole room looked bug-free.

And there was no sign, as far as he could tell, that they’d been there at all.

His mother grunted lightly as she fought with the window. “How did you even get this open, honey? Crowbar?” It stuck. It always had. Sean had never been able to open and close it by himself. It used to take him and Mom and his big sister, Ruthie, to budge it past a certain point.

“I didn’t.” His voice cracked.

“What?”

“Nothing. Will you . . . check the sheets?”

With a sudden bang, the storm window finally gave and crashed onto the sill. His mother yanked her fingers out of the way just as the wood splintered beneath them. She glanced at him, a dry-faced sort of look that meant she was tired or irritated. In this case, he figured, probably both.

“I think you must have had a nightmare. Maybe something buzzed into the room through the window—”

“Please, Mom, just check the sheets.”

She seemed to consider his request a moment, then crossed to the bed and yanked off the blanket. The sheet followed. She shook both out thoroughly.

A tiny pelting of black rain on the floor made him flinch. Bugs—dead spiders the size of half dollars, it looked like. His mom looked down at them, then back up at Sean. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. These look
like some kind of jumping spiders. Maybe they’re coming up out of the basement. How about we change your sheets,” she said, pulling off the offending linens, “and I’ll call the exterminator in the morning?”

Sean nodded slowly, swallowing several times. He wasn’t quite convinced the bugs were all dead. He imagined that once the door closed behind her, more would flood the ceiling and drop down on top of him like shiny black paratroopers.

Sean’s mom unrolled some toilet paper from the bathroom and used it to sweep up the little black corpses on the floor, then chucked the whole thing in the garbage can by his door. She changed the sheets and pillowcases, smoothed a hand over the mattress, even got down on her knees and looked under the bed.

“I think we got them all. You okay?” She pulled back the clean sheets and nodded for him to hop in. Staring at the cool linen, smooth and flat and utterly unmoving, Sean felt better. Much better.

She hugged him good night and her nightgown was soft, smelled vaguely of her perfume and her deodorant. “We’ll take care of it, Sean. It was probably all this rain. Brings them up out of the ground, I think.”

He briefly considered mentioning the balloon to her, but decided against it. “Okay,” came a resigned, if not altogether hearty, response muffled by the nightgown. She let him go. Sean’s eyes shifted hesitantly around the room again.

“Good night, tiger.” She left the door open a crack behind her, as she had since he was seven years old.

When the retreating footsteps in the hall faded,
Sean pulled back the sheets, slipped out of bed, and crept over to the garbage can. Inside, half curled, lay red rubber fragments of balloon where the carcasses of those bugs should have been. A flash of nervous heat pulsed across his skin and drew sweat out under his arms. His fingers closed over one of the balloon fragments and he lifted it up. It was cool and smooth in a way that turned his stomach, a greasy and almost insubstantial kind of smooth, the way gum got if it was left in the sun. He fingered it uneasily, repulsed and fascinated.

It melted in his hand and he jumped as if he’d been bitten, shaking the dripping liquid rubber from his fingertips into the round bin. He squeezed his eyes shut (
it’s not, not blood, not my blood
) and when he opened them again, his hand was unblemished. He peered around it into the garbage can.

No trace whatsoever of the balloon.

The nagging voice in Erik’s head echoed one solitary word that he’d grown to loathe. “Loser.” He hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud until Casey turned her head toward him, her eyes wide and brown and throbbing with hurt feelings.