The Hollower (3 page)

“What?” she said.

“Nothing, baby. Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

“Erik, are you mad at me or something?”

He turned on his side to face her, propping his head up with his hand. Her eyes immediately searched his for an answer.

“Of course not, baby. Why would I be?”

“Then I don’t understand.” Casey turned her head away from him, the moon gliding over her hair in a gleaming halo. Tea-and-milk-colored hair, his mom
had once called it, though it was coffee-brown in the dimness of their bedroom. Soft sheaths of it fell over her bare breasts as she lay on her back, her arms wrapped around her waist in a hug of self-pity. As he stared at her, an unexplainable surge of love welled up from his gut, followed by a wave of guilt.

She was a pretty girl. If he’d ever had occasion to forget how pretty she was, some friend of his was right there to remind him. Great body, nice breasts, long legs. She always complained that she had no hips and no ass, but Erik thought those looked great, too. Even when she was dating that skinny little jerkoff What’shisname and he was with Tanya, Casey had turned his head more than once. It was a sex appeal of contradicting forces, a way that she had about her that was both innocent and seductive. Big, bright eyes and tiny features, a kind of pretty the way those girls in perfume and fabric softener commercials were pretty, picking flowers out in sun-soaked Spring Fresh fields. She carried herself as if she were both surprised and fascinated by men, and the mystical, mysterious, forbidden concept of sex.

Of course he wanted her—who wouldn’t? Yet lately . . .

His fingertips stroked her shoulder lightly. “I’m sorry,” he repeated for the fifth or sixth time. He didn’t know what else to say, so he pulled away. The bed creaked as he swung his feet over the side. She didn’t move.

“I . . . I’ll be right back.” He slipped on boxers, then made his way to the adjoining bathroom and closed the door on the heavy air of disappointment behind him.

“Loser,” he sucked in a breath. Damn it, what was
wrong with him lately? The nagging voice in his head came back louder, more insistent.
C’mere, you little shit. Didn’t I tell you you’d never be anything but a stupid loser good-fer-nothin’ son of a
—

His eyes squeezed shut, he concentrated on the feel of the cool bathroom tiles on his bare soles (
one, two, three, four
) and the breeze swirling around his shoulders from the open window (
five, six, seven
) and the sound of crickets. The disparaging voice ebbed away like the retreating of a cramp in a muscle, and he opened his eyes.

From the window, Schooley’s Mountain stood almost black against the muddied charcoal of early morning. An irregular hairline of treetops separated mountain from sky.

Below lay a sullen empty street. The garbage cans lined the curb to the right of the driveway. A tiny luminous Chemlawn sign stood amidst the dark patch of lawn. The low rumble of cars from the cross-street provided an arrhythmic heartbeat to the neighborhood that was not altogether unsoothing in its way.

A densely wooded lake area of serenity and tranquillity, with Quick Checks and Wal-Marts few and far between, Lakehaven had served as a vacation community for New Jersey’s more prominent citizens until the fifties. As the years passed, Morris County, with its new upper middle class New York-commuter families moving in, grew more expensive. Many younger people like Erik and Casey found that the only affordable housing was out north or west. So they’d laid claim to places like Lakehaven and made it their own. He and Casey—they’d built a home together.

She could have had a hundred men but she stayed
with him—just about six years come May. They’d survived a layoff (hers), a breakdown (his), a breakup with coke (his again), and the death of his father. Six years was a long time. And he loved her—at least, believed wholeheartedly, with little basis of comparison, that he loved her. But lately, things got fouled up when it came to sex, or those deep talks she felt compelled to have once in a while. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to try. He just didn’t seem to have it in him anymore to try hard enough.

Why?
The wind rattled the garbage cans, carrying their metallic voices up to him.
Why?

“I don’t know why,” he whispered back.

Turning to the sink, he splashed some water on his face—an okay-looking face, he’d always thought, but not one he wanted to look at in the mirror right now. He leaned over the sink basin, droplets dripping off the stubble of a mustache and goatee that stippled his jaw and chin. A slightly trembling hand yanked dark blond locks from his eyes and off his shoulders, then let them fall back into place. He was scruffy-looking, he had no doubts about that. But his eyes were a soft and honest blue that had worked in his favor many times, and his build, now that he was off the drugs, was on its way back to lean and muscular as it had once been. Erik had no reason
not
to look at the reflection in the mirror. So what was the problem?

Not tonight
, he thought.
No more thinking for tonight. Thinking only ever leads to
—He turned back to the window, and his heart shot into his throat.

In the silvery blue glow of the moonlight, it stood watching him.

No, no, not again, not now
. At the foot of the driveway,
a figure in a black trench coat, black pants and shoes, and a black hat not unlike Humphrey Bogart’s stood with legs slightly apart, arms resting at its sides. With a stance both predatory and confident, the thing bided its time in the camouflage of the driveway behind it, as if waiting for a sure kill to strike. The surface where the figure’s face should have been was white, round, and featureless, tilted up in his direction. It reminded Erik a little of fencing masks. His guidance counselor in high school thought joining a club would keep Erik out of trouble, and he’d suggested fencing. But Erik had to drop out of it. He never would have admitted it, but he couldn’t stand the mask. It made his skin crawl. Something about it, about any white mask, struck him as so emotionless and utterly alien, and the thought of it pressed to his own face bothered him.

You are not there
, he told it silently.
Not there at all
.

A sharp pain in his head caused him to wince.
Oh yes. Yes, I am
. Not Erik’s thought, but a silent invasion into the most personal of territories.

He blinked several times but the figure remained. The wind stirred leaves and papers behind the black trench with a low whine. The figure remained silent, quizzical, watching him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that with such certainty, but he did. Even without eyes, it stared right at him.

He squeezed his eyes shut again, so tightly that kaleidoscope shadows whirled behind his eyelids. His fists clenched, too, as he willed the figure to go away. He concentrated on the floor tiles, the breeze, the crickets.

Wanna get high, Erik?

The voice, soundless but commanding in his
mind, made him think of Escher art—it had a quality like that, impossible but breathtakingly there all the same.

He saw the figure behind his eyelids, clothes blacker than a vortex, face as luminous as the Chemlawn sign. Better still, though, than the awful possibility that if he opened his eyes, the figure would be closer, hovering right outside the window, inches from the screen.

Wanna get really high?

“Stop it.” Something wet and heavy turned over in his stomach with a gurgle. He opened his eyes.

The street below lay empty, except for the garbage cans, the Chemlawn sign, the chirping of crickets.

No one was there.

Dave Kohlar shivered, pulled his trench coat tighter across his stocky frame, and quickened his stride. He cast a suspicious glance skyward and frowned. Above, the insipid gray blended like an overwet watercolor with the clouds. The Weather Channel had threatened rain, but so far it was little more than cold, overcast, and windy. Cool drafts lifted his blond hair, tugging it from his forehead with little jerks that matched his steps.

The funeral-goers stood out like a black inkspot against the pale colors of the cemetery, flanked by two mounds of coffee-colored dirt.

So Max won’t be the only new kid on the block
, Dave thought, and glanced at his sister, standing over by the other Group therapy members. Sally had taken Max’s death hard. She’d been with another Group member, Alice Vance, when they went to Max’s house, concerned that he hadn’t shown up for the last two meetings. She and Alice both found the
body. Dr. Stevens hadn’t been with them. For that, Dave would never forgive the doctor, or the Group.

But Sally loved every one of the Group members, especially Max. She’d tried so hard to get through to him and make him feel safe and cared for. She insisted her brother meet him, and Dave had put it off every time, partially because of a discomfort and mild distrust of the Group. Too many secrets, too many shared hurts and knowing glances, too much guilt. Dave wanted no real part of any of them. But even that wasn’t the real reason he’d put off meeting Max.

Mostly, it bugged him that Sally claimed Max saw the figure in the black “detective hat,” too. The very idea that he and Max Feinstein shared a—what? Hallucination? Vision?—stirred up far more hypotheticals about Dave’s own state of mind than he was ready to speculate on.

At a tombstone several feet from the funeral gathering, he hesitated. A woman Dave assumed to be Max’s ex-wife stood in front of the casket. Sourdough woman, Sally once called her, and judging by her short, round frame and pasty, puffy skin, Dave guessed it suited her. Gladys looked up briefly at the sound of Dave’s feet crunching on the dry grass and frowned, her wispy eyebrows knitting over eyes as dark and severe as her dress. He nodded a hello, but her gaze was already fixed again on Max’s casket.

Sally’s small hand waved from the far side of the funeral-goers. Dave skirted the circumference of the ensemble to join them.

“Glad you finally made it,” she whispered, her breath warm on his ear.

“I was . . . held up.” He could feel Sally’s eyes on
his face but made the pretense of surveying the green-and-wheat-colored patchwork plots of the cemetery, broken by the widely placed stone or monument or memorial bench.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” An almost accusatory hiss. Her intuition was dead-on.

He said nothing. His little sister was sensitive—always had been, particularly after their father died. But finding a counselor to provide the right diagnosis as to why had been harder than the family expected. The first blamed Mrs. Kohlar’s child-rearing techniques. Their mother dropped him after the second visit. The second wanted to consider institutionalization, with a strict regimen of dosages and milligrams. Mrs. Kohlar politely bowed out of his services, thank you very much. The third blamed the disorder on the late Mr. Kohlar, whose death had left a great many things unsaid and a lot of unarticulated thoughts to gather dust in the quiet, shadowed corners of their minds. None of them liked that therapist at all.

The fourth couldn’t quite say for sure what was wrong with Sally, but he recognized many of the symptoms. He suggested outpatient therapy as a first step, with light and regulated medication to follow should her condition worsen. That seemed doable for his mother. She could handle that. They all could.

Dave was young, not much more than fifteen, when his mother sat him down to break the news to him. She wouldn’t use the medical term for what was wrong with Sally, but she conveyed its effects neatly and efficiently. Mrs. Kohlar had always constructed
precise bridges over unpleasantness, and trod lightly across them. This situation required no different sort of action, in her mind.

Sally is like the clock in the downstairs hall
, she told him.
Sometimes the gears slow down and sometimes the metal keys wind her up too tight. The pills help her regulate her clockwork. Do you understand?
And part of his brain did understand—Sally was sick. But the part that was at times still nine (
David, watch your sister
) and thirteen (
David, you can’t go unless you take her with you
) couldn’t help but get angry. Angry that he, as big brother and man of the house, was responsible for looking out for her.

And guilty that no matter what he did, he couldn’t ever really protect her.

Yet another smaller and simpler part of him simply feared his sister—feared someday hearing her voice sink in timbre and wind down gradually, like a robot whose power supply had been cut. No matter how often he told himself that
people don’t really
do
that
, he half expected the light to suddenly die in her eyes before they shot from the sockets and bobbed cheek-level on silver springs, while gears and wheels and cogs exploded from her in a fireworks display of metal.

“It was nothing, Sally. Just traffic.”

But she knew. Even with the pendulum swinging the wrong way, so to speak, she had a sense about him, and about when trouble bought him a drink and told him to stay awhile. She idolized him, and depended on him. Her world revolved around his being okay enough to protect her, and so she tuned herself to his frequencies of discomfort or stress or
anger. He never liked her to worry about him but she did, and ceaselessly. And that was his fault, too.

Once, in a moment of weakness, a stupid drunken moment of selfish need to connect on her level, he’d told her about how sometimes he dreamed of a figure. It stood out in crisp black clothes and one of those old-fashioned hats that men used to wear in the forties. But he’d never quite managed to get a good look at its face. Some primal instinct in the dream told him it was better that way, not knowing, not getting too close. Dave found its very posture menacing, the curious tilt of the head and easy wave of the gloved hand sinister in their lightness.

In the dream, he’d be walking down a shadowy alley, between two impossibly tall buildings whose upper floors dissipated like smoke high in the sky. He’d become aware of something close at his heels, its rancid breath (did it breathe?) an almost tangible force that propelled him into a run. He never turned around, but he could feel the thing that swam through the darkness only inches from his back almost as surely as if he saw it. A luminescent face, maybe, blank but radiating a hatred that splashed cold waves of pain across his spine. The hard skittering of its metallic claws reverberated in his skull, even when his eyes first opened in the morning.