The Hollower (7 page)

DeMarco motioned for Cheryl to sit in the wooden chair to the side of the desk, and then sat down herself. She pulled Cheryl’s report from amidst the stacks and drummed the nub of a pencil as she skimmed through it.

“So, tell me what happened again with the knife on the bar.”
Tap, tap
.

Cheryl let out a shuddery sigh and said, “I came around from over by the bathrooms and I saw it lying on the bar. It wasn’t there when I went into the bathroom.”

“And you said you found”—she glanced down at the report—“little bits of paper stuck to the blade?”

Cheryl nodded.

“But no blood, nothing like that, is that correct?”

“Yes, Detective, that’s correct.”

“I see.”
Tap, tap, tap, tap
. “What did you do then, ma’am?”

“I got the hell out of there. I didn’t want to hang around and wait for the guy to walk up and order a drink, you know?”

“No, I don’t suppose that would be wise on your part, ma’am.” She smiled, and it seemed genuine to Cheryl. “Can you describe the intruder?”

“Well, it was dark . . .”

“But you did say you saw someone, is that correct?” She glanced down at the pages. “Someone in a coat and hat?”

Cheryl nodded hesitantly. “Yes, that’s right. A black hat, you know—like Humphrey Bogart wore in those old movies. Black trench coat and shoes.”

“Did you get a look at the intruder’s face? Hair color, eye color, anything like that?”

An uncomfortable heat fanned out beneath Cheryl’s skin. “No. No, I didn’t.” She cleared her throat. “It was dark, like I said, and—”

“Height? Build? Was it a man?”

“I—well, it—it was hard to tell. I mean, it was tall, broad like a man, but the way it moved . . . I honestly couldn’t say what it was.”

“It?”

“He or she. You know what I mean.”

DeMarco studied her face. Cheryl figured the detective was assessing how much of the bar’s fringe
benefits she’d swallowed down before coming to the station.

DeMarco’s gaze dropped again to the report, trailing the lines for the description of the intruder. “Says here that he—or she, as the case may be—wore gloves.”

“Black gloves,” Cheryl said. “No hands.”

“Pardon?”

Cheryl felt a warm blush rise from between her breasts to redden her neck. She hadn’t realized how that would sound out loud.

“I mean, I couldn’t see hands. Or wrists. I guess with the darkness, and the gloves, and all . . .”

“Smart enough not to leave prints, I guess.” DeMarco smiled into her paperwork. “Now, the poster especially is very strange. This figure scratched out the facial features, left the bits of paper stuck to the knife, and taunted you from various locations around the bar, but you didn’t see it inside the premises?”

Cheryl paused. “No, I heard it, but I didn’t see it.”

“When you saw the figure outside the bar, did you notice if it had any kind of weapon then?”

“No, not that I saw.”
See no evil
, she wanted to add, but didn’t.

Somewhere in the back of Cheryl’s brain it registered that Detective DeMarco had begun calling the figure “it,” too, and although it was an under-thought, it made Cheryl relax some. She hadn’t gone to the police right away because she knew how crazy her account sounded. She’d taken the rest of the night to think (
to hide
). If she had gone in the state she was in the night before and the police found
nothing to substantiate such a wild story, what would that say about her? So she’d waited and called Bob in the morning and he agreed she should go to the police right then and there. Based on Bob’s tone over the phone, she still wasn’t sure what it said about her.

DeMarco, though, seemed willing to give her a fair chance to explain. “Did this figure threaten you in any way? Come at you, or the car?”

“No, it just stood there. But . . . inside the bar, I—”

“
I’m not behind the bar, Cheryl. But I’m very close
.”

“—felt very threatened. I don’t know if it meant to hurt me, but I firmly believe it meant to make me think it would. It meant to scare me into thinking it would kill me.”

“Have you ever seen this figure before?”

And there it was.
Seen it? No, ma’am. But sometimes, at night
. . .

“It knows my name.” This she said very softly, and the currents of talking and telephone rings and shuffled papers carried it away before DeMarco could catch it.

The detective leaned in. “Pardon, ma’am?”

“I hear it. In my house. Just like I heard it in the bar. It knows my name.”

DeMarco paused, and Cheryl got the impression the detective was trying very hard not to dismiss her outright as a schizophrenic.

“A bar regular—someone following you, maybe?”

“It isn’t a regular. It knows my name and I’ve never seen its face before in my life, because for Chrissakes, Detective,
it didn’t have a face
.” Her voice grew high and strained but never rose in volume.

DeMarco stopped tapping. She no longer appeared
to be sizing up Cheryl’s possible mental disorder. Something in her expression had changed—a surprised arch of the eyebrows, a bright flash of the eyes, and a silent “uh” that parted her lips. Cheryl thought she saw recognition.

It was then that two officers walked into the room. The shorter of the two, a young, wiry, sandy-haired man, laughed loudly as he crossed the threshold. The taller came in behind, deep lines carved by annoyance into the features of his weathered face.

Panning the room, the officers spotted Detective DeMarco and made their way across to her, elbowing a cop here, cracking a joke with another there. The younger nodded at Cheryl as he approached, his eyes sweeping her up and down with subtle interest.

“Ms. Duffy, Officers Penn and Jenkins, our patrolmen. They’ll be heading over to the bar to check things out.” DeMarco gestured vaguely in their direction. “I think we have enough for now, Ms. Duffy. If you’d like, Penn and Jenkins can escort you home and give your house a once-over.” The detective scribbled something on the report that Cheryl couldn’t read from her angle, then closed the file.

“We’ll get back to you and your employer with any findings. Not to worry, Ms. Duffy. We’ll search the place from top to bottom.” She leaned in and added in a low voice, “We’ll find it.”

For a moment, it seemed the detective wanted to ask her something, thought better of it, and offered a smile instead. Handing her a business card, DeMarco accompanied Cheryl back out to reception, with Penn and Jenkins in tow.

She waved the officers away, already feeling somewhat better in just having gotten the incident
off her chest. She went home alone and did a careful search of her own, room by room. And naturally, she found nothing. The birds chirped outside and she could think of nothing she’d rather do more than take a nap. After she’d climbed into bed, though, sleep did not come quickly, in spite of the drain she felt and the weightiness in her limbs. Instead, she stared at the ceiling until the fuzzy patterns her tired eyes made on the surface expanded and melded into one black blanket of sleep.

She dreamed of alleyways, and a high-pitched skittering like nails scraping over glass.

The deserted street stretched a block before and behind Dave, lined to either side with basically the same design of house—bi-level, cold in the shadows of sunset, uninviting with their closed doors, inky windows, and smokeless chimneys. A shallow high-pitched wind skittered to the other end of the block.

Dave’s car rolled to a gravel-crunching stop outside 68 River Falls Road, and he cut the ignition. Part of him couldn’t believe he was even there. Another part fought to keep in check a vague fear that gnawed at the edges of his thoughts. Whatever was in that house, waiting for him, he wasn’t too sure he wanted to find it.

In the blue twilight, splotches of gray clouds hung above the severe slate-colored roof. To either side, trees flanked the lawn, halfheartedly offered before the house itself. It struck Dave that, like its former inhabitants, the ex–Feinstein residence had just given up. It was dejected, empty not only in its overall exterior, but in the very wood and fiberglass itself.

Dave let out a long breath. With wary eyes panning the streets for witnesses, he got out of the car.

The front door would most likely be locked. Had to be, he reasoned. Gladys didn’t seem the type to trust neighbors even in such a mild, suburban area. He could always tell Sally the door was locked, and he didn’t want to break in through a window because, after all, trespassing was bad enough without tacking on breaking and entering charges.

But she would know. Some gut feeling inside told him if he lied, she would know, and for some reason this was important enough to her that a lie would be an outright betrayal.

Stones and bones. A guy couldn’t go back on stones and bones.

With a final glance toward either end of the street and to the window whose curtain lay motionless against the frame, Dave headed toward the house. He wondered briefly what ghosts were in that house, memories let go, tears long dried, old pains left to fall apart like his surroundings.

Dave shook his head. He was, of course, being silly. There was nothing waiting inside for him but dust and old furniture. Gladys and the executor of Max’s will no doubt had taken anything important from the place already. And Dave would make sure by seeing for himself. To put Sally’s mind to rest, of course.

Dave’s feet creaked beneath his weight on the first wooden step, and for a moment, he stopped, compelled to silence by the overcautious desire to slip in unnoticed. Back in his days of teenage escapades sneaking in and out of the house, a friend had told
him that climbing the stairs with feet as far out toward the side edges of the steps as possible made for a quieter ascent. It didn’t really work, but by instinct Dave reverted to the trick every time he wanted to sneak up stairs. His feet splayed toward the outermost edges, and he climbed the remainder of the steps. Taking hold of one of the posts to either side of the steps, he hoisted himself up onto the porch. It groaned as he crossed to the front door. The knob felt cold in his hand. As he turned it, it caught.

Locked, see, it’s locked, thank God, and now I can just
—

The door swung inward on silent hinges.

Damn
.

Dave crossed into the shadowy front hall.

The house had simply ceased to be domestic. The hall held a grayish tinge of dust that made it appear grainy and secondhand, a replication of a real house assembled in a charade of hominess. An air of unuse hung heavy, almost humid. Dave went to turn on the light and thought better of it.

Nothing moved. Nothing settled or creaked or even ticked. He alone breathed. The house was dead.

Stairs rose upward into shadows from off to the left, a few feet before a living room, while the right offered a dining room. In those spaces, too, Dave couldn’t help but feel that the spirit of the rooms had departed, and the empty shell, still as stone, lay open to other more terrible things occupying it.

Parallel from the stairs on the right side before the dining room, a rectangular portion of the wall jutted outward. Embedded too deeply into the surface of the outcropping stood a weather-worn old door with an old-fashioned brass handle.

Dave reached a hesitant hand out toward the handle, his fingers brushing the cold metal.
Please, God, let
this
one be locked, at least
, he thought as he gripped it. With a woody whisper the door arced open.

Damn again
.

The boxy gloom of the interior molded into winter coats, and above them, an empty shelf. He peered on tiptoe, just to see what was back there. Nothing.

He crouched to peer under the coats. A pair of galoshes, a couple of pairs of winter boots, and some scarves littered the floor. Nothing Dave figured was meant for him.

With distaste that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, he reached gingerly into the pocket of a pea-green canvas jacket. Something about the sensation of the fabric on his skin gave him goose bumps, as if he were touching the dead flesh of the man who had once worn it.

The pocket was empty. He reached into the one on the far side. Empty. One by one, he delved into the pockets of a fur, a winter coat, a couple of spring jackets, and a few windbreakers, but his search turned up nothing. Unless Max had meant for him to be warm in the chill evening wind, there was nothing in that closet for him.

Dave sighed—a long, slow exhalation of both relief and disappointment. Sally was wrong. She was off. A gear was definitely and most clearly out of whack in her head, probably one of many. And that meant Dave could take back the Hollower as his own problem now, and not include Sally in the mess. She’d had a bad scare, but she could relax. It wasn’t after her.

Her giggle floated down from the murkiness at the top of the stairs. Dave at first assumed it was a part of his thoughts, a wave in the flood of his relief.

Then it came again, louder, higher in pitch—more the way she’d giggled as a child than her laugh now. Dave frowned.

“Hello?” No one answered. “Uh, Gladys? Mrs. Feinstein, the uh, the door was, ah, open so I thought I’d come by to see if you needed—”

Fresh laughter, a full-force peal of glee from the top of the stairs, cut him off. Sally’s laughter.

“Sally?” His feet carried him unwillingly back across the hall to the bottom of the stairs. A diminutive silhouette—a woman, maybe, or a child—sat cross-legged at the top of the stairs. The darkness swam thick around it and obscured any feature or detail.

“Sals?”

The giggle floated down to him again, a slow, dry chuckle that dropped in pitch to a sinister bass. “
Davey
. . .” It was Sally’s intonation, but overlaid with another, manlier voice. The delicate outline of her hand rose like a shadow puppet on the wall behind her, waving. The waving became a clicking that grew to a metallic chatter and reverberated down the stairwell.

Dave bolted to the front door, yanked it open, and leaped across the porch and down the stairs in one catapult motion. It was only when he made it to the car, panting, his heart jackhammering in his chest, sweaty palms on the hood to steady him, that he dared look back at the house.