At first, Erik thought his new girl might be trying to sabotage his recovery. He certainly wasn’t planting the bags of coke around the house, but he saw them there all the same. The bags disappeared as his tentative, outstretched fingers brushed against them, providing his first indication that the girlfriend conspiracy theory had gaping holes in it. The shrink at the rec center thought Erik was experiencing some kind of concentrated form of wishful thinking. That, at least, was easier to swallow than the other options.
Like he was losing his mind.
Like he had no willpower.
Like deep down, he wanted the coke more than Casey.
Sometimes, out on the street, walking to or from the N.A. meetings at the rec center, he’d catch from the corner of his eye a face that wasn’t a face staring at him, always just far enough away from Erik that its features (if it had any) were unclear. It never spoke, but it thought things at him. Terrible, terrible things.
His shrink called that a manifestation of his guilt, the Jones personified. To make it go away, all Erik had to do was squeeze his eyes shut and count backward from ten or concentrate on the sensation of the floor beneath his feet. Refocused, he’d open his eyes and the figure would be gone.
Erik could buy that it was a figment of his imagination. He could believe that wholeheartedly with stubborn resolve, if that’s what it would take to make it go away. But the problem was, the figure didn’t go away. Not at first. It took sheer willful blindness to stop the hallucinations.
No, Erik thought angrily, that’s not true. It took one tiny little relapse, none before and none since. But after that one time . . .
The hallucinations stopped after the night he’d done some coke. He’d scored it from Jimmy Dumonte at the usual haunt around the corner from the Quick Check. Beneath a canopy of stars who’d turned their gaze the other way, amidst the shadows drawn like curtains across the wooded lot behind the local high school, he’d gotten good and high. And in his delirium, he’d seen the faceless figure one last time, standing above him, thinking down on him, urging him to get lost in the high and bleed into the shadows and never come back.
Except, it was the faceless Jones that hadn’t come back. It vacated the weird waypoint where Erik’s reality skewed, and with it left a great deal of pressure as well. Things with Casey fell back into place. He’d found a decent job in landscaping and masonry that kept him working hard and staying out of trouble. He hadn’t touched coke, nor wanted to, since.
But now he felt . . . different. Regressed. He suspected maybe he wasn’t quite okay enough with sobriety yet to have someone depend on him to be clean. At the meeting, the realization had hit him full force. In its wake, the old-time insecurities found their way back into his thoughts—like weeds, they kept sprouting up just when he thought he’d killed the last of them. And to be insecure, the way Erik saw it, was to be inadequate. Weak. A worthless good-fer-nothin’—
“Stop.” He said it out loud, soft under his breath.
But he’d felt it the other night, when the middle-of-the-night romp in bed had gone wrong. He’d felt inadequate. He still wanted to get high, and it must have sent out some signal somewhere before he’d even realized it, because the figure had come back. The Jones in a black hat was back.
Erik turned up his empty driveway and made it practically onto the porch before he realized the front door stood slightly open beyond the screen. He cast a puzzled glance at the driveway.
Casey’s car wasn’t there. Too early for her to be home, anyway. Frowning, he opened the screen door. The creak of the hinge sounded magnified in the empty hall.
“Hello?” No answer. Peering into each room as he passed, he made his way down the hall to the kitchen.
“Casey? Baby, you home?” She’d left after him to go to work—maybe she’d forgotten to lock the door in a rush to get out this morning. Maybe she hadn’t closed the door all the way, and the wind had pushed it in.
Sure, maybe, Erik thought, but that isn’t like her. She doesn’t just—
“Back here, Erik!” Casey’s voice carried through the open kitchen window from the backyard. So she was home, then. Erik crossed to the back door and swung it open. Casey sat on a patio bench, turned away from him, her head bent over something at the table. Strands of her hair hung in front of her face. Without looking up, she curled her fingers in a half wave.
Erik crossed the backyard toward her. “Hey, baby, what’re you doing home so early? And where’s your car? I didn’t—” He gestured toward the front of the house but stopped, his gaze falling on Casey’s head as she inhaled sharply.
“Casey? Whatcha doin’?” A crazy thought occurred to him. Please let her be sniffing flowers or perfume or Crazy Glue for all I care, but not . . .
“Coke,” she said lightly, snorting again. “Want some?”
Erik swallowed the thick, sandpapery lump in his throat. “Huh?”
She giggled.
“Casey, stop messing around, okay?”
Sniff. “It’s only a little coke, Erik. Isn’t it bad enough that you’re a kill-buzz in bed? Do you have to take away all my fun?”
“What did you say?” Heat radiated across his face and threatened to force tears.
“I’m saying,” Casey replied in a voice not quite hers but several androgynous voices harmonizing at once, “that you’re a loser, Erik. A stupid loser good-fer-nothin’ son of a bitch.”
She looked up. Erik’s knees buckled where he stood as he stared at her face.
Her lack of face.
The honey-framed oval was a stark white contrast to the pale neck upon which it rested. Where Casey’s eyes and mouth had been were burnt holes stuffed with ashes, which blew away on some otherwise unfelt wind. Her nose, as well, was a crater of blackened fillings. Erik squeezed his eyes shut (ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one . . . ), hoping it was only a hallucination. But when he opened his eyes, the figure from the other night sat in Casey’s place, a black-gloved hand raised in a wave. It was close to him, closer than it had ever been, a mere arm’s length away, there but somehow not there, an alien image imposed on a natural, familiar landscape. Bile rose in Erik’s throat.
“Don’t you love me anymore, Erik?” Casey’s voice again, coming from that thing, Casey’s mannerisms so clearly recognizable in the way it crossed its legs and tilted its head. The fabric of its hat and clothes looked cold—almost frosted, and utterly unreflective of the sun’s rays. Erik was somehow sure that one touch could cause frostbite. Maybe even death.
Erik’s voice failed in his throat. “Go away.”
A rumble deep in the meat of the blank visage pushed him involuntarily backward with a real, physical force of its own. Erik took it to be a laugh.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please go away.”
“Erik?” The screen door to the backyard slammed shut and Erik jumped, whirling around. Casey smiled at him and waved.
He didn’t wave back. For a moment, the world threatened to slip away beneath the growing kaleidoscopic patterns before his eyes. He took several deep breaths and looked down at his hands. They were shaking and he shoved them in his pockets. When he looked back at the bench, he saw it empty. The figure was gone.
Casey’s expression changed to one of concern when she saw his face. “Baby? Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Her hand, cool and smooth and dry, touched his cheek lightly. He flinched, and gave her a narrow-eyed once-over. She frowned.
“What’s wrong, Erik?” It sounded more to him like an accusation than a question. Are you high, Erik? Are you messing around with that stuff again?
“Casey.” He searched her eyes for something familiar and undeniable to hold on to, but his vision blurred with tears. “Casey?”
“What? What’s wrong?”
He grabbed her hand suddenly and dragged her around to the front of the house. Her car was parked in the driveway. He touched the hood. Still warm.
“Erik, what happened?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I’m ju
st glad you’re home.” He pulled her into a hug so tight she winced. “I love you, baby.”
“I love you, too, Erik. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I am now.”
Cheryl saw the Lakehaven police office as little more than a converted log cabin set a little ways off the main road. The white-walled interior of its reception area included a few important town notices hanging from corkboards, a framed picture of the department softball team, and a brass clock that ticked the minutes out with a lazy sound like air leaking from a tire. Even in the low hum of early morning under way, the place stood empty except for a handful of visitors crossing and uncrossing their legs along the pine benches. Cheryl approached the policeman at the front desk. After looking Cheryl up and down, he asked for her name and the type of crime she wished to report.
“Breaking and entering,” Cheryl said between deep breaths, “and maybe threatening behavior, too.”
The policeman raised an eyebrow at her. “Do you need medical attention?”
“No, no, nothing like that, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.
The man paused a moment, eyeing her in the space between her words, and then handed her a clipboard of papers to fill out. When Cheryl had written down as much as she could pick from her panic-jumbled thoughts, she handed the papers back to the policeman.
“Please take a seat,” he said, more as a command than a request. “A detective will see you in a few minutes.”
Ten said minutes later, the detective came out of the room behind the reception desk. She was the smallest woman Cheryl had ever seen, wiry, with a bony but not unpleasant face beneath a cloud of brown hair. She tilted her head to one side, nodded at Cheryl and asked, “You Cheryl Duffy?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Detective DeMarco.” The detective’s grip was strong for such slender little hands, and she gave Cheryl a quick, confident shake. “Ms. Duffy, please follow me.” They passed through a doorway into a brightly lit room that sharply contrasted with the waiting area. Cutting a swath through ringing phones, noisy detainees, and a few other cops scribbling away at notepads, she led Cheryl to a desk that dwarfed her size. Skyscraper stacks of papers and files created a miniature city of open cases on her desk. Cheryl’s eyes surfed over the high-rises of file folders, papers, and Post-its. A few coffee rings and pens were scattered among the paperwork. The black name plaque across the front of the desk by the phone read in solid white lettering DET. ANITA DEMARCO.
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 th
reshold. 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.
The Hollower Page 5
