The Hollower
Page 6
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.
Against a backdrop already dotted with occasional stars, the ex–Feinstein residence stood quiet.
The front door was closed.
“Mister?”
Dave jumped, whirling around on a boy no more than eleven or twelve years old. The boy’s fair-haired head was cocked to one side, his eyes squinting inquisitively over his freckled cheeks. He scratched at a scabbing scrape along the underside of one skinny forearm.
“You okay, mister? I saw you boltin’ outta the ol’ Feinstein place like a bat outta heck.”
“I—I’m fine. Fine. Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.” By degrees, the pounding in Dave’s chest receded. “What are you doing out here?”
The boy jerked a thumb to the house across the street. “It’s curfew now. Was on my way in. Boy, I’ve never seen a grown-up run so fast.” He cast a wary eye at the upstairs window. “Look like you seen a ghost.”
“Why do you say that?” Dave snapped.
The boy shrugged. “Dunno. You know the guy that used to live there? Guy that shot himself?”
Dave exhaled slowly. “Not well. He was . . . a friend of my sister’s. You know him?”
“Not well, either. Friend of my mother’s.” The boy hesitated, as if a question hovered on the tip of his tongue, but he seemed to decide against asking it. “Well, I’m sorry all the same. For your sister, I mean. Her loss, and all. He said . . .”
“What?”
The boy looked at the upstairs window again. “Said he saw monsters or something.”
Dave frowned, but said nothing.
The boy paused a moment before adding, “I dunno. I don’t think a person’s crazy, just for seeing monsters. Do you?”
“My dad didn’t think it was crazy, neither. When I was little and my dad was still alive, I was afraid of these bug monsters under my bed—baby stuff, but I was little then. Anyways, my dad showed me this thing he called a Warding Ritual—”
“Sean!” A woman leaned from the doorway in the house across the street, waving the boy inside.
Sean looked up at Dave sheepishly. “Well, I guess I oughta go, mister. That’s my mom. See ya around.” The boy turned and jogged off toward the soft glow of his house’s interior. He cast one final glance back at Dave and another at the house across the street before he and his mother disappeared inside.
Dave stared at the closed door for several long seconds afterward. If that kid had seen what he had seen—if he’d seen the Hollower—what did that mean? What could it possibly mean?
Reason, cold and clear, splashed Dave in the face. He was reading way too much into an innocent, harmless conversation. Opening the car door, he slipped inside and pulled away from the house.
Sean watched the man’s car drive away until it was out of his line of sight from the bedroom window. He didn’t know monsters went after grown-ups, too, but he was sure the man had seen the thing that had sent over the balloon (Sean shivered inwardly, the sensation of bug legs on his blanket raising goose bumps on his skin). It had been the way the man tore out of the house and the look on his face when he’d stopped by the car—like he was a little sick around the edges, and scared in the middle—that made Sean sure enough to cross the street. Sean knew better than to talk to strangers, but they shared an enemy; no one the monster would go after could possibly be a bad kind of stranger.
Sean had seen it himself that morning, at first a glowing orb hovering just beyond the curtains in an upstairs corner window across the street.
“That was Max’s bedroom, honey,” his mother had told him when he’d asked. “Why?”
Sean shrugged it off, unsure how to answer. Okay, so that was the bedroom where old Max Feinstein had shot himself. Nothing to be a sissy about. It wasn’t like there were such things as ghosts. But he’d seen something in that bedroom window, all right. Sean was pretty sure it wasn’t a ghost, but it was something. And Sean had started to wonder if Max maybe had seen it, too.
He didn’t think the thing was always there in the master bedroom of the house across the street. In fact, Sean was sure, although he couldn’t say why, that it only visited there to keep an eye on him. To scare him. To watch him, and wait for the perfect chance to—
“Sean, into bed.”
Jolted from his thoughts, Sean turned from the window. His mother stood in the doorway, arms folded beneath her chest. He glanced once more at the house across the street. Dark, empty windows. The curtains hung still.
“Okay.” He hopped into bed, and let his mother tuck him in and kiss him good night (even though he was really getting to be too old for those things). Then she turned out the light.
Alone in the room, eyes glued suspiciously on the window, Sean went through the series of gestures his father had shown him to keep the bug monsters away. His father hadn’t thought seeing monsters was crazy at all. His dad taught him the Ritual with total seriousness. Three circles around the face, an X, a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the bed. Worked every time. Not a bug monster to be found ever after. And that faceless monster could hide out across the street and wave all it wanted, but the Warding Ritual would keep it at bay. It had to. Sean refused to believe otherwise. Three circles around the face, an X, a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the bed.
That done, he settled into the pillow.
Too bad, Sean thought before sleep overtook him, that he didn’t get the chance to show the man the Ritual. It looked like the guy would probably need it.
Four
“You are not there.”
Erik spoke the words aloud to himself as he stood in the bathroom with the lights off. His heart pulsed a resounding unease that stuck to his ribs. The thinnest slivers of moonlight sliced through the blinds and lined his bare chest, but for all intents and purposes, the view of the street below remained obscured. Erik stared at the blinds and reasoned to himself that there was no harm in peeking outside. After all, there was only so much a guy could be expected to take, wasn’t there? And a quick peek would satisfy that little nagging voice that so stubbornly needed to know.
Erik’s sponsor had told him he’d recover faster if he’d only realize that no one always has control over every situation, and that sometimes a person needs to trust a Higher Power. Erik found the concept difficult to understand, that a person could trust anyone or anything blindly. He wasn’t sure he’d ever put much stock in a Higher Power. His mother had been a flat-out nonpracticing Catholic and his father was an atheist who never brought up God unless it was to call him a goddamned son of a bitch. But Erik was willing to entertain the possibility that there was probably Something up there looking out over the universe, and he didn’t think that the Something was malicious—indifferent, maybe, but not outright mean-spirited. Erik wanted to believe that this Higher Power, God or whatever It was, could protect him from the Jones. But he’d wanted to believe It could have protected him from his dad and It hadn’t. He wanted to believe It would save him from himself, and It hadn’t done that, either.
Erik figured he could handle the occasional desire to get high. He’d resigned himself to the fact that cravings came and went—for food, drugs, sex. Sometimes a person could satisfy those cravings. Sometimes a person couldn’t, and it sucked all around, sure. Sometimes a person jerked off or chewed gum or bummed a smoke and sat down somewhere to wait it out. He called it the religion of Shit Happens. He could accept its doctrines, and didn’t think a Higher Power wasted time getting in the way of it. Erik could not, however, accept that the Jones was part of the natural order of Shit Happens.
So that night at their regular N.A. meeting, he’d had a talk with Gary, his sponsor.
“Sometimes, you just gotta let go, my friend.” Slouching under the orange glow of the rec center porch light with his toughened hands thrust into worn denim pockets, Gary had squinted at him as the smoke rose into his eyes from the cigarette eternally clamped in his mouth. He’d always struck Erik in general as being the perfect man to wear the shirt—Shit Happens—and when enough of it had happened to Gary, he’d picked himself up out of the waste he’d made for himself and gotten clean. He’d taken on that bitch sobriety and when she threatened to leave him from time to time, he weathered the threats. That wasn’t ever going to go away.
“It’s more than that. Different. Weird shit, Gary, that I don’t think is supposed to happen.”
Gary raised an eyebrow at that, but Erik ducked his gaze and hurried on. “It’s hard to explain. I’m having more trouble, I think, than I ought to be.”
“Want to talk about what’s been going on?”
Erik considered it, then shook his head. “Not . . . yet. I don’t think I can yet.”
“Well,” Gary replied with a barely perceptible shrug, “I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle.” He glanced down at his Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, then back at Erik.
Gary sighed, suddenly looking very tired. “Sometimes the old feelings come back. You know, like nostalgia. Then they go, simple as that. Sometimes shit happens, but hey, that’s healin’ for ya. You have to remember to see it for what it is.” He paused. “It isn’t some untamable beast, Erik. You’ve seen its true face, and it has no power over you.”
Surprise flopped like a cold fish in Erik’s gut. Its true face? Had he really seen its true face? It was such an odd choice of words. Did Gary see the Jones, too? Did all recovering addicts see it?
He’d been tempted to tell Gary then about the Jones, but others had started filing out of the rec center and he lost his nerve. Along the walk home, it occurred to him that he’d never understood how lonely he really was until the possibility had surfaced that maybe he wa
sn’t alone. Well, at least not alone with the Jones.
Erik reached tentatively toward one of the slats. He had to know if the Jones was out there. Actually, he corrected himself, he had to know it wasn’t out there.
And yet, his fingers refused to touch the string to draw the blinds. They hovered so close to the window he could feel the cool night air seeping in beneath the slightly open pane, but he couldn’t will them any closer. Dust had settled in symmetric rows along each of the slats. A dead bug carcass lay bottoms-up in a corner against the lower-most slat. The paint had worn thin where Casey had accidentally dripped nail polish remover on the sill, then tried to rub it off. Erik took in each detail, close enough to notice every chip, mark, and dent. He breathed in a musty smell, like old clothes. Like old costumes, he thought, and dead actors awaiting their curtain call with their feet in the air on the paint-worn stage. And once the curtain is drawn, the tragedy and the comedy masks will be hovering outside the window.
He blinked, swallowed the dry patch in his throat, and wiped sweaty palms onto the thighs of his pants. Those didn’t feel entirely like his thoughts. What the hell did he know about the theater? It was the Jones’s thought.
But it wasn’t going to be out there. Wouldn’t, couldn’t, no way in hell.
And what if it is?
Erik’s stomach tightened as he forced his fingers to pinch an edge of the blinds. Gently, as if disturbing the dust would bring the Jones into being, Erik bent down a slat to peer out the window.
For a moment—just a single moment—a dark mass loomed at the end of the driveway, and something unpleasantly hot and tingly ricocheted around his rib cage.
Damn, oh, damn, it’s really—
The mass took on the form of a garbage can. Erik released the breath that had locked in his throat and yanked the cord to pull up the blinds, his eyes scanning the street below for any signs of the Jones. Several other garbage cans lined the curbs, ready for the next morning’s pickup. His car, parked in front of the house, cut a hulking, quiet shape in the shadows. Aside from some debris that the wind urged down the street, all else remained still, everything as it should be.