The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Erik turned to splash some water on his face, the thudding in his chest growing steady. Then, patting his face with a nearby towel, he turned back to the window.

  Still nothing there. Nothing—thank the big H.P., wherever, whatever—was there.

  “Erik?”

  His skin leaped before his body had a chance to follow. He wheeled around, his heart picking up where it had left off. Casey stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, a confused frown on her face.

  “Jeezus, Case, you scared the hell outta me.”

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Erik found it hard to look her in the eye, and so focused on her nipples, tenting the tank top she wore, and the string of her bikini underwear resting gently on her hips above the waistline of her pajama pants.

  “Nothing. Just—just splashing some water on my face.”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “Well, you nearly gave me a heart attack.” He looked up at her.

  Her thin arched brows had connected in a crinkle. She shook a lock of hair from her eyes and sighed.

  “What’s going on with you lately?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can’t you feel it? Tell me you can actually recognize that something is wrong here. You’re differently lately. Distant. Angry. Sometimes . . .” She slumped against the door frame, her eyes wet with tears. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Sometimes you look so scared. Sometimes I think—”

  Erik knew—or thought he knew—what she was going to say. High, Erik. That’s right, you’ve been acting straight-out high. Instead she switched gears. “I just don’t understand what’s going on. Are you mad at me?”

  “What?” Erik frowned. “No, no, of course not, I just—”

  “Don’t you love me anymore?”

  “That’s not it either. I—”

  “Are you seeing someone else?”

  Erik’s eyes narrowed. “You really think I’m seeing someone else? Thanks for the fuckin’ trust there, Casey.” He threw his hands up and shouldered past her into the bedroom, but she was on him.

  “What the hell do you expect me to think? For Chrissakes, I’m not the enemy here! If you’re not mad at me and you’re not seeing anyone else, then what are you doing?” Her words, thick with accusation, hung heavily between them.

  Erik turned on her, eyes blazing with anger, mouth twisted into a snarl. “You have one hell of a nerve,” he forced through gritted teeth. “If I was using again, then I sure as hell wouldn’t be here listening to you.”

  That hit a nerve. The color drained from Casey’s face, and with a slightly trembling hand, she brushed a loose piece of hair from her eye. For a moment it looked as if she were going to say something, her pink lips parting a little and working toward a word. But then they clamped shut again, and she brushed past him out the bedroom door. Damn. Her footsteps, heavy on the stairs, drummed up a headache in his skull. Damn, damn, damn.

  He grabbed his jacket from where it lay flung over a corner of the bed and stormed out into the hall and down the stairs. Soft, broken sniffles carried from behind the closed door of the spare room, off to the right. They used it as a guest bedroom when Casey’s parents came to visit. Erik paused a moment, hovering uncertainly at the bottom of the stairs outside the spare room’s door. He hated to make her cry. The sniffling dissolved into tiny sobbing. He yanked the front door open and swung out into the night.

  “Cheryl . . .”

  A whisper of labored breath close to her ear made her jump. Lukewarm bathwater, milky from dissipating bubbles that foamed around the glistening peaks of her knees, splashed loudly against the side of the tub. Immediately, the terror from the night before resurfaced. She opened her eyes.

  “Hello?” Her voice lingered in the stillness of the empty house. She lived alone in the place on Cerver Street, and didn’t expect anyone to answer—hoped, in fact, that no one would.

  Several seconds passed as she listened to the dripping of the water from her fingertips onto the floor tiles before she finally opened the drain.

  What few noises permeated Cheryl’s suburban rental were usually the products of groaning pipes and creaking wood, or the occasional thump and bump of her neighbor tooling with his muscle car across the street. At its worst, it made for far less noise than a house with six older brothers and two tightly wound terriers had. The objective had been to find her own space—sweet blessed privacy and a quiet place to think. She liked that in her own place, she could take a bubble bath or walk around in a bra and panties without fear of intrusion. She decorated the apartment to her taste alone. She could watch the movie on the Lifetime for Women channel rather than concede to Monday Night Football, and always got first dibs on the best piece of KFC chicken or the last Hershey bar. If she felt so inclined, she could even leave boxes of tampons sprawled out over the bathroom.

  But despite the perks, it was an adjustment. After the last few days she’d been having, Cheryl missed times when she’d had the security and the comforting presence of other human beings close by. Her brothers were classic beer-belching, mess-making, knuckle-scraping bruiser men, but they were warmly and reassuringly there.

  As she’d gotten up from her nap that afternoon with the remnants of strange dreams still clinging to her, she felt the distinct lack of their company. She couldn’t seem to hold on to the relief she’d initially felt after talking to Detective DeMarco. Why?

  Because the detective had gotten Cheryl to admit that it wasn’t the first time she’d heard that voice from the bar. That was part of it. Over the last few weeks, when she was in bed or crashed out on the couch or when she was in the tub, she’d hear—

  “Cheryl . . .”

  She rose quickly—too quickly. A wave of white dizziness threatened to bring her crashing down. The towel rack steadied her. Once the spell had passed, she took the blue terry cloth from its bar and wrapped it around her body. “Hey, hello?”

  No one answered, but that didn’t mean no one was there.

  At the door she hesitated with hand poised on the knob, considering whether there really was someone on the far side of the door. She imagined the freak that she’d seen outside the bar. The man in the white mask, the man (c’mon, Cheryl, you know it wasn’t a man) behind her car.

  You’re being silly. You know that. She did know that. The doors were locked, the windows shut tight. No bogeymen here. No slumber party slasher movie trench-coated killers, either.

  The sound of footsteps—were they footsteps? She couldn’t be sure—retreated down the hall. Her stomach lurched, a surge of sudden panic like she was losing her footing. She saw the figure in her mind’s eye, its hulking form graceful, almost intangible, a blur of black on black in the shadows.

  Of course, she couldn’t stay in the bathroom all night, either. She counted off seconds, then minutes in her head, waiting and listening for that voice or for the sound of footsteps.

  Maybe it was waiting for her in the bedroom. Maybe it was hiding in her closet or on her bed, ready to pounce on her as soon as she entered the room. Maybe it would rip off her towel and—

  Cheryl shook her head, shivering now all over from being wet and cold (yes, yes, just from the cold). There is no one out there.

  She eased open the door.

  And she found the hallway empty, bathed in golden light from a covered bulb overhead.

  Some part of Cheryl thought it better not to speak. She dripped on the tiles, acutely aware of the even colder air against her damp skin, and listened, but heard nothing. She padded to her bedroom, glancing into the guest room as she passed. No one.

  As she slipped into underwear and then pulled on a pair of roomy sweatpants and a tank top, a part of her wished she was working that night. She’d rather be in the company of the Tuesday after-work regulars than alone—mostly alone, which seemed somehow worse—in that house. A sudden quiet pervaded the upstairs rooms, but a heavy quiet, charged with the crackle of bad things to come.

  She
had seen a documentary once about Devil’s Island, a brutal segment flashing scenes of gaunt, baggy-eyed faces with prickling gray stubble and spindly hair. The outlines of their bones appeared as shadows beneath their skin. They looked positively haunted, starving and beaten and left alone to their own minds, to their own grumblings and the constant chatter of deadly bugs inches from them in the darkness. They cowered, their eyes squinting when the warden finally opened the door and swinging-bulb light flooded in and they gazed up terrified and relieved at their jailers like they were looking on the face of God Himself.

  But why—why had she thought of that just then?

  Relativity, she realized. Evil was relative. It was a matter of perception. And solitude and silence were only okay if you knew you were truly alone in the dark.

  I should call the cops, she thought. Or Mike or Teddy. I could just ask them to come check out the noises, or maybe I could—Could what? Tell them what she told the detective? That a head without a face and a glove without a hand were trying to scare her? No, sir. No, thanks. Her brothers had enough reason to think that living on her own was a bad idea to begin with. She wasn’t about to give them any further reinforcement.

  “Cheryl . . .”

  She whirled around. The voice tickled inside her ear as much as out, and that time she was sure she’d heard her name.

  She couldn’t see it. She felt it, though, when it left. A sudden change in the air, as if the house breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever it was, it was gone.

  Five

  “Saaa-leeee . . .”

  Sally awoke to night, unsure for several seconds whether she had even opened her eyes. The sedative felt heavy inside her head, and made it hard for her to focus. Hazy charcoal clouds grew clearer by degrees and took on forms: machines, monitors, a small end table, the bathroom door, and the other bed. The hospital room. For two hours the old woman who slept there in the other bed had moaned into the night around her, then cried until sleep overtook her. Sally didn’t like this hospital at all.

  She looked over at the clock on the wall, but it ticked off five seconds . . . then took them back as the hand moved the other way. Then it stopped altogether.

  She turned her head and squinted in the dark at the woman next to her, looking for the rise and fall of her chest. She saw no movement and heard no breathing. A kind of dusty inanimate quality had settled over both the woman and the room, and gave Sally the impression that everything around her was a cardboard cutout of hospital scenery in some strange play.

  She scratched her nose. It felt good—much needed and well deserved—

  Wait a minute, she thought. What about—

  The restraints? Slowly, she bent her head until her chin touched the hospital gown neckline. Someone had unbuckled the restraints on her wrists. Her wide-eyed gaze traveled downward along her legs to her bare feet. Someone had removed her covers as well. She frowned. Some crazy person had taken her blankets. The thought caused a sharp pain to strike her skull behind the eyelids, and she blinked several times to work it away.

  “Saaa-leeeeee . . .”

  She jumped at the sound of Dave’s voice. Dave’s voice? What was he doing here? It occurred to her vaguely somewhere in her mind that it was after the hospital’s visiting hours, and that Dave probably shouldn’t be in the women’s wing.

  “Dave?” she whispered. She didn’t like the way her voice sounded—too loud in the utter stillness. Too much, she thought with distinct unease, like the sounds the boiler used to make in her childhood home. The sound memory came, unbidden and unwelcome, to her mind—a hissing of barely discernible words of steam that she caught every time she stood at the top of the basement stairs. A cold ripple of fear crawled across her skin. That boiler had always scared her as a child, and every time her mother asked her to get soup cans or a box of Ronzoni from the storage closet down there, she’d run to find Dave. The boiler never bothered her when Dave was around. And it never called him the way she just had (shudder to think), with the steam sticking to the sharpest sounds of the name. But when she was alone—when Dave wasn’t around to protect her—it called to her then, with its scalding, scathing steam-words, threatening to boil the skin off her little bones. . . .

  “Sally, come here. I need to talk to you.”

  She blinked a few times. It was hard to tell where the sound came from. It had a faint faraway kind of echo, but at the same time, it was soft, close to her ear.

  “Please . . .” The voice came from the floor right beneath her bed. Sally frowned. Couldn’t be—Dave couldn’t fit there without his feet sticking out. . . .

  “Dave? Where are you? Can’t you come out of there? I don’t think I should—”

  “I need you to get up like a good girl.” Dave’s measured tones came from beyond the curtain that was pulled back between the two beds. His shadow was distorted by the folds of the curtain, but she thought by his silhouette that he was wearing a hat, maybe, and a long coat. “I need you to come out here.”

  “Out where?” The flutterbugs (that’s what Dr. Stevens called them, but she thought it sounded stupid) flapped up a squall in her stomach.

  “Out . . .” The voice passed from the bathroom to outside the room door. “. . . in the hallway.”

  “Okay. Okay, I’m coming.” With deliberate slowness, she dangled her legs over the side of the bed. Her toes tingled, and the floor felt cool against the bottoms of her feet. The world around her lurched off-rhythm to her movements as she crouched to peer beneath the bed—just in case. Nothing but dust like a fine hair on the tiles of the floor there. No Dave.

  She stood.

  “Dave?” Her voice sounded small in her ears, tinged with childhood fear.

  “Come out here.” An infinitesimal skittering of metal across the hallway tiles like the wheels of gurneys drew her gaze immediately in that direction. The door stood slightly open.

  “Dave?”

  She made a few tentative baby steps toward the door. All around her the silence was deep, and she concentrated on nothing but the rectangle of weakly lit hallway and the buzz of her own internal workings in her ears.

  The moment she crossed into the hallway, a cold wind sliced down the corridor like the backswing of a pendulum, cutting through the thin cotton of the hospital gown and sticking deeper into her flesh, nicking her bones. She wrapped her arms around herself in a tight hug. Her head swiveled back and forth for signs of Dave as she hopped from one foot to the other to generate some heat.

  “Dave?” she whispered, eyeing the empty nurses’ station warily. Where was he? And where were the night nurses? Her fingers and toes felt as if they’d been dipped in ice water. “Davey?”

  A shiver racked her body. She hated the cold, always had. Reminded her all too well of that time she’d snuck out to retrieve a toy one winter night and the door had closed and locked behind her. She’d pounded and pounded on the front door for what felt like hours (Dave swore it was only a few minutes), her little purple-white fists two bundles of alternate numbness and shooting pain. The realization that she could freeze to death had drawn tears from her eyes that froze to her cheeks. Her skin felt like a sheath of cold separate from her body, pinching her toes in her slippers. She’d finally fallen into Dave’s arms in the great, gold box of the house’s interior warmth, blubbering uncontrollably, refusing from that point on to go out in the snow alone.

  The hallway stood empty, a void of soundlessness. Shadows took on sinister shapes on the wall by the nurses’ station, in the narrow doorways of the other rooms, beneath the gurneys (is that frost on the metal there?) parked against walls and forgotten about.

  “Dave? I’m cold.” Silence met her plaintive protest. Panic rumbled like hunger in her gut. “Where are you?”

  She felt it before she saw it, long before she even heard it. Her head was turned to peer down one length of hallway, but she could feel its eyeless gaze on the back of her head, her shoulder, her waist. She turned slowly in its direction, and something flipped over
in her mind. It was not Dave who had called her. Not Dave at all.

  The Hollower.

  Its footsteps made no sound on the gray-blue tiles—not a scuff, not a squeak, not an echo. Its stride was confident, determined. She could feel its hate; frigid waves of it radiated from the Hollower’s body—not quite physical, but raw on the flesh inside the nose, like the harsh smell of winter.

  It wanted her dead.

  Her eyes grew wide, her feet frozen to the spot, her leg muscles cramped, then weak and threatening to buckle beneath her.

  “Leave me alone,” she managed to whisper through chattering teeth.

  The whiteness of its empty face grew taut near the bottom in what she knew without a doubt to be a grin.

  She willed all the strength in her body into her legs, forcing stiff movement, urging them to run down the hall.

  Behind her, a chirp like squeaky sneakers in a gymnasium rebounded in the hallway, echoing. She wouldn’t look. Couldn’t.

  Sally concentrated on the neon exit sign to the left, letting her vision fill with the crimson glow. She’d take the fire staircase.

  Sally reached the door and pushed it open. It scraped against the tiled floor, sticking a little. She whimpered, but the sound got lost beneath the drawn-out squeals of claws running furrows in the walls.

  It wanted her dead. She felt the sentiment cut through the static of noise and chaos in her mind. It wanted her dead, dead, dead, dead, dead . . .

  She flung herself onto the staircase and skidded down two at a time, the din behind her reverberating, magnified by the acoustics of the stairwell. It was coming closer, scraping paint from the walls. She felt the vibrations, the shudders of hate, beneath her palms.

  As she reached the second or third landing, she heard it over her head. She stopped short, touching the wall to steady herself, and looked up.