“It collects identities and voices at will and uses them against you. It’s the perfect weapon—the perfect disguise. Few things can hurt us more than the way we can hurt ourselves, am I right? Little else shakes our faith in ourselves so much as self-doubt, however offkilter or misplaced. And few things are more dangerous than misconceptions about the world around—”
Max suddenly sucked in a sharp breath. His eyes widened as four or five quick footsteps drew closer to the mike and then receded. Dave leaned farther inward toward the television. Something was wrong.
Soft, sexless chuckling caused Max to grow stiff in his chair. There was a flash of static and the chuckling became soft blots of sound like wind blowing into a microphone. Then they stopped dead.
“It knows. It’s here, I think. Outside,” Max continued in a terrified whisper. “Watching. It’s always watching, waiting.” Another pause, followed by his own laughter, tinny and forced, which preceded his resolution: “It isn’t going to torture me again. I won’t let it. I—I won’t be made a weapon against myself.”
He took several large draughts of scotch and relaxed visibly on the tape, settling back into his chair. But his expression had changed. The terror spent, a strange, somehow more chilling tone of emptiness replaced it.
“I’ve told you all I know. All anybody knows. I daresay, that may be all anyone has ever known about the Hollower. And I can do no more.” He sighed. Static skewed the picture on the screen for a moment and peppered out Max’s image for the next, and for less than a second—barely even enough time for his brain to register it—Dave thought he saw a figure, a trench coat, a blond sweep of hair, a pale, featureless face. Then Max was back, the tape clear again.
“I left you something. When the time comes, I think you’ll know how to use it. Think what it’s for, what it shows people, and you’ll know. I’m too tired now and I can’t bear it—I can’t do what needs to be done, or what comes after. But you can. I know you can.”
He leaned over and smothered the camera angle with shadow, and then the tape snapped off.
Dave rose and ejected the tape. It felt warm, almost alive in his hands, and he felt an immediate sense of relief when he broke contact by putting it down on the table. He picked up the mirror and his eye caught a folded article at the bottom of the box. Laying aside the glass, he picked up the paper. It was old, and he unfolded it gently.
Hyattstown, New Jersey had made the front page of the Holston-Hyattstown Gazette on October 5, 1952, when a man by the name of Krellbourne—Charles Krellbourne—was indicted on sixteen counts of murder. Over the course of nine months, he had strangled children ranging in age from eight to fourteen and left their bodies under blankets of leaves and dried grasses in shallow graves.
Max had taken care to underline certain passages with a red grease pen. Krellbourne stated to police that he’d attempted to remove the children’s faces to find “the beast underneath.” He claimed he’d seen through its deceptive incarnations, and had witnessed the beast’s “true and faceless form.” He spouted self-defense on the stand, but his official plea, entered by his public defender, was “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Dave wasn’t sure what he thought was more horrible—what Krellbourne had done to those children, or that he might have been right in why he did it. But considering either for too long made his chest burn.
It destroys lives. It destroys every life it touches. Krellbourne’s, Max’s, Sally’s . . . mine.
Mrs. Claudia Saltzman had been absolutely right. It wanted them dead—all of them. And it didn’t matter if no part of it ever touched this world. It didn’t have to. It destroyed lives just by being in and near them.
The sudden, shrill ring of the phone trumpeted into the silence, and Dave flinched.
“Georgia?” he asked the phone, but it answered only with another blast of sound, louder and stronger than his own small voice. He grabbed the phone in the kitchen.
“Hello?”
“Sally’s brother?”
Dave frowned. “Claudia? How did you—”
“There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”
There was a rustling sound, and then, “Davey?”
Dave’s heart flittered in his chest. “Sally. Oh, thank God! Where are you? Where have you been? Are you back at the hospital?”
A giggle. “No.”
“No? Are you—is Mrs. Saltzman with you?”
“Mrs. Saltzman is one of you. I didn’t know before now. I couldn’t find her.”
“Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
“You can’t get me now. You can’t take me back from here.” She sounded delighted, almost gleeful.
“Sure I can, Sally. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come get you, and everything will be all right. You’re not in any trouble or anything. No one’s mad. We just miss you, and want you to come home.”
There was a sniffle from the other end of the phone, and a sudden change in tone from glee to childlike terror. “I’m scared. It’s cold here. So very cold. I don’t like the cold. . . .”
“I know. It’s okay. I’ll come get you. Just tell me where you are.” A vague memory tugged at his heart, a recollection of frantic pounding on the front door and a frail form carried through it on the breath of the winter wind to collapse into his arms. Sally did hate cold.
“I’m scared. No one looks at me or talks to me. No one has a face. And every clock gives a different time.” Her voice quivered, distorted as if filtered through something mechanical or something liquid.
He blinked hard to bring the kitchen back into focus. “Is . . . the Hollower with you?”
“Help me, Davey,” she answered, on the verge of tears. “Please. I’m so cold. I don’t think I’m alone.”
“Damn it,” Dave said into the phone. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me where you are.” Anger, fueled by worry, stiffened his fingers around the receiver as he pressed it close to his ear.
“I told you,” Sally answered, but her voice melded into something deeper, something infinitely more sinister than Sally would ever be capable of producing in that slender, fragile throat. “I’m someplace where it wants you all dead, dead, dead as a doornail, dead as a coffin lid, dead as poor old Max, dead as Krellbourne’s kiddies.”
Dave pulled the phone momentarily away from his ear to stare at it. He felt cold, too, an unpleasant tingle across his whole body. He brought the receiver back to his ear and whispered, “Leave her alone.”
“I’ll play with her,” it responded with delight in its dual strands of voice, “until the tiny coils that hold her together simply snap.”
Dave squeezed his eyes shut and whispered nonsense words to drown out the giggling until the operator’s electronic disconnect message finally made its way to his ears.
Eight
Erik drove the landscaping truck home through the quiet streets of his neighborhood. He thought a single late-afternoon moment in Lakehaven, caught and framed by a windshield, would look like this: a row of boxy summer homes that lay quiet, collecting dust along the uneven shore of the lake. The gray-green outline of Schooley’s mountain encircling most of the water, tapering into the stirred-up clouds. The 1971 Chevy Malibu, parked within view of Erik’s house, radiating a liquid heat and white-gold shine. A ball cupped by the lawn, left untouched in the shadow of a large maple. A pair of roller skates that had made their escape toward the curb and hit the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, one standing upright, and the other lying flat in defeat next to it.
That moment saddened him. It seemed flimsy, a cheap knockoff representation of reality, too shiny and perfect to be either real or his.
The night before, he’d had a dream. The beginning found him and Casey on the shore of the lake, walking hand in hand through a warm sunset much like the one now. Mournful bird-cries echoed across the water. It was still warm on the shore in the early orange hours before twilight, and he smiled. Nothing ached, nothing felt lost to h
im. He was with Casey, and she was beautiful; the wind carried her hair playfully around her head, across her face, and carried the light scent of her perfume to him. She gazed at him with unwavering love and trust. With that certainty that only dream-selves have of events past and present, he knew things were better. Perfect, even.
He saw at times through his own eyes and at others as an omniscient observer. The sun sank slowly over the mountains and the sky took on a pale cast, a smooth and featureless white like the coming of fog, or a snowstorm. He and Casey looked up, surprised but not yet alarmed.
Small chunks of gray and colorless cloud-matter rained from above, carrying weight and substance with jarring little pings. They struck Casey from the clouds’ gray underside, melting to rain, flattening first her hair to her head, then the cloth of her T-shirt to her breasts.
She started to back away. With growing horror, Erik watched as his girl smeared and dribbled into the ground as if she were made of ink. The visible drain of color from Casey’s head down to her feet carried away with it that trusting look.
“How could you?” she mouthed with soundless hurt. “How could you let it get me?”
Her eyes grew wide as if she were suddenly caught in the grip of a deep and convulsive pain. Her fingers, locking into claws, reached for him. Paralyzed by fear and confusion, Erik stood very still, his breath held in his lungs. He couldn’t reach out to her, couldn’t do anything now, because he knew it was too late. . . .
With a silent shriek, her body shriveled to a dry husk that fell at his feet. Wind carried sprinkles of crumbling skin up to the now trench-black clouds. Erik whimpered where he stood, unable to close his eyes against Casey’s decay.
Her voice from far across the lake finally tore him from the pile of bones at his feet. He turned and found himself in the next instant in a residential area he didn’t recognize. Schooley’s was beyond his point of view, as was the lake. The deserted rows of bi-levels stood lightless and cool, their neat curtains drawn, their doors shut in grim distaste of his presence. A street sign farther down, too far in real life to see clearly but close enough in dream logic to be visible, read RIVER FALLS ROAD.
On the porch on one of the nearby houses, a semicircle of wicker porch chairs had been arranged around a small card table. Mannequins with their faces rubbed off occupied each of the five seats. One reminded him very much of Casey—the hair, the body type—and the others were vaguely familiar, too. He thought he recognized one with coarse, bristling gray hair. It was the tattoo that looked familiar, stenciled on the plastic shoulder in black and gray, a Confederate soldier corpse astride a skeleton horse rearing on its hind legs.
They were posed as if engaged in spirited conversation with each other, but none of them moved. He took a few hesitant steps toward them and frowned. Blood seeped from the seams at their wrists and neck. A white dust covered the table between them. He leaned toward it.
And the arm with the tattoo slammed down on the table.
Erik went to scream, but found he couldn’t. No sound came out. Hands shaking, he brushed his fingers across his face. His lips were gone. He felt nothing but smooth, featureless skin. In a panic, he felt upward across a flat expanse where his nose should have been. And the porch blurred as the wind carried his eyes away.
He’d woken up from the dream that morning breathing hard and feeling sick. He hadn’t felt right the whole day after.
It was the dream that he thought of as he pulled into the driveway. Everything in his life lately had that cast of flimsy reality and deviation from safe, solid normalcy. As he climbed out of his truck, he felt heavy. Tense and tired, as if he’d been standing on tiptoes for hours.
He found Casey in the bedroom sitting with her long legs tucked under her on the bed. She had a magazine open on her lap, but the look on her face suggested that she hadn’t been reading it.
She was waiting for him. She looked up, started to rise, then reconsidered, when she saw him. “Hi.”
“Hey.” Erik stood in the doorway, uncertain whether to sit.
“Can we talk?”
He nodded, inched into the room, and sat across from her at the foot of the bed.
“I need to ask you something, and I need you to be straight with me.” A pause, where she gently laid the magazine on the night table beside her. He noticed tears glistening in her eyes and found it hard to look at her. Her lower lip trembled slightly. She folded her arms beneath her breasts—not defensively, he thought. More like she wasn’t sure what to do with them. More like she was trying to warm herself, or console herself. “Are you doing coke again?”
An ache began beneath the bridge of his nose, radiating outward toward his sinuses. A similar one started up in his chest, over his heart. He clenched and unclenched his fists—aches had begun there, too. “No, baby.”
She returned a hurt expression, sucked in a breath, and let it out very slowly. “I really want to believe you. I do. I love you. I think I know you well enough to know when something’s wrong. And, baby, something’s wrong. I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. I can see something’s bothering you.” The hands slid back to her lap. “You swear it isn’t another girl. You swear it isn’t the drugs. But if you don’t tell me what it is, then what else am I supposed to think?”
Erik’s gaze dropped to the floor, focusing on the iridescent pink of her painted toenails. “I know. I know, and you’re right, but it isn’t easy to explain.”
“If we’re sharing a life together, then we ought to be sharing everything—good, bad, important, trivial, crazy. That’s one of the things I’m here for.” She scooted toward him, cupping the back of his neck with her hand. He looked into her eyes. Even with the gloss of tears and the soft charcoal smear of her eyeliner, her eyes were beautiful.
“Whatever it is,” she whispered, “tell me. I’ll understand.”
The ache urged him. She would make it stop. She would understand. But—
“Casey, I can’t—”
“Please.” The word barely stood on its own. It seeped from her like a shallow breath, nearly drowned beneath the tears she fought to hold back.
Erik took a deep breath and let it go. “Okay. Okay.” He closed his eyes, opened them, and took her hand. “The truth is weird, but if you want it . . . baby, if you want it, it’s yours.”
He continued when she nodded. “There’s this . . . this guy, in a hat. Well, guy’s not the right word. It—I think it can be both. Either. Or neither. I’m not sure. Anyway, this thing in a Bogart hat and black trench coat follows me sometimes. It has no face. No joke. Looks like someone took a giant eraser to its head and rubbed out anything remotely human.”
Saying it out loud, and seeing her silent reaction in her expression, drove a stab of guilt into Erik’s chest. “I told you—”
“I believe you. Go on.”
Erik sighed. “It does things—bad things—to try to confuse me. Hurt me. I think it wants me dead.”
“A psycho? If you’ve got some nut—”
“No, it’s not like that. This thing isn’t . . . a person. Not like what you’d think of as a person. It changes appearance and voices. It hiccups the world around it and—” He thought a moment, then settled on an analogy he thought fitting. “It’s like when this thing is around, you’re looking through warped glass. Everything you see through it is a distorted, inaccurate version of what it really is. Only, I think for that period of time, that distortion is the reality. I think if it could just convince me what it was showing me was real, those distortions would hurt me. Maybe kill me.”
“I don’t understand.” She shifted on the bed.
“I call it Jones—you know, because it seemed like it was always trying to get me high. I couldn’t tell you about it. Couldn’t tell anyone. I thought . . . I thought I was failing you. Failing myself. I thought I was seeing this thing because I just couldn’t cut being sober. And I couldn’t face you like that. I didn’t want you to think . . .” His voice trailed off. Didn’t want her to th
ink what? That he was a failure? A loser? Didn’t want her to think that he’d rather get high than anything else in the world? That he’d risk losing her just for one more time?
He found he couldn’t say those things out loud to her. He didn’t have to. The hurt in Casey’s eyes and the turn of her lips in grim understanding was enough for him. She never had been able to hide what she thought. It was always in her eyes.
“It isn’t only me, though. The other night, I found out that at least two other people can see this thing, too. Probably more. And it’s trying to do the same thing to them. It’s trying to ruin our lives. It wants us dead and it’ll do whatever it takes to lead us to that end.”
“You realize how that sounds. I believe you,” she added quickly. “I mean, I believe you’re really seeing this . . . whatever it is—”
“Hollower. I’m told that’s what it’s called.”
She frowned. “Hollower, then. I could maybe believe that you see it. But I’m having trouble swallowing why. I mean, come on, Erik. You’re telling me this thing, this ghost or monster or alien or something, is trying to kill you. It’s showing you hallucinations that can actually hurt you. It’s lying to trick you, and for some reason, it’s trying to get you high. You’ve got to understand that sounds paranoid. It sounds—”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but he knew where she was going with it. It sounds like something you’d say when you were high. And he didn’t have the strength to argue that. Because actually, it did sound like something he might have said when he was high.
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