The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  DeMarco watched through the static, leaning forward in the hard interrogation room chair, fists clenched in her lap. The static continued.

  DeMarco waited five, six minutes before leaning back, surprised at the tension that dissipated from her hands, her teeth, when nothing else appeared on the tape. She watched the static for another couple of minutes, too satisfied—too relieved—to question right away what it might have been that May saw.

  Static. There was nothing else there on the tape. She rose to shut it off.

  Up close, her finger poised on the Stop button, she heard the voices. That close to the television speakers, they sounded agitated, whispering to each other in a frenzy of words she couldn’t make out. She could feel their meaning, though—the implication in the tone. She heard fear and pain and confusion.

  She thought she heard her name.

  DeMarco backed away from the set and sank back into her chair. The static wavered, and she thought she saw an inky sleeve, the skewed brim of a hat. The picture blurred, and the sound caught. A hiss drew out, thinning the voices into a shrill, stretched scream. Then both the sound and the static froze.

  A moment later, the peppering pulled back to the corners of the set and DeMarco found herself looking at Feinstein’s desk, the one from which he’d filmed his message for David Kohlar. A black-gloved hand passed across the lens and then moved away, and the view jostled a moment and then rose. The camera made a steady progression out into the hallway and bounced lightly up the stairs. At the top, it turned the corner and angled down as it crossed a threshold into a room. DeMarco thought she saw the toe of a black shoe.

  Suddenly, the camera stopped. When it panned upward, DeMarco felt that tension return, tightening her jaw, her neck, her stomach.

  From the doorway, the view passed a window and dipped down to a bed. What was left of Feinstein’s head bled out onto the bedspread around his body. On the wall behind the bed, a blood-burst of red splattered the wall.

  “Oh my God.” DeMarco leaned nearly out of the seat, chewing her thumbnail thoughtfully. “Bastard’s in the house.” When the police had found the camera, it had been empty, sitting on the desk where Feinstein had left it. The tape hadn’t been inside. Had the person (he/she/it) who videotaped this part gotten the tape out, filmed this, then put it back where Feinstein had left it?

  The camera began to tremble, just enough to wiggle the picture, and DeMarco heard the dry rustle of a chuckle from behind. The black-gloved hand reached around the lens toward the blood splatter. The fingers waved and drew back, and for a minute, the blood writhed on the walls, pulling together in tribal-looking shapes and then squirming back into nondescript splashes.

  The picture blacked out for a second and then flashed back to the desk, where it lowered slowly to the position in which Feinstein had left it.

  Close to the camera—a whisper in the ear, really—a sexless voice full of mirth said, “That part was for you, not Dave. That part was just for you.”

  Immediately, the tape went black.

  Ten

  At the end of the dark period, the Hollower found two of them in the transportation object, and followed them without intrusion to the gathering-structure, a place where the beings put physical liquids inside them and dulled their crude senses even further. There, the female retrieved a false skin with a strap and a jingling set of metal. This far away, it couldn’t remember the names, the sounds the beings used as names for those things, and it didn’t much care. That information and more was always available when it went close to them, translatable from the ugly light and vile smells and sounds and awful heat of them, as outward as the false shells they covered parts of their solid, fleshy bodies with.

  The black-hole spaces inside its own body tugged and pushed and stretched at its shell. It had hunted them long enough. It was time to move close enough for the kill.

  Such grotesque skins had to contain such delicate meat.

  It followed the male as he drove the female to another structure, then drove himself to yet a third, where it stayed until the shade came back. That structure was riddled with sound, diseased with noise. The being boxed into a corner of the structure came out to him when he arrived and yelled in anger.

  It knew anger. It knew rage. It knew hate fueled by disgust. It recognized the thin overlap of its consciousness and theirs, like the brushing of walls between worlds. They ate lesser physical beings and it imagined there was overlap between senses cruder still in the most basic understandings of life and death. It had tried those lesser beings and found them for the most part not only unpalatable but barren, devoid of any real sustenance. They mostly lacked something their greater masters had in abundance—aberration of thought.

  It had taken in millennia of thoughts and feelings constantly churning behind the beings’ physicality, and nothing sustained so well as their aberrations. These were nearly powerful enough to change their physical senses, to alter the light and the sound, to recharacterize them. With these and only these did it find satisfaction, a quelling of the shifting spaces inside it, and moments of respite from the alien hostility of their world.

  They had whole structures dedicated to containing beings with various aberrations. Often, though, other beings it couldn’t always find gave them liquids or solids to put inside them and after, it couldn’t find them, either. They also cut into each other sometimes and afterward, it would lose them.

  Not so, the ones who hadn’t recognized the aberrations in themselves. True, the meat came in smaller quantities, but it made up for that by pursuing more of them.

  It was delighted to find the other male crossing worlds, his body on top of an oblong and covered by a thin white skin. It knew that place they went to, the Point of Convergence between the dimensions. It found him there, and hurt him.

  It pulled back a bit to scan for the little one. It found him in a structure surrounded by other little ones, pushing thin cylinders over flat surfaces bound together. It drew close enough to feel the full spray of their world head-on, and it collected the voices and faces and words it needed. It waited until the boy looked out the window, and it waved. The boy grew pale and looked away. It bent the school, and gave the boy a taste of what was to come when the night took over again.

  When it had finished with the boy, it pulled back, back farther, back to the place just before the Convergence, right before the membrane to its home. There, its will draped in layers over the structure where the older male had snuffed his aberrations forever. In that place, it had taken in the older male’s dying misfires of thought and feeling and maybe caught up a little of the essence that meant to carry itself to the Convergence.

  In that structure it pulled close and armed itself with colors. It showed the woman awful colors. One they called red, which it splattered all over the house the way the fluid in the older man’s head had splattered against the back wall. She cried for her brother. The woman was fragile, nearly broken. The sweetness of her welled up to the surface. It could crack her, if it tried hard enough.

  She feared pain, the concept of which interested it—perhaps the only physical sensation that did not disgust it. Down in the basement, it talked to her through the furnace. It told her all the bad things it was going to do to her, all the ways it would make pain throughout her body. When the dark came, she was broken.

  Then something changed. It pulled away when it felt them. They were together. Blurry. Angry. Scared. Not pinpoints but a mass. They had melded into a solid thought, a bouquet of feelings bound by a base idea. They were coming.

  It would not need to collect them. They would deliver themselves up together.

  It pulled back just a little more, to wait.

  Dave Kohlar hadn’t returned DeMarco’s calls and since the car registered to him wasn’t in the driveway when she drove by, she decided to do the Feinstein place first, then try him again after.

  She glanced in the rearview mirror at the squad car behind her. Bennie and Rubelli hadn’t seen the t
ape, but they had read the files, and agreed to serve as backup, in case the gloved hand and the possible killer that wielded it were still in the habit of visiting the Feinstein residence. She wasn’t generally given over to getting the creeps, even in the face of confronting potentially dangerous people, but she was glad all the same to have them watching her back.

  She felt better having Bennie there, especially. Some part of her brain recognized this in vague and discomforting terms, but it wouldn’t quite gel in the forefront of her thoughts. She didn’t need him. It was nice, was all. Nice that he was there.

  She exhaled slowly, glanced in the mirror again, and shook her head. May would have called her out on that. “Stallion sex, my left foot. You like him, An. More than you’re willing to tell him.”

  Maybe. She turned left and peered ahead into the darkness. Up in Lakehaven, some of the back roads got swallowed in the shadows of overhanging trees and outcroppings of rock for a curve or a dip or a small hill, and then emerged into the moonlight. She slowed down as she plunged into just such a pocket of shadow, careful of deer and unfamiliar bends and twists. Behind her in the rearview, Benjamin Mendez and Joe Rubelli followed her into the dip.

  They didn’t come back out again on the other side. As DeMarco pulled farther and farther from that patch of shadow, she glanced between the rearview and the windshield, expecting them to emerge any minute and pick up her back.

  Behind her, the road lay like a silent tongue on the floor of a rocky mouth.

  It had swallowed their squad car.

  She slowed and picked up the radio. “Rubelli? Mendez? What the hell happened to you? Where are you?”

  The radio crackled back but gave her no answer.

  “Guys? Where are you?” Still nothing.

  DeMarco frowned, checked the side view, then the rear view again. She rolled to a stop, waited a few minutes, then glanced at the clock. Five more minutes. If those two ditched me . . .

  But Bennie wouldn’t have done that. Something was wrong. She made a U-turn in the road. That small part of her more than professionally concerned for Bennie’s well-being fully expected to be swallowed up, too, and spit out wherever the squad car had gone.

  Their car broke down. They’re stopped in that dark patch there, that’s all. She came back through into the moonlight and turned around again. Her car rolled back into the dip. The headlights gave her little more than a foot or so, but she rolled straight through to the other side without rear-ending them.

  DeMarco put the car into Park. Could she have missed them when she turned around? Possibly. What May Davis called her “cop hunch” didn’t think so, but it was possible. She tried tracking them by pulling up their car on the computer. It was a bust. The computer told her they were a hundred yards or so behind her. She tried radioing into the station, but got static.

  “Shit.” Her voice sounded timid in her own ears, solitary in the darkness. “Shit.”

  She put the car in Drive and moved forward. With any luck, she’d find them at the River Falls Road residence. She glanced in the rearview mirror once more, her brow furrowed, and then turned her full attention on the road ahead.

  “I don’t understand what you’re going to do, exactly. Who are these people again?” Casey leaned in the doorway and brushed a strand of hair from her eye, then crossed her arms beneath her chest.

  Erik tugged on a pair of jeans and zipped them. Fragments of the dream he’d had about beating his father to death with a crowbar—and worse, that he hadn’t been by himself when he’d done it, but watched by something—remained like a bad after-taste. “That thing I told you about, the Hollower. We’re going to stop it.” He crossed to the closet and pulled a green T-shirt off the hanger. “We’re going to kill it.”

  “Baby, you’re scaring me. You’re not going off to kill somebody, are you?”

  “Not some-body. Some-thing. It’s not a person, I swear to you. It’s definitely not a person.”

  He paused in lacing up his boots. “You don’t believe a word of this, do you?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “You should be.” He rose.

  “I believe you,” she said, coming into the room. “I believe you see this thing. I believe these . . . people you’re meeting up with tonight see this thing. But—”

  “You don’t believe this thing is really there, is that it?”

  She slipped her arms around his waist and rested her head on his chest. He put his arms around her, and wondered for a moment if it would be the last time he’d feel her.

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore. I really don’t.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  She looked up at him. “Yes. If you say this will make things better, then yes.”

  “Then that’s all I need.” He pulled her close to him, inhaling the scent of her hair.

  “Promise me you’ll be okay.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I can’t.”

  “Promise me something.”

  “I promise you I’ll be careful.” He thought a moment, then added, “And I’ll do my best to stay out of trouble.”

  “Then that’s all I need,” she whispered, but he could feel the tears soak through his T-shirt.

  Outside, he heard Dave’s car pull up to the house. “I’ve gotta go. I love you, baby.” He pulled away from her, then grabbed his jacket without turning around and headed for the stairs. He couldn’t look at her.

  “I love you, too,” she called from the bedroom.

  He swallowed the lump in his throat and went out the door.

  “You okay?” Dave asked as Erik slid into the backseat. From the look on the boy’s face, he thought maybe there had been another run-in with the Hollower.

  Erik shrugged. “My girl,” he muttered, and from his tone, Dave thought it best not to press further.

  They drove in silence toward Cheryl’s house for a while before Erik said, “Not like I don’t have buckets of faith in us or anything, but what we’re planning to do—”

  “We don’t have a plan yet,” Dave reminded him.

  “But we have a goal. And we’re up against some pretty big odds in achieving that goal.”

  “Yup.” Dave kept his eyes on the road.

  “It ain’t a bad thing if we’re scared, is it?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. Just my opinion, but I’d have to wonder about the sanity of any carload of fools who weren’t afraid of staring down death like that.”

  Erik snickered in the backseat, and Dave cracked a smile.

  “Yeah, they’d have to be real nut jobs, wouldn’t they?”

  “Hell yes.”

  Erik’s smile faded. “Yeah.”

  Dave glanced at him in the rearview. “There isn’t any other way. You made me see that.”

  Erik nodded.

  When they pulled up to Cheryl’s house, she was waiting outside. She hopped in on the passenger side and greeted them. She was shivering.

  “Chilly?” Dave asked.

  “Not really.” She offered him a small smile, and he squeezed her hand.

  There was a pause, and Erik said, “Hey, I’ve got a joke for you. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.” Dave hadn’t heard it—a dirty one about a drunk in a bar—and he laughed heartily at the punch line. Cheryl, who had heard that one and just about every other bar joke in her experience as a bartender, laughed anyway.

  After that, the conversation warmed quickly. Dave had expected the car ride to the Feinstein place to be solemn and silent, but it wasn’t. They talked about the Tavern, and the gossip that the locals told her in semidrunken hazes. They joked some more and laughed at one-liners and banter between them. And Dave and Cheryl flirted. He caught Erik’s knowing smirk in the backseat from time to time. It felt comfortable. It felt right for them to be there, together. They were connected. Dave thought maybe they always had been.

  The laughter died away when they turned onto River Falls Road. By the time Dave rolled to a stop in front of the Fei
nstein place, all conversation had ceased.

  They sat for a moment, staring at the house, its front door closed, its curtains half drawn, its porch sighing into the foundation. Dave wondered what they’d do if the door was locked, then almost had to laugh at his own thought. The door wouldn’t be locked, not if the Hollower was in there, waiting for them. It would be expecting them.

  “It doesn’t look so big,” Erik said finally. “Not too many places to hide in there.”

  Dave nodded. “We’ll find it.”

  “And we’ll kill it,” Erik said.

  “Damn right, we will,” Cheryl added.

  No one made a move to get out of the car.

  “I’ve got weapons in the trunk,” Dave said. “Can’t see that they’ll do much good, but I thought we might feel better having them.”

  “Good idea,” Cheryl said, giving his arm a squeeze.

  Just then, movement in one of the upstairs windows caught Dave’s attention. A moment later, the front door opened. They sucked in a collective breath. No one moved.

  Nothing came out through the front door.

  But it was in there, oh yes. Dave had no doubt about that at all. It was most certainly in there, waiting for them.

  “Guess there’s no time like the present, huh?” Erik opened the car door. Reluctantly, Dave and Cheryl followed suit.

  They followed Dave around to the back of the car. The air blew cool around him, creeping beneath his jacket. He glanced around. No neighbors peered out. No one interested, maybe. No one to care about three strangers breaking into a dead man’s house.

  And then he thought of the nurses’ station, fully staffed, and how no one had seen Sally leave and how the old woman hadn’t seen any nurses. He shivered against the wind.

  Dave popped the trunk. Inside, he’d put a butcher knife, a crowbar, and a battery-powered nail gun, as well as three flashlights.