The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “I can’t.” His voice was hoarse. “I can’t do it again, Cheryl.”

  She grasped the knob. “We have to, sweetie. We can’t stay in this—”

  She opened the door and stepped out into a hallway she didn’t recognize. Not the upstairs hallway, but someplace else.

  Cheryl turned to Sean, who stood inside the closet doorway. “Well, at least we don’t have to—”

  The bulb winked out inside the closet. The door creaked once and swept inward to close Sean off from her. She thought fast and reacted faster, thrusting an arm in the doorway. She cried out from the impact of wood on her forearm, and squeezed her eyes shut as sharp pain ran up to her armpit. But she felt his shirt, his shoulder. She had him.

  “Sean?” she said through gritted teeth. She felt his hand on her own.

  “I’m here, but something’s in here with me. Please get me out of here. Oh . . . oh God.” He sounded very close to tears. She tried using her foot and shoulder to widen the opening, but the door wouldn’t move.

  “Please, Cheryl!” Sean’s voice cracked on the other side of the door.

  “I gotcha, don’t worry.” She clenched his shirt tighter and the pain in her forearm grew hot and bright behind her eyes. She tucked the nail gun between her knees and worked her good arm into the opening, then threw her weight against the door. It resisted her attempt, but budged enough to let Cheryl pull the boy through. The door slammed shut behind him.

  He hugged her, and for several moments, she just held him. She didn’t ask what he saw and he didn’t tell her. She just hugged him and after a moment, she thought she heard little sobs, muffled by her clothes.

  It felt nice, to be needed. To be the comforting one. The brave one.

  When he pulled away, she saw his eyes were red, but he rubbed them with the heel of his hand before she could see tears.

  “Where are we now?” He cast a suspicious glance around the hallway.

  “I don’t know. Looks like some kind of hospital.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “Probably not.” Behind them, to the right, were a couple of closed doors, painted a pale eggshell color. Off to the left was an empty nurses’ station, and beyond that, the door to the fire stairs. The entire hallway was dusted in white powder. It reminded Cheryl of snow.

  She noticed a small plaque outside the door through which they’d just come. It read kohlar, sally in neat black lettering. Her grip around the nail gun tightened. Not good at all.

  “Do you hear that?” Sean frowned, hugging the bat close to him.

  “Hear what?” She strained but heard nothing.

  “That,” he whispered, his eyes wide, and then she heard it, too. A scrabbling sound, like a thousand tiny legs skittering over the hard floor. And the groan of wood under pressure.

  From beneath the door at the far end of the hallway, black blood oozed onto the tiles, sending up puffs of white dust. At least, at first, that’s what Cheryl saw. But then large individual drops of black began moving on their own. They caught the fluorescent lighting and shined.

  Sean’s bat fell to his side. “Oh God.”

  They poured into the hallway in an inky wave, kicking up a whitecap as they surged forward. Their contact with the powder increased the metallic smell, making it sharp in Cheryl’s throat. Some drops jumped up onto the front of the nurses’ station desk, leaving smoking furrows as they skittered along its length.

  “Let’s go,” Cheryl said, but Sean stood transfixed to the floor, his horrified face taking it all in. “Now, Sean!” She tugged on his shirt and dragged him toward the fire stairs and pounced on the handle.

  It wouldn’t move. Inside her head, Cheryl screamed.

  How could it be locked? She threw her good shoulder into it, trying to force open the door. No luck. Her gaze darted to the nurses’ station. Was there a key, maybe? A security button?

  Sean held the bat out in front of him, ready to swipe through the first wave of attack. She grabbed his arm and led him over to the nurses’ station. On the desk was a box with a series of buttons, but nothing marked security. There was one marked fire alarm. She jabbed it.

  A splintering sound like an ambulance siren filled the hallway with noise. The sprinklers turned on and snowed more powder down on top of them. The wave of black hesitated. The white piled up fast, burying the drops beneath it. Cheryl grabbed Sean and lunged back toward the fire door.

  A long wail rose above the siren. She had made it angry. She wasn’t sure where the thought had come from—it wasn’t hers, really—but she knew it to be true.

  The piles of white rustled from beneath. The drops were burrowing their way out again. She turned the handle and slammed herself into the door. It swung open and she and Sean spilled out onto the stairs. They raced down, two at a time to the landing, then down farther to the bottom. Only then did they stop and listen.

  The stairwell echoed with their ragged breathing, but they were alone.

  Sean offered her a grateful smile. They both turned to the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  DeMarco opened the front door and stepped into the police station.

  “What the . . . ?” She blinked, but there it was. Most of the other desks, even the night-shifters’ desks, were unoccupied, their phones quiet, their desk lamps turned off for the night. The captain’s door stood closed, the light off. Hers was on, though. So was Bennie’s, and Joe Rubelli’s. But she appeared to be alone in the room. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  “Hello? Anybody here?” No one answered.

  Gun drawn, she crossed the room to her own desk. Everything on it appeared to be in order. She opened the top drawer. Extra paper clips, a granola bar, and some rubber bands, all as they should be. But this wasn’t the police station. It couldn’t be. What had happened to Feinstein’s house?

  She picked through the contents on top of her desk. Her case files lay stacked neatly in one corner, along with her morning coffee mug, her legal pad, telephone, computer . . .

  The computer was on. She was sure she’d logged out and shut it off before she’d left.

  An open writing document filled the screen. In a large black font that took up most of the page, someone had typed:

  LOOK

  BEHIND

  YOU

  She clicked the safety off her gun and turned slowly.

  At Rubelli’s desk, a body lay slumped over. Another at Bennie’s, too. She recognized them from their builds, even hunched over, and swallowed the tightness in her throat.

  Not Bennie. Please, not Bennie.

  “Guys?” She moved toward Bennie’s desk. A quick sweep of the room again told her no one else was there.

  “Bennie? She looked down on him. From this close, she could see a couple of drops of blood already dried brown on his desk blotter.

  “No, but I could be.” The body sat up—jerked, DeMarco thought, like a puppet on a string—and tilted its head up at her.

  She uttered a small cry and pointed her gun at it, backing away.

  It had no mouth. No eyes or nose, either, but she suspected it could see and smell her as well as it had been able to talk, as if facial features were window dressings, and not actual conveyances for the senses. It did have a bullet hole, though—right where its forehead should have been. The skin around the small hole was stippled with gun powder. DeMarco felt a sharp pinprick in her chest.

  No exit wound. There’s no exit wound. There should be—

  She clung to this thought, because underlying it was a more important one: this thing hadn’t thought to form an exit hole in the back of its head because it hadn’t copied a bullet wound from a real-life model. Which meant maybe Bennie Mendez was alive and kicking somewhere.

  It seemed to hear her thoughts, and as if in defiance, blood dribbled out of the bullet hole and down the length of its face.

  Behind it, at the other desk not too far away, the Rubelli-thing’s body jerked upward. Scorch marks in the pasty flesh indicated where eyes would
have been. It had a bullet hole in its chest. A crimson halo stained the front of its shirt and part of its tie.

  “We found you,” the Rubelli thing said. The sound came from the burn holes.

  “Who are you?” DeMarco saw the Bennie-thing push its chair out from the corner of her eye, and she leveled the gun at its head.

  “Don’t you know?” It bled a little more from its bullet hole as it spoke. Its voice—Bennie’s voice—sounded close to her ear, over her shoulder.

  “I know who you aren’t,” she said.

  When the Bennie-thing rose, she fired at its head. The bullet never made contact, though, because the thing dissolved into a pile of white powder on the chair. The bullet lodged itself in the wall behind the desk.

  She turned and found the other one had closed half the distance between them. Each step pumped fresh blood through the bullet wound in the chest, too. The front of it shone in the dim light.

  She fired at it and before the bullet could reach it, it snowed into a pile on the floor.

  DeMarco ran a hand over her eyes and found them wet. Pull it together, An. She crossed the room, sidestepping the pile of dust on the floor, and opened the door to the waiting area—

  —and found herself in Feinstein’s basement, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  She assumed, at any rate, that it was the basement. Wiring hard-stapled to wooden beams ran across the ceiling. The washer and drier stood in one corner, and the casing of the water heater and the furnace stood in another. The floor beneath her feet crackled when she took a step, and she looked down. A sticky crimson stained the concrete.

  The furnace belched and she jumped. The after-echo sounded like a word. . . .

  And then she heard soft crying, like a child’s, from somewhere farther in the basement. Ahead of her, the room took a ninety-degree turn to the right. She moved forward, the gun guiding her way, listening for the source of the crying. At the bend, it occurred to her there was something broken-record-like about the sound, its dips and swells following a pattern. She thought she even heard the muffled clip of a record skipping in its groove.

  She kept going anyway. In the basement acoustics, her ears could deceive her. And besides, a record player still needed someone to turn it on.

  The remainder of the basement around the bend proved a shorter distance. It ended in a door. She approached it with caution, weary now of doors and what could lay beyond them in the confines of the Feinstein house.

  A sob broke out from under the door, and dissolved into whimpering and sniffles.

  She leaned an ear closer. “Hello? Anyone in there? Hello?”

  “Help me,” a woman’s voice said.

  DeMarco tried the door but it was locked. “I can’t get in. Are you hurt? Can you unlock the door?”

  “It’s unlocked,” the voice replied.

  “Well, then it might be stuck because I can’t—” She turned the knob and the door eased open.

  She stepped into a small storage room. Stacked boxes marked HOLIDAY DECORATIONS and WINTER COATS and GLADYS walled the room in on three sides. DeMarco felt for a switch and flipped the light on. In the middle of the room, sitting on the floor with her legs tucked under her, was a frail blond woman. She hugged herself tightly with bony arms. Tears cupped in the skin beneath her eyes spilled over onto her cheeks.

  She looked familiar—a photo from the missing persons case file.

  “Ms. Kohlar? Everything’s okay, ma’am. I’m a police officer. I’m going to get you out of here.” She flipped the safety of the gun back on and put it in its holster. “Everything will be okay.”

  Sally Kohlar shook her head. “No, it won’t. It’s sensed you. Now it can find you like it finds us.”

  Twelve

  Standing inside Feinstein’s bedroom, Dave felt surprisingly at peace. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but it seemed like the hub, a place from which all the rest of the rooms sprang. The rest of the house scared him with its alien hostility, but in that room, that objective control to the rest of the experiments remained constant. Ironically, the safest place in the house was right in the heart of it.

  Until the Hollower returned.

  By degrees, he realized he could hear other parts of the house—a television, a gunshot, what sounded like a fire alarm. His first instinct was to run toward the sounds, to try to find the others and help. After the first few steps he was seized with a strong sense that to interfere would cause the others harm, that he could cause them to get lost where they thought they were, or hurt by what they thought they saw. Or worse.

  The idea wasn’t his, though; the Hollower wanted him to think that. He bucked in doubt and made his way toward the door. Before he could get far, a space opened up in the floor before him and his arms pinwheeled to keep him from falling through. Peering down, he saw Sally in some dark room—a closet, maybe, or somewhere in the basement. His heart thudded.

  “Sally! Sally, up here!” he called, but she didn’t seem to be able to hear him. “Sally!”

  Sally for the others, a voice in his head said. Sally if you just let me have them.

  Dave’s hands clenched into fists. He made for the door again. When he opened it, he fully expected something with metallic claws to jump on him and tear open his throat.

  He stepped out into the hall and made his way down to the first floor without incident. He checked the closet where he’d gone looking for the box. She wasn’t there.

  Dave turned to the study and was about to search there when the clock struck. He counted off the chimes, one, two, three . . .

  And realized he hadn’t seen a grandfather clock the last time he’d been there.

  Six, seven . . .

  He went toward the source of the chimes. The study? He opened the door to a large hall. At the far end was the clock.

  Eleven, twelve, thirteen . . .

  The polished mahogany casing stood tall and opposing, hooded by a Gothic arch. Beneath the arch, its white face, set in a black frame of stars and nebulae, featured no numbers at all. The black iron hands pointed straight out at him.

  Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . . He wondered if the chimes would ever stop.

  They did, and that, to Dave, was worse. They didn’t just ring and then fade to pleasant oblivion. They wound down, like a broken merry-go-round. As he got close enough, he heard wood splinter beneath the momentum of the heavy gold pendulum. It dislodged, crashed into the other side, pulled itself free again. The weights and their gold chains tangled in the gears, the force of their relentless turning prying loose cogs and shafts and gear wheels. They sprang away from the clock as if it were on fire, and he flinched when one grazed his cheek. When they landed, they turned into red meaty things—organs, chunks of flesh, tissue—and the chimes blurred into a long, loud wail of pain.

  The clock was dying.

  He backed away from it, then turned to find the room blazing with sunlight.

  No, not a room. He was outside. In the front yard of his childhood home.

  Dave felt queasy. He remembered that apple-blossom smell in the air, and the sunshine warmth on the back of his neck that made him hot as he realized what he’d done, and the tears cooled by the breeze.

  Sally’s little body lay on the ground at his feet. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving, except for her chest, which made shallow attempts at maintaining breath. Blood encircled her head like a halo. Dave looked at her through nine-year-old eyes, and remembered.

  “Maaaaaaa!” A scream, terrified, frenzied—his voice, but not coming from his mouth.

  His mom came running out of the house, saw Sally, and crumpled a little where she stood. “Sally! Oh, my baby girl! Sally!” She came running, folded next to her daughter, and touched her neck.

  “I’m sorry,” Dave said, and the voice came out of time, a child’s voice full of guilt and apology and abject fear.

  “What did you do?” his mother growled, and looked up. He half expected her to have no face, but she did.
Angry eyes, hateful mouth. “What did you do?”

  “It was an accident,” he said. That was what he’d said then, that it was an accident. He hadn’t meant to push her.

  But he had.

  He hadn’t meant for her to hit her head. It was the kind of thing he’d done to her a hundred times, a big brother’s right to scrape off the annoying questions, the tiring demands that he play with her, the silly little girl observations about everything. He didn’t want to hurt her, he’d only wanted to—

  —get her away from him.

  The lady next door came to watch him while his parents took Sally to the hospital. He couldn’t sleep, though, until he’d mopped up the blood. He’d used towels. There was a lot of blood, for such a little head. It was late when they came home, three worn, pale faces, one tiny blond head with stitches.

  His mother had grounded him for a week over Sally. She’d smacked his arm when she saw what he’d done to her towels.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, with his own voice. He remembered, and felt cold inside his clothes.

  “No, you’re not. You want to be rid of her. You want to be free.”

  Dave shook his head. “That’s not true.” But part of it was. That part made him feel terrible.

  “You’re a bad brother, Dave. You’ve always been a bad brother. You let her fall apart.” His mother rose, fixing a withering look on him. “You never wanted to take care of her.”

  “I’d do anything for her.” Even now, his mom loomed impossibly tall. He shielded his eyes from the sun and looked up at her.

  “Would you quit drinking? Worry more about her, maybe, than that floozy from the bar? Maybe show up for work on time and do your job so you can pay for better care? You think that doctor is doing her any good, or that silly support group? Maybe stop making promises to her you can’t keep—are you ready to do that, Dave?”

  As she spoke, she’d gotten closer and closer to him until she towered over him. “You’ve ruined her.”

  Dave felt his face grow hot, and his hands clenched into fists. All the years of guilt, the worrying, the frustration and anger, collected and smoldered in his hands and face.