The Hollower

by Mary SanGiovanni

  His voice sank to a barely contained low. “No, I didn’t. I love Sally. I take care of her as best I can.”

  “I should take her away from you.”

  “You can’t have her.”

  The mother smiled. It was a terrible fault across the expanse of her face. “I already do.” She nodded toward a place over his shoulder, and he wheeled around.

  He was inside again, at the top of the stairs. He saw a flashlight beam arc its way across the landing at the bottom, but the source was out of his line of view.

  Taking two at a time, he lunged downward. A figure stepped in front of him just as he hit the bottom and he nearly plowed it over.

  “Man, I get that you’re happy to see me, but you don’t need to bowl me over.” Erik laughed.

  “Erik?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, really Erik?”

  He got Dave’s meaning and punched him lightly in the arm. “Our friend doesn’t seem to like physical contact, right? See, it’s me. In the flesh.”

  Dave exhaled in relief. “Thank God.” He pulled the boy into a hug. Erik laughed again.

  “Have you seen Cheryl or the boy?”

  “Right here,” Cheryl’s voice said. They turned and found her, holding on to Sean’s hand.

  “Found ya,” Sean said.

  Dave smiled at the sight of her. “Have to test if you’re really you,” he said, and hugged them both, relieved that they were okay. Then, smiling wider, he said, “Still not sure about you, Cheryl,” and swept her up in a hug again. She giggled, and he felt her breath in his ear. It made him want to keep holding on to her, but after a moment longer, he let her go.

  “So, what the hell just happened? I mean, one minute I’m following you guys, and the next minute, I’m having a conversation with my father.” Erik exhaled an unsteady breath, and gave them a meaningful look. “My dead father. Every time I turned around, the Hollower was there, and I blew every chance to kill it. I’m sorry. I blew it.” He held out a hand, palm down, and studied it. It shook.

  “Yeah, we ran into it, too,” Cheryl said, somewhat breathless. Her eyes crinkled in a worried squint, and she glanced once around the basement. “Well, not the Hollower exactly. But I guess it ran into us. Or over us. We didn’t stand a real fighting chance, either.”

  Dave walked to the stairs and peered up. The door at the top smeared as if someone had taken a damp thumb to an ink picture. It looked surreal. Deadly, somehow. Certainly not the way to go. “None of us stand a chance alone,” he said. “It’s too easy, much too easy for it to change up reality and fade back and watch it all happen.”

  “It split us up for a reason,” Erik said. “I figure, we stick together and if the Hollower wants us, it’ll have to show its face, so to speak, and come get us.”

  “I think we should look for it around here,” Cheryl said, looking to Dave.

  Erik shrugged. “I think she’s right. Basement’s got kind of a lairish thing happening.”

  “It seems we might have more to go on here than I found in Max’s room. This place feels—”

  “Unstable,” Cheryl finished.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “Unstable.” Maybe he’d been wrong about Max’s bedroom. Maybe it wasn’t the hub of the Hollower’s activity but simply the room most grounded in humanity. Maybe it struck him as an eye in the storm of the house not because it was the first place the Hollower retired to, but the last place it touched in its torment of Max, and likely, only after the man died.

  In that basement, the feeling was different than in the bedroom. There beneath the house, the solidity of wall and floor gave way to material thrumming with alien life. The very sureness of a wall or floor was missing. To get lost in such a place was to mistake a slab of concrete for a safe place to lean, or to take a step and keep falling through to the center of the world.

  The Hollower’s world.

  He thought of the vision of Sally, and felt impatient to move forward.

  “Anyone see a light switch around here?” Dave felt toward the nearest wall, but found nothing. He didn’t much expect to. The Hollower didn’t need to see, and wouldn’t want to make it any easier for them.

  “Nothing up there,” Erik called from the middle of the stairs, then jogged back down. “There isn’t even much of a door anymore.”

  “I saw that,” Dave replied with a grim nod. “Nice touch.”

  From over by the far wall, Cheryl and Sean shook their heads.

  “Okay, I guess we forge ahead with the flashlights.”

  Their flashlight beams skittered about ahead of them, but didn’t illuminate much more than a few feet. Their footsteps echoed and as they walked on, Dave got the distinct impression that beyond where the flashlights could penetrate, the walls were drawing back and the distance ahead of them stretching beyond the width of the house.

  But then they turned at a bend in the hall and came abruptly upon a wooden door. In the weak light, the irregular patches of chipped paint looked like bloodstains. From beneath the door he heard muted sounds of voices.

  Dave held up a hand for them to wait, and they stopped, silent and huddled, behind him.

  He turned his head and whispered, “There are people in there.”

  “People.” Erik’s whisper implied doubt.

  Cheryl touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Maybe Sally?” Dave met her gaze for a moment, and she gave his shoulder a squeeze.

  He turned back toward the door. “Let’s find out.” He was aware of the cold metal of the knob before he was conscious of the fact that it was turning in his hand. The door opened.

  And the muzzle of a gun pointed directly at the tip of his nose. He felt his stomach bottom out.

  The detective from the hospital stood in the doorway. When recognition dawned in her eyes, she lowered the gun.

  Her name came to him after a second. “Detective DeMarco?”

  “Mr. Kohlar. Ms. Duffy, hello there.” She paused, looking from one to the other, and finally to Sean. She looked unsure what to say next. After a moment, she opted for, “I’ve found your sister.”

  Dave’s heart leaped in his chest. “Is she okay?”

  DeMarco stepped back to let them pass, and he moved into the room on heavy legs. The others crowded in after him.

  Sally sat with her feet tucked under her on the floor and her arms wrapped around her. She rocked gently to a rhythm only she could feel. Dave felt a rush of both relief and lingering fear. She looked okay, but the slack-jawed expression made him worried.

  “Sally?” The question sounded so loud in his ears, so pregnant with the things he needed to know.

  She kept rocking, but closed her eyes.

  Dave crouched next to her. “It’s Dave. Can you hear me?” He felt a lump forming in his throat, which made pleading with her difficult. “Please. Please talk to me.”

  She turned her head and gave him a blank stare. “It’s here, in this basement,” she whispered. “The furnace. It says the most awful things.”

  Then he saw the gash on his sister’s ankle, the dried blood that had collected over and at the top of her shoe, and looked up at DeMarco, his eyes burning with the beginnings of tears. “What happened?”

  The detective reholstered her gun. “I wish I could tell you, but that’s all she’ll say. I was hoping you could tell me.” When none of them answered, she added, “Look, I’ll spare you the breaking and entering bit, since I have a pretty good idea why you’re here. I’ll also spare you the interrogation, since I would bet a paycheck that none of you brought Ms. Kohlar here yourselves. And I also figure that whatever condition Ms. Kohlar suffers from, none of you were the ones who made it worse since she’s been gone. But someone did. Someone made it a whole lot worse. Someone you’re all here looking for. But what I don’t get,” she said finally, “I mean, what I’ve been spending the better part of the last half hour trying to wrap my brain around, is what the hell this Hollower really is. And how does it mess up the world the way it does?
Because that’s enough to break anyone.”

  Dave gaped at her. Erik exchanged a glance with Cheryl and said, “You . . . how did you . . . ?”

  “Call it a cop hunch. Or an instinct for connecting jagged pieces of a puzzle. And a very nasty run-in somewhere I couldn’t have been with people I couldn’t have seen. Well, people, such as they were.” A dark expression passed over her face for a moment, and then she looked down at Sean. “Sweetheart, I’m willing to bet your mother doesn’t know you’re in a dead man’s house this late at night. You do know that a sensible, respectable cop would march you right back home and into your mother’s custody, and probably spend a good hour ranting about what a terribly stupid and dangerous idea it was for you to have come here in the first place.”

  Sean started to protest but DeMarco held up a hand. “As it is, the sensible, respectable thing isn’t going to work here.”

  “What do you mean?” Dave rose.

  “I almost lost your sister once—when I went to step out into the hall. I heard the sound of footsteps. Yours, I suppose, but I didn’t know that then. I meant to check out the situation.” She cast a wary glance at the door. “But the second I set one foot through, the hallway out there changed. I happened to have a hand on the door frame still, and managed to pull myself back into the room and close the door. That wasn’t the first time part of the house changed. And frankly, I don’t believe it will be the last. I can’t in good conscience risk letting the house swallow any of you up if I can help it. So it’s an all-or-nothing situation for me. Assuming I could find the front door again, I’d either have to escort all of you from the premises at the same time, or risk losing those I left behind, possibly forever. Of course, if I did force you all to leave together—”

  “You’d have to shoot us first,” Dave said. “We’re not leaving until we take down that thing, or it takes us down.” He heard the finality in his words, and his resolution felt good. Being sure felt good.

  DeMarco gave him a resigned smile. “And I figured as much. Given what I’ve seen the last few days, I can’t much say I blame you. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was scared as hell for you. And me too.”

  Dave could see it then, the exhaustion creeping around the edge of her features, the tension in her mouth, the carefully reined-in terror in her eyes. And he felt more comfortable, more safe with her than he had felt in a long time with anyone. She felt real and honest, and those things made her endearing.

  She took a step toward the boy. “All that being said, kid, you stick with me, okay?”

  The boy glanced up at Cheryl, and at her gentle nod, replied in kind to the detective.

  “So, I think if I’m to help you, I should know who you all are. I’m Anita.”

  “Call me Dave.”

  The cop acknowledged it with a nod.

  “And Cheryl.”

  “Sean,” the boy said in turn, and gesturing, added, “And that’s Erik.”

  Erik offered an awkward grin and a half wave. Dave suspected that with his drug history, cops probably made Erik nervous.

  As if to confirm that, DeMarco smiled and said, “Erik, yes.”

  “How’s Detective Mendez?”

  That same darkness passed over DeMarco’s face, and she answered in a tight voice, “Was fine, last time I saw him. He moved out of Narcotics two years ago.”

  “Was he . . . one of the people you thought you saw?” Cheryl’s expression was a strange mix of confusion and realization, as if she had a working picture of something almost too awful to look at fully with her mind’s eye.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “We’ve been fending off the Hollower’s mind games for months. Warps in our everyday lives. Wrong places, a wrong face. But before, you said ‘people.’ You said ‘people you couldn’t have seen.’ ”

  DeMarco looked genuinely sympathetic. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like. I can certainly understand your resolve now.”

  “You said ‘people,’ ” Cheryl repeated.

  “Not sure we follow,” Erik said.

  Cheryl looked down at Sally. “None of us have ever seen more than one figure at a time, have we? None of us have ever seen ‘people.’ We’ve seen one—the Hollower—pretending to be someone else.” She looked up at Dave and there were tears in her eyes. “God, what do you think more than one means?”

  The others were silent. Sean drew close to Cheryl, who put an arm around him.

  DeMarco stepped toward the door. “Could simply mean it’s strong enough now to split off into other figures. I have no idea what the limits of its capabilities are, if it has any at all. But given that it’s invited me into your little circle, and given that obvious escalations have drawn you here, I think it’s probably safe to assume that this thing is kicking up its tactics a notch. We have no real reason yet to believe this splintering of figures is anything more than a new trick.”

  Dave noticed that in spite of everything he’d seen in her face of worry and fatigue, DeMarco still had a way of commanding authority, as if she could bend the Hollower’s world back to her will. He looked back down at his sister, and for the moment he felt stronger, more capable of protecting her. “We can’t stay here all night. We’ll have to try to leave this room. Together. With Sally.”

  DeMarco cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “We seem to have done okay so far when we stuck together. Not as much change as when it split us up. Maybe it has more trouble moving the earth under us when there are more feet firmly planted on it.” Dave shrugged.

  “If you try to leave now,” Sally muttered from the floor, “it will paint you with pain and suffering.” She looked up at Dave. “It hurt me.”

  Dave tried very hard not to read any notes of accusation in her last statement. The logical part of him asserted that she wasn’t blaming him, but the rest of him had trouble backing it up.

  “You need to get up, hon. We have to go.” He reached an arm down to her to help her up.

  “You can’t. If you snip me from the ground I’ll wither and die.”

  It occurred to Dave that she meant what she said literally, that maybe somehow she was only still alive in this room, and outside it, she’d disintegrate to a pile of dust and he really would lose her forever.

  And he decided in the next moment the idea was irrelevant. If taking her out of the room meant taking the risk, so be it. There was no life in that room, no real life, and no peace in leaving her behind.

  “Sally,” he said, maybe more sternly than he intended. “Get up. We’re going.”

  She obeyed without a word, rising unsteadily on shaky feet, favoring the bad ankle but refusing his help, refusing even to let him touch her.

  “You want me to die.” The voice was a light breeze past his ear. He wasn’t sure whether she’d breathed it in his direction or he’d heard it in his head, but he watched miserably as she stumbled past him, her feet heavy and her body drugged and clumsy. He tried to touch her arm again and she yanked it away.

  She didn’t want his help. She didn’t want him to protect her—or else, she finally believed he couldn’t anyway.

  Sally stopped when she saw DeMarco and took her hand, like a child. From the corner of his eye, Dave noticed the others watching him for a reaction, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Erik had tucked the crowbar into his belt, and had taken both Sean’s and Cheryl’s free hands while they held on to their respective weapons with the other. Cheryl offered Dave her arm to link his own through. He tucked his knife into a belt loop and took it. DeMarco offered her other hand, and he took that, too.

  The detective led them into the hall.

  Thirteen

  When Erik, bringing up the rear, crossed the threshold back into the basement hallway, nothing happened. Not at first.

  Dave had expected the walls to melt, the floor to drop out from beneath them, the gloom to ooze up into something massive and hungry and very deadly. But the solid foundation of the Feinstein house stretched out exactly as it had befo
re.

  Maybe there really was something to what Erik had said about safety in numbers.

  They pressed forward as one on careful, quiet feet, not speaking, as if to make too much noise would summon the Hollower to them. Which was pointless—it knew where they were, if it wanted them.

  Come to think of it, Dave wondered, why hasn’t the Hollower come after us? If it does know where we are, why hasn’t it confronted us yet?

  The answer came so quickly he couldn’t quite be sure if the thought was really his. It’s waiting. It has every intention of confronting us, but on its own terms. Its own turf.

  Dave looked around the basement. There wasn’t too much to see; the dark around them ate at the edges of the flashlight glow. The dank smell of concrete holding out the cold, wet mold and moss and dirt was humid, palpable in the air and on their skin. Dave felt Cheryl shivering through his arm.

  They passed beneath a curved arch of wood beams and continued down a long, straight passage.

  The hall changed. No turn now. Here we go again.

  The air grew heavier, a terrible silky, almost slimy density that slid in and out of his lungs. He found breathing it both difficult and repulsive.

  All at once, the flashlights tucked into belt-loops or clumsily clutched between them died out, leaving them in total darkness. Moments later, a chittering sound like nails on a chalkboard came from somewhere a ways off.

  Dave froze, the chain of hands to either side of him taut and suddenly cold.

  “Oh my God,” Sean whispered. “It’s coming.”

  “Where is it?” Cheryl squeezed his hand.

  Erik said, “Sounded like it came from back here. Behind us.”

  “Let’s move.” DeMarco tugged his hand. “Let’s keep going.”

  They moved forward again as one. Dave held his breath until it grew painful in his chest. He couldn’t hear anything other than their breathing and their footsteps.

  The basement passage sloped down, an endless black yawn ahead of them, and Dave wondered if the house had finally swallowed them up. The possibility that they might spend days walking deeper and deeper into the belly of a basement that didn’t exist in his world, walking until they dropped from exhaustion and thirst, inked its way into his thoughts. He felt cold all over, and was quite sure his hands were clammy in the grip of his partners.