The Hollower (30 page)

“He’s right,” DeMarco said, strolling over to her car. “This isn’t mine. Well, not all of it, anyway. The side mirror is broken. And the license plate—it’s off by two numbers.” She crossed around to the trunk, and tried her keys. They didn’t fit in the lock. “Figures. I have a shotgun back there.”

“Speaking of numbers,” Erik added, “anyone notice that all of the houses—all that we can see, anyway—are numbered sixty-eight? Like Feinstein’s place, sixty-eight River Falls Road?”

A breeze picked up, rattling the garbage cans even louder. It threaded through the trees and became dry laughter. It nipped at their clothes and hair, teasing them, and beneath its rustle, they heard words close to their ears, the murmur of a betraying lover before plunging the knife in.

“Found you,” the wind said. “Found you, found you, found you . . .”

“It’s here.” Sally shivered.

Dave followed her gaze up to the roof of the Feinstein house.

The Hollower crouched above them, its blade-legs digging into the shingles and its facelessness wrinkled in fury. Its chains whipped back and forth like the tails of cats. Up there, it looked impossibly large.

“I’m scared,” Cheryl said.

“You too?” Sean looked up at her.

Dave said, “We all are.” Seeing the boy’s face, he added, “It’s going to be okay.”

“I hope so,” Erik muttered from the other side of them.

Dave hoped so, too.

The Hollower scissor-clipped to the edge, then nailed itself with its own whips—symmetrical blows to the front of its hips. When it tore the barbed whips out again, the skin split, and shiny silver crablike claws broke through. They looked to Dave to be mounted on jointed stalks. When it pinched the air in front of it, the chittering of the hard substances scraping together echoed in the suburban canyon between the houses.

Dave knew that sound. He’d heard it in dreams, and in the woods around the Tavern. He felt a little sick to his stomach.

Above them, the Hollower shivered. Then it leaped off the roof.

Cheryl cried out when the Hollower landed a few feet from her and Sean. But then something changed in her face. She ushered the boy behind her, standing firm between him and the beast, her chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths. Dave saw her hands clench into fists.

It occurred to him then that she meant to kill it, or die trying. Essentially, they had all made a pact to do that very thing, by agreeing to come to the house. Without weapons, without a plan, without any conceivable means of destroying the Hollower, they intended to stand up and fight or fall on that front lawn together.

And Dave felt something change in him, too. A kind of calm settled over him—not one that dispelled fear or tension, but one that simply let him think clearly, without panic dissolving the corners of his confidence.

Its head twitched back and forth. Beneath the blade feet, frenzied sprays of dirt and grass kicked
up. Dave felt the cool blast of its rage, but also something else—a kind of intensity bordering on desperation. The Hollower meant to kill them, too. He had no doubt of that. But from the way the Hollower’s head seemed to focus above and around but not quite on him and the others, Dave got the impression something was wrong with it. It looked as if it sensed the bulk of them, but maybe not each of their individual presences. He wondered if they really had hurt it.

It swung a whip knee-height in his vicinity, and Dave jumped over it. It swung back and he ducked. The momentum of the swing landed the whip against one of the porch posts. It yanked back, freeing the whip in a spray of splintered wood.

From somewhere behind Dave, DeMarco fired at its head. The first bullet hit it at about the temple. Tiny veins of black spidered out from the hole. It howled, turned in her direction, and the veins stopped, then receded. The second bullet nailed it in what would have been the forehead. It bellowed again in pain and anger, but absorbed the bullet.

It backhanded a whip toward DeMarco, and connected with her wrists. The whip wrapped around both of them, binding her hands together. The Hollower flung out a wave across the whip and on the other end, DeMarco cried out in pain. Then it yanked her off balance, and she stumbled forward onto the grass. Her feet scrabbled in the grass, but every time she made a move to roll over or get up, the Hollower yanked her off balance.

It raised another whip above DeMarco’s spine, and she floundered.

Suddenly, Cheryl dropped from the porch and
dove underneath the Hollower. She plunged a splintered wooden porch spindle deep into its chest, then bolted away from it. The whip intended for DeMarco’s back fell with a heavy thud they could feel in their feet, making a small crater in the lawn.

The Hollower made a few attempts to pull out the wood with its claw, but it seemed unable to get the proper leverage to keep the blades from sliding off. It untangled its whip from DeMarco’s wrists and tugged the wood from its body with a long, parchment-dry rustle. Its scream shook the trees and echoed between the houses. The claw snapped the wood in two.

Dave glanced at the detective, who had rolled over and out of the way. He could see bleeding rings around the outsides of her wrists.

The Hollower tore another whip’s barb out of the ground in a little flying tuft of grass and dirt. It swung the whip out in a wide arc. Cheryl bent backward out of range, lost her footing, and crab-crawled out of the way, toward Sean. He stood frozen, eyeing the monster. His lips moved, but Dave couldn’t hear what he was saying.

It smacked at Dave, landing a barb in his thigh, and Dave cried out. In a panic, he yanked his leg away, and the pain sizzled down the length of his body. Blood welled up immediately, soaking his pants.

Dave limped closer to Sean and the Hollower followed. Its hate felt tangible now, a chill that crisped the grass around its legs and crackled like static in the air around it.

“It’s real,” Sean muttered.

It watched him, too, wary of the child for the first
time. It snaked a whip out near Sean’s shoes, but didn’t close in. Sean didn’t move.

“Kid, I think you better get out of the way.” From the corner of Dave’s eye, he could see the others drawing in, afraid to make a sudden move. Sean stood stone still, his little chest rising and falling with shallow breaths, his lips tight as he mumbled through his teeth.

“My dad told me you fight big monsters differently. You need something special. Some lose their power when you stop believing. But you can’t help believing in something when it’s standing right in front of you. That won’t work here.” His voice sounded hoarse. “He said bravery works, but I’m scared. I don’t think silver bullets or crosses or garlic will make a difference to this thing. I don’t think it has a groin. Holy water, sunlight—it’s all useless. It’s not like killing monsters in video games.” At that point he did look specifically at DeMarco, then Erik. They were bleeding, both of them, and Dave suspected that Sean understood just how deadly the Hollower was.

It growled low. A shiver shook its frame as it scissor-stepped toward Sean.

“What are you getting at, baby?” Cheryl moved next to the boy.

“Everything has a weakness, doesn’t it?” Tears formed in Sean’s eyes.

“Sean, maybe you should back aw—”

“My dad thought so,” Sean continued, oblivious of Dave’s words, “but he never saw anything like this, I don’t think. I saw what it did in the house. Its strength is going after our weaknesses.” His voice was flat, hypnotically monotone, as he spoke.

He glared at the Hollower and said, “But I don’t think it can use our weaknesses against us anymore. Not now. Not all fleshy like that.”

Sally poked him in the arm and when he jumped, she giggled. “It hates us. Hates this world. We chill it. Blind it. Starve it.”

Sean nodded. “Being like us is its weakness.”

The Hollower’s head spasmed, its claws grinding like angry brakes, its whips snapping above its head. It leaned toward them and screamed, and all around it, the property changed.

High above their heads, starbursts of blood swelled and then popped, raining chunky bits of gore down onto the lawn. The blood soaked into their clothes, matted their hair, and the stink of old meat got into their noses and throats.

Feinstein’s house trembled, and each vibration carried a sustained groan into the air. Pieces of vinyl siding rotted and quickly fell in meaty thumps around its base. Dave saw a complex machine of steel beam framework, gears, springs, and pendulums. Smooth, pale human limbs tumbled bedroom-height from one gear to another, mashed to pulp by the time they reached the ground. The porch creaked and its floorboards moved slowly to the right, now an assembly line to carry out what was left from the gears, mostly in smears of red and black. The trees around the house sloughed off their bark to expose torsos stretched long, the branches reaching up as grotesque arms that fractalized into fingers and then into—what, toes? They swept high overhead and Dave couldn’t be sure.

Dave and the others huddled closer together, backing away from the Hollower as one. It shook
with rage, its whips striking the air like snakes. It was carpet-bombing them with its ideas. Dave suspected since it couldn’t tap into their insecurities, it was bending the world to its own mind’s hatred of all things body.
A kind of autocannibalism
, he thought, and grimaced.

A spike of bone erupted near Sean’s feet, and Cheryl dove and tackled him, rolling out of the way with him just as a larger one burst through the lawn and up toward the sky. Dave grabbed her arm and pulled her up. There was a low rumble by her ankle and he tugged her and the boy out of the way as a whale-size rib arced up out of the ground.

Sally tugged on his sleeve and he turned around. Behind them, tightly arranged cage-bars of bone, each topped with a skull, had them closed off from the curb. Beyond the bones, Dave could see the street exposed like open tissue, flinching as the breeze blew over it. Across the street, Sean’s house, also flayed to expose machinery, churned what looked like hamburger meat out of one of the upstairs windows.

Both his car and DeMarco’s reeked of rot; the Hollower had made them slabs of carcass, skinned and twisted into vaguely animal shape and left to buzz by the curb.

Dave took a step back and slipped on something rubbery and full of lumps. He looked down and saw an upturned face, its nose mashed against his toe, its eyes closed, and by reflex he shrank away from it.

“Oh, Christ.” Erik nudged DeMarco, who looked decidedly pale and uncoplike at that moment. “They’re scalps. Scalps and hair. The whole fucking lawn.”

Cheryl cringed and a soft “ewww” leaked out from between her lips.

The grass had been replaced by countless caps of black hair that knotted beneath their feet. Whether there were heads or just skin beneath the strands, Dave didn’t want to know.

Sean looked up at him. The tears still cupped his eyes, but he looked determined not to cry. He whispered, “My dad never told me what to do about this, either.”

Dave squeezed his shoulder. “Mine, neither. We’ll figure something out, though. I promise.”

“We can’t stay here with the bones to our backs,” DeMarco said. “Dave, we can’t—Dave!”

He followed her gaze and the muzzle of the gun that, by reflex, was pointed at the threat.

The Hollower was cutting a swath through the hair to get them.

“Run!”

They bolted sideways, along the length of the bones, which kept speed with them as they rose from the hair. From the periphery of his vision, Dave noticed the occasional bone spearing a scalp and launching it upward.

“Keep going! Keep going!” he shouted, and they ran while the bones fenced them in, finally dodging inward toward the center of the lawn. The Hollower seemed to catch glimmers of them, then lose them. Then it turned on them suddenly and they skidded to a stop.

It lashed out, swiping at Erik. A whip connected with his knee, and Dave heard a pop. Erik fell on the lawn. He clutched his knee and whimpered, but didn’t stay long on the ground. Cheryl shouted to
Erik. DeMarco grabbed his hand and she and Cheryl yanked him to his feet.

The Hollower backhanded Cheryl with a claw. She flew back a few feet and landed with an “oof” on the hair, a foot or so shy of a sharp spindle of bone. The Hollower lurched in her direction and landed a barb squarely on her shoulder. Her eyes grew wide, but she didn’t scream until it ripped the barb out. She rolled over on her side, tears wetting her cheeks, and pushed herself up.

Four whips shot out, each encircling one of Sally’s limbs; they wrapped around both wrists and both ankles. She screamed, but the scream was cut short. A fifth looped around her neck and pulled tight.

The whips groaned as the Hollower stretched Sally’s arms and legs. Her mouth worked open and closed, but little more than choked whimpers made it out of her throat. Where the whips bound her wrists, blood oozed out from beneath and trickled down the length of her outstretched arms. She flinched as one of the whips tightened on the ankle of the leg where she’d injured her calf. It squeezed blood from that wound, too. She jerked as she tried to pull her arms and legs into herself, out of the grip of the Hollower.

“Sally!” Dave ran toward them. The Hollower’s head snapped in his direction, and he stopped short, feeling cold all under his skin.

DeMarco shot it once in the head, but it shook off the bullet and the white swallowed up the hole.

The Hollower pulled Sally taut, stretching her arms and spreading her legs. Her face twisted in pain. She glanced once at Dave, her eyes pleading, her skin very pale. Blood flowed heavily now from
around the sides of the whips on her wrists. It spilled down her neck and down inside the front of her blouse, where it soaked through in uneven dark spots.

Dave became suddenly aware of the weight of the backyard key in the palm of his hand. He couldn’t remember how he got it again, or if he’d ever put it down in the first place.

“
Everything has a weakness
,” Sean had said. A soft spot, a vulnerable underbelly to everything, if a person knew how to pierce it.