The Hollower (4 page)

Stress of the job, was all it was. That’s what he’d told her. That’s what he’d told himself to block out the idea that maybe Sally wasn’t the only one whose gears were slipping. But the dreams brought on a nebulous kind of terror difficult to shake, a sense of impending . . . what? Something hard to put a finger on. Something bad, like the beginnings of a tornado
about to swirl up and out of control. Whatever it was, it wanted to close in on him until it bridged the gap between the shelter of daylight and whatever nameless, shapeless, faceless horrors were caught up in its maelstrom.

“Traffic.” She said the word as if it tasted bitter on her tongue. Sally knew he was lying. She knew that sometimes he saw the figure in black when he was awake, too—on assignment, across a busy street whose traffic in the next moment whisked it away from view, or in the shadows between two houses on his way home from the bar down the road. On the latter occasions he’d stare at it, forcing the panic down with the drunken logic that monsters would break apart if he could just get it together and focus his eyes. Whatever was left would be real and no more intimidating than a mailbox or garbage can or hell, maybe even a lawn gnome.

She knew because he told her. And he told her because sometimes the figure wouldn’t disappear right away. Sometimes the tequila shots still sloshing around in his head dulled his vision like bad reception on a TV and he’d think—this was crazy, he told her—that the figure’s eyes and nose and mouth had been rubbed out. Erased like smudges of graphite on a paper. Before the perception could fully swim through the tequila and take hold, the figure as a whole would, indeed, recede into the dark. But he told her because sometimes it scared the shit out of him anyway and just once, he wanted someone to tell
him
it would be okay.

He told her and then immediately regretted it. She was sensitive. She had a tendency to internalize—another phrase her therapist liked to throw around.
She’d internalized his little problem as her own. She even claimed some others in her therapy Group saw the same thing.

Like Max. Sally believed that Max took off the back of his own head because of the figure in the fedora that Dave sometimes thought he saw on street corners. It was simple Sally-logic (often not at all discernible to him as
being
logic), but she believed it wholeheartedly, forever and ever, amen.

Dave glanced at her. Her eyes were fixed intently on the minister. Her bottom lip rolled beneath the gentle chew of her teeth, pale skin cast in a bluish hue as a cloud passed over the sun.

“. . . soul finally find peace in heaven with God, with the multitude of angels, the saints . . .”

She cast a reproachful glance in his direction. She knew he didn’t want to talk about it, and she didn’t normally push it, but that look in her eyes remained.
You can’t take care of me because you can’t even take care of yourself
. . . .

He suddenly wished for a drink, and checked his watch: 2:13. Three hours more, tops. Another half an hour or so at the cemetery, and then he’d take Sally home. He’d stay for a bit, make some chat, then drive out to the bar. He could be there by quarter after five, easy, and could busily set about forgetting the day had ever happened.

He turned back to the heart of the funeral. The minister closed the book and stepped aside. Gladys took a carnation from the bundle in the funeral director’s arms and tossed it onto the coffin. She then let herself be led away by a younger man, probably a nephew—Dave didn’t think Gladys and Max had any children. The other mourners followed suit, each
taking a flower doled out by the severe-looking funeral director and pausing for a moment to drop it onto Max’s coffin. Their fingers lightly grazed the wood as a final good-bye passed from the mind of the living to the container of the dead. Dave shifted uncomfortably as a fresh wellspring of tears erupted from a nearby aunt.

After many of the family and friends had dispersed, Dave relieved himself both of the carnation and the awkward obligation to say good-bye to a man he really didn’t know. As he turned toward the car, Sally caught his arm, the pressure of her fingers light like a child’s.

“David. You saw it, didn’t you? You saw the monster?”

“Sally, really, I don’t th—”

But the word died in his throat when he saw something half hidden by an immense oak several yards away. The sleeve of a black trench coat and the leg-line of pants leaned away from the trunk in familiar silhouette. The hat was tilted down against a wind that had built without his notice and now whistled low around the stone monuments. As if Dave had called out a greeting to it, the figure’s head rose slowly, a vacant canvas of white beneath a black brimmed hat. Without the slightest movement or smallest wrinkle of the face, Dave felt it smile at him. He pulled the coat tighter, but the chill got under the cloth—under the skin, even. A leather glove, dark as the sleeve from which it protruded, rose slowly to tip the hat.

“You’re seeing it now, aren’t you?”

Sally’s voice, barely above a whisper in his ear, made him jump. He swallowed several times to keep
his heart from pounding its way out his throat. “Yeah. How did you—”

“Because I can see it, too.”

It had definitely turned into a drinking night.

Lakehaven’s best local bar came up over the crest of the road, warm against the cool backdrop of dusk. The neon tubing of the sign glowed with a diffused halo of red, bent into shapes that pressed the words olde mill tavern into the sky. Simply designed, the solid wooden oblong emanated a kind of reliability that transcended the problems of its patrons, as if it could stand the test of weathering and time. It was Dave’s second home. He parked in his usual spot and made his way across the parking lot.

“
I can, Dave. I can see it
.” Sally’s voice, terrified and small, echoed in his thoughts. He wanted to believe she was internalizing again. It was easier to accept that he hallucinated alone, rather than shared that thing as a reality with anyone, least of all Sally. But she had spoken with such conviction that it was hard not to believe her. And not just by the conviction in her voice, but the things she said, for Chrissakes. “
I can see it, Davey. It’s waving at you right now. And it’s saying the most terrible, beautiful things
.” When she said the last part, her eyelids shrank away and one trembling hand brushed a thin strand of blond hair off her face. She lurched forward toward the thing as if tugged by some unseen cable. An icy panic crystallized in Dave’s lungs.

Because if she could see it, it could probably see
her
, too. An insane thought, possibly, but it scared the hell out of him. He’d taken off after the streaming blond hair, the flurry of feet, both of them closing
the distance within seconds between the grave site and the oak. They made several laps around the trunk, scouring the panorama of tombstones. No sign of the figure—except for on the tree. A long crude heart had been scratched into the bark. Inside the heart, it had carved

DK
+
SK
+
ME
4-EVER

Dave had felt a little sick.

He pushed open the bar’s wooden door and stepped in from the iciness of his thoughts, breaking the barrier between the stretch of virtually carless road and the inviting world of the Tavern. As he crossed the threshold, the last vestiges of that afternoon’s nausea subsided. Classic rock floated down from overhead speakers set to the local rock station, tripping lightly across the merry clinking of shot glasses and beer bottles, laughter and small talk. The interior was dimly lit, more cozy than seedy. A bar ran along an ‘L’ shape, the shorter leg crossing in front of the door while the longer ran the length of the left wall. To the right the bar area opened up into a room for tables and chairs, mostly empty. A few of the regulars occupied stools at the bar, bent intimately over their drinks. An older guy with a balding head and a spreading gut—Arty, a retired salesman and widower—waved and smiled. Another regular, a long-haired kid he saw mostly on
the weekends, offered a faint, halfhearted smile. Erik, he thought the boy’s name was, or Evan, Dave couldn’t remember which. He smiled back with the same enthusiasm as he took a stool at the bar. Kid was probably having a day like he was.

“Hi there, Dave. What can I get for you?” Cheryl, the bartender, swiped the counter in front of him, her brown hair swinging off her shoulder to brush her tan cleavage, and he flushed warm beneath his jacket. Dave thought she was beautiful enough to be a model—high cheekbones, full lips, brown eyes fringed with long lashes. And she had a body to rival the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit pinups. In Dave’s opinion, she was too good for this place or the countless guys that ogled and stammered and clamored to the bar to be near her. Including him.

She dropped the rag under the counter and swept a shot glass onto the bar in front of him in one motion. Her hand hovered around the neck of the tequila bottle. “Usual?”

“Hey.” He smiled again, this time a genuine, brighter kind than he’d managed for Erik-Evan. “You know me too well.”

“So, how’re you doing?” She poured an expert shot whose surface was flush with the top of the glass.

Dave knocked back the tequila before answering. It blazed a hot liquid-lava trail down his throat. “I’ve been better.”

Her arched brows tented and she frowned. “How come?”

“Ehhh, long story. But thanks for asking.” He dismissed her question with a halfhearted wave.

“Could I have a Killian’s, please?”

“No problem. Hey, I hope everything works out, huh?” Genuine concern stared back at him from brown eyes, touching him with a tingly kind of warmth.

He smiled back. “Sure, thanks.”

She paused a moment as if considering something, nodded, and produced the beer from the cooler beneath the bar. He watched as she filled a glass with Pepsi and brought it to Erik-Evan. Then Dave turned his attention to the refracted slips of light that rocked along the bottom of his bottle.

“
I can, Dave. I can see it
.” Sally’s voice tinkled like broken glass in his head.

Why Sally, of all people? Dave had been seeing the figure in black for about four months. Its haunt brought with it a foreboding, an unshakable sense of vague but terrifying things to come. He hadn’t dealt too well with it, but Sally wouldn’t be strong enough. A few weeks of head games with Dave’s man in black might very well prove the solid
whack!
that knocked her last few gears out of place. She might as well pull up a patch of dirt next to Max, for all the good her Group therapy would do in the face (or conspicuous lack thereof) of that thing.

He drained the Killian’s bottle within minutes, and another one met its doom shortly thereafter, followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth. He barely noticed the bar clearing out—did not, in fact, notice it until he drained the seventh beer bottle. The overhead radio station snapped off and the emptiness of the place seemed to clear its throat and tap him on the shoulder. His head swiveled slowly as he took in the vacant bar stools, the mug- and glass-strewn tables, and Cheryl, wiping down the bar.

“You okay, Dave?” she asked. “I mean, you gonna be okay going home and all?”

Dave nodded slowly, aware of the sensation of the cool metal-rimmed bar stool beneath him, holding him up. He slipped off the stool and moved toward the door, peripherally aware of Cheryl’s gaze following his shuffling steps. She stopped wiping up and crossed around to open the door for him. When he passed her, he caught a faint scent of vanilla.

“Cheryl?” He stopped outside the door and wheeled around on clumsy feet.

“Yes?”

Date. The word pulsated, purple on a black background, a visual prompter behind his eyelids. Dinner. A movie. A wild roll in the hay. Dave wanted to ask her out. The moon lit her soft hair. A small smile played at her mouth as she leaned against the door frame. Her expectant eyes searched his, patiently waiting for his half-numb lips to form the question so she could go and lock up for the night.

Then the rare but radiant light of drunken self-awareness dawned. He realized that anything he managed to slur at her would sound pretty pathetic, even to him. The prompter faded.

He smiled. “Nothing. It, uh, it can wait. Take care, huh?”

She smiled back. “Yeah, you too, Dave. Take care.”

The door swung closed behind her. He studied its wood grain for several moments before he finally turned to leave. Brain to foot, connections restored.

An afterglow of that drunken insight glimmered still in his head, telling him to walk home and leave the car until tomorrow. He nodded slowly to himself and slipped the keys back into his pocket. Dave continued
on past the car and down along the tree-lined road. It was a silent trip except for the slap of his shoes against asphalt and the occasional rustle of a rabbit or deer in the surrounding wood. The air felt cool and good, smelled good after the lingering scent of spilt beer and stale cigarettes from before the smoking ban that he’d breathed for the last few hours.

For that half hour or so while he walked, peace reigned, and all thoughts of Sally and the faceless thing got lost in the blissful fog of inebriation.

“
Cheryl
. . .”

She jumped at the sound of her name spoken over her shoulder, her hand paused on the lock. Her heart sped up in her chest as she turned from the door. The echo of the voice, unsettling and surreal, overlapped the original, giving its otherwise flimsy and insubstantial tone some depth. Cheryl couldn’t be sure whether the man’s voice overlapped the woman’s voice or vice versa, but two distinct genders spilled across each other in a singsongish kind of wave. Her eyes panned the room.

Cheryl thought she was alone. Dave had been the last, hadn’t he?

The bottles stood sentinel on the shelves behind the bar, winking into the moon shining down through the skylights. The mirrored Jeigermeister plaque reflected the bent neon ribbons of the $1 drafts friday! sign in the front window. The only face in the Tavern besides her own was that of Carmen Electra, smiling seductively down from the old “Queen of Halloween” promo poster on the far wall that was such a popular favorite with the longtime regulars.