The Hollower Read online

  He closed his eyes and opened them. No one was at the window. Nothing, he noticed, in the mirror, either. The glass stood across from his bed, capturing in reverse the closet door, a battlefield of strewn action-figure bodies by his dresser, the foot of his bed encased in navy sheets and blanket, and a band of the window that looked out over the front yard from the second floor. The empty window.

  Sean settled down beneath his sheets, a chill brushing along the hairs of his neck and down his spine. Until that moment, he hadn’t been aware of the thudding of his heart. Moon, it had to be some type of reflection of the moon or—

  A scraping that he felt more than heard brought his gaze back to the window. His breath shrank terrified into the deep recesses of his lungs.

  The heavy storm pane skittered up along the frame. By itself.

  By itself.

  A scream died silent in his throat. Ohmigod, ohmigod . . .

  The screen followed in stiff jerks. A cool breeze blew in. Sean heard the low whine of the wind as it banged the garbage cans out on the curb.

  And into the bedroom floated a red balloon—stately, as if the noises on the street below had heralded its arrival. Its string fluttered behind it like a royal train. The balloon bumped lightly along the ceiling, its course set, its purpose decided.

  The balloon came to rest dead-center above his bed, bobbing lightly to and fro with the late September night breeze. It was then that Sean really noticed the chirp of friction against rubber and the tiny writhing that stretched the confines of the red bulb.

  Something—some things—are in there.

  He felt the revulsion as a tingling in his extremities, originating from that single realization in his brain. Something was in that balloon, trying to get out.

  “Mom.” The whisper was drowned out by the sound of (what, legs? Claws?) things stretching, expanding . . .

  The balloon burst with a pop that thundered through the little room like an explosion. A black rain fell from it onto his blanket. The drops dispersed with a din of angry chatter, spreading outward like fallout and spilling off the bed in wave after wave.

  It took only a moment for Sean’s mind to wrap around what was happening. Hundreds of spindly legs and barbed stingers dug into the blanket for purchase, propelling bloated black bodies forward in the race toward Sean.

  The chirp of the bugs’ skittering legs over legs sounded loud in his ears. Just as they crossed the border between blanket and pajamas, Sean dislodged the scream from his chest. Flinging the blanket off, he leaped from the bed and flew to the door. His feet landed once on several crunching obsidian shells before he launched through the doorway.

  The light in his mother’s room flicked on before he even reached it. Her legs kicked off the blankets and she swept toward him.

  “Sean!” She cupped his chin in her hands. “My God, baby, are you all right? You’re shaking—”

  “Bugs,” he whispered, the word dry and hard in his throat. “Millions.”

  She searched his face for several seconds, concern and confusion in her eyes. Then she led the way back to his room. Sean, hanging a safe distance behind, ran a pale hand through his bed-fluffed brown hair. When her arm reached around the door frame for the light, he had a terrible vision of a writhing black wall of insect bodies swarming from the switch plate down her arm. He could see it, a black sleeve of their polished backs and needle-legs. He opened his mouth to say something to stop her.

  The switch clicked, flooding the room with light. His mother didn’t scream. She crossed her arms—her bare arms—over her chest, then drew them tighter around her body as she stepped through the door.

  “Sean, it’s cold in here. Why did you open a window?”

  Sean peeked around the door frame, his eyes panning the room. The blanket hung crumpled off the side of the bed. His pillow still supported the dent where his head had pressed it in. Nothing chattered, nothing scrambled over the wrinkled sheets toward the headboard. Nothing on the floor, either. No bug carcasses crushed into the carpet by flying feet, no smears of bug guts or blood. Nothing on the walls. Swiveling around, he examined the light switch. Bug-free. The whole room looked bug-free.

  And there was no sign, as far as he could tell, that they’d been there at all.

  His mother grunted lightly as she fought with the window. “How did you even get this open, honey? Crowbar?” It stuck. It always had. Sean had never been able to open and close it by himself. It used to take him and Mom and his big sister, Ruthie, to budge it past a certain point.

  “I didn’t.” His voice cracked.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Will you . . . check the sheets?”

  With a sudden bang, the storm window finally gave and crashed onto the sill. His mother yanked her fingers out of the way just as the wood splintered beneath them. She glanced at him, a dry-faced sort of look that meant she was tired or irritated. In this case, he figured, probably both.

  “I think you must have had a nightmare. Maybe something buzzed into the room through the window—”

  “Please, Mom, just check the sheets.”

  She seemed to consider his request a moment, then crossed to the bed and yanked off the blanket. The sheet followed. She shook both out thoroughly.

  A tiny pelting of black rain on the floor made him flinch. Bugs—dead spiders the size of half dollars, it looked like. His mom looked down at them, then back up at Sean. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. These look like some kind of jumping spiders. Maybe they’re coming up out of the basement. How about we change your sheets,” she said, pulling off the offending linens, “and I’ll call the exterminator in the morning?”

  Sean nodded slowly, swallowing several times. He wasn’t quite convinced the bugs were all dead. He imagined that once the door closed behind her, more would flood the ceiling and drop down on top of him like shiny black paratroopers.

  Sean’s mom unrolled some toilet paper from the bathroom and used it to sweep up the little black corpses on the floor, then chucked the whole thing in the garbage can by his door. She changed the sheets and pillowcases, smoothed a hand over the mattress, even got down on her knees and looked under the bed.

  “I think we got them all. You okay?” She pulled back the clean sheets and nodded for him to hop in. Staring at the cool linen, smooth and flat and utterly unmoving, Sean felt better. Much better.

  She hugged him good night and her nightgown was soft, smelled vaguely of her perfume and her deodorant. “We’ll take care of it, Sean. It was probably all this rain. Brings them up out of the ground, I think.”

  He briefly considered mentioning the balloon to her, but decided against it. “Okay,” came a resigned, if not altogether hearty, response muffled by the nightgown. She let him go. Sean’s eyes shifted hesitantly around the room again.

  “Good night, tiger.” She left the door open a crack behind her, as she had since he was seven years old.

  When the retreating footsteps in the hall faded, Sean pulled back the sheets, slipped out of bed, and crept over to the garbage can. Inside, half curled, lay red rubber fragments of balloon where the carcasses of those bugs should have been. A flash of nervous heat pulsed across his skin and drew sweat out under his arms. His fingers closed over one of the balloon fragments and he lifted it up. It was cool and smooth in a way that turned his stomach, a greasy and almost insubstantial kind of smooth, the way gum got if it was left in the sun. He fingered it uneasily, repulsed and fascinated.

  It melted in his hand and he jumped as if he’d been bitten, shaking the dripping liquid rubber from his fingertips into the round bin. He squeezed his eyes shut (it’s not, not blood, not my blood) and when he opened them again, his hand was unblemished. He peered around it into the garbage can.

  No trace whatsoever of the balloon.

  The nagging voice in Erik’s head echoed one solitary word that he’d grown to loathe. “Loser.” He hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud until Casey turned her head toward him, her eyes wide and brown
and throbbing with hurt feelings.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing, baby. Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

  “Erik, are you mad at me or something?”

  He turned on his side to face her, propping his head up with his hand. Her eyes immediately searched his for an answer.

  “Of course not, baby. Why would I be?”

  “Then I don’t understand.” Casey turned her head away from him, the moon gliding over her hair in a gleaming halo. Tea-and-milk-colored hair, his mom had once called it, though it was coffee-brown in the dimness of their bedroom. Soft sheaths of it fell over her bare breasts as she lay on her back, her arms wrapped around her waist in a hug of self-pity. As he stared at her, an unexplainable surge of love welled up from his gut, followed by a wave of guilt.

  She was a pretty girl. If he’d ever had occasion to forget how pretty she was, some friend of his was right there to remind him. Great body, nice breasts, long legs. She always complained that she had no hips and no ass, but Erik thought those looked great, too. Even when she was dating that skinny little jerkoff What’shisname and he was with Tanya, Casey had turned his head more than once. It was a sex appeal of contradicting forces, a way that she had about her that was both innocent and seductive. Big, bright eyes and tiny features, a kind of pretty the way those girls in perfume and fabric softener commercials were pretty, picking flowers out in sun-soaked Spring Fresh fields. She carried herself as if she were both surprised and fascinated by men, and the mystical, mysterious, forbidden concept of sex.

  Of course he wanted her—who wouldn’t? Yet lately . . .

  His fingertips stroked her shoulder lightly. “I’m sorry,” he repeated for the fifth or sixth time. He didn’t know what else to say, so he pulled away. The bed creaked as he swung his feet over the side. She didn’t move.

  “I . . . I’ll be right back.” He slipped on boxers, then made his way to the adjoining bathroom and closed the door on the heavy air of disappointment behind him.

  “Loser,” he sucked in a breath. Damn it, what was wrong with him lately? The nagging voice in his head came back louder, more insistent. C’mere, you little shit. Didn’t I tell you you’d never be anything but a stupid loser good-fer-nothin’ son of a—

  His eyes squeezed shut, he concentrated on the feel of the cool bathroom tiles on his bare soles (one, two, three, four) and the breeze swirling around his shoulders from the open window (five, six, seven) and the sound of crickets. The disparaging voice ebbed away like the retreating of a cramp in a muscle, and he opened his eyes.

  From the window, Schooley’s Mountain stood almost black against the muddied charcoal of early morning. An irregular hairline of treetops separated mountain from sky.

  Below lay a sullen empty street. The garbage cans lined the curb to the right of the driveway. A tiny luminous Chemlawn sign stood amidst the dark patch of lawn. The low rumble of cars from the cross-street provided an arrhythmic heartbeat to the neighborhood that was not altogether unsoothing in its way.

  A densely wooded lake area of serenity and tranquillity, with Quick Checks and Wal-Marts few and far between, Lakehaven had served as a vacation community for New Jersey’s more prominent citizens until the fifties. As the years passed, Morris County, with its new upper middle class New York-commuter families moving in, grew more expensive. Many younger people like Erik and Casey found that the only affordable housing was out north or west. So they’d laid claim to places like Lakehaven and made it their own. He and Casey—they’d built a home together.

  She could have had a hundred men but she stayed with him—just about six years come May. They’d survived a layoff (hers), a breakdown (his), a breakup with coke (his again), and the death of his father. Six years was a long time. And he loved her—at least, believed wholeheartedly, with little basis of comparison, that he loved her. But lately, things got fouled up when it came to sex, or those deep talks she felt compelled to have once in a while. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to try. He just didn’t seem to have it in him anymore to try hard enough.

  Why? The wind rattled the garbage cans, carrying their metallic voices up to him. Why?

  “I don’t know why,” he whispered back.

  Turning to the sink, he splashed some water on his face—an okay-looking face, he’d always thought, but not one he wanted to look at in the mirror right now. He leaned over the sink basin, droplets dripping off the stubble of a mustache and goatee that stippled his jaw and chin. A slightly trembling hand yanked dark blond locks from his eyes and off his shoulders, then let them fall back into place. He was scruffy-looking, he had no doubts about that. But his eyes were a soft and honest blue that had worked in his favor many times, and his build, now that he was off the drugs, was on its way back to lean and muscular as it had once been. Erik had no reason not to look at the reflection in the mirror. So what was the problem?

  Not tonight, he thought. No more thinking for tonight. Thinking only ever leads to—He turned back to the window, and his heart shot into his throat.

  In the silvery blue glow of the moonlight, it stood watching him.

  No, no, not again, not now. At the foot of the driveway, a figure in a black trench coat, black pants and shoes, and a black hat not unlike Humphrey Bogart’s stood with legs slightly apart, arms resting at its sides. With a stance both predatory and confident, the thing bided its time in the camouflage of the driveway behind it, as if waiting for a sure kill to strike. The surface where the figure’s face should have been was white, round, and featureless, tilted up in his direction. It reminded Erik a little of fencing masks. His guidance counselor in high school thought joining a club would keep Erik out of trouble, and he’d suggested fencing. But Erik had to drop out of it. He never would have admitted it, but he couldn’t stand the mask. It made his skin crawl. Something about it, about any white mask, struck him as so emotionless and utterly alien, and the thought of it pressed to his own face bothered him.

  You are not there, he told it silently. Not there at all.

  A sharp pain in his head caused him to wince. Oh yes. Yes, I am. Not Erik’s thought, but a silent invasion into the most personal of territories.

  He blinked several times but the figure remained. The wind stirred leaves and papers behind the black trench with a low whine. The figure remained silent, quizzical, watching him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that with such certainty, but he did. Even without eyes, it stared right at him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut again, so tightly that kaleidoscope shadows whirled behind his eyelids. His fists clenched, too, as he willed the figure to go away. He concentrated on the floor tiles, the breeze, the crickets.

  Wanna get high, Erik?

  The voice, soundless but commanding in his mind, made him think of Escher art—it had a quality like that, impossible but breathtakingly there all the same.

  He saw the figure behind his eyelids, clothes blacker than a vortex, face as luminous as the Chemlawn sign. Better still, though, than the awful possibility that if he opened his eyes, the figure would be closer, hovering right outside the window, inches from the screen.

  Wanna get really high?

  “Stop it.” Something wet and heavy turned over in his stomach with a gurgle. He opened his eyes.

  The street below lay empty, except for the garbage cans, the Chemlawn sign, the chirping of crickets.

  No one was there.

  Two

  Dave Kohlar shivered, pulled his trench coat tighter across his stocky frame, and quickened his stride. He cast a suspicious glance skyward and frowned. Above, the insipid gray blended like an overwet watercolor with the clouds. The Weather Channel had threatened rain, but so far it was little more than cold, overcast, and windy. Cool drafts lifted his blond hair, tugging it from his forehead with little jerks that matched his steps.

  The funeral-goers stood out like a black inkspot against the pale colors of the cemetery, flanked by two mounds of coffee-colored dirt.

  So Max won’t be
the only new kid on the block, Dave thought, and glanced at his sister, standing over by the other Group therapy members. Sally had taken Max’s death hard. She’d been with another Group member, Alice Vance, when they went to Max’s house, concerned that he hadn’t shown up for the last two meetings. She and Alice both found the body. Dr. Stevens hadn’t been with them. For that, Dave would never forgive the doctor, or the Group.

  But Sally loved every one of the Group members, especially Max. She’d tried so hard to get through to him and make him feel safe and cared for. She insisted her brother meet him, and Dave had put it off every time, partially because of a discomfort and mild distrust of the Group. Too many secrets, too many shared hurts and knowing glances, too much guilt. Dave wanted no real part of any of them. But even that wasn’t the real reason he’d put off meeting Max.

  Mostly, it bugged him that Sally claimed Max saw the figure in the black “detective hat,” too. The very idea that he and Max Feinstein shared a—what? Hallucination? Vision?—stirred up far more hypotheticals about Dave’s own state of mind than he was ready to speculate on.

  At a tombstone several feet from the funeral gathering, he hesitated. A woman Dave assumed to be Max’s ex-wife stood in front of the casket. Sourdough woman, Sally once called her, and judging by her short, round frame and pasty, puffy skin, Dave guessed it suited her. Gladys looked up briefly at the sound of Dave’s feet crunching on the dry grass and frowned, her wispy eyebrows knitting over eyes as dark and severe as her dress. He nodded a hello, but her gaze was already fixed again on Max’s casket.

  Sally’s small hand waved from the far side of the funeral-goers. Dave skirted the circumference of the ensemble to join them.

  “Glad you finally made it,” she whispered, her breath warm on his ear.

  “I was . . . held up.” He could feel Sally’s eyes on his face but made the pretense of surveying the green-and-wheat-colored patchwork plots of the cemetery, broken by the widely placed stone or monument or memorial bench.