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  “Who are you? And how the hell did you get in there?”

  “I’m here to do horrible things, Steve. Unspeakable things. And I can be anywhere, any time.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “You will.”

  Steve frowned. “I think you better identify yourself.” His hand closed around the grip of the gun.

  The legs swung over the side of the cot, and the head tilted up. It had no face. Steve recoiled back a step. “What the fu—What are you?”

  Although it had no mouth, he was sure beyond doubt that it smiled.

  “I’m your death, waiting to happen.”

  “Is that a threat?” Steve found he had trouble forming the words.

  “I am threat, plain and simple.”

  His gun at the ready in his hand, he tried to peer into the other cells again, hoping, he supposed, that he wasn’t alone. Even the company of drunks and disor-derlies would provide some anchor to the real world, some reassurance that there had to be an explanation that made sense.

  The cells so far as he could see were still empty. “Where are the others?”

  “In some other place. Some otherness.” It stood, and Steve raised his gun at it.

  “What did you do to them? Did you let them go?” He chanced a quick glance at the stairs, hoping someone would assume New Guy was lost and come down looking for him.

  “In a manner of speaking.” The words seemed over his shoulder, around his head, clearly the will of the thing in the cell, although detached from it. He flinched away from them, his full attention again on the black figure.

  “Where are they? For the last time, where are the others who were in these cells?”

  “They’ve run off. Off to tell the world your secrets. Off to tell your police friends all about you. All kinds of interesting little things about you.” It laughed.

  Steve felt a rush of heat to his face. Sweat broke out under his arms. He tried to level the weapon at the thing in the cell, but the barrel shook slightly.

  “You have secrets, don’t you? Everyone does.” It clapped its gloved hands together in delight, but they made no sound, not even the muffled slap of leather. “Ohhh, I know a lot of secrets about a lot of people. Things they think but don’t say. Ways they act when they think blind eyes will be turned. Do you know what Sharkey’s friends did for him when he was fifteen? They beat the hell out of a fragile boy named Andy Franco with some sticks they found in the woods. They gave Andy two broken ribs, a black eye, a busted wrist, and a twisted ankle. He needed four stitches across his forehead and a new school when they were done with him. They did it for Sharkey, see, because he told them Andy was a ‘faggot.’ He never told them Andy liked him. And he never told them it made him feel kind of nice that someone—even Andy—thought so much of him as to write him a love letter.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Steve suddenly felt light-headed. He slumped against the wall across from the monstrosity. It took a few steps closer, coming within breathing distance of the bars (if it breathed, and as it stood there, its chest still, its faceless composure sinister in its blankness, Steve got the further sickening notion that it didn’t), but it didn’t touch anything. It shoved its gloved hands in its pockets and tilted its head thoughtfully.

  “You know what your boss says about ‘those damn whining liberals and fucking queers’ at any given Christmas party after a few rounds of eggnog? About what he thinks of gay marriage and about the time he let those kids go because after all, they were only kids, and all they’d done was ‘rough up a queer a little, scare him a bit, no real harm done’?”

  “Now look, I—”

  “You look.” It pointed at its feet, and Steve could see a gun—his gun. He looked down at his own hands and found them empty. “Know this, Steve. I can hurt you from right here, without ever touching you. But see, as you say, there is…more than one way to skin a cat. If your friends find out all those little secrets I know about you, I may not have to.” It laughed again.

  A metal groan ricocheted from the top of the stairs and Steve jumped, his eyes darting in the direction of the sound. Footsteps sounded on the stairs, feet that grew into legs that grew into Sharkey, who smiled, turning his hands palms-up, expecting an answer for Steve’s disappearance. “Whatcha doing, New Guy?” Sharkey’s eyes slid down to Steve’s hands and the smile slipped off his face. “Seriously, Steve, whatcha doing?”

  Steve looked down, saw the gun back in his hand, looked back up at cell five, and found it empty. He stalked back across the rows of cells and found them occupied as before—a pair of glassy eyes, two pairs of scared but rebellious ones, an angry glare, and a loud, drunken snore. Bodies, solid, really there, locked behind bars where they belonged.

  “Steve? Man, you okay? You don’t look so good.”

  Steve turned a bewildered face to the detective. “I…I’m fine…sure. Fine.” He checked the bars again on one of the cells, rattling them to test their movement. The dealer behind them jumped and sat up, but the bars remained in place.

  Steve brushed past Sharkey and the question on his face, went to the men’s room, and promptly threw up in the first stall’s toilet.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On the afternoon of Sally’s funeral, the sun was bright and cast a surreal shimmer on the hoods of cars that formed the cemetery procession. It was hotter than usual for June, and heat sank into Dave’s black-suited back as he stood next to his friend, Erik McGavin, by the casket. Erik wore a black suit as well and a tie. He’d gained a little bit of weight since Dave had met him, and it looked good on him. The suit fit him. His brown hair, neatly combed away from his face, was bound in a rubber band at his neck, damp behind his ears and at his temples. Erik still wore sneakers. Vaguely, Dave wondered if Erik owned dress shoes and decided he didn’t. The suit was probably borrowed, too.

  The thoughts took him away from Sally for a moment, and he was grateful. He had almost worked up a smile over the simple fact that Erik came, that he cared. And then the oppressive reality crashed back behind his eyes, making him squint, drawing tears that he mashed away with a fist.

  Sally was dead. And he hadn’t done a damn thing to stop it. He hadn’t protected her. He’d put her away someplace with pleasant-faced doctors who murmured soothing half words and administered medication when necessary but otherwise didn’t register Sally’s existence as significant. He’d put her away on a neat little shelf with a loose door and a weak floor, and she’d fallen through.

  Dave felt his chest tighten. After everything that happened…

  He felt Erik’s hand on his shoulder and turned to his friend. There was a mist of sadness in Erik’s eyes, and his expression of sympathy as his eyes searched Dave’s face suggested understanding, even of Dave’s thoughts.

  After all they’d done to protect her…

  Once, Erik had rescued her from the grass blades of a terrible lawn that existed in no place on this good Earth, while Dave scaled a fence to find a means of escape.

  Once, Dave had stabbed a monster that had nearly torn his baby sister apart.

  Once, Dave had felt Sally was safe, that she was in a place where she could get the help she needed and that nothing—no real or imagined haunters in the dark—could ever hurt her again.

  But now she was gone. An idea came unbidden just beneath the surface of his thinking that maybe only now was Sally truly safe. He found it offered no comfort, because he didn’t believe that death should be the only time a person could be free.

  And also because, more insistently, he wondered what happened to the dead when the Hollower got to them. If it never touched bodies, then it stood to reason the meat it was after, so to speak, was something less tangible and more spiritual.

  You’re not sure about that, he told himself. And besides, there’s no reason to drudge up that old memory now.

  The mourners in the cemetery bowed their heads as the minister stood by the coffin and prayed for Sally’s soul. Dave couldn’t help but wonder what it
was, where it was now. If the monster had left anything of it to go into the Great Beyond.

  Don’t be silly. You have no proof. No solid evidence at all that a Hollower had anything to do with Sally’s death.

  And yet, the idea persisted. The cop’s words, “It was a word, Mr. Kohlar. HOLLOW,” echoed in his head. “Does that mean anything to you? Anything significant about that word?”

  Once, that word would have made all the difference in the world.

  But they’d killed it. They’d killed the Hollower, and there had been no more voices close to the ear, no faceless passersby on the street, no more walking into rooms and hallways that didn’t exist anywhere on Earth. He and Erik and Cheryl and Sally and the boy, Sean, and the cop, DeMarco—one night, they’d cornered it in an unimpressive house on an unimpressive suburban street, and it had fought like hell, bending the world around them into unspeakable shapes and nightmarish landscapes. It nearly killed them, but in the end, the six of them had watched it die, its body deflating with a siren wail into the night sky that arced over a place that wasn’t really there.

  He looked at Sally’s coffin, closed now, polished shine catching the sun. The air was thick with the flowers atop it, the kind of flowers you never gave a girl because the scent meant death and funerals and crying and failure.

  Dave remembered Max Feinstein’s funeral. Overcast day. Sally, her eyes worried and sad. She’d seen the Hollower for the first time that day. And that one time was all it took for the beast to target her. It was Max’s videotape, the one he made the day he blew the back of his head off with a shotgun, that had given Dave the only real knowledge, apart from his experience, of what the Hollower was and why it did what it did. And it was Max Feinstein’s house where they’d found it waiting for them. Where they’d killed it.

  But there had been others.

  There. He’d thought it, plain and simple, the true crux of his worry. Yes, they’d killed the Hollower. But there had been others at the end, others that had come out of the rip between their dimension (or world or whatever) and his. Three others. Two had taken the body of their fallen kin. And one—one had gazed without eyes, had sneered without a mouth, had scowled without a face, and Dave had been sure it promised revenge.

  “How you holding up?” Erik’s question broke through his thoughts. Dave squinted and looked around. Mourners were touching the coffin, tears streaking their faces, before making their way back across the soft ground to the trail of cars that lined the narrow road through the cemetery. His small family milled, talking in low voices.

  “Not so good.”

  Sally’s old doctor, Dr. Stevens, came up to shake his hand and offer his condolences before leading other members of Sally’s therapy group back to a dark green minivan. Her new doctor, accompanied by some of her neighbors from Oak Hill, approached him shortly thereafter. Dave felt numb as he shook hands, halfheartedly returned hugs, offered his face for cheek kisses. Crinch, his boss, and Georgia, one of his coworkers, swept him up in their sympathies—Crinch with his gruff shoulder pounding and handshaking and muttered words of strength, Georgia with her candy-sweet perfumed tight embraces and lipstick kisses and offers to be there if he needed anything, anything at all. Erik stood quietly by him through all of it, a background, a rock, an anchor amidst the tides of conversation that were stiff from discomfort and respect and sensitivity.

  After a while, they stood relatively alone in the cemetery, aside from the gravediggers, who waited patiently in earth-toned clothes, set apart from the scene, and the funeral parlor men, looking neat and somewhat Mafioso in their crisp suits.

  “I guess they want us to go,” Dave said, eyeing the gravediggers. Out of respect, he supposed, they wouldn’t lower the coffin until he’d gone.

  “When you’re ready, man. When you’re ready.”

  Dave nodded. Erik stepped forward and touched Sally’s coffin. He whispered something Dave couldn’t quite catch. Then he stepped away.

  Dave gazed down at the polished wood, and it blurred as tears rose in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Sals. I’m so sorry.” He felt there ought to have been more to say, something about their childhood, her going off to their parents, something he could take away with him and think about while he was working on some kind of closure.

  He found he really didn’t have anything else beyond an overwhelming sense of failure. He turned and caught up to Erik.

  They were almost to Erik’s car when Dave cleared his throat. “I could really use a beer.”

  “Olde Mill Tavern?”

  A familiar ache in his chest made him frown, but he nodded.

  They took Erik’s car. Cresting the road, Dave felt some of the weight lift just seeing the neon tubes, dark at the moment, which outlined “OLDE MILL TAVERN” against the soft blue of the sky. The building itself, long logwood stacked solid and assuring, promised sanctuary. The door stood slightly open, ostensibly to let in the summer breeze.

  Erik pulled into the parking lot and parked the car. As they got out, Erik shook his head. “Been a long time since I’ve been here. I think the last time was the night DeMarco had her office baby shower. Remember? Last time I saw her.”

  Dave nodded. “Me, too. Funny, to see her pregnant. Tiny little thing, she is.”

  “Must be due soon, eh?”

  “Any day now, I think.”

  There was a pause which bordered on uncomfortable. Erik broke it with, “Have you talked to her lately?”

  Dave knew that Erik wasn’t talking about DeMarco anymore. He meant Cheryl. Dave felt a heaviness pressing into his chest. “No, not really. I mean, she knows, you know, about Sally. I told her. We talked for a little bit, but…” He shrugged, pulling open the door to the bar.

  The usual Sunday quiet greeted them—a few tinkling glasses, muttered conversation from the regulars, the jukebox playing old familiars like the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” The new guy—Cheryl’s replacement—wiped down the bar. Behind him, liquor bottles neatly lined a shelf, their different colored liquids glinting in the light. A mirrored Jagermeister plaque above the bottles reflected the front window and the darkened “$1 DRAFTS FRIDAY!” neon sign. In the corner, Dave remembered, there once had been a Carmen Electra poster. It had since disappeared, replaced by a pretty hot one of Pamela Anderson.

  They sat down at the bar.

  “I’ll have a shot of tequila—Jose Cuervo—and a Killians, please,” Dave told the bartender.

  “Diet Coke,” Erik said with a shrug and an almost apologetic smile.

  The bartender, a college frat boy type with muscled, lightly tattooed arms and blue eyes, the kind of guy that girls gave big tips and real phone numbers to, smiled in such a way that Dave thought he probably practiced it and used it to serve a variety of purposes. “Sure thing, boss.” He slid the shot glass neatly in front of Dave and poured the tequila in then popped off the top of a Killians and set that in front of Dave, too. “Tab?”

  Dave nodded and downed the shot.

  Clinking Diet Coke to Killians, Erik said, “A toast to Sally.”

  “To Sally,” Dave echoed and then added “to all the ones we lost, one way or another,” and took a swig.

  On the jukebox, someone had programmed in “Angie.” A Stones fan. A sad Stones fan.

  “How are things with Casey?”

  “Good. She’s good. Busy, planning the wedding and all.” He chuckled. “You know how they are, giggling with girlfriends, talking dresses and flowers and music. She basically told me to show up at the church in a black tux, clean and neat and on time, and to leave the rest to her.”

  Dave smiled. “Sounds like Casey. Glad to hear things are going well.”

  Casey was Erik’s fiancée. They’d been having problems when Dave first met Erik, but things had gotten better, after. After the Hollower was dead. Erik had gotten better. He’d gotten a handle on his coke addiction and had even become a sponsor. Erik didn’t talk about this young guy under his wing, not by name and not in detail, but Dave c
ould tell Erik was proud to be able to sponsor the guy and proud of the guy’s progress. Keeping him off drugs was intensely important to Erik, and few things made his eyes shine or his mouth settle into firm agreement like the brief mentions of this guy’s successes—except maybe when Erik talked about Casey.

  “And your sponsee?”

  Erik surprised him with a frown. “Funny you mention him. Distracted lately. Won’t open up to me.”

  “Oh. Something serious? Think he’s using?” Dave gulped his beer.

  Erik shook his head. “I don’t think it’s like that. It’s…well, it’s…” Erik’s face flushed. “Actually, it’s kind of like…ah, nevermind.”

  “What?”

  Erik sighed. Looking away from Dave, he said quietly, “More like before. Like the way I was, nervous, looking over my shoulder, jumping at the slightest touch or noise. Like I was when I was seeing…you know. The Jones with the hat.”

  The Jones, as Erik called it, had been his name for the Hollower, before he’d known what he was up against, back when he, like Dave, thought it was all in his head. Dave shuddered inwardly. Outwardly, though, he shook his head firmly, took another gulp of beer, and said, “Can’t be the same thing.”

  “I know, I know. It seems like such an impossibly long shot. It’s just…”

  “We killed it,” Dave said in a low voice.

  “I know.”

  He had told Erik once that he and Cheryl never talked about the Hollower. It was an unspoken belief that to think it, to talk about it, was to put into the air of the real world those vibes or thoughts or whatever psychic scent the Hollowers used to sniff them out. Irrational, maybe, but it had held true so far that not talking about them had coincided with a quiet in which the Hollowers didn’t seem able to find them.

  “It was a word, Mr. Kohlar…”

  Dave debated telling him about what they found on the wall beside Sally’s body but decided against it.

  There had been others. Three others.

  Dave finished off his beer.