Eight

Erik drove the landscaping truck home through the quiet streets of his neighborhood. He thought a single late-afternoon moment in Lakehaven, caught and framed by a windshield, would look like this: a row of boxy summer homes that lay quiet, collecting dust along the uneven shore of the lake. The gray-green outline of Schooley’s mountain encircling most of the water, tapering into the stirred-up clouds. The 1971 Chevy Malibu, parked within view of Erik’s house, radiating a liquid heat and white-gold shine. A ball cupped by the lawn, left untouched in the shadow of a large maple. A pair of roller skates that had made their escape toward the curb and hit the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, one standing upright, and the other lying flat in defeat next to it.

That moment saddened him. It seemed flimsy, a cheap knockoff representation of reality, too shiny and perfect to be either real or his.

The night before, he’d had a dream. The beginning found him and Casey on the shore of the lake, walking hand in hand through a warm sunset much like the one now. Mournful bird-cries echoed across the water. It was still warm on the shore in the early orange hours before twilight, and he smiled. Nothing ached, nothing felt lost to him. He was with Casey, and she was beautiful; the wind carried her hair playfully around her head, across her face, and carried the light scent of her perfume to him. She gazed at him with unwavering love and trust. With that certainty that only dream-selves have of events past and present, he knew things were better. Perfect, even.

He saw at times through his own eyes and at others as an omniscient observer. The sun sank slowly over the mountains and the sky took on a pale cast, a smooth and featureless white like the coming of fog, or a snowstorm. He and Casey looked up, surprised but not yet alarmed.

Small chunks of gray and colorless cloud-matter rained from above, carrying weight and substance with jarring little pings. They struck Casey from the clouds’ gray underside, melting to rain, flattening first her hair to her head, then the cloth of her T-shirt to her breasts.

She started to back away. With growing horror, Erik watched as his girl smeared and dribbled into the ground as if she were made of ink. The visible drain of color from Casey’s head down to her feet carried away with it that trusting look.

“How could you?” she mouthed with soundless hurt. “How could you let it get me?”

Her eyes grew wide as if she were suddenly caught in the grip of a deep and convulsive pain. Her fingers, locking into claws, reached for him. Paralyzed by fear and confusion, Erik stood very still, his breath held in his lungs. He couldn’t reach out to her, couldn’t do anything now, because he knew it was too late. . . .

With a silent shriek, her body shriveled to a dry husk that fell at his feet. Wind carried sprinkles of crumbling skin up to the now trench-black clouds. Erik whimpered where he stood, unable to close his eyes against Casey’s decay.

Her voice from far across the lake finally tore him from the pile of bones at his feet. He turned and found himself in the next instant in a residential area he didn’t recognize. Schooley’s was beyond his point of view, as was the lake. The deserted rows of bi-levels stood lightless and cool, their neat curtains drawn, their doors shut in grim distaste of his presence. A street sign farther down, too far in real life to see clearly but close enough in dream logic to be visible, read RIVER FALLS ROAD.

On the porch on one of the nearby houses, a semicircle of wicker porch chairs had been arranged around a small card table. Mannequins with their faces rubbed off occupied each of the five seats. One reminded him very much of Casey—the hair, the body type—and the others were vaguely familiar, too. He thought he recognized one with coarse, bristling gray hair. It was the tattoo that looked familiar, stenciled on the plastic shoulder in black and gray, a Confederate soldier corpse astride a skeleton horse rearing on its hind legs.

They were posed as if engaged in spirited conversation with each other, but none of them moved. He took a few hesitant steps toward them and frowned. Blood seeped from the seams at their wrists and neck. A white dust covered the table between them. He leaned toward it.

And the arm with the tattoo slammed down on the table.

Erik went to scream, but found he couldn’t. No sound came out. Hands shaking, he brushed his fingers across his face. His lips were gone. He felt nothing but smooth, featureless skin. In a panic, he felt upward across a flat expanse where his nose should have been. And the porch blurred as the wind carried his eyes away.

He’d woken up from the dream that morning breathing hard and feeling sick. He hadn’t felt right the whole day after.

It was the dream that he thought of as he pulled into the driveway. Everything in his life lately had that cast of flimsy reality and deviation from safe, solid normalcy. As he climbed out of his truck, he felt heavy. Tense and tired, as if he’d been standing on tiptoes for hours.

He found Casey in the bedroom sitting with her long legs tucked under her on the bed. She had a magazine open on her lap, but the look on her face suggested that she hadn’t been reading it.

She was waiting for him. She looked up, started to rise, then reconsidered, when she saw him. “Hi.”

“Hey.” Erik stood in the doorway, uncertain whether to sit.

“Can we talk?”

He nodded, inched into the room, and sat across from her at the foot of the bed.

“I need to ask you something, and I need you to be straight with me.” A pause, where she gently laid the magazine on the night table beside her. He noticed tears glistening in her eyes and found it hard to look at her. Her lower lip trembled slightly. She folded her arms beneath her breasts—not defensively, he thought. More like she wasn’t sure what to do with them. More like she was trying to warm herself, or console herself. “Are you doing coke again?”

An ache began beneath the bridge of his nose, radiating outward toward his sinuses. A similar one started up in his chest, over his heart. He clenched and unclenched his fists—aches had begun there, too. “No, baby.”

She returned a hurt expression, sucked in a breath, and let it out very slowly. “I really want to believe you. I do. I love you. I think I know you well enough to know when something’s wrong. And, baby, something’s wrong. I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. I can see something’s bothering you.” The hands slid back to her lap. “You swear it isn’t another girl. You swear it isn’t the drugs. But if you don’t tell me what it is, then what else am I supposed to think?”

Erik’s gaze dropped to the floor, focusing on the iridescent pink of her painted toenails. “I know. I know, and you’re right, but it isn’t easy to explain.”

“If we’re sharing a life together, then we ought to be sharing everything—good, bad, important, trivial, crazy. That’s one of the things I’m here for.” She scooted toward him, cupping the back of his neck with her hand. He looked into her eyes. Even with the gloss of tears and the soft charcoal smear of her eyeliner, her eyes were beautiful.

“Whatever it is,” she whispered, “tell me. I’ll understand.”

The ache urged him. She would make it stop. She would understand. But—

“Casey, I can’t—”

“Please.” The word barely stood on its own. It seeped from her like a shallow breath, nearly drowned beneath the tears she fought to hold back.

Erik took a deep breath and let it go. “Okay. Okay.” He closed his eyes, opened them, and took her hand. “The truth is weird, but if you want it . . . baby, if you want it, it’s yours.”

He continued when she nodded. “There’s this . . . this guy, in a hat. Well, guy’s not the right word. It—I think it can be both. Either. Or neither. I’m not sure. Anyway, this thing in a Bogart hat and black trench coat follows me sometimes. It has no face. No joke. Looks like someone took a giant eraser to its head and rubbed out anything remotely human.”

Saying it out loud, and seeing her silent reaction in her expression, drove a stab of guilt into Erik’s chest. “I told you—”

“I believe you. Go on.”

Erik sighed. “It does things—bad things—to try to confuse me. Hurt me. I think it wants me dead.”

“A psycho? If you’ve got some nut—”

“No, it’s not like that. This thing isn’t . . . a person. Not like what you’d think of as a person. It changes appearance and voices. It hiccups the world around it and—” He thought a moment, then settled on an analogy he thought fitting. “It’s like when this thing is around, you’re looking through warped glass. Everything you see through it is a distorted, inaccurate version of what it really is. Only, I think for that period of time, that distortion is the reality. I think if it could just convince me what it was showing me was real, those distortions would hurt me. Maybe kill me.”

“I don’t understand.” She shifted on the bed.

“I call it Jones—you know, because it seemed like it was always trying to get me high. I couldn’t tell you about it. Couldn’t tell anyone. I thought . . . I thought I was failing you. Failing myself. I thought I was seeing this thing because I just couldn’t cut being sober. And I couldn’t face you like that. I didn’t want you to think . . .” His voice trailed off. Didn’t want her to think what? That he was a failure? A loser? Didn’t want her to think that he’d rather get high than anything else in the world? That he’d risk losing her just for one more time?

He found he couldn’t say those things out loud to her. He didn’t have to. The hurt in Casey’s eyes and the turn of her lips in grim understanding was enough for him. She never had been able to hide what she thought. It was always in her eyes.

“It isn’t only me, though. The other night, I found out that at least two other people can see this thing, too. Probably more. And it’s trying to do the same thing to them. It’s trying to ruin our lives. It wants us dead and it’ll do whatever it takes to lead us to that end.”

“You realize how that sounds. I believe you,” she added quickly. “I mean, I believe you’re really seeing this . . . whatever it is—”

“Hollower. I’m told that’s what it’s called.”

She frowned. “Hollower, then. I could maybe believe that you see it. But I’m having trouble swallowing why. I mean, come on, Erik. You’re telling me this thing, this ghost or monster or alien or something, is trying to kill you. It’s showing you hallucinations that can actually hurt you. It’s lying to trick you, and for some reason, it’s trying to get you high. You’ve got to understand that sounds paranoid. It sounds—”

She didn’t finish her sentence, but he knew where she was going with it. It sounds like something you’d say when you were high. And he didn’t have the strength to argue that. Because actually, it did sound like something he might have said when he was high.

“It’s not,” he said, his voice low and defeated. “Look, I know this is hard to believe and a hell of a mouthful to swallow. Could we just leave it at my need to explore my reasons for my shaken belief in my own sobriety? Can we think of it as at least a step forward that I’m aware of the problem this is causing and I need you to bear with me as I try to figure out how the fuck to fix it? Please?”

Tears blurred his vision, and with the hand not holding Casey’s, he mashed them away. She pulled his head to her neck and stroked his hair, and he wrapped his arms around her. He suddenly wanted very much to be pressed close to her, their skins touching, to be inside her. He needed her not only near him but a part of him, and the need made him hard and hungry and shivering.

He kissed her neck. He hadn’t realized how tense her body was, too, until she relaxed beneath his lips, beneath the fingertips that wanted to feel the heat of her and the breath that wanted to catch the scent of her and hold on to her forever. She let him ease her onto her back on the bed. They fumbled silently, somewhat awkwardly with clothes, but they exchanged soft, single words of comfort and encouragement, and giggled into each other’s necks and hair.

As the flimsy gold of the dying afternoon gave way to cool, solid night, Erik found Casey again, and as he made love to her, he thought he would never let her go.

Dave arrived at the Olde Mill Tavern just after the sun set. Monday nights weren’t usually too busy at the Tavern, and Dave hoped to find Cheryl relatively alone.

Erik had been right. Maybe there was safety in numbers.

Dave pushed open the door, and the warm glow of the bar’s interior greeted him. He saw some of the regulars leaning over quiet dinner drinks, but didn’t see Cheryl—or anyone else, for that matter—behind the bar. For a moment, he panicked.

Then she came out through the kitchen doors. Dave exhaled in relief. She scowled at him as he approached the bar, but before she could unleash whatever anger she had for him, he held up a hand and said, “You’re right. And I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry.”

The glare softened. “How do you know what I was going to say?”

He chuckled. “Because I’m a dumb jerk about most things. Law of averages, really.”

She smiled. “The usual?”

“If you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

She poured him a drink. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re here now.”

The smile faded from his face. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. But not here.”

“Then where? When?”

“Tonight after work?” He downed the shot of tequila.

“We close at midnight.” She poured him another shot.

“I’ll be back then. With Erik, if I can find him. He can see it, too.” Dave knocked back the second shot, put fifteen dollars down on the bar, and rose.

“His name’s McGavin—he’s in the book.”

Dave nodded. “I’ll find him.”

“What is it, Dave?” she said, barely above a whisper.

“It’s called the Hollower. Good a name as any, I guess.” He glanced around the nearly empty bar, then fixed her with a cool stare. “Trust your instincts. If anything happens tonight, get the hell out of here. Otherwise, I’ll be back at midnight. I promise. And I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Should I be scared?” She wiped the bar in little circles with the rag.

Dave thought of Sally in the dark, in the cold of wherever the Hollower had taken her. “Yeah. You should. But at least you won’t have to be scared alone.”

She looked up at him. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You’re not going to like what I have to tell you.” Dave headed for the door, then called over his shoulder, “Midnight?”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she replied, tentative.

Dave pushed the door open and headed out to find one Erik McGavin.

Dave got back in his car and locked the doors. He didn’t turn on the headlights or start the engine. Some part of him was vaguely aware of being watched. He stared through the windshield of his car to the woods across the road, waiting. It wouldn’t want him to call Erik, he thought. They were each weaker apart.

Dave had had a girlfriend once, a blond with long legs and little inclination to ever wear a bra beneath her tank tops. She was light and sweet and dumb as a post. The most insightful gift she had ever given him was a cell phone that he never went anywhere without. He kept her number still in there, more as a nod of gratitude for the gift than any fond recollection of the deer-in-headlight eyes or the way her breasts bounced when she stamped her foot in disagreement. But he silently thanked her the time his car had broken down off Route 202, the times he was late for work and needed Georgia to cover him, and the times Sally had an emergency and needed him to come fix it. He had come to think of the cell phone as lucky.

He pulled it out now and prayed luck would hold out against the Hollower long enough. He got the information for an Erik McGavin in Lakehaven, New Jersey. Then he dialed the number. So far so good.

No movement from the trees, he noticed. Also good.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end sounded sleepy and distracted.

“Erik McGavin?” Dave scanned the trees across the street for signs of movement.

“Yeah? Who’s this?”

“It’s Dave Kohlar. From the Tavern?”

A pause, then, “Dave Kohlar?”

“I need to talk to you about the Hollower.” Dave thought he saw a flash of white in the dense shadows of the woods, but in the next moment, it was gone. “If you tell me where you live, I’ll come pick you up. I’ve got to meet Cheryl at midnight. I think you’re right. About it being safer with all of us together, I mean.”

“What made you change your mind?” There was a muffled grunt of effort, like Erik was doing something while the phone was pressed against his ear. Getting dressed, maybe. Dave thought he heard a snap of clothing and what might have been the zifvt of a zipper being pulled.

“A lot has happened in the last day or so. I’ll explain it all tonight. Thing is, I think you had something, about us standing a better chance together than alone.” His hand slid back and forth in small arcs across the steering wheel and a pause stretched across the phone between them.

Erik broke the silence with “It isn’t ever going to leave us alone, is it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What time do you want to meet?”

Dave checked the clock on the dashboard. “It’s almost ten thirty now. Can I pick you up at eleven?”

“Works for me.” Erik gave him directions, which he scribbled in pen on the only surface available in the car—an old Dunkin’ Donuts foam cup.

“Got it.” He put the directions in the cup holder.

“Dave?”

“Yeah?” Dave switched ears.

“Thank you, man.”

Dave didn’t know why these people were grateful. He couldn’t protect them. He wasn’t even sure what he hoped to accomplish by bringing them together. “You’re welcome,” he muttered. “See you at eleven.” Then he clicked off the phone.

He saw another flash of light in the trees and frowned, peering out into the darkness. A moment later, a deer stepped onto the road, and he let out a short breath.

Despite the glare of Dave’s taillights as he pulled away, another flash of white went unseen, followed by a looming of black against the shadows, both so intense as to be almost iridescent.

The chattering of claws echoed softly across the lake.

DeMarco drummed the pencil against the side of the desk as she perused her notes on the Kohlar woman’s case, chewed on the eraser, then drummed again.

Something wasn’t clicking.

Three of her most recent files and two cold case files that instinct had compelled her to pull from the boxes in the basement lay spread out before her. Lakehaven Police Department had been for some time “in the process of converting the contents of the cold cases to electronic format for reference and storage,” but truth be told, the project was an organizational nightmare and had stalled several times since ’96. It had taken her a good three hours to find what she was looking for. As she sat with the reports and photographs and witness statements fanned out over the small space she’d cleared on her desk, she frowned.

How could the cases possibly be related?

DeMarco would have chalked up statements made by Mrs. Saltzman as mostly hazy, useless products of her condition, except that some of them rang familiar in her ear. The old woman indicated that a person unknown had taken Ms. Kohlar from the hospital. She had also said this person could “steal voices.” Maybe someone who could do impressions, like a comedian or a ventriloquist. Not too strange a detail, in itself. But it nagged her, reminded her vaguely of Cheryl Duffy’s case days before. That woman mentioned someone lurking around her house, someone who appeared to be able to throw his voice and call her by name.

Then there was the face thing. Mrs. Saltzman said this person who had kidnapped Ms. Kohlar had taken her to “a place where they don’t need faces.” Ms. Duffy insisted the figure she saw hadn’t had a face. Both seemed to believe this figure wished to do harm. And yet subsequent investigations of the premises had turned up no trace, no evidence of this figure ever having been there at all.

It nagged at her, too, that Mrs. Saltzman believed Dave Kohlar—she checked her notes—would understand these things or be familiar with them somehow. The old woman thought he should have known about this place where people didn’t need faces. It would have been easy to dismiss the assumption if it wasn’t for his reaction, and his voice.

And the doctor—Stevens’s name sparked some recognition, although it had taken her most of the car ride back to the station to place why. Stevens had counseled Max Feinstein, too, and prescribed narcotics.

All of it tenuously connected by leaps of instinct. Except when she added the info from the Feinstein suicide.

It had been ruled a suicide by the M.E., but DeMarco hadn’t needed Heddy Blickman to tell her that. She and the other investigating officers thought it odd at the time that there had been no note, but after talking with his ex-wife, DeMarco learned Feinstein attended group therapy sessions and took (or more accurately, according to the inventory of pills and the prescription date, did not take) heavy medication.

Max Feinstein saw Dr. Stevens, and he ended up taking out the back of his skull. Sally Kohlar saw Dr. Stevens and disappeared from a psychiatric ward of a hospital.

Was Stevens responsible somehow in either instance? Was that, under the guise of strict doctor-patient privilege, the reason why he hadn’t wanted her to talk to the old woman? But then, if he was the mysterious figure in question, why hadn’t Mrs. Saltzman recognized him? She appeared to know him well enough when they’d questioned her—in fact, seemed to hold the opinion of him that DeMarco herself did.

And further, why wouldn’t Sally have recognized her own doctor, if that was the case? What could he have done to make Sally suddenly afraid of him, and what purpose would that serve if he was looking to get her out quickly and quietly, beneath the staff nurses’ noses? In fact, why remove Sally from the facility at all?

So many questions. So many tenuous connections.

DeMarco realized at length that these connections were more or less secondary to the stranger one, the one that had been sitting on her desk a few mornings ago when she had come in. Brindman & Symmes, attorneys for the estate of Mr. Maxwell Feinstein, had sent her the original copy of a tape that had recently come into their possession. The police hadn’t found it because it hadn’t been marked as anything special, nor had it been with the other tapes. She suspected it was an oversight on the part of Rubelli’s boys, and DeMarco was still fuming about it days later. But given his condition, even watching the tape hadn’t meant much to the Feinstein case. He had mentioned some being, some kind of thing he called the Hollower.

But given the developments of the more recent cases, the things Feinstein said took on a whole new light.

“It collects identities and voices at will and uses them against you.” That’s what Feinstein said on the tape. This Hollower collected voices and used them. Just like Ms. Duffy claimed her bar intruder had done. Just like Mrs. Saltzman claimed Sally Kohlar’s kidnapper had done. And DeMarco had a growing certainty that the “Dave” Feinstein addressed on the tape—the intended recipient of his suicide video—was, in fact, Mr. Dave Kohlar. Symmes had confirmed it over the phone.

The cases looked as if they were tied to Feinstein. A suicide, a disappearance, a possible stalking.

And the murders. The cold case murders.

Debbie Henshaw from Plainfield had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and stomach, and most of the skin of her face had been removed. Her eyes had been gouged out as well, and the sockets filled with the ashes of burnt paper. That one had always bothered DeMarco. Her first homicide as a detective, but far from her first homicide, it had gotten under her skin, so to speak, because the vic was so young. DeMarco had seen a picture of the girl’s face once she’d been identified, and the girl had a sweet look—innocent good-girl pretty. Freckles across a tiny nose. Someone’s kid sister. Someone’s high school sweetheart.

Someone carved one jagged word into the pale skin beneath her breasts: hollow. At the time, DeMarco and her partner suspected it represented the killer’s belief about Debbie’s soul, her person, saying she was hollow inside, a shell without life and so there was no guilt or wrong in ending the shell’s existence on this earth.

Now DeMarco wasn’t so sure. Feinstein’s faceless Hollower possessed awfully coincidental similarities. Even its name suggested uncanny coincidence.

The second case equally unsettled, in its own way. Not that any murder wasn’t unsettling if she thought about it too long, but she didn’t. She couldn’t afford to. She wasn’t getting paid to be derailed by sentiment.

In the second case, a neighbor found a woman named Savannah Carrington dead on her back patio with several shards of glass in her neck, arms, torso, and legs. Her death might have been ruled a suicide if not for the impossible odd angles of some of the shards. The police searched the premises and the yards of the surrounding properties and found nothing with a broken glass surface that might have accounted for her condition. However, small shards lay scattered about her and were also fished from her in-ground swimming pool. She slumped against the sliding glass door, her nightgown splattered with blood. More blood collected in sticky little puddles around her. The door against which her bloody cheek was pressed was intact; the glass hadn’t come from there, either. In fact, it had provided a surface for her to write a message about the one part of her body that was unscathed.

My face. They thought she had written that after the killer had left, as she slowly bled to death in her backyard. Whoever killed Savannah Carrington (“for Chrissakes, Detective, he didn’t have a face”) gave her the impression that for some reason he wanted to disfigure her.

DeMarco stared at the photo, at the dried drops of blood on the glass, at the wide-eyed glazed look of horror even death could not relax. She looked at the skinned head of Debbie Henshaw’s corpse, and the blood-speckled wall behind the collapsed body of Max Feinstein. She thought of the ever-widening ripples of sadness, bitterness, loss, and mistrust that these deaths brought to family, friends, colleagues. In essence, all murder victims shared a common injustice. All grieving relatives shared a common pain. All of society shared a loss—of its members, its security and safety, its understanding of itself.

She sighed, rubbed her eyes, then let her gaze trail over the walls of the department. Most of the desk lights were off and only two other officers remained, poring over cases of their own. Behind one was a map of the Morris/Sussex County area.

She rose slowly. Scooping up the files, she made her way over to the map and found Feinstein’s house. Then the Kohlar residence. Then the Duffy residence. Then the homes of the two cold case vics.

More ripples, with Feinstein’s house in the center and the other properties forming rings around it spreading outward.

“Late night for you too, An?”

DeMarco smiled down at Bennie Mendez. “Hey, Bennie. Yeah, late night for me. But I get my most genius deductions done after hours. Going to make a phone call, then go home and rest this brilliant mind.”

He smiled up at her. “Your modesty rivals only your beauty, Detective.”

DeMarco laughed. “See you in the morning.”

“Night, genius.”

DeMarco turned and walked back to her desk. Picking up the phone, she rang up the district attorney. “May? Anita here. I think I’m going to need a warrant for the Feinstein place . . . Yup, I’ll bring the files over tomorrow morning . . . Right, right. Thanks, May. I appreciate it. Night. . . . Yeah, you too. See you tomorrow.”

She closed the files and tucked them into a relatively neat stack, then grabbed her keys and called it a night.

The last of the regulars had cleared out of the Tavern by a quarter after eleven. Cheryl kept glancing at the clock as she finished wiping down the bar. She hoped someone, anyone—even Ray Gravelin, for Chrissakes—would wait until closing time with her. Dave wouldn’t be there for another twenty-five minutes or so, and she really didn’t want to be alone.

Ray stumbled out at a quarter to midnight, and took the last of the barfly warmth and camaraderie with him.

She remembered the voice at the bar, not quite male and not quite female, but somehow a chilling strain of each intertwined.

Cheryl realized that for a long time it had been with her, watching her, close to her ear, a chill breath on her neck not like any breath of this earth. It moved freely in her private places, in her safe spaces, and had for months. It invaded her life, her mind, her sense of security. It wasn’t the first time.

“It was tall, broad like a man, but the way it moved . . .”

Cheryl crossed the bar to the dining area. She began to place the chairs upside down on the tables, her ear tuned to the silence of the bar, listening for disruptions in the after-hours hum of the bar’s appliances.

As she upended the last of the chairs, it came to her soft and unobtrusive—the tinkling music of wind chimes.

She straightened and turned, and found she was no longer in the bar.

At least, not in the Olde Mill Tavern that she knew. The oblong shape of the bar rotted, its rough wood waterlogged and stinking now of lake things left to decompose—dead fish, decaying seaweed, baby doll arms floating in the shallow pools close to the shore . . .

Baby doll arms? That had been long ago, too far in the past. A past long gone. A past as hazy as the fog that settled low around the now-rotted hull where night after night she served drinks to leering men who talked to her breasts and then went home and tucked their little girls in and swore to protect them from men who might tempt them with dolls.

She blinked hard. When she opened her eyes, the bar remained, but she could see more of where she stood. She felt the warm grainy texture of sand between her toes and the slight tug of early sunburn across the backs of her bare shoulders. The white legs of the lifeguard stand reached up into the sun glare. From the crossbeam by one of them, the metal chimes knocked around in the midsummer breeze. All around her the sun was dazzling, but she saw a stretch of beach before her and heard the lapping of water against the gray-green wood of the dock a ways out.

Cheryl stepped backward and cool water splashed the backs of her legs. She cried out, turning in the water. The shimmer of sunlight hazed the world beyond the dock, a far shore lost now, if even a far shore existed out there.

She remembered this lake. Not a patch of beach in Lakehaven but a shore farther back, farther away. She remembered the ice cream man’s truck came at three o’clock and if you stood perfectly still and no boys splashed loudly nearby, the little iridescent fish would swim right up to your ankles and dart between your legs.

She turned back to the shore, the rest of the Tavern faded away now into sun sparkle. The water around her calves was cold, colder. She tried to wade toward the warm sand again, but found she couldn’t move. Cheryl looked down. A thin sheen of ice covered the water. A few little fish, keeled to one side and caught frozen, stared up at her with bulging eyes glazed in death. The skin of her legs grew pale, and the water hurt her instep, her toes, and her ankles. The sand slid beneath her feet, slimy and slippery.

“Hey, little girl. Do you like dolls?”

Her head shot up. She saw shiny shoes and black-clad legs. A glove floated obediently where a hand should be at the cuff of a sleeve crusted with cold. The glove held a doll.

The man stepped forward toward the water, which reached the shore by his shoes but seemed to shrink away from actually touching them.

This time Cheryl was afraid. This time she didn’t want the doll, didn’t want the man with the big towel in his trunk to look under her bathing suit.

She stood in the center of the ice, unable to move, unable to run, her own breath frost in her throat, her scream an icicle lodged deep, cutting off the air. Fear crystallized through her body.

Cheryl looked up into the glare of the sun, which had rubbed the features of the man’s face right off his head. She kicked as best she could at the ice that bound her ankles. The skin of her shins split against the sharp edges of ice. The blood felt first hot, and then cold like lake water dripping down her legs.

The figure took a step closer. Tears threatened to break free from her lower lids and spill down her cheeks in panic.

“Are you alone, Cheryl?” The man spoke with the voice of the thing in the bar, the thing Dave had called the Hollower. The voice, androgynous and chilly, formed the words of the question as if they were foreign and took a great deal of effort to pronounce.

Cheryl felt the acceleration of heartbeats in her chest, pounding arctic pain against her breasts.

“What are you?” she whispered.

“I am ageless.”

“Leave me alone.” She closed her eyes, trying to press out the sight of the rotted bar, strewn across the sand like an old shipwreck, and of the Hollower holding the doll out to her and tracing her body with eyes it didn’t really have.

“You are never alone. I will always be with you.”

“No.” The word barely made it past her lips, and until it answered, she wasn’t sure if she’d even spoken out loud.

Its laugh echoed over the lake behind her, and also over the lake that some fleeting part of her mind knew to still be out there beyond the fog, a real lake and a real town of Lakehaven, not a phantasm of the past.

The Hollower stepped onto the ice toward her.

Erik was waiting on the front step of a pleasant-looking lake bungalow when Dave arrived. The boy’s hands were shoved into faded jeans pockets, and he wore a leather jacket to brace himself from the wind blowing off the lake. He nodded a hello and jogged down to the car as Dave pulled up to the curb.

Once in the passenger seat, he said, “I’m not sure what to say. I’m glad you called. That’s something.”

“I wish I could tell you I had a plan for stopping this, but I don’t.” Dave turned at the end of the road toward the direction of the bar.

“But you do have information, right?”

Dave nodded. “Not much. A start. Maybe you and Cheryl will be able to come up with something I couldn’t.” A pause. “I think the Hollower is getting more aggressive, more intrusive. I think it’s done toying with us.”

Erik’s breath came in excited little puffs of air. “I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare the shit out of me.”

Dave snorted. “Yeah, you and me both, man.” They settled into silence for a moment, and then he said, “It took my sister.”

He felt Erik’s wide-eyed gaze search his face. “You’re serious? What do you mean, took her?”

“I think it . . . changes things. Bends reality, or the way we see reality. Warps our perception. It took her right in front of the night nurses, and no one ever saw a goddamned thing.” Dave shrugged and turned left. “Took her right from the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

Dave could tell from the tone that the question was born of genuine confusion. But he felt that ache in his chest, that familiar mix of embarrassment and guilt and defensiveness and sympathy. He slowed to a stop at a red light and glanced at Erik. “It’s a long story. My sister is ill. She sees things. Hears things.”

The glow of the traffic light flushed their faces through the windshield. Erik took in his words with a nod. “Heh. Yeah. Don’t we all?”

The ache in Dave’s chest eased. The light changed and he pulled forward again.

“Anyway, I talked to her roommate, who said she saw what happened. She told us the Hollower chased Sally—that’s my sister—right down the hall of . . . of some other hospital that only she and Sally could see.”

He wanted to go on, to say he thought it was somehow significant that the Hollower didn’t notice or bother Mrs. Saltzman at all, before, during, or since, so far as he knew. But he wasn’t quite sure what the significance of that was, or how, as a piece of the puzzle, it fit the picture he had so far.

“I’m not sure I understand.” Erik frowned.

“I’m not sure I do, either. I think the old lady was saying the Hollower changed the hallway somehow, so Sally never saw the nurses and they never saw her. Like maybe it superimposed its own version of the hallway, a hallway from its dimension, on the one Sally was in. At any rate, the hospital told me the nurses’ station was staffed all night, and no one saw Sally leave. The old lady said she never saw any nurses—not in that version of the hallway, at least.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought since then. I considered that maybe she was parroting back what Sally told her about the Hollower. I mean, I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that if she was in the hospital with Sally in the first place, she probably sees and hears things that aren’t there. But I got a phone call, too. From Sally, maybe. From the Hollower. I don’t know which. But it has her. I’m sure about that. And I have to get her back.”

He felt Erik’s eyes on him again, expectant, full of a question he wasn’t sure he should ask.

“I don’t know if she’s dead,” Dave answered in a flat tone. “I really don’t know anything, except if I hadn’t been so fucking stupid and unwilling to actually do something about all this before, she might still be safe.”

“You don’t need to have all the answers. Ain’t your fault, man.”

Dave gave him a sad smile. “You know that for sure?”

“I know we go through life beating ourselves up about stuff that we really can’t control, and never could.” Something in the boy’s tone made Dave steal a glance at his passenger, and he noticed Erik’s expression darkened for a moment. “That’s what destroys people. That’s what eats away at them over the years. Guess that’s what makes them empty. Hollow. Ready to be filled with all the bad luck and the accidents and those little slips of sanity that ruin everything.”

“Susceptible to the Hollower, you mean?”

“Yeah. Yeah, exactly.”

It made sense. Dave buried everything beneath other people’s baggage, their useless springs and coils and junk of the past he had never been able to change. Obviously Max Feinstein had carried around some pretty heavy pieces of the past—carried them until he couldn’t bear to hold them up anymore. He wondered what Erik beat himself up about, and Cheryl.

A thoughtful silence settled over the car like a soft snow, muting conversation. But when they rolled into the parking lot of the Tavern, he felt the change almost instantly—a tang in the air, a hum he felt in dull pricks on his skin, a nearly audible hum in his head.

“Something’s wrong,” Dave said, rolling to a stop in the closest space. He felt a greasy stirring of nausea in his stomach. “Where is she?”

Erik glanced around the parking lot. “That her car?”

Dave craned his neck to follow where Erik was looking and discovered an old Ford Taurus. “Yeah, I think so.”

“So she’s still here, then.” Erik opened the door and got out. “Maybe she’s finishing up inside.”

Dave followed, but he knew something was happening. “No, something isn’t right. Can’t you feel it? Like being seasick.”

“I was gonna say, ‘like being hungover,’ but yeah. Thought it was just me.”

The two made their way to the door and Dave knocked. Several seconds stretched to a minute, then two, and Dave knocked again. “Cheryl?” He tried the door, but the knob wouldn’t turn.

“Cheryl?” he called, loud enough, he hoped, to be heard through the door. “You still in there?” He tried the knob again, threw his shoulder against it in case it had swollen and stuck, jiggled the knob again. Nothing.

“Door’s locked,” Dave said, frowning. “Maybe I should call her? Phone’s in the glove box.”

Erik nodded, and they got back in the car. Dave dialed up the number for the bar, a number his companion seemed faintly amused to discover he knew by heart. Immediately an electronic voice informed him, “I’m sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number, or dial zero for assistance,” in a pleasant simulation of human politeness.

“That is the number, damn it.” Dave shook his head. “She’s in trouble. She can’t hear us.”

Erik looked at the locked door and ran a hand through his hair. “Shit. What if it’s in there with her?”

They became aware, by degrees, of a brightness coming from beneath the door. It looked to Dave like the sun had been captured and poured into the barroom. He and Erik exchanged a look. And then they heard laughter.

“Honk the horn.”

Dave leaned on the horn.

There was a faint bleating sound, like a hurt animal, and at once, the illusion dissipated. Cheryl was back in the Tavern, back on the dusty tiled floors of the dining area, back amidst the forest of upturned chairs.

Blood from small cuts soaked through the shins of her jeans and dried crusty, adhering her socks to her ankles. Her feet felt frostbitten.

She made her way with slow and painful steps across the bar and out the door, not bothering to shut the lights or lock up or even grab her purse. Outside, she sank to the step and curled her legs underneath her. For a long time, she breathed in the cool autumn air and let it go in grudging little puffs. All strength had left her.

She was vaguely aware of Dave jogging from the driver’s side of his car to her, and of Erik McGavin getting out on the passenger side. When Dave touched her shoulder, he said something her mind couldn’t quite wrap around. She looked up at him.

Then she started to cry.