Thirteen

When Erik, bringing up the rear, crossed the threshold back into the basement hallway, nothing happened. Not at first.

Dave had expected the walls to melt, the floor to drop out from beneath them, the gloom to ooze up into something massive and hungry and very deadly. But the solid foundation of the Feinstein house stretched out exactly as it had before.

Maybe there really was something to what Erik had said about safety in numbers.

They pressed forward as one on careful, quiet feet, not speaking, as if to make too much noise would summon the Hollower to them. Which was pointless—it knew where they were, if it wanted them.

Come to think of it, Dave wondered, why hasn’t the Hollower come after us? If it does know where we are, why hasn’t it confronted us yet?

The answer came so quickly he couldn’t quite be sure if the thought was really his. It’s waiting. It has every intention of confronting us, but on its own terms. Its own turf.

Dave looked around the basement. There wasn’t too much to see; the dark around them ate at the edges of the flashlight glow. The dank smell of concrete holding out the cold, wet mold and moss and dirt was humid, palpable in the air and on their skin. Dave felt Cheryl shivering through his arm.

They passed beneath a curved arch of wood beams and continued down a long, straight passage.

The hall changed. No turn now. Here we go again.

The air grew heavier, a terrible silky, almost slimy density that slid in and out of his lungs. He found breathing it both difficult and repulsive.

All at once, the flashlights tucked into belt-loops or clumsily clutched between them died out, leaving them in total darkness. Moments later, a chittering sound like nails on a chalkboard came from somewhere a ways off.

Dave froze, the chain of hands to either side of him taut and suddenly cold.

“Oh my God,” Sean whispered. “It’s coming.”

“Where is it?” Cheryl squeezed his hand.

Erik said, “Sounded like it came from back here. Behind us.”

“Let’s move.” DeMarco tugged his hand. “Let’s keep going.”

They moved forward again as one. Dave held his breath until it grew painful in his chest. He couldn’t hear anything other than their breathing and their footsteps.

The basement passage sloped down, an endless black yawn ahead of them, and Dave wondered if the house had finally swallowed them up. The possibility that they might spend days walking deeper and deeper into the belly of a basement that didn’t exist in his world, walking until they dropped from exhaustion and thirst, inked its way into his thoughts. He felt cold all over, and was quite sure his hands were clammy in the grip of his partners.

“I’d kill for a window,” Erik said. “Just a little moonlight or something.”

A drawn-out scrrrreeeech followed by a few quick chirps sent an electric chill through the chain of hands. Their muttering worry came all at once.

“If we run—”

“We can’t see—”

“—is coming.”

“—scared.”

They moved faster, stumbling blind on unsure feet. Cheryl tripped and nearly brought them all down, but Dave managed to pull her to her feet before she broke the chain and spilled onto what Dave could only suspect was a floor. He was sure that if his hold had been broken, he would have lost not only Cheryl, but everyone behind her. The gloom would have surged up like a black tide and washed them away.

Sally giggled. Dave thought it was an awful sound.

“Oh, shit.” Erik’s disembodied voice stopped them once more.

“What?” Dave turned around, and then he saw it, too.

A faint silvery light, and within it, movement—rapid, fluid movement, of many legs and arms scrambling to get at them. From the light—from behind the light somewhere—they heard noise. The sounds made Dave think of great metallic jaws chewing wads of metallic things. Like gears was what came into his head, like huge, rusty gears and cogs tumbling down a long metal throat. On the heels of this thought were simple panicked impressions; it was getting closer, it was swallowing them whole, it would crush their bones and tear away skin beneath the metal teeth and endlessly whirring, turning, churning gears.

“It’s the Hollower,” Sean whispered.

They broke into a clumsy run, uncoordinated on six pairs of feet, but loping away from the Hollower as best they could. The light picked up speed and grew brighter, blotting out the moving shadows behind it and whatever cast them. Cheryl squeezed Dave’s hand tightly, and he thought he heard her say his name beneath the roar of scraping metal.

The light overtook them, blinding them for a moment. They stood still. The light was worse to Dave than the darkness. And then it blew past and returned to flashlit brightness again, and utter silence reigned in Max Feinstein’s basement in the room where Dave first rediscovered his friends.

“Everybody okay?” DeMarco was the first to let go of Dave’s hand. The others reluctantly followed suit, nodding.

“Okay here,” Erik said. He didn’t sound sure, though.

“Me too.” Cheryl uttered a nervous little laugh.

“Are we back?” Dave glanced around the room. “I mean, really back?”

“Looks that way,” DeMarco said.

Sean’s cheeks looked ruddy and his eyes shone. There was an emptiness about his expression that concerned Dave. It struck him as . . . hollow. The boy’s voice reflected the same. “We can’t kill this thing. We can’t do anything to stop it. It’s too strong.”

Cheryl crouched down beside him. “Sweetie, it isn’t over yet. We still have a chance, okay? We made it this far, didn’t we?”

“And we’re no closer to killing it than we were when we got here.” Sean kicked at a spot on the floor. “My dad—”

His words clipped off in his mouth.

They’d all heard it. A faint laugh, close enough to be among them, but from no discernible direction. They drew their weapons.

Suddenly Dave felt movement in his hand, as if the knife squirmed against his palm. He glanced down as the blade pulled against his skin. It curved upward, and shiny black poured down over the metallic surface from the tip. Then it reformed into a scorpion stinger. The scorpion tried to gain footing in his palm.

Dave flinched and threw it hard against the wall. The handle grew tiny, spindly legs and skittered away. Behind him, Sean gasped.

Dave turned to see the baseball bat become a python. Sean threw it away from his body. DeMarco drew her gun, but she didn’t need to. When the snake hit the floor, it broke into a trail of dust.

“What the—?” The curve of Erik’s crowbar separated into teeth, the shiny silver body drawing back to strike. He ripped it from his pants and threw it away. It, too, turned to dust upon impact with the floor.

For several moments, no one spoke. Then Erik said, “Well, then. Guess we won’t be needing those.”

“Oh, fuck.” That came from Sean. The others turned in his direction when he said it—surprised, Dave supposed, at how grown-up words sounded in such a small voice. Sean was looking up, and they followed his gaze.

Dave felt his chest hitch.

The Hollower stood right there among them, solemn and unmoving. Its gloves lay folded in front of it, frosted black clothes nearly blending into the background. Only its head stood out, pale like a full moon hanging in the night air of the basement.

Dave had never seen it so close before. From where he stood, he could see the blank slate of a face that was not as empty as it appeared. Countless tiny fractal threads in the white seemed quite capable of expression, subtle suggestion, even question. The slightest movements of the threads changed everything.

It regarded them then, unperturbed by their number, the threads rustling slightly and giving the impression of watchfulness.

DeMarco drew her gun.

It tilted its head in her direction. Its real voice, layered with female and male strains and unpleasantly musical, surrounded them. There was venom in the deadly flicker of it in their ears. “You can’t hurt me with that. You know that.” It shook its head. “Guns hurt people.”

DeMarco’s gun held steady—so steady, Dave thought, that only someone who was really looking would have noticed how much effort DeMarco put forth to keep it from shaking.

“People like Bennie.”

“Bastard,” DeMarco said, and fired. There was a gunshot that made the others flinch, but instead of a bullet, the gun dribbled blood from its muzzle that pattered on the floor.

Sally crouched down and splashed her fingers in it.

“Don’t,” Dave said, swooping down and pulling her to her feet.

She laughed, reaching behind him. He half turned to see what she was doing. She grabbed Feinstein’s mirror from him and with the blood on her fingers, thumbed two dots and a crooked swiggle like a drunken happy face on the glass surface.

What had Max said? “Think what it’s for, what it shows people, and you’ll know.” Sally understood somehow. She knew.

The ripple in the layers of the Hollower’s head conveyed confusion at first, then anger, and then something Dave thought looked very much like dread.

Sally stepped around DeMarco and held the mirror up to the Hollower, and it growled. The sound filled the basement, vibrating the concrete beneath their feet. Sean covered his ears.

A sharp turn of its head toward DeMarco’s gun caused it to fire again. The bullet tore through the back of the mirror, shattering the glass. DeMarco looked thrown by the suddenness of it, and fought to reclaim control of her weapon.

Unperturbed, Sally dropped the mirror frame, and bent to pick up a shard of glass. Dave stepped up to stop her, but Erik grabbed his arm. Dave was about to say something to him, to pull free and take the glass from his sister before she cut herself. But then Sally lunged forward, a blond blur, lashing out at the luminous pale canvas in front of her.

The Hollower staggered back. The thin horizontal black slice she’d made across the bottom half of its head quivered. With a wet ripping sound, the faceless expanse started to dissolve in places. That’s how it looked to Dave, like some kind of acid was eating through from the inside. Cheryl cried out. DeMarco put a protective arm across Sean’s chest. The slice pulled apart to a jagged tear. The Hollower groaned like a metal door. The sound came from the slack, gaping mouth. It stretched, elongating into a scream. Punctures in the top hemisphere puckered and then sank into empty sockets. Other fainter rips and tears delineated nose, ears, cheeks. Its mouth stretched open in a wail, its sockets pinched into a scowl. The whiteness of its face fought to fill those rips in, to seal them up and smooth them over. Its head became a tumult of movement.

Its body changed, too. It expanded upward, straining at the fibers of the trench coat. Dave thought it was reclaiming its real shape—its home-world shape. It towered over them, filling up most of the space at the base of the basement stairs.

DeMarco ushered Cheryl and Sean behind her. Erik gaped at the monster that was quite literally unfolding and expanding beneath its trench coat before them.

Dave’s gaze slid from the Hollower to the staircase. There was a little room there at the base stair, and the change would give them enough time to run for it.

The Hollower shot up by about two feet and threw off the trench coat. Its body swept up behind its head and then curved down like a grotesque swan to pale white stumps of thighs split four ways. From these, it rested on two pairs of long, lean scissor blades. Great discs of bone slid in and out of the curve of its back. Along the sides of its ribs, whips of segmented bony spikes dangled like chains. They rose up with indignant flips every time it wrenched its body. The whips braided into arms and it tore off layer after layer of its face-in-flux until it reached a pure, unbroken white.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Erik muttered.

Cheryl covered her mouth.

Dave was so in awe of it—so horrified, but if truth be told, fascinated, too—that the comparison of Sally’s small stature to the massive bulk of the thing took several moments to register. It drew whips above her head.

“Sally!’ He made a move to grab her. The Hollower buried a whip into the cement floor by her feet. Another reached behind her and pulverized the floor between him and his sister. He stopped short and gazed up at the Hollower.

Something was different. Beyond the obvious changes to its appearance, something else was different. It looked less a superimposed thing, devoid of color and size and seams that matched this world. This version of it was solid, physical in a way it hadn’t been even minutes before.

Dave stepped back. “Anita, try your gun now.”

DeMarco gave him a funny look. “Won’t work, Dave. You saw—”

“Try it now. It’s changed. I think you can shoot it.”

The detective regarded him for a few moments, seeming to consider what he said. She turned her attention back to the Hollower, studied it a moment, then raised her gun and fired over Sally’s head.

This time, she fired bullets. The first grazed a disc of bone with a metallic ping and was redirected to a place in the ceiling. The second, though, hit the Hollower dead in the chest in a dusty spray of white. It roared, turning on DeMarco. What looked like a dark burn hole bore out a chunk of its body straight through between two swimming blades. But after a moment, the hole sealed, leaving an ashy black smudge where the bullet had passed through.

It tried to smack the gun out of her hand with a whip. She held firm, but when it disengaged from her wrist, a barb took a small chunk of skin off the back of her hand. DeMarco yelped in pain.

She fired again, this time at its head. The bullet burrowed like a burning ember through where its right eye should have been, and its body trembled in pain and rage.

“Run,” Dave said. When no one moved, he shouted, “Run!”

He grabbed Sally’s arm and tugged her away from the Hollower and toward the stairs. The others followed his lead, dodging angry whips as they slipped past it. One connected with Erik’s arm and tore out a small chunk of his triceps. He bit his lip and slapped a hand over the wound. Dave saw the blood dribbling from between his fingers as he shepherded Erik and the others up the stairs. The Hollower’s raging bellows below spurred them on. At the top, DeMarco threw open the door.

Instead of spilling out onto the first floor of Feinstein’s house, they found themselves in an enormous backyard. They stopped on a shiny black marble patio that spanned about twenty by forty feet. Beyond it was another thirty to thirty-five feet of lawn. To their left, resting on the marble titles, was an obsidian oblong that vaguely resembled a bench, and another oblong on four small blocks that might have been a table. Or an altar, Dave thought, and a high seat. Small curlicue carvings made complex patterns across the shiny top surface of the table-altar. Laid out across the symbols were metallic instruments—tools, maybe, or utensils—formed into shapes not meant for human hands or human uses.

A ragged picket fence about eight feet high, its posts leaning at odd angles like a drunken lineup, fenced them in on three sides, while the house sealed them off from behind. There was no gate that Dave could see, but the odd tilt of the posts left gaps wide enough for a head. Beyond, as far as he could tell, there were nebulous clouds of silvery dust in an expanse of blue black. The same continued above them. Occasional massive chunks of silver- and green-veined marble hammered into odd geometric shapes blocked out the view as they drifted by.

Before them, the blades of grass grew long and sharp, dusted with a frost that glinted silver in the light of unseen moons. The grass writhed with movement. To Dave, it looked like fat drops of black ink surging up from the grass, separating and pooling together. In the center of the yard, the ink spidered small streams all over what Dave thought at first was a large doll in a pink-flowered bathing suit, lying on its back. The black oozed over the entire expanse of its head and covered it. The force of the inky drops rocked the little figure. He squinted and leaned in, and realized that what he mistook for a crack in the porcelain hand was actually a line of dried blood. The ink worked over part of the chest, separating, melding together, threading outward, and the chest finally caved. They devoured the cloth and skin around it and from inside the chest cavity, and gold coils sprang out and dissipated like smoke in the air.

Erik gazed upward, shaking the excess blood off his hand and curling up the corner of his T-shirt to press against the wound. “What the hell is this place?”

“Home,” Sally muttered inside a breath. “Both and neither. The topsy-turvy. The underside of night.”

“I think the Hollower leaked into Feinstein’s backyard,” DeMarco said. She followed with a small laugh, but she looked pale. The gun hung limp at her side.

“What do we do now?” Sean took Cheryl’s hand. They both looked solemn, tired, their lips dry and their eyes unblinking as they fixed on the figure in the center of the yard. “I don’t think we can cross through the grass.”

“Let’s see.” Dave grabbed one of the strange instruments from the table and tossed it onto the lawn.

It made a light thump in the grass where it landed. Immediately, the black inky mass paused, as if a collective consciousness noticed something new on its territory, and the black drew away from the figure and surged forward toward the tool, washing over it completely.

Cheryl cried out. The figure (Dave could see what they saw, that it wasn’t a doll at all) lay unmoving. Its dark hair hung in limp clumps from a bloody scalp. The face—what was left of it—stared glassy-eyed, the mouth caught in a misshapen O of terror. Most of the left cheek had been dissolved. There was skull bone beneath.

Dave grabbed two more instruments and threw them in opposite directions. When they landed, two parts of the black split off and one each went in the direction of an instrument.

When the divided portions of the ink were finished, they pulled back from the instruments and merged in the middle of the lawn. Dave could see the corrosion of the metal even from where they stood. The inkiness, whatever it was, had dissolved it.

He exchanged glances with Cheryl. “It can hear or smell, maybe. Or feel vibrations in the ground. Either way, the grass is out.”

“Are we safe here? What happens if it swarms the patio?” Cheryl gave him a worried look.

Sally flopped down on the tiles. “Don’t feed the bears.” She ran a gentle finger along one of the blades of grass, and drew it away covered in blood. Dave pulled her to her feet. Three red drops fell into the grass and another two fell on the tiles. The ink swam through the grass and enveloped the blood there. Dave pulled Sally away from the edge of the grass, his heart picking up speed.

The inkiness didn’t acknowledge the blood on the tiles at all. It merged with the rest of the black out in the center of the lawn.

“Guess that answers my question.” Cheryl tried to smile, but it looked more like she was trying not to cry.

“No door to the house.”

They turned to Erik, who was feeling along the outer wall. “Whatever we came through, it’s gone now. And it looks like the fence disappears around the side of the house. Not on this side, but down that end.” He pointed. “But there’s a big strip of grass between the fence and the house, maybe too big, seeing as how that stuff moves so fast. I don’t see anything we can lay across like a bridge down the far end there, but if we could scale the length of the fence, I saw a gate on the other side.” He jerked a thumb at the corner of the house behind him as he walked back to them. It met the fence exactly.

“Sounds dangerous,” Cheryl said.

“We don’t have much of a choice.” DeMarco holstered her gun. “We can’t stay here. No sense in us all going. Let me go first, and I’ll holler back if it’s safe to follow.”

“But how will we get Sally across? I don’t think she’s in much shape for climbing.”

“We’ll have to get her to try.” DeMarco walked over to the fence. Dave followed until they were just out of earshot of the others.

“I think I should go,” Dave said. He heard his voice saying words but he felt detached, like he was hearing a dream version of himself.

DeMarco cocked an eyebrow. “Spare me the machismo, Dave. I appreciate the thought, but—”

“I’m too restless. I can’t wait here. Frankly, they’re all making me too jittery. I’d welcome the time alone.”

“You really want to go?”

“Yeah.” Dave forced an easy smile.

“On one condition,” she replied, staring hard into his eyes.

“What?”

“Tell me what you’re thinking. Don’t lie to me, Dave. I’m a cop. I’ll know.”

Dave sighed. He glanced back at the others, who stood more or less transfixed by the ink. It had gone back to working the flesh off the little figure in the yard. Sally stood close to the edge of the grass. Only her gaze was on him. She looked angry. Jilted, was what came to mind. Abandoned, maybe.

“She doesn’t trust me,” he said to DeMarco, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “I was supposed to protect her, and I let it get her and hurt her. And I can’t live with that. I’m tired of living with having let her down. I can’t stay here and wait. I need to do something to get her out of here, instead of making these stupid, useless attempts at running and dodging. Then, maybe—”

“You can fix her?”

Pain jackknifed in his chest. “She can’t be fixed. But she could be comfortable. Safe.”

DeMarco looked hesitant. Her eyes never left his face.

“I need to do this.” It came out harsh, desperate. He softened his voice. “Please. I need to do this.”

“Can you even climb?”

“No, but I can’t fight, either.” He nodded toward the house. “If the Hollower isn’t out here somewhere already, it’s on its way. And when it comes, I need someone to protect Sally. You’re trained to protect people.”

“Dave—”

“Protect them,” Dave pleaded with her. He hoped his eyes, his whole face conveyed it.

“Okay.”

He exhaled. “Thank you. If this works, I can’t imagine anyone better equipped to get my sister around that fence than you.”

“Your faith overwhelms me.” A small grin found her mouth.

He smiled. This time it did feel easy, and genuine. “I feel it’s probably well placed.”

“I hope so. Listen, I think you should go grab one of those . . . tools, or whatever they are, off that big stone slab. I’d feel better if you were armed with something, at least.”

“Okay, will do.”

DeMarco followed him back to the obsidian table and examined the objects. They seemed to be made of metal, each with a smooth silver handle and a bar of metal twisted and bent into random snaking designs. When he touched one, it caught and reflected green light. Another gave off slips of blue in the silver. He settled on one that reflected burgundy. Its shape reminded him of those straws he’d had as a kid—Crazy Straws, or Twisty Straws, he thought they were called. Its tip spiraled about four inches to a sharp point. He picked it up. It hummed, vibrating in his hand.

Then he turned to DeMarco. “I’m ready.”

DeMarco put a hand on his arm. A sweet gesture—soft and gentle—and it touched him. “Be careful.”

In the next moment, she turned on an authoritative heel and called to the others. “Dave’s made a good argument for going. I’m staying here with you. With the gun.”

Cheryl’s eyes widened, and then she frowned. “What? Wait. Why, Dave?” She followed him to the fence.

He had trouble looking her in the eye, but from the side glances, he could tell by her face that she was afraid.

“Dave, wait.” She took his arm, forcing him to turn and look at her. “Why you?”

He sighed. “Cheryl, believe me, I’m not a brave man. Not a strong one, and obviously not a smart one. But Sally . . .” He looked over Cheryl’s shoulder at his sister. “I’ve lost her. I’m no good to her if I can’t get her out of here.”

“You’re no good to any of us if you fall off that fence and whatever’s eating away metal objects on that lawn eats you, too. You have no idea what’s beyond that fence, or beyond the gate. We need you here. I need you.”

Dave felt warm in his chest, and for a moment, he considered telling DeMarco to forget it. Then in his mind, he saw Sally (“You want me to die”) tottering forward onto the lawn, the black swarming over her, eating into her face. He didn’t want her to die, but God, how he’d wished every once in a while that he didn’t have to worry about her. Wished he could put her on a shelf somewhere safe to collect dust so he could be free of responsibility.

And all he’d managed in thinking that was a life of guilt and shackles anyway. And that tied him down more than anything else.

If he went, he’d know he tried to take care of her—really take care of her. Maybe then he’d feel free.

“I have to, Cheryl. It’s hard to explain, but I’m no good to anyone if I’m buried under my own failure as a brother.”

“You’re not a failure. But I can see you’re going, whether I like it or not.”

He looked at her then, really looked at her. She was beautiful. For a moment, he was amazed by how much he’d let slip away from him—work, friends, family. Love.

He pulled her to him and kissed her. It was neither a gentle nor a fierce kiss, but it was passionate all the same. He put every fear into it, and every word to her unspoken, every date he’d never asked her for, every thought unfulfilled of taking her to bed. Every shy, humble, vulnerable, totally honest sentiment toward her.

And she kissed him back, as if all this time, all he’d had to do was ask.

When they pulled apart, he noticed DeMarco smirking at him, arms crossed beneath her chest. Erik wore a big goofy grin. Dave’s face and neck felt hot, but he smiled back. Cheryl followed the look over her shoulder and giggled.

To Dave she said, “You will come back to us,” then walked away. It left no room for debate, or for any other possible outcome.

He looked out on the lawn. The black oozed upward, bobbing on the grass. It seemed to be watching him. Waiting. He wondered if it could flow right up the pickets of the fence, right over his foot and ankle and sink into the muscles of his calf.

“Only one way to find out,” he muttered to himself, too low for anyone to hear.

Tucking the handle of the strange tool into his belt loop, he eyed the fence.

Not so tough, that fence. He could climb it. No worries.

The wood was weathered and pockmarked, hairy with splinters. He put a palm to the picket directly in front of him, which canted wildly to the left. It felt rough, as he expected. He pushed on it, then leaned on it. It didn’t budge.

Good, he thought. So far so good, at least. One damned picket at a time. No worries.

He looked back at the others. They were watching him with hopeful, expectant, anxious eyes. All of them except Sally. She was looking out across the lawn.

Dave turned back to the fence and, taking a deep breath, hoisted his foot to the V where the picket in front of him met with the one next to it. He pushed down, put a little weight on it, but it didn’t move. Taking hold of the edges of the wood, he climbed on.

So far so good. Good little fence.

The next space between pieces of wood was narrower, but Dave managed to switch his left foot for his right, and wedge the freed foot sideways into the space. The fence wiggled a little, and Dave sucked in a tiny breath. After a moment, when he felt confident he could move again, he leaned his head out to check for the next open space.

It pointed down, wider than the last, two pickets away. If he stretched, he could reach—maybe. He chanced a look back at the others and his hand slipped off the wood.

For one panicked moment, he felt himself slipping, saw himself landing on his back and the inkiness swallowing him whole. Then he caught the wood again with his hand and pulled himself close. The wood felt rough against his cheek.

With slow and deliberate movement, he carefully replaced right foot with left again. Then he stretched his right leg out as far as he could. His toe found the next foothold between the two pickets. He looked ahead. The back fence looked so far away.

Ahead of him, beyond the pickets, a long, low wail filled the black. Through knotholes and in the dips of open space between his hands, he saw an endless blue black, and through it, metallic bars twisted into asymmetrical shapes floated. One bumped the wood right next to his head and he flinched.

Take one side at a time, he reasoned with himself. Just make one side for me, Davey-boy, and we’ll talk about the next one.

Behind him, he heard floating words of encouragement. Erik, Cheryl, DeMarco, Sean. They were counting on him.

Sally was counting on him.

Left foot to right foot. Rook to Knight 4. The next V was a picket away.

He made his way down the length of the fence that way, right foot to the foothold, left foot to replace it, right foot to the new foothold, move the hands.

At the corner, Dave took another deep breath and leaned out to gain purchase along the first perpendicular picket. He stretched his hands, each in turn, with spasmodic little waves. They were cramping from clutching the wood. The arches and blades of his feet were starting to hurt, too, but he could ignore that.

Two sides left. Two sides. Seventy feet, maybe. Seventy feet of fence.

The next open space was down low, close to the grass. Dave looked to the one after. It stood higher up, out of the reach of the blackness on the lawn. If he tried, he might be able to make that one.

He stretched a foot out. His toe caught again but slipped, and the momentum nearly pulled him off balance.

Dave took a few moments to breathe, to switch gears to plan B.

The space was awfully low. The inkiness pooled a few feet away. It was aware of him. It spread thin, separating into small, shiny black drops, and this for some reason seemed more awful, more deadly to Dave. He half expected them to splash up, pelting him with deadly acidic juice in tiny pinprick burns all over his face and body.

Not going to think about that. He could dip down and up. He could do that, a quick dip. His right foot slid into the space and the black ebbed forward. He put his left foot down on top of his right foot, missing the cue, blowing the coordination.

“Shit.” His right foot jammed. He moved his left foot out of the way, back to higher ground. But when he went to remove his other foot, he met with resistance.

“Oh, come on, for Chrissakes—” He leaned his weight on the secure purchase and yanked on his right foot. His shoe gave a little. The blackness pooled beneath the picket. He could hear it now, humming, a crowd of tiny voices contributing to a collective mind-buzz.

He gave one more sharp tug and pulled his foot free. The picket groaned and shifted outward toward the endless night. Dave closed his eyes and prayed pleaseohpleaseohplease don’t let me die and waited until the picket settled again. Then he opened his eyes.

He could almost hear . . . words? No, thoughts. Sentiments.

They’d waited too long and he’d pulled free. He sensed hunger, anger, hate. The Hollower’s thoughts in microcosm. Drops of its blood, sentient and plotting. This last idea terrified him. It wasn’t completely his thought, and it surprised him. He hadn’t figured the Hollower even to have blood, given the way it took the bullets from DeMarco’s gun, but the idea that it had maybe had parts that functioned separately and with their own agenda scared the hell out of him.

He made a little hop and landed with his left foot in the low space and his right in the next one over. This time, the mass on the lawn didn’t hesitate. Drops of black splashed up onto his pants as he used his right leg to pull his left out of harm’s way. After a moment, he winced, then cried out as they ate into the spaces behind his ankle, his calf, a spot just below his knee. He felt twenty or thirty needlelike jabs beneath his pants, and then tiny trickles of blood dribbling down his leg.

Gritting his teeth, Dave inched down the length of the back fence. Each time he put his injured leg down, tiny pricks of pain shot up toward his thigh. He stopped, took a few breaths, continued on. At the corner, he swung gently out to the final stretch of fence.

One more. One more side. One more. The gate was within sight, massive weathered wood with thick gray posts and a large gold plate with a keyhole. Thirty, thirty-five feet, maybe. He could make it. He could get Sally out.

Dave ignored the voice in his head. It wanted to know what happened next if what was on the other side of the gate was worse than back there on the lawn. Instead of thinking on an answer, he chanced a look behind him. Way over on the patio, the others watched.

Erik cupped his mouth with his hands and called, “Good job, Dave. Keep going. You’re cool, man. Cool and collected.”

“You’re doing great, Dave!” Cheryl yelled. “I’m proud of you.”

DeMarco gave him a thumbs-up, and Sean waved. All present and accounted for.

Except Sally.

Dave felt nauseated and a little dizzy. Despite the cramps, his fingers dug into the wood. Where was Sally?

He mouthed the words—he must have—because Cheryl frowned at him.

“We can’t hear you,” DeMarco said.

“Whe—” The breath failed him. He tried again. “Where’s Sally?”

“What do you mean? She’s right—” DeMarco stopped midgesture, because Sally wasn’t right there.

Dave spotted her around the same time the others did.

Maybe six feet or so out from the patio, she stood on the lawn.