Authors: Mary Sangiovanni
Jake seemed to let go of whatever guard had been up—just a little—and said, “Yeah, no kidding. It’s been a long, strange trip every step of the way. Thanks for the coffee.”
And with an uncomfortable side-step, he bypassed Erik and went inside for the meeting.
Erik kept an eye on him that morning, though,
through the prayer and the announcements and the accounts from veterans of the drug addiction wars. Jake seemed fidgety, distracted, unwilling to share.
At one point, he noticed a strange look on Jake’s face. His sponsee had fixed a gaze on the door that was part confusion, part horror, and not a little bit of guilt. Jake glanced once back at Erik and the others in the rec hall and got up, making his way past crossed legs and folding chairs down the aisle to the doorway. Then he disappeared out into the hallway. With a nod from Terry, who was leading the meeting that morning, Erik got up and followed him.
Jake was nowhere in the hallway, nor was he in the men’s room at its far end. He wasn’t in any of the open adjacent rooms either. Erik made his way outside to see if maybe his sponsee had gone out for a smoke. No sign of Jake out there, either. He was about to turn around and go back in when he heard the crying.
Erik’s heart sank. He knew the sound of the stuff inside a person, the stuff that keeps the person together and sane, breaking. He knew that kind of crying.
He followed the sound around the side of the building. In the narrow space between the rec center and the alley behind it, he found Jake crouched on the ground, hugging his knees and bawling. When he saw Erik, he toppled over, but quickly wiped his eyes and nose dry. Still, though, both were red.
Erik sat down on the ground in front of him. “Want to talk about it now?”
Jake shook his head, dazed. “I didn’t do it, man. I didn’t.”
“I believe you,” Erik said, not sure what Jake was talking about. “Tell me your side of it.”
When Jake answered, his monotone was soft, almost soothing, except for the things it said. “I didn’t kill her. It wasn’t my fault. I just…I just left her. I went out that night without her, to get out, away from her. We were fighting about some girl that meant nothing. I needed time to think, to figure out how to make her understand. And she took the heroin and the pills and the booze. She shouldn’t have taken it all at once. But I didn’t put the needle in her arm. She only ever did it to keep up with me, but I never, never made her do it. Never even asked her to do it. I don’t think. I don’t remember. But I didn’t kill her. She killed herself.” The words came out on the crests of each wave of breaths, clumps of words at once that were hard to understand, nearly pulled under by the intensity in his voice and the tears in his eyes.
Erik knew a little about the girl he was talking about, an old girlfriend who Jake never mentioned without a dark flicker in his eyes. Carefully, so as not to break the thin strands of communication between them, Erik said, “You’re right. Everyone needs to take responsibility for his or her own actions. You didn’t kill anyone.”
Jake finally looked at him. He looked haunted, red-eyed, his cheeks and the pale forehead sweating. “I saw her,” he whispered.
The sinking feeling in Erik’s chest and gut turned painful. “Who?”
“Chloe. I saw her, man. I followed her out here. I—” He stood up with a sudden, unstable jerk. “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got to—”
“Jake, wait. I—”
Jake held up a hand. “Sorry, but…I can’t do this right now. I can’t. I need…air, need fresh air and a walk and…” Whatever else he said was lost to a series of mumbles beneath his bowed head. He hurried away from Erik and fairly broke into a run once he hit the street. Erik watched until he was out of sight. Then he turned back to the alley. Beyond where he and Jake had been sitting, it continued and then veered to the right, around the back of the building. Erik concentrated on the space there, on the very air itself, searching it, waiting to see something materialize.
He saw nothing. He crept back there, every sense drawn tight and ready to spring if the bastard Jones in a hat made its appearance. But there was no upset of the world as he knew it, no turning the corner on some vivid scene of his past put before him to hurt him. There was nothing but the alley, the building, the cool air, the sound of the occasional passing car, and his own footsteps.
Whatever Jake had seen was gone now.
Erik got to the mouth of the alley, just about at the front of the building, when he heard the laughter, a twisted intertwined sound of many mocking voices. He spun around.
No one was there. The laughter faded, carried off on the cool breeze.
It took Dorrie most of the rest of the day to feel comfortable enough to go back to the house. By midafternoon, she grudgingly accepted the fact that she couldn’t stay in the hotel room forever and that if she
wasn’t going to ask for help from the police, that she’d have to go back to her own place.
Besides
, a nasty little voice in her head told her,
if
you’re crazy, that’s going to follow you everywhere. You could
just as easily see blood streaming out of the hotel shower head
or open the minibar and see the severed head of the boy you
had a crush on in the sixth grade telling you you’re a fat-
assed
bitch who could just jump in front of a train and end it all, except
you’d probably derail the train with all that blubber
…
The mean voice, and the sheer disgusted horror with which she now looked at the hotel room’s plain black minibar by the television, made her want to cry again. Made her feel sick.
You cry a lot
, the little voice said.
Big girls don’t cry
.
“Fuck you,” she whispered to the little voice and wiped away the wetness in her eyes.
It had a point, though. First in that crying wasn’t going to solve anything. Second, if there was really something wrong with her, changing location wasn’t going to help. If she were really sick in the head with a tumor, a brain lesion, whatever, then it wasn’t the police she should have gone to that morning. She saw that now, that her choice to speak to the detective had been a last ditch effort to convince herself that it was really something external that was after her and not something in her head. But the responsible thing, the healthy thing (yeah, the sane thing) to do would be to go home, call a doctor, and schedule an appointment.
The house was quiet when she got back. No giggling coming from the kitchen—a good sign. She dropped her keys on the table by the front door and went into
the kitchen anyway. The refrigerator stood closed and quiet. She spent several seconds just watching it, screwing up her courage to approach it and open the door.
She took the plunge and crossed the kitchen, grabbing the door handle and yanking it open.
All the contents were as they should be, as they had been before those containers jumped all over the place. There was no trace of any blood. She exhaled her relief and closed the door. Then she walked through each room, inspecting it, searching for any anomaly, even the slightest difference from the night before. Completing her inspection of the house, she went back to the front door and outside to the small front porch. Little sat out there besides a couple of chairs, a small table, a set of wind chimes that hung from a plant hook at the corner where the porch’s roof met the end pillar, and a flower box that hung over the railing.
She’d call the doctor when she went back inside. A few more minutes to herself, believing that everything could be okay—that was all she needed.
A nice breeze picked up, lifting her hair as she stood there, leaning over the railing. It caught up the scent of the flowers and whirled them up to her face. It rustled the tops of the trees across the street. It blew low and soft through the suburban valley of Cerver Street. It was otherwise quiet. No people outside, watering or mowing or taking their afternoon constitutionals around the block.
She’d call the doctor, a general practitioner, she supposed, and tell him what she’d been seeing—what happened at the lake and what happened in her kitchen.
She’d explain about her exercise program and her diet. Maybe, yes, maybe that was it. Maybe she was working out in such a way as to cause some stressful side effect. Maybe she was dieting right out of her system some necessary food that kept her rational and calm. Maybe those diet pills…ooh, yes. The diet pills. Maybe there had been some chemical reaction she didn’t know about, and those pills had given her some bad side effect. There were options, choices. She’d feel better, stronger, and more in control with a plan.
Unless…it wasn’t her head that made up the figure without a face to hurt her. What if it was its own entity, using her mind to do the work for it?
Don’t be silly
, the nasty voice told her.
She looked at a house across the street and a few down from hers. There was a FOR SALE sign on it that had been there for months. Dorrie didn’t talk to too many of her neighbors, but she knew that the house used to belong to a bartender, a nice girl. A very pretty girl, with a nice enough looking boyfriend (or, reasonably, Dorrie assumed he was her boyfriend, as he’d come to see her sometimes and stay the night). Dorrie had envied her, even knowing so little about her or her life. Girls like that, she had always thought, had everything. Looks, a nice body, a nice personality, and, therefore, a life she imagined was full of friends and dinners and parties and boyfriends.
More than the social aspects, though, Dorrie envied the confidence. The way the bartender moved, the way she held herself, the way she carried herself. All the rest could come in time, to anyone, she thought, if a person
had the confidence to laugh easily, to move gracefully, to thrive in one’s own skin. Girls like that didn’t drive themselves nuts with hallucinations of monsters that thwarted every attempt to shed the weight that buried over her self-confidence.
Dorrie sighed, and then shivered, noticing the wind picking up. It made her skin tingle in little goose bumps all up and down her arms. It rustled the trees now so that they sounded like whispers of words. It tore a bit at the flowers in the flower box. By instinct, Dorrie looked up to the wind chimes, expecting to have to untangle them…
…and found them perfectly still. The wind blew all around them, but they didn’t move at all. They made no sound. They seemed completely apart from the rest of the neighborhood,
like Colorforms or that transfer stuff you
used to have to rub off with a plastic stick onto the background
…
She shook her head. Those were disjointed, weird record-skipping childhood thoughts. They didn’t feel like her thoughts at all. And the wind chimes…well, maybe there was a current that was skittering around them, missing them. She reached a hand up and felt the cold air of the wind on the back of it. Her fingers trailed against the sides of the metal tubes and they dangled a bit where they hung and then stopped, hanging pin-straight as if another hand, invisible, had reached up next to Dorrie’s to still them.
She drew her hand back and frowned.
Then she heard her name.
Only a tree-whisper at first. She wasn’t sure she’d
heard it correctly, but then it came again, louder and clearer.
It was coming from across the street.
She turned and followed the direction of it, and there the figure stood. Her heart felt cold in her chest, each beat an icy stab.
It raised a gloved hand and waved at her, tilting its head as if watching her.
As if considering how to kill her.
The breath stuck in Dorrie’s throat.
It took a few steps forward and began crossing the street. When it reached the middle of the road, it said, “I brought you some flowers, Dorrie.”
Her brow furrowed in confusion. Flowers? She didn’t see—
Then she realized and looked down at the flowers in the box below where she was leaning. The petals sparkled in the afternoon light, jagged shards of glass arranged on glass pipettes. They suddenly grew upward, shooting toward her fingers. She jumped, crying out, and tried to pull her hands away, but she wasn’t fast enough. The petals sank into the flesh of her hands like thorns. The leaves curled around her wrists and cut into them. She screamed, shaking her hands until they were a blur in front of her. And when she stopped, she noticed the flowers were as they always had been in the box, not glass but organic petal and stem. Heavy breaths wracked her whole body. She looked down at her hands, turning them palms up. A dozen tiny cuts crisscrossed each palm, the thin lines of blood already coagulating. She watched them heal up and leave tiny white scars, which, within a few minutes, faded,
too. The pain, however, still throbbed in her hands as if the wounds were still there, and Dorrie was gripped with the terrifying notion that the pain was the very intent, that the faceless figure in the street had specifically given her a preview of what it could do, what it would do. It didn’t have to touch her, but it could hurt her. It could drive her crazy. It could make her head believe the whole rest of her was in pain. Maybe mortally wounded. Even dying.
It would kill her, when it was done toying with her.
She looked up. It was gone. This time she didn’t cry.
Dorrie didn’t call the doctor, either. She didn’t need to.
“Wanna talk about it?” Casey asked Erik. The sun was going down, and Erik had come home from work early in a strange and pensive mood, one he figured Casey knew by instinct meant he needed her just to be there with him, close to him, real and solidly and safely there beside him, without question or comment. They lay on the bed, her arm and one of her long legs flung over him as if to protect him, the rising and falling of her chest pressing against his arm, her breath coming in soft tickles on his neck. However, one of the understandings they’d come to over the last few months of reconciliation was that sooner or later, Casey would need some indication of his mood’s source, the seriousness of it, and the level of her participation in it. As his partner, she explained, she needed to know if it was something she should share the burden of worrying about, too. And if it was something that she was causing, she needed to know what steps to take to fix that. She’d give him space to brood if he needed it, so long as he gave her some gauge by which to involve herself or back away, in good conscience.
“Not really.”
She made a little huffing noise that came out as warm air on his neck.
He considered it for a moment, and then said, “It’s just my sponsee.”
“Is he using again?”
“No.” He rolled over to face her. “Do you remember, you know, back when things weren’t going so well? Remember what I told you, about, well, what I was seeing at the time?”
The smallest trace of pain flashed in her eyes. “I remember.”
“Well, I told you it wasn’t just me, that other people could see it, too.”
“You said that it looked like a man without a face, something like that? That it was…stalking you. Haunting you.” Her voice came tight through her lips, controlled and careful. He’d asked her to believe something wild and impossible sounding during a time when she probably had wanted to simply forget he ever existed. But she’d risen to the occasion; she’d at least given him the benefit of the doubt that
he
believed he was seeing something, and that he believed others could see it, too. She’d never asked him what happened that night he spent with Dave and the others, and he’d never told her. She’d just taken him to the hospital to get his wounds looked at (she hadn’t asked about those, either), and all she’d said about the whole thing on the way there was, “I hope that whatever happened last night means that this is over. I want us to start over, only better than last time.”
He’d nodded slowly and, squeezing her knee as she drove, he told her, “It’s done. No more, baby. I promise.”
After that, no more on the subject came up. From time to time, though, he’d catch her giving Dave or Cheryl or even DeMarco a funny look, not quite jealousy over something shared that she was in no way a part of, but…a little like that. A little mistrust, maybe, too, of their common craziness that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—share.
Now she reminded him, almost too soft to hear, “You promised it was done.”
“It is, for me,” he said in an apologetic whisper. “But not for him. He sees it, too. I’m almost sure of it.”
She turned over so that her back was to his chest and snuggled up against him. He slid an arm over her waist.
“I love you, Case.”
She stroked the arm that was draped over her. “I love you, too. But you know that talk like this reminds me of the bad times. Scares me. I can’t go through that again.”
“I know. And I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“I almost lost you.”
“I know.”
She sighed. “So what did you tell him?”
Behind her head, Erik frowned. “Nothing.”
She turned back to him, a surprised and not altogether approving look on her face. “What do you mean, nothing? Are you sure he’s seeing this…this…”
“Hollower,” Erik said.
She made a face like she was swallowing a bad taste. “This Hollower, you’re sure he’s seeing it?”
“Pretty close to absolutely.” He tried to look unaffected, but it wouldn’t stick.
“Then why would you leave him alone?”
“Huh?”
Casey shook her head. “Erik, I’ve always dreaded this topic ever coming up again. I hoped that…that night, whatever happened…I hoped you were done, even though from that very night on, there’s always been a part of me that’s been scared that you were going to slide back to that place, that dark place. And that the next time, I’d lose you forever. But, if it’s really like you say, and this guy is where you were, and you…if you’re in a position to help him—” Her eyes filled up with tears. “I don’t know if he has family, a girlfriend or a wife, but I wouldn’t wish those times we had on any couple. Erik, if you can help this guy…get past whatever it is you saw, then why wouldn’t you? You told me that it was safer in numbers. You’re his sponsor. How could you leave him alone?”
It was a good question, a noble one, and he had a whole bunch of answers to it, not a single one nearly as noble. He subscribed to Dave’s and Cheryl’s idea that to acknowledge the presence of the Hollower, to talk about it, think about it, remember it too much, would be to send up a red flare pinpointing his location and all the tasty insecurity it could eat. He also thought, as Dave had once, that the responsibility of having brought Jake into contact with the Hollower was too much a burden to accept. Sobriety, even now, was a struggle. A simpler struggle than it had been, maybe, but additional stresses made the rock you kicked in front of you more of a boulder you needed to roll up hill. And in spite of all the progress he’d made inside and out, that fear that the boulder would roll right back down on top of him and crush him never quite left him. He remembered
the night he’d helped kill the first one, and the fight had nearly crippled him. When he’d talked to Dave on the phone, his friend had referred to this new Hollower as a Primary, that watcher from the rip, a higher breed of cruelty. The distasteful idea of fighting another one—a stronger one, according to Dave—made his entire body and soul groan inwardly. And if all that could be avoided by pretending nothing was going on…
…except he couldn’t. Thus, the pensive mood, the worry about Jake, the nagging supposition that he should call Dave and give him a heads-up. What kind of a man was he that he could do to his own sponsee exactly what he’d convinced Dave and the others would mean sure death? He had, in a manner of speaking, Jake’s life in his hands every time Jake was faced with temptation and called him, every time the resolve weakened and Jake needed a pep talk. The wrong word could send Jake back to using. And although Erik wasn’t sure if he’d ever feel good enough or strong enough to speak to Jake without that fear hanging over his head, he still thought he’d done a passable job of keeping Jake straight, keeping him alive. Leaving him to fend off the Hollower on his own, though…
Erik stumbled through a long, uncomfortable silence before he swallowed the lump in his throat. “Because I’m scared,” he answered finally. “Scared of going back to that dark place, too. Scared of dragging you down with me, or leaving you behind. Scared that even if I reach out to Jake, I won’t be able to help him. I don’t want to make it worse. I’m supposed to keep the guy off drugs, not off the radar.”
She shook her head. “You don’t believe that. I can hear it in your voice.”
Erik settled back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Call him.”
“And say what?”
“Whatever that guy Dave, who called you, said to you.”
Erik thought about Dave and that phone call all those months back. “
I need to talk to you about the Hollower…
I think you’re right. About it being safer with all of us together,
I mean
.” It had been Erik’s idea to fight together. Safety in numbers. No dividing and conquering on his watch.
“You really think I should call him?”
“I don’t think you should let him handle this alone. No one,” she said in that same tight voice, “should have to go through things like that alone.” She put her head back down on his chest.
“And what about you, baby?” He reached out and stroked her hair.
“What about me?”
Erik didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure how to word what he wanted to ask. He needed to know if she’d bear with him, if he got involved. The truth was Erik was already thinking of how to kill the Hollower, where to find it, and whether Casey would still be there when and if he came back from another mysterious night out with Dave, bruised and cut and beat to hell.
That instinct for knowing him, he supposed, prompted her to say, “Do what you have to do. I love you. If this puts it to rest once and for all, forever and ever and ever
Amen, then do it. See him through this. But you come back to me, Erik McGavin, when this is finished. Don’t come back until it’s finished, because after it’s done, I never want to talk about it again. I want you back. Do you understand?”
He did. He kissed the top of her head and murmured an acknowledg ment.
This time, they’d finish it.
Over the course of his shift, Steve had gotten the idea in his head that Ms. Dorothy Weatherin had seen something very similar to what Ms. Duffy, Ms. Carrington, Ms. Henshaw, and Mr. Peters had seen. Something maybe exactly like what he’d seen in the cell. The idea took root and germinated. But it wasn’t until he’d accidentally come across another missing persons file in doing a computer search that the idea became an imperative need to confirm.
Sally Kohlar, the dead woman from the assisted living place, had been missing for some time. There was a connection to Ms. Duffy, who, Steve discovered on his lunch hour, had moved to California. Evidently, Sally Kohlar’s brother had dated Ms. Duffy for a time. But more interesting still, Ms. Kohlar had been a friend of Max Feinstein, the suicide whose file Mendez had snatched from him. That in and of itself wouldn’t have really raised an eyebrow, as both Feinstein and Kohlar were in group therapy sessions together, except that when Kohlar went missing, Detective DeMarco had gone to the hospital to talk to a Mrs. Saltzman, a supposed witness. DeMarco had scribbled notes about a doctor all in
black, who made it snow in the hallway of the hospital right before Kohlar disappeared. Real wacko stuff, most of it making no sense. But there had been a note appended to that, a Post-It afterthought, really, which read, “See Feinstein file—tape.”
The Feinstein file. And there was mention of a tape, maybe a videotape?
Steve thought of the crime scene photos, of the black hat.
He needed that file. So he approached Bennie Mendez at the close of the shift.
“Mendez, I need to see the Feinstein file.” Steve, standing next to Mendez’s desk and trying to find a way to stand that was both casual and assertive, just came out and said it, and it sounded neither casual nor assertive to him. But after the visit from Dorothy Weatherin, kicking around the things she’d said, the little things, and looking over the files, Steve had to know. If he sounded desperate, fuck it. Any possibility that what he’d seen in the basement was some hiccup in nature, maybe an anomaly of some sort, or a hallucinatory effect of some shared bacterial infection or even some kind of mass hypnotic hysteria—if it was possible that the Feinstein file tied all the pieces together, including Ms. Weatherin’s aborted attempt to explain her situation, Steve wanted to know.
He needed to know.
Mendez continued to ignore him, his back bent over some phone list. He was making little checks and cross-throughs next to various numbers on the list.
“Come on, man. It’s important.”
“Why?” Mendez didn’t look up.
“Because,” Steve said, thinking fast, “I know that De-Marco saw something. And I want to know how she put it in the file.”
“You don’t know jack shit about DeMarco.”
But he had Mendez’s attention now. The detective put down his pen and looked up at him.
“I know she made some important notes, pertaining to a videotape—”
“It’s gone. Disappeared from evidence three months ago.”
“Other notes, then, about what was on it,” Steve persisted.
“Nothing you need to worry about, Corimar.”
“Then there’s no reason you can’t give me Feinstein’s file, right?”
“You’re a pushy bastard, you know that?” Mendez turned around again, and Steve took the chair next to Mendez’s desk. “You got no business poking around through that shit. We’re behind with things as it is. We don’t need no Columbo bullshit.”
“Look, I may be new, but I’m not stupid. I’m not wasting time. I need to know how you guys handle the weird stuff. And not just for shits and giggles.” He left it at that; let Mendez think whatever he wanted. Steve wasn’t backing down.
“What do you mean, weird stuff?” Mendez finally closed the file he was working on. His eyes darkened for a moment, but the stubborn set of his mouth never faltered.
“I mean like, something you couldn’t explain. Something you couldn’t sign off on the line and file neatly in
a folder and stamp ‘Case Closed’ because it just didn’t tie up like that.”
“Whaaat, you mean, like, a Kolchak kind of thing?”
Steve nodded slowly, vaguely aware of the reference, which was, if he recalled, a hell of a lot closer to what he meant than he’d intended to suggest. “I guess so. I mean, in the course of police business, things that you…maybe…”
“Reword for the report.”
Steve couldn’t tell anything from Mendez’s expression, but from the tone, he clearly understood. Mendez sighed and leaned in with a conspiratorial glance around the room. To Steve, he said in a low voice, “Under any other circumstances, I’d tell you to go screw yourself. But you hit a nerve, either by happy accident on your part, or because—and I sure as hell hope this isn’t the case—you’ve got a real reason for asking. And around here, sometimes that isn’t out of the realm of possibility. So since I think I know where you’re going with this, I’ll tell you a story. You hear me out, and if you’re still not convinced to give up on this useless shit, I’ll give you the damn file, okay?”
Steve nodded. They did a subtle glance around the room. Shirley was up front, out of earshot. Some of the guys were in the locker room, a couple in the break room, and the rest out on patrol. The mostly quiet station afforded them some privacy.