Read Online The Hollower by Mary Sangiovanni - Free Book Online Page B

crazy, just for seeing monsters. Do you?”
    Dave searched his face. “No, kid, I guess I don’t.”
    “My dad didn’t think it was crazy, neither. When I was little and my dad was still alive, I was afraid of these bug monsters under my bed—baby stuff, but I was little then. Anyways, my dad showed me this thing he called a Warding Ritual—”
    “Sean!” A woman leaned from the doorway in the house across the street, waving the boy inside.
    Sean looked up at Dave sheepishly. “Well, I guess I oughta go, mister. That’s my mom. See ya around.” The boy turned and jogged off toward the soft glow of his house’s interior. He cast one final glance back at Dave and another at the house across the street before he and his mother disappeared inside.
    Dave stared at the closed door for several long seconds afterward. If that kid had seen what he had seen—if he’d seen the Hollower—what did that mean? What could it possibly mean?
    Reason, cold and clear, splashed Dave in the face. He was reading way too much into an innocent, harmless conversation. Opening the car door, he slipped inside and pulled away from the house.
    Sean watched the man’s car drive away until it was out of his line of sight from the bedroom window. He didn’t know monsters went after grown-ups, too, but he was sure the man had seen the thing that had sent over the balloon (Sean shivered inwardly, the sensation of bug legs on his blanket raising goose bumps on his skin). It had been the way the man tore out of the house and the look on his face when he’d stopped by the car—like he was a little sick around the edges, and scared in the middle—that made Sean sure enough to cross the street. Sean knew better than totalk to strangers, but they shared an enemy; no one the monster would go after could possibly be a bad kind of stranger.
    Sean had seen it himself that morning, at first a glowing orb hovering just beyond the curtains in an upstairs corner window across the street.
    “That was Max’s bedroom, honey,” his mother had told him when he’d asked. “Why?”
    Sean shrugged it off, unsure how to answer. Okay, so that was the bedroom where old Max Feinstein had shot himself. Nothing to be a sissy about. It wasn’t like there were such things as ghosts. But he’d seen something in that bedroom window, all right. Sean was pretty sure it wasn’t a ghost, but it was something. And Sean had started to wonder if Max maybe had seen it, too.
    He didn’t think the thing was always there in the master bedroom of the house across the street. In fact, Sean was sure, although he couldn’t say why, that it only visited there to keep an eye on him. To scare him. To watch him, and wait for the perfect chance to—
    “Sean, into bed.”
    Jolted from his thoughts, Sean turned from the window. His mother stood in the doorway, arms folded beneath her chest. He glanced once more at the house across the street. Dark, empty windows. The curtains hung still.
    “Okay.” He hopped into bed, and let his mother tuck him in and kiss him good night (even though he was really getting to be too old for those things). Then she turned out the light.
    Alone in the room, eyes glued suspiciously on the window, Sean went through the series of gestureshis father had shown him to keep the bug monsters away. His father hadn’t thought seeing monsters was crazy at all. His dad taught him the Ritual with total seriousness. Three circles around the face, an X, a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the bed. Worked every time. Not a bug monster to be found ever after. And that faceless monster could hide out across the street and wave all it wanted, but the Warding Ritual would keep it at bay. It had to. Sean refused to believe otherwise. Three circles around the face, an X, a reverse X, and a spit off the side of the bed.
    That done, he settled into the pillow.
    Too bad, Sean thought before sleep overtook him, that he didn’t get the chance to show the man the Ritual.