The Hollow Man

Most of the carcasses in the center rows had been knocked off their hooks, either by the water pressure from above or by the madness below. They stood now—beef sides and human bodies—in stalagmites of ragged ice. It looked as if the entire fifteen-hundred-gallon tank had been emptied in here. Bremen set his boots carefully on the rough and rising swirls of blue-green ice, both to keep his balance and to avoid stepping on any of the raw-ribbed carcasses frozen into the nightmare mare beneath him.

Miz Morgan was almost directly beneath the hole where sunlight shafted down through the vapor and dripping stalactites. The ice mound was at least three and a half feet tall here, and the bodies of her and the two dogs were embedded in it like some sort of pale, three-headed frozen vegetable. Her face was the closest to the surface, so close that one wide, blue eye actually was lifted above the line of frost. Her hands, with fingers still curved into claws, also rose above the general level of ice like two crude sculptures abandoned before the refining strokes could be applied.

Her mouth was open very wide, the frozen torrent of her last breaths like a solid waterfall connecting her to the solid sea of cold around her, and for one mad second the obscene image was so perfect that Bremen could imagine her vomiting this roomful of rancid ice.

The dogs seemed to be part of her, joined below her hips in a torrent of frozen flesh, and the shotgun rose up through the ice from one of the dogs’ bellies in a caricature of an erection.

Bremen lowered the rifle and reached out one shaking hand to touch the layer of ice above her head, as if the warmth of his touch would cause her to begin squirming and struggling in her cold shroud, curved claws tearing through ice to get at him.

There was no movement, no white noise. His breath fogged the ice above her straining, open-mawed face.

Bremen turned and went out of that place, taking care not to set his boot soles above any other sunken faces with staring eyes.

Bremen left at dark, releasing the dogs and setting out enough food and water to keep them comfortable around the hacienda for a week or more. He left the Toyota where it was parked and took the Jeep. The distributor cap had been sitting atop Miz Morgan’s dresser like some clumsy trophy. He took none of her money—not even the pay due him—but loaded the back of the Jeep with three shopping bags of food and several two-gallon plastic jugs of water. Bremen considered taking the .30-.06 or the pistol, but ended up wiping them clean and setting them back in the closet gun case. For a while he went around with a dust rag cleaning surfaces in the bunkhouse as if he could eradicate all of his fingerprints, but then he shook his head, climbed into the Jeep, and drove away.

Bremen drove west through the night, letting the cool desert air bring him up out of the nightmare that he had been dwelling in for so long now. He went west because going back east was unthinkable to him. Sometime after ten P.M. he reached Interstate 70 and turned west again below Green River, half expecting Deputy Howard Collins’s cruiser to come roaring up behind him with all of its lights flashing. There were no lights. Bremen passed only a few cars as he drove west through the Utah night.

He had stopped in Salina to use the last of his cash to buy gas and was heading west out of town on Highway 50 when he found himself behind a slow-moving state patrol cruiser. Bremen waited until he found a road branching off—Highway 89 as it turned out—and turned south on it.

He drove a hundred and twenty-five miles south, cut west again at Long Valley Junction, passed through Cedar City and over Interstate 15 just before dawn, continued west on State Road 56, and found a place to park the Jeep out of sight behind some dry cottonwoods at a county rest stop east of Panaca, twenty miles across the state line into Nevada. Bremen made a breakfast of a bologna sandwich and water, spread his blanket out on some dust-dry leaves in the shade of the Jeep, and was asleep before his mind had time to dredge up any recent memories to keep him awake.

The next night, driving slowly south through the fringes of the Pharanagat National Wildlife Refuge on Highway 93, headed nowhere in particular, feeling the thrusts and echoes of mindbabble from passing cars, but still being able to concentrate better in the still desert air than he had in many weeks, Bremen realized that in another seventy-five miles or so he would be out of gas and out of luck. He had no money to take a bus or train anywhere, not a cent to buy food when the groceries ran out, and no identification in his pocket.

He also had no ideas. His emotions, so spiked and exaggerated during the previous weeks, seemed to have been stored away somewhere for the duration. He felt strangely calm, comfortably empty, much as he had as a young child after a long, hard bout of crying.

Bremen tried to think about Gail, about Goldmann’s research and its implications, but all of that was from another world, from someplace left far above in the sunlight where sanity prevailed. He would not be going back there.

So Bremen drove south without thinking, the gas gauge hovering near empty, and suddenly found that Highway 93 ended at Interstate 15. Obediently, he followed the access ramp down and continued southwest across the desert.

Ten minutes later, coming across a small rise, expecting the Jeep to cough and glide to a stop any second, Bremen blinked in surprise as the desert exploded in light—rivers of light, flowing constellations of light—and in that second of electric epiphany, he knew precisely what he would do that night, and the next night, and the night after that. Solutions blossomed like the missing transform in some difficult equation suddenly coming to mind, shining as clearly as the oasis of brilliance ahead of him in the desert night.

The Jeep got him just far enough.

EYES

It is hard for me to understand, even now, the concept of mortality as Jeremy and Gail brought it to me.

Dying, ending, ceasing to be, is simply not an idea that had existed for me previous to their dark revelation. Even now it disturbs me with its black, irrational imperative. At the same time it intrigues me, even beckons me, and I cannot help but wonder if the true fruit of the tree denied to Adam and Eve in the fairy tales that Gail’s parents taught her so assiduously when she was young had been not knowledge, as the folktale insists, but death itself. Death can be an appealing notion to a deity who has been denied even sleep while tending to His creation.

It is not an appealing notion to Gail.

In the first hours and days after the discovery of the inoperable tumor behind her eye, she is the essence of bravery, sharing her confidence with Jeremy through language and mindtouch. She is sure that the radiation treatments will help … or the chemo … or some sort of remission. Having found the enemy, identified it, she is less afraid of the darkness under her bed than she has been.

But then, as the illness and terrible ordeal of medical treatment wear her down, filling her nights with apprehensions and her afternoons with nausea, Gail begins to despair. She realizes that the darkness under the bed is not the cancer but the death it brings.

Gail dreams that she is in the backseat of her Volvo and it is hurtling toward the edge of a cliff. No one is in the driver’s seat and she cannot reach forward to grab the steering wheel because of a clear Plexiglas wall separating her from the front seat. Jeremy is running along behind the Volvo, unable to catch up, shouting and waving his arms, but Gail cannot hear him.

Gail and Jeremy both awake from the nightmare just as the car hurtles over the cliff. Each has seen that there are no rocks below, no cliff face, no beach, no ocean … nothing but a terrible darkness that assures an eternity of sickening fall.

Jeremy helps her through the winter months, holding tightly with mindtouch and real touch as they share the terrible roller coaster of the illness—hope and suggestion of remission one day, small bits of promising medical news the next, then the spate of days with the growing pain and weakness and no glimmer of hope.

In the last weeks and days it is Gail again who provides the strength, diverting their thoughts to other things when she can, bravely confronting what needs to be confronted when she must. Jeremy draws farther and farther into himself, rocked by her pain and her growing distance from the reassuring absorption of mundane things.