The Hollow Man

Bremen’s parting gift. Anonymous. Robby would never know who had shared these images.

Robby’s snore caught, stopped for an agonizingly long time, and then started up again like a balky engine. He was drooling heavily. The pillowcase and sheet near his face were moist.

Bremen decided, and lowered his mindshield. Hurry, Patrolman Everett will be headed toward the bathroom any minute. The remnants of his mindshield went down and the full force of the world’s neurobabble rushed in like water into a sinking ship.

Bremen flinched and raised his mindshield. It had been a long time since he had allowed himself to be so vulnerable. Even though the neurobabble always got through anyway, the volume and intensity was almost unbearable without the woolly blanket of the shield. The hospital neurobabble cut directly at the soft tissue of his bruised mind.

He gritted his teeth against the pain and tried again. Bremen tried to tune out the broad spectrum of neurobabble and concentrate on the space where Robby’s dreams should be.

Nothing.

For a confused second Bremen thought that he had lost the focus of his power. Then he concentrated and was able to pick out the urgency of Patrolman Everett as he hurried toward the rest room and the preoccupied fragments of Nurse Tulley as she compared med dosages between Dr. Angstrom’s list and the pink sheets on the tray. He focused on the nurse at the monitor station and saw that she was reading a novel—Needful Things by Stephen King. It frustrated him that her eyes scanned so slowly. His mouth filled with the syrupy taste of her cherry cough drop.

Bremen shook his head and stared at Robby. The boy’s asthmatic breathing filled the air between them with a sour fog. Robby’s tongue was visible and heavily coated. Bremen narrowed his mindtouch to the shape of blunt probe, strengthened it, focused it like a beam of coherent light.

Nothing.

No … there was—what?—an absence of something.

There was an actual hole in the field of mindbabble where Robby’s dreams should have been. Bremen realized that he was confronting the strongest and most subtle mindshield he had ever encountered. Even Miz Morgan’s hurricane of white noise had not created a barrier of such incredible tightness, and at no time had she been able to hide the presence of her thoughts. Robby’s thoughts were simply not there.

For a second Bremen was shaken, but then he realized the cause of this phenomenon. Robby’s mind was damaged. Entire segments were probably inactive. With so few senses to rely on and such a limited awareness of his environment, with so little access to the universe of probability waves to choose from and almost no ability to choose from them, the boy’s consciousness—or what passed for consciousness for the child—had turned violently inward. What first had seemed to Bremen to be a powerful mindshield was nothing more than a tight ball of turning-inwardness going beyond autism or catatonia. Robby was truly and totally alone in there.

Bremen took a breath and resumed his probe, using more care this time, feeling along the negative boundaries of the de facto mindshield like a man groping along a rough wall in the dark. Somewhere there had to be an opening.

There was. Not an opening so much as a soft spot—the slightest resilience set amid solid stone.

Bremen half perceived a flutter of underlying thoughts now, much as a pedestrian senses the movement of subway trains under a pavement. He concentrated on building the strength of his probe until he felt his hospital gown beginning to soak through with sweat. His vision and hearing were beginning to dim in the single-minded exertion of his effort. It did not matter. Once initial contact was made, he would relax and slowly open the channels of sight and sound.

He felt the wall give a bit, still elastic but sinking slightly under his unrelenting force of will. Bremen concentrated until the veins stood out in his temples. Unknown to himself, he was grimacing, neck muscles knotting with the strain. The wall bent. Bremen’s probe was a solid ram battering a tight but gelatinous doorway.

It bent further.

Bremen concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight.

The accidental mindshield continued to bend. Bremen leaned forward as if into a strong wind. There was no neurobabble now, no awareness of the hospital or himself; there was only the force of Bremen’s will.

Suddenly there came ripping, a rush of warmth, and a falling forward. Bremen flailed his arms and opened his mouth to yell.

He had no mouth.

Bremen was falling, both in his body and out. He was tumbling head over heels into a darkness where the floor had been only a moment before. He had a distant, confused glimpse of his own body writhing in the grip of some terrible seizure, and then he was falling again.

He was falling into silence.

Falling into nothing.

Nothing.

EYES I

Jeremy is inside. He is diving through layers of slow thermals. Colorless pinwheels tumble past him in three dimensions.

Spheres of black collapse outward and blind him. There are waterfalls of touch, rivulets of scent, and a thin line of balance blowing in a silent wind.

Jeremy finds himself supported by a thousand unseen hands—touching, exploring. There are fingers against his lips, palms along his chest, smooth hands sliding along his belly, fingers cup his penis as impersonally as in a doctor’s exam and then move on.

Suddenly he is underwater, no, buried in something thicker than water. He cannot breathe. Desperately he begins to flail his arms and legs against the viscous current until he has a sensation of moving upward. There is no light, no sense of direction except the slightest sense of gravity compelling downward, but Jeremy paddles against the resisting gel around him and fights against that gravity, knowing that to remain where he is means being buried alive.

Suddenly the substance shifts and Jeremy is jerked upward by a vacuum that grips his head like a vise. He is compacted, compressed, squeezed so tightly that he is sure his damaged ribs and skull are being shattered again, and then suddenly he feels himself propelled through the constricting aperture and his head breaks the surface.

Jeremy opens his mouth to scream and air rushes into his chest like water filling a drowning man. His scream goes on and on, and when it dies, there are no echoes.

Jeremy awakens on a broad plain.

It is neither day nor night. Pale, peach-colored light diffuses everything. The ground is hard and scaled into separate orange segments that seem to recede to infinity. There is no horizon. Jeremy thinks that the serrated land looks like a floodplain during a drought.

Above him there is no sky, only levels of peach-lit crystal. Jeremy imagines that it is like being in the basement of a clear plastic skyscraper. An empty one. He lies on his back and stares up through endless stories of crystallized emptiness.

Eventually, Jeremy sits up and takes stock of himself. He is naked. His skin feels as if he has been toweled with sandpaper. He rubs a hand across his stomach, touches his shoulders and arms and face, but it is a full minute before he realizes that there are no wounds or scars—not the broken arm, or the bullet graze or the broken ribs, or the bite marks on his hip and inner thigh, or—as far as he can make out—the concussion or lacerations to his face. For a mad second Jeremy thinks that he is in a body other than his own, but then he looks down and sees the scar on his knee from the motorcycle accident when he was seventeen, the mole on the inside of his upper arm.

A wave of dizziness rolls through him as he stands upright.

Sometime later Jeremy begins walking. His bare feet find the smooth plates warm. He has no direction and no destination. Once, at Miz Morgan’s ranch, he had walked out onto a wide expanse of salt flats just at sunset.