The Hollow Man (32 page)

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. This is a little like that … but not much.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back
.

Jeremy walks for some time, although time has little meaning here on this orange plain with no sun. The peach-colored levels above him neither shift nor shimmer. Eventually he stops, and when he stops, it is in a place no different than the one where he began. His head hurts. He lies on his back again, feeling the smoothness under him—more like sunbaked plastic than the grit of sand or stone—and as he lies there he imagines that he is some bottom-dwelling sea creature looking up through layers of shifting currents.

The bottom of the swimming pool. So achingly reluctant to return to the light
.

Peach-colored light bathes Jeremy in warmth. His body is radiant. He shuts his eyes against the light. And sleeps.

He comes awake suddenly, totally, nostrils flaring, his ears actually twitching with the strain of trying to pinpoint a half-heard sound. The darkness is total.

Something is moving in the night.

Jeremy crouches in the blackness and tries to filter out the sound of his own ragged breathing. His glandular system has reverted to programming more than a million years old. He is ready to flee or fight, but the total and
inexplicable darkness eliminates the former. He prepares to fight. His fists clench, his heart races, and his eyes strain to see.

Something is moving in the night.

He feels it nearby. He feels the power and the weight of it through the ground. The thing is huge, its footsteps send tremors through the ground and Jeremy’s body, and it is coming closer. Jeremy is certain that the thing has no trouble finding its way in the darkness. And it can see
him
.

Then the thing is near him, above him, and Jeremy can feel the force of its gaze. He kneels on the suddenly cold ground and hugs himself into a ball.

Something touches him.

Jeremy fights down the impulse to scream. He is caught in a giant’s hand—something rough and huge and not a hand at all—and suddenly he is lifted high into the blackness. Again Jeremy feels the power of the thing, this time through the pressure on his pinned arms and creaking ribs, and he is sure it could crush him easily if it so wishes. Evidently it does not so wish. At least not yet.

He feels the sense of being viewed, inspected, weighed on some unseen balance scale. Jeremy has the helpless but somehow reassuring feeling of total passivity one feels while lying naked on an X-ray table, knowing that invisible beams are passing through one’s body, searching for malignancy, probing for decay and the seeds of death.

Something sets him down.

Jeremy hears no sound but his own ragged panting, but he can feel the great footsteps receding. Impossibly, they are receding in all directions, like ripples in a pond. A weight lifts from him and he discovers to his own horror that he is sobbing.

Later, he uncurls and gets to his feet. He calls into the
blackness, but the sound of his voice is tiny and lost and later he is not even sure whether he had heard it himself.

Exhausted, still sobbing, Jeremy pounds the ground and continues to weep. The blackness is the same whether his eyelids are closed or not, and later, when he sleeps, he dreams only of darkness.

T
he sun is rising.

Jeremy’s eyes flutter open, he stares into the distant brilliance, and he closes his eyes again before the fact fully registers.

The sun is rising
.

Jeremy jerks awake and sits up, blinking at the sunrise. He is lying on grass. A prairie of soft, knee-high grass expands to the horizon in all directions. The sky is a deep violet fading to blue as the sun climbs clear of the horizon. Jeremy sits up and his shadow leaps across grasses stirring softly in the morning breeze. The air is filled with scents: grass, moist earth, sun-warmed soil, and the hint of his own skin scent touched by the breeze.

Jeremy goes to one knee, plucks a strand of the tall grass, strips it, and sucks on the sweet marrow. It reminds him of childhood afternoons spent playing in grassy fields. He begins walking toward the sunrise.

The breeze is warm against his bare skin. It stirs up the grass and sets up a soft sighing that helps ease the headache that throbs behind his eyes. The simple act of walking pleases him. He is content with the feel of grass bending under his bare feet and the play of sunlight on his body.

By the time the sun is far enough beyond the zenith to suggest early afternoon, he realizes that he is walking toward a smudge on the horizon. By late afternoon the smudge has resolved itself into a line of trees. He enters the edge of the forest just before sunset.

The trees here are the stately elms and oaks of Jeremy’s Pennsylvania boyhood. He pauses just inside the woods and looks out at the gently rolling plain he has just left; the evening sunlight is burnishing the rippling grass with gold and igniting coronas around the countless tassels atop the stalks. Jeremy’s shadow leaps ahead of him as he turns and moves deeper into the forest.

For the first time fatigue and thirst begin to work on him now. Jeremy’s tongue is thick and swollen with dryness. He stumbles leadenly along through lengthening shadows, dreaming of tall glasses of water and checking the visible patches of sky for any sign of clouds. It is while he is looking up for a glimpse of the darkening sky that he almost stumbles into the pond.

The circle of water lies within a low ring of weeds and reeds. A cluster of cherry trees on the higher banks sends roots down to the water. Jeremy takes the last few steps toward the pond with the agonizing conviction that he is viewing a mirage in the dim light, that the water will disappear even as he throws himself forward into it.

It is waist-deep and as cold as ice.

She comes just after sunrise the next morning.

Jeremy has breakfasted on cherries and cold water and is just in the process of stepping out into a clearing to the east of the pond when he spots the movement. Not believing, he stands perfectly still, just another shadow in the shade of the tree line.

She moves hesitantly, placing her feet amid the high grass and low stones with the tentative step of the meek or the barefoot. The tasseled saw grass of the clearing brushes at her bare thighs. Jeremy observes her with a clarity amplified by the rich, horizontal sweep of morning light. Her body seems to glow, to radiate rather than absorb that light. Her breasts, the left ever so slightly fuller than the right, bob gently with each high step. Her dark hair is cut short and stirs when the breeze touches it.

She pauses in the center of the clearing and then comes forward again. Jeremy’s gaze drops to her strong thighs as she walks, and he watches as they part and close with the heart-stopping intimacy of the unobserved. She is much closer now, and Jeremy can make out the delicate shadows along her fine rib cage, the pale, pink circles of areolae, and the faded old appendix scar along the lower cusp of her belly.

Jeremy steps out into the light. She stops, arms rising across her upper body in a motion of instinctive modesty, and then she moves quickly toward him. She opens her arms and he steps into their closing circle, setting his face against her neck and being almost overcome by the clean scent of her hair and skin. His hands move across muscle and the familiar terrain of vertebrae. Each of them is touching and kissing the other almost frantically. Both are sobbing.

Jeremy feels the strength go out of his legs and he goes
to one knee. She bends slightly and cradles his face between her breasts. Not for a second do they relax the pressure binding them together.

“Why did you leave me?” he whispers against her skin, unable to stop the tears. “Why did you go away?”

Gail says nothing. Her cheek is against his hair as her hands tighten against his back. Wordlessly, she kneels with him in the high grass.

T
ogether they pass out of the forest just as the morning mists are burning away. In the rich light the grassy hillsides beyond the woods give the impression of being part of a tanned and velvety human torso. Gail reaches out one hand as if to stroke the distant hills.

They speak softly, occasionally intertwining fingers. They have discovered that full mindtouch brings on the blinding headaches that have plagued each of them since awakening, so they talk … and touch … and make love in the soft grass with only the golden eye of the sun watching them. Afterward, they hold each other and whisper small things, each knowing that mindtouch is possible through means other than telepathy.

Later, they walk on, and in midafternoon they cross a rise and look past a small orchard at a vertical glare of white clapboard.

“The farm!” cries Gail, wonder in her voice. “How can it be?”

Jeremy feels no surprise. His equilibrium remains as they pass the barn and other outbuildings and approach the farmhouse itself. The building is silent but intact, with no signs of fire or disturbance. The driveway still needs new gravel, but now it goes nowhere, for there is no highway at the end of it. The long row of wire fence that used to parallel the road now borders only more high grass and another gentle hillside. There is no sign of the neighbors’ distant homes or of the intrusive power lines that had been set in behind the orchard.

Gail steps onto the back porch and peers in the window with the slightly guilty manner of a weekend house browser who has found a home that might or might not still be lived in. She opens the screen door and jumps a bit as the hinge squeaks.

“Sorry,” says Jeremy. “I know I promised to oil that.”

It is cool inside, and dark. The rooms are as they had left them—not as Jeremy had left them after his weeks of solitude while Gail was in the hospital—but as they had left them before their first visit to the specialist that autumn a year ago, an eternity ago. Upstairs, the afternoon sunlight falls from the skylight he and Gail had wrestled to install that distant August. Jeremy pokes his head into the study and sees the chaos abstracts still stacked on the oak desk and a long-forgotten transform still scrawled on the chalkboard.

Gail goes from room to room, sometimes making small noises of appreciation, more often just touching things gently. The bedroom is as orderly as ever, the blue blanket pulled tight and her grandmother’s patchwork quilt folded across the foot of the bed.

After making love again, they fall asleep between the
cool sheets. Occasionally a wisp of breeze billows the curtains. Gail turns and mumbles in her sleep, frequently reaching out to touch him. Bremen awakes just after dark, although the sky outside the bedroom window holds the lingering twilight of late summer.

There has been a sound downstairs.

Jeremy lies motionless for a full moment, trying not to disturb the stillness even by breathing. For the time being no breeze stirs. He hears a sound.

Jeremy slides from the bed without waking Gail. She is curled on her side with one hand lifted to her cheek; she is smiling ever so slightly. Jeremy walks barefoot to the study, crosses to his desk, and carefully opens the lower right-hand drawer. It is there, wrapped in old rags, under the empty folders he had laid atop it the day his brother-in-law had given it to him. The .38 Smith & Wesson is the same one Jeremy had thrown into the water that morning when he had come across Vanni Fucci in Florida—the nick in the stock and dullness along the lower part of the barrel is the same—but it is here now. He lifts it, breaks the cylinder, and sees the brass circles of the six cartridges firmly in place. The roughened grip is firm against his palm, the metal of the trigger guard slightly cool.