The Hollow Man (26 page)

One of the rottweilers, a bitch, broke free then, and came lunging after him, apparently so surprised by her sudden freedom that she forgot to howl. Bremen whirled at the corner of the building, dropped to one knee to avoid the snapping jaws, and punched the animal in the gut, right under its ribs, as hard as he could.

The wind went out of the rottweiler like air from a
punctured balloon. It went down, but its legs were already scrambling, claws scratching to get back on its feet.

Weeping, Bremen knelt on the big animal’s back, grabbed its jaws with his swollen, throbbing hands, and snapped its neck. The surviving three went wild behind him.

Bremen hobbled around the corner. The jerry-rigged shower stall that Miz Morgan had used was still there, the five-gallon holding tank seven feet up, the heavy fire hose running to the fifteen-hundred-gallon tank above. Ignoring the pain, Bremen ran to the shower, leaped for the shower head, leveraged himself up high enough to get a grip on the holding tank, and swung up until he could get his bleeding hand around the four-inch fire hose.

The tank ripped loose from Bremen’s weight and fell away to the stone pad below, but he was already eight feet up and shinnying up the now-dangling fire hose.

He swung over the edge of the roof and lay panting for a second on the gravel of the rooftop, the arc lamp on the fifteen-hundred-gallon water tank still blinding him. There were sounds from the broken vent or old skylight that he had climbed through. Bremen went over, peered down, and saw the barrel rising toward the opening just in time.

The shotgun blast went past his shoulder. The effort of raising the weapon had made Miz Morgan lose her grip and she went sliding back onto the shoulders of a young woman’s corpse. Bremen could hear the curses as Miz Morgan began climbing again, one-handed. The light stanchion squealed as the big woman swung up on it.

Bremen had to sit down or faint. Even then, his head between his knees, the arc-lighted world dwindled to a narrow tunnel between walls of black. Distantly, so distantly, he heard the noises of Miz Morgan climbing, finding
her balance, resting the shotgun against the inside wall of the vent, getting to her feet. Bremen closed his eyes.

Come on, Jer. Get up! Get up now. For me
.

Tiredly, sighing, Bremen opened his eyes and crawled across the tar paper and gravel to the fire hose. He left bloody handprints and a smear from his left leg as he went.

With the last of his strength—no, with strength that was not his but that he borrowed from some hidden place—he lifted the fire hose, stumbled back across the rooftop, and teetered on the edge of the hole.

Miz Morgan’s head and shoulders were already out. With her eyes so white and wide, the rimming of frost on her wild hair, and her lips pulled so far back in the killing grin, she looked like something not nearly human being born. The white noise of her psychotic bloodlust was all but overridden by the sudden surge of triumph that emanated from her like warm urine. Still grinning, she struggled to raise the shotgun through the gap.

Not smiling at all, Bremen slapped the release valve open and held the fire hose steady as six hundred pounds of water pressure slapped the woman down out of sight and pounded the boards loose around the hole. He walked closer, and a stray geyser from the swiveling nozzle shot gravel fifty feet out into the night.

She had taken the shotgun with her as she fell. Bremen shut off the water and peered carefully over the rim of the hole where icicles were already beginning to form.

Miz Morgan was climbing back up, a figure wreathed in hoarfrost and sheeted with ice. She was still grinning wildly. The shotgun was in her milk-white right hand.

Sighing, Bremen stepped back, set the hose over the
opening, and opened the valve all the way. He staggered toward the front of the building and collapsed on gravel just short of the low wall around the edge of the roof. He closed his eyes for a second.

Just for a second or two.

T
he problem is that Gail has suffered terrible migraines since puberty, so when the headaches become more frequent and more severe, neither she nor Jeremy takes adequate notice for some months. Emotional stress often triggers the migraines, and both of them suspect that Jacob Goldmann’s suicide is what has triggered this most recent series of headaches. Finally, though, when Jeremy has to leave a symposium at the college, weaving with the reflected pain of her headaches, to find her vomiting endlessly in the downstairs bathroom, blinded by the pain, they see the doctor. He sends them to a specialist, Dr. Singh, who immediately schedules Gail for CAT scans and MRI studies.

Gail is nonplussed.
It’s like Jacob’s tests.…

No,
sends Jeremy, holding her hand there in Dr.
Singh’s office,
these are studying structures … like X rays … Jacob’s scans were for the wavefront actions
.

The tests are on a Friday and Singh will not get back to them until Monday. They each see the darkest possibilities hidden behind the doctor’s smooth reassurances. On Saturday, as if the tests themselves were the remedy, Gail’s headaches are gone. Jeremy suggests that they take the weekend off, drop all the work around the farm, and go to the beach. It is the week before Thanksgiving, but the sky is blue and the weather warm, a second Indian summer deep into what is usually their drabbest season in eastern Pennsylvania.

Barnegat Light is all but deserted. Terns and sea gulls wheel and scream above the long stretch of sand below the lighthouse while Gail and Jeremy set their blankets amid the dunes and cavort like newlyweds, chasing each along the sliding edge of the Atlantic, playing tag and tickling—using any excuse to touch the other in their spray-wet suits—and finally coming back to drop goose-bumped and exhausted on the blankets to watch the sun set behind the dunes and weathered houses to the west.

A cold wind comes up with the dying of the light and Jeremy pulls the less-tattered of the two blankets over them, wrapping them both in a warm nest as the dune grasses and narrow fences reflect the rich russets and golds of the autumn light. The white lighthouse glows in indescribable shades of pink and fading lavender during the two minutes of perfect sunset, its glass and lamps prisming the orb of the sun across the beach like a spotlight of pure gold.

Darkness comes with the breathtaking suddenness of a curtain slamming down. There is no one else on the beach and only a few of the beach houses are lighted. The
sea wind rattles dry grasses above them and stirs the dunes with a sound like an infant sighing.

Jeremy pulls the blanket higher around them and slips Gail’s wet one-piece suit down from her shoulders, then lower, her breasts rising free from the clinging material and Jeremy feeling the goose bumps there, as hard as her nipples, and then he tugs the suit down over the curve of her hips, off her legs, past her small feet, and then frees himself from his trunks.

Gail opens her arms and shifts her legs, pulling him above her, and suddenly the cold wind and rising darkness are distant things, forgotten in the sudden warmth of their joining and mindtouch. Bremen moves slowly, infinitely slowly, feeling her sharing his thoughts and sensations—and then only his sensations—as they seem to ride the growing breeze and rising surf noise toward some quickly receding core of things.

They come together and then stay together, finding each other in the returning slide of external senses and small touchings, then in mindtouch structured by language once again after their wordless swirl of feelings beyond language.

This is why I want to live
, sends Gail, her mindtouch small and vulnerable.

Jeremy feels anger and the vertigo of fear rise in him almost as strongly as the passion had moments before.
You’ll live. You’ll live
.

You promise?
sends Gail, her mental voice light. But Jeremy sees the fear-of-the-dark-under-the-bed beneath the lightness.

I promise,
sends Jeremy.
I swear
. He pulls her closer, trying to stay inside, but feeling the slow withdrawal that he has no control over. He hugs her so tightly that she gasps.
I swear, Gail,
he sends.
I promise. I promise you
.

She sets cool hands on his shoulders above her, cusps her face to the salt-tinged hollow of his neck, and sighs, almost drifting off to sleep.

After a moment Jeremy shifts only slightly, lying on his right hip and side so that he can hold her without wakening her. Around them the wind blowing in from the unseen ocean has become late-autumn cold, the stars burning almost without twinkling in winter clarity, but Jeremy pulls the blanket tighter and hugs Gail more firmly to him, keeping them both warm with the heat of his body and the intensity of his will.

I promise,
he sends to his sleeping love.
I promise you
.

B
remen awoke late into the next day, the sun bright, his skin blistering. The gravel burned against his bare palms and forearms. His lips were chapped to the consistency of ragged parchment. Blood had caked his hip and inner thigh and run onto the hot stones beneath, congealing with the torn denim of his Levi’s to a brown, sticky paste that he had to rip free from the roof. At least he was no longer bleeding.

He limped the twenty feet to the hole in the roof, having to sit down twice to let dizziness and nausea pass. The sun was very hot.

The hose still dangled into the dark hole in which cold air still stirred, but no water was dripping. The lights were out in the cold house. Bremen lifted the hose and glanced at the fifteen-hundred-gallon tank on the roof, wondering if it could possibly be empty. Then he
shrugged and carried the long hose to the south edge of the roof, planning to use it as a rope to get down.

The pain upon landing was enough to make him sit on the sandstone shower slab for several minutes, his head between his legs. Then he pulled himself to his feet and began the long trip to the hacienda.

The dead rottweiler at the corner of the cold house was already bloated and pungent in the midday heat. Flies had been busy at its eyes. The three surviving dogs did not rise or growl as Bremen hobbled past, but merely watched him with troubled eyes as he moved down to the road and then up to the big house.

It took him the better part of an hour to make it to the house, to cut himself out of his jeans and clean the wounds on his hip and thigh and then stand under the shower for a blissful, gray period, to apply antiseptic—he did pass out for a moment when he dabbed at his hip—and then to dig some codeine Tylenol out of Miz Morgan’s medicine cabinet, hesitate, set the bottle in his shirt pocket, find and load a rifle and a pistol from the open gun cabinet in her bedroom closet, and then to hobble down to the bunkhouse for fresh clothes.

It was early evening before he approached the cold-house door again. The dogs watched the muzzle of the rifle, whimpered, and pulled away as far as their leashes would allow. Bremen set down the large bowl of water he had brought up from the bunkhouse, and slowly the oldest bitch, Letitia, eased forward on her belly until she was gratefully lapping at it. The other two followed.

Bremen turned his back on the dogs and opened the combination lock. The chain dropped away.

The door did not swing open; it was jammed. He pried it loose with a crowbar brought up from the house and then pushed it open the last few inches with the barrel of
the .30-.06 and stepped back out of the doorway. Cold air billowed out, turning to fog in the hundred-degree air. Bremen crouched, safety off, his finger on the trigger. A ridge of ice gleamed almost three feet above the level of the old floor.

Nothing emerged. There was no sound except that of the rottweilers lapping up the last of the water, some of the cattle lowing as they came in from the lower pasture, and the chugging of the auxiliary generator out behind the cold house.

Bremen let another three minutes pass and then he went in low, sliding on the raised hummock of ice and moving to the left of the doorway quickly, letting his eyes adapt to the dark and swinging the rifle in front of him. A moment later he lowered his weapon and stood up, his breath swirling around him. He walked forward slowly.

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.