The Hollow City

by Dan Wells

  After a while I don’t cover the clock anymore, but I still don’t go near it. It’s a lifelong habit, and habits are hard to break. Linda says the little things, like being scared of phones and stuff like that, are the last to go because they’re learned behaviors, not psychiatric disorders, and it will take time to unlearn them. They’re a sane reaction to false data, and now that I’m perceiving real data, more or less, the therapy will help my reactions shift to match. I can watch TV now, plugged in and turned on and everything.

  Dr. Little says I get better every day, but I still have symptoms and he’s raising my dose. Dr. Vanek is still working on my memory, doing everything from drugs to hypnosis, but the holes are still there. I don’t mind so much. Why would I want to remember being crazy?

  By the time the FBI comes back, I haven’t had a hallucination in nearly two weeks. I figure that means the agents are probably real.

  Devon takes me in to the small therapy room. There’s only one this time, the taller one. He smiles and holds out his hand to shake.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Shipman, I’m Agent Jon Leonard with the FBI. Do you remember me?”

  “Were there two of you last time?”

  “Yeah, my partner, Agent Chu.”

  “Just making sure.”

  He gestures to the chair opposite his, and I nod politely. It’s a real nod this time, though they aren’t always; the dyskinesia hasn’t fully gone away. I don’t mind so much, since I got my whole life in exchange. Devon leaves us, shutting the door behind him, and Agent Leonard sits down.

  I sit as well, watching him. “Did you find the man I saw?”

  “We did.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. His name is Nick; he was applying for a job here. He wasn’t faceless, he wasn’t an authority figure, he wasn’t anything to be afraid of.”

  “I figured as much.” I sit back, sighing in relief. “You have no idea how great it is to hear that.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “You don’t believe in the conspiracy anymore?”

  “I have schizophrenia, Agent Leonard. The conspiracy was all in my head.”

  He nods, eyeing me from across the table. “What do you know about the Red Line killings?”

  “Not much,” I say honestly, trying to gauge his reactions as I talk. Does he still think I’m a part of them? “I had a, uh, longtime phobia of TVs and radios, so I never really heard about the killings until I got in here.” I laugh nervously. “To tell you the truth, I was kind of hoping it would all turn out to be just one of my hallucinations, and not be real at all.”

  Leonard laughs as well, a shallow chuckle. “No, Michael, I’m sorry to say that the Red Line murders are very real. What else do you know about them?”

  He’s fishing for something he can pin on me, I think, and then immediately I tell myself I’m wrong. I’m just being paranoid—no one’s out to get me. He probably just thinks I’m a witness. Just calm down and everything will be fine.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know anything else. I don’t even know why they call him the Red Line.”

  He chuckles again. “Mostly just a sick joke, really. The first detective on the case—a local guy, not a fed—was a big Blackhawks fan.”

  “Hockey?”

  He nods. “You watch hockey?”

  I shake my head. “TV phobia.”

  “Oh yeah. Well, this guy was a big fan, and he called the crime scene the ‘Red Line’ because that’s where you have a face-off.”

  I grimace. “Seriously?”

  “I told you it was kind of sick.”

  I fidget in my chair, suddenly anxious again at the mention of missing faces. “But they don’t have anything to do with me, right?” I’m too nervous now for subtlety. “I mean, just because I saw Faceless Men and, and stuff like that, doesn’t mean I’m the killer, right?” My arm twitches; the movements get worse when I’m nervous.

  “Do you still see them?” he asks. “The Faceless Men?”

  I freeze, too nervous to answer. He waits, then raises an eyebrow.

  “Michael?”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “I haven’t seen them in weeks.”

  “Excellent,” he says, smiling. “You have no idea how long we’ve waited for the chance to talk to you, but your doctor wouldn’t let us back in until today.”

  “Because I’m cured?”

  “Because you’re lucid.”

  I nod. He still didn’t answer my question. I feel cold and small.

  “You’re aware,” he says, pulling his briefcase up from the floor, “of who the Red Line Killer seems to be targeting?”

  I nod again. “The Children of the Earth.”

  “Precisely,” he says, opening the briefcase with a sharp click. “And what do you know about that organization?”

  “It’s not an organization,” I say darkly, “it’s a cult.”

  “Fair enough,” he says, “but as cults go this one is remarkably well organized. They own a farm; they sell fruit and cheese in stands by the highway; they’re almost fully self-sufficient. The only thing they buy from the state is water.”

  “No power?”

  “They’ve refused electrical power for nearly two decades,” he says. “They even tore down the power lines that used to connect them. They’re practically Luddites—they make the Amish look high tech.”

  I swallow nervously. Why does that make me so scared? I rub my hands together, trying to warm them. “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Two things.” He reaches into the briefcase and holds up a piece of paper with a long list of names. “One: of the thirteen Red Line victims, nine have been members of the Children of the Earth. The other four were connected indirectly, friends and family and so on.” He sets down the paper and picks up what looks like a legal document. “Two: at present day the cult resides in a farming commune outside of Chicago, centered around the former home of Milos Cerny.”

  That catches my attention. “The Milos Cerny? The kidnapper?”

  “I’m afraid so. But that’s not even the weird part.” He sets down the document and holds up another list of names, shorter than the first. “Of the five children recovered from the house of Milos Cerny twenty years ago, four of them ran away from home to join the Children of the Earth, at ages ranging from fourteen to seventeen. They were found by the police, of course, and were returned to their parents, but as soon as they came of age and their parents couldn’t hold them, boom, straight back to the cult. Every one of them.” He pauses. “Except you.”

  I frown, not sure what to say. I’m not even sure what to think. “Were they…” I feel faint, like my heart is beating too fast. “The cultists—did they help Cerny abduct the women? Did they help kill them? Why aren’t they in jail?”

  “Some of them were,” he says, trying to calm me, “but only as accessories, and all of them have completed their sentences or been released on parole.”

  I sit back in my chair. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m afraid it’s all true. Now you see why I came to talk to you.”

  “You think they’re going to try to contact me?”

  “Frankly, I’m astonished that they haven’t already done so. Once the other four children started drifting back to the cult, we contacted your father to ask about you; we got in touch with your school. Your name’s been flagged in the system for virtually as long as we’ve had a system, but there’s never been any sign, that we could see, that you’d been contacted. We were hoping that you might be able to tell us more.”

  “Wait,” I say, pushing my chair back from the table. “You mean to tell me that I really have been under government surveillance? All this time I thought I was paranoid, or crazy, and now I’m in this damn madhouse taking drugs like they’re candy, and you’re telling me it’s true?”

  “Michael—”

  “Is it the clocks? Are you the ones watching in there? And what about the—”

  “Michael,” he says, more force
fully this time, “please calm down. You have not been ‘under surveillance,’ you’ve been flagged in the system. That’s very different—it just means that if you ever show up on a police report, or a medical report, or anything like that, I get a little email and I read it. That’s all it is.”

  “You’ve been watching me.”

  “I’ve been protecting you. Listen, Michael, the people that kidnapped you and your mother are out there, and they’re tied up in another string of murders, and I am doing everything I can to figure it out. Our best theory right now is that they’re killing dissenters; anyone who leaves or speaks out against the cult. I need to know if they’ve contacted you, because that might give me some kind of lead—”

  “How did they contact the others?”

  “We have no idea. One day the kids just got up and left; nobody called them, nobody drove them, by all appearances they did it completely on their own.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re telling me. Listen, there’s got to be something, somewhere, that you can tell me. A letter shoved under a door, a stranger on the street, something.”

  I laugh, frustrated and confused. “I’ve had imaginary men chasing me for years. Maybe they were the contact.”

  He starts to speak, but suddenly I’m flat in my chair, writhing in pain, and Agent Leonard’s pocket rings loudly.

  “Shut it off!” I force myself to sit back up, clutching my head with one hand and reaching for him with the other. My arm pulses with the same syncopated rasp as the computer speakers in Dr. Little’s experiment.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Turn off the cell phone!”

  He pulls out the phone, brow furrowed in confusion, then clicks a button. The ringing stops, and my headache starts to fade. He stares at the phone in shock.

  I rub my temples, groaning in pain. “That’s not supposed to happen anymore.”

  He looks up, and his eyes get wider. “Your nose is bleeding.”

  I touch my lip and he’s right; my fingers come away slick and red, and I can feel the blood dribbling down my lips. I shake my head. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Get Dr. Little.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I need him now!” I shout, and go to the door myself. “Get Dr. Little in here!” The headache explodes again, sudden and devastating, and I fall against the wall in a cringe. I turn around to see Agent Leonard holding his phone to his ear. “Are you calling someone, you idiot?” I stagger back and snatch the phone from his hand, throwing it against the wall. The signal stops, the headache calms, and I let out a long, exhausted breath.

  “What the hell?” shouts Agent Leonard.

  Dr. Little rushes in. “What’s wrong?”

  I gesture at the broken phone. “I had another headache from a cell signal. Two, thanks to him.”

  “Hey,” says Leonard, picking up the phone; the back has come off, and he collects the batteries.

  “You can’t have had another cell phone attack,” says Dr. Little. “That’s a psychosomatic delusion and your medication prevents those.”

  “Yeah, well, apparently not,” I say. “It’s not a psychosomatic … whatever. It’s a physical thing—I’ve been telling you that since I got here. There’s something in my head!”

  Dr. Little shakes his head. “There is nothing in your head, Michael—”

  “Wait,” says Agent Leonard slowly. “What if there is?”

  Dr. Little narrows his eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve seen this reaction before,” he says, “on the security camera at ChemCom. Right before the Red Line killed the janitor, the janitor had some kind of sudden migraine, just like what you just had. It almost looked like the headache warned him of the attack, but we didn’t understand how—but if he reacted to cell phone signals, like you do, then that could be what tipped him off.”

  Dr. Little frowns. “You think the Red Line had a cell phone?”

  “Everyone has a cell phone.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t. I guess that means I’m not the killer.”

  “But you are a potential victim,” says Agent Leonard, “just like Brandon Woods and the other cultists.”

  “I’m not a cultist,” I hissed.

  “But there might be something in your head,” says Leonard, “like a chip or a beacon or … I don’t know. Something. If Cerny implanted something in the babies he kidnapped, like a communicator, that could be how the other children were contacted and brought back into the cult. Maybe they all have one.” He shrugs. “Maybe yours is faulty, and that’s why you never went back.”

  “I told him something just like that almost two months ago,” I say, jerking my head toward Dr. Little, “but I’m the crazy guy so no one listens to me.”

  Dr. Little shakes his head. “Now you both sound insane.”

  Agent Leonard looks at Dr. Little. “I know, and I agree, but there are … other factors at play here. We saw certain things on that tape, which I am not at liberty to discuss, but which lead our agency to believe that this investigation goes well beyond what we typically consider to be normal. A tracking implant would be one of the least insane explanations we’ve come up with.”

  Dr. Little purses his lips. “Two months later, all things considered, the theory doesn’t seem entirely out of the question.”

  “So if there’s really something in his head,” says Leonard, “how would we go about finding it?”

  Dr. Little pastes his broad smile back across his face. “This is a mental hospital, Agent Leonard. Finding things in people’s heads is our specialty. I’ll schedule an MRI first thing tomorrow morning.”

  FIFTEEN

  DR. VANEK STORMS INTO MY ROOM in a fury. “You can’t let them give you an MRI! It’s out of the question.”

  “Calm down,” I say, closing my eyes. “This is hard enough for me to deal with without you in here stirring up all my old twitches.”

  “You’re going through with it?”

  I open one eye, looking up from my chair as he storms through the room in directionless agitation. “Yes, I’m going through with it, it’s the smartest thing to do.”

  “It’s an MRI,” he says.

  “Which is completely harmless, as you told me yourself the last time I got one.”

  “Am I not allowed to be wrong on occasion?” He stops pacing and points at me with a thick finger. “We still don’t know why you lost your memory, and I’ve been going over the evidence for weeks and the only good lead is the MRI.”

  “I fell out of a window; I probably hit my head.”

  “The MRI confirmed that you didn’t.”

  “Because that’s what an MRI does,” I say. “It looks at your brain and tells you if there’s a problem. Now we’re going to use it again to confirm that I do or do not have a foreign object inside of my skull.”

  “And if you do,” he says, “the MRI will interact with it again, just like it did before, and frankly we’ll be lucky if two weeks of memory is all you lose. Assuming there’s actually an electronic device in your head, and knowing absolutely nothing about what it is or how it works, it’s unconscionably stupid to bombard it with radiation.”

  “I am trying to get better!” I shout. “I’m trying to get rid of my delusions and work through all my phobias, and nothing you are saying is helping!”

  “It’s not helping because you’re not listening!”

  “I don’t have any say in it anyway,” I say, shaking my head. “You people haven’t let me decide anything for myself since you put me in here, so stop yelling at me and talk to Dr. Little.”

  “I’ve already talked to him, and he’s more stubborn about it than you are.”

  “Then talk to my father.”

  He shakes his head. “An MRI is not considered a dangerous test, so they don’t need your father’s approval.”

  “He could refuse treatment, though, right?” I shift in the chair, sudde
nly not sure which side I’m arguing for. I don’t want to be afraid of the MRI, but I am. “I mean, if my father demanded that you not do the test, you’d have to stop, right? Like those religious groups that refuse medical treatment—dangerous or not, you still have to follow the wishes of the patient or the patient’s guardian.”

  “It’s a possibility,” says Vanek thinly, “but depending on your father’s parental concern has never gotten us anywhere before.”

  “Then…,” I throw up my hands. “Then just forget it, and I’ll get the MRI, and we’ll be fine.” My pulse quickens at the thought of it—the giant tube, the whirr of magnets and motors, the invisible menace of a thick magnetic field slamming through my body. I close my eyes again and fight off the wave of panic. “It’s all in my head; nothing’s going to hurt me.”

  Dr. Vanek grunts, a deep growl of anger. “The fact that it’s all in your head is precisely the problem.” He looks at me sternly. “We still haven’t figured out what happened during the two weeks you lost.”

  “We never will,” I say. “It’s all gone.”

  “Memories don’t disappear, Michael, only our access to them. Whatever you saw, or did, during those two weeks is still in your head. You just need a way to get it out.”

  I nod. “Lucy said the same thing.”

  “Lucy is a dream,” Vanek snarls. “Focus on reality. Can you remember anything?”

  “I remember an empty city,” I say. “And a … a pit. Like a deep black hole. That’s the root of it all—it has to be.”

  “Ignore the hole for now,” says Vanek. “Focus on the empty city. Remember every little detail you can think of.”

  “Why does this even matter?”

  “Because your mind is important,” he says, “to me at least, if not to you. Because you need to prove you’re not a killer, now more than ever. Because … because we don’t know. You are surrounded by mysteries, Michael. Those two weeks might be able to answer some of them, maybe all of them. If you’re going to risk erasing even more of your own mind, the least you can do is recover it first. Write it down so it doesn’t just … disappear.”