The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  NO!!! PLEASE!

  Suddenly the dunes are gone, the cliffs are gone, and the receding sea has disappeared. Where it had been a second before, a dull expanse of salt flat now stretches to infinity. The sky continues to shift down through darker and darker grays.

  There is a sudden flash to the east, as if the sun is rising again. No, Jeremy and Gail realize, the light is moving. Something is crossing the wasteland toward them.

  They climb to their feet again, Gail starts to break away, but Jeremy holds her tight. There is nowhere to run. The beach and mountain and cliffs behind them are gone … there is only desolation stretching to infinity in each direction … and the light moves across the dead land toward them.

  The radiance grows brighter, shifts, sends out streamers that make both of them squint and shield their eyes. The air smells of ozone and the hair on their arms stands out.

  Jeremy and Gail find themselves leaning toward the blaze of pure light as if toward a strong wind. Their shadows leap sixty feet behind them and light strikes their bodies like a shock wave from an atomic blast. Through their fingers they watch while the radiance approaches and resolves itself into a double figure just visible through the corona.

  It is a human figure astride a great beast. If a god were truly to come to earth, this then is the perfect human form he would choose. The beast the god rides is featureless, but besides its own corona of light it gives off a sense of … warmth, softness, infinite solace.

  Robby is before them, high on the back of his teddy bear.

  TOO WEAK! CANNOT KEEP

  The god is not used to limiting himself to language, but he is making the effort. Each syllable strikes Gail and Jeremy like electrical surges to the brain.

  Jeremy tries to reach out with his mind, but it is no use. Once at Haverford he had gone with a promising student to the coliseum where they were setting up for a rock concert. He had been standing in front of a scaffolded bank of speakers when the amplifiers were tested at full volume. This is much worse than that.

  They are standing on a flat, reticulated plain. There are no horizons. Above them levels of translucent, gray-colored nothingness cover them like the cold folds of a plastic shroud. White banks of curling fog are approaching now from all directions. The only light comes from the Apollo-like figure before them. Jeremy turns his head to watch the fog advance; what it touches, it erases.

  “Jerry, what …” shouts Gail over the rising wind that drowns out their mindtouch.

  Suddenly Robby’s thoughts strike them again with physical force. He has given up an attempt at structuring language, and images cascade over them. The visual and auditory images are vaguely distorted, miscolored, and tinged with an aura of wonder and newness around a core of sorrow. Jeremy and Gail reel from their impact.

  a white room

  the heartbeat of a machine

  sunlight on sheets

  the sting of a needle

  voices and shapes moving

  a current pulling, pulling, pulling

  With the images comes the emotional overlay, almost unbearable in its knife-sharp intensity: discovery, loneliness, an end to loneliness, wonder, fatigue, love, sadness, sadness, sadness.

  Gail looks around in terror as the fog boils and reaches its tendrils for them. It is closing around the god on his mount, already obscuring his brilliance.

  Gail sets her face against her husband’s. My God, why is he doing this? Why can’t he leave us alone?

  Jeremy raises the volume of his thoughts above the roar all around them. Touch him! Reach him!

  They step forward together and Gail extends a shaking hand. The fog obscures all but the fading corona. She jerks at the electric shock as her hand melds with the radiance, but she keeps her hand in place.

  My God, Jerry, he’s just a baby. A frightened child.

  Jeremy extends his hand until the three are a circle of contact. He’s dying, Gail. He’s been holding me here against terrible forces … he’s been fighting to keep us together, but I can’t stay. He’s too weak to hold me … he can’t resist the pull any longer.

  Jerry!

  Jeremy pulls away, breaking the circle. If I stay any longer, I’ll destroy us all. With that thought he steps closer and touches Gail on the cheek. Gail sees what he plans and starts to protest, but he pulls her closer and hugs her fiercely. They both feel Robby as part of the embrace, even while Jeremy’s mindtouch amplifies the hug, adding to it all of the shades of feeling that neither human touch nor human language can communicate in full.

  Then he pushes away from both of them and turns before he can change his mind. The fog surrounds him almost instantly. One second Robby is visible only as a fading glow in the white mist, an Apollo child clutching the neck of his teddy bear, Gail little more than a gesturing shadow next to him, and then they are gone and Jeremy is plunging deeper into the cold whiteness.

  Five paces into the fog and he can see nothing, not even his own body.

  Three more paces and the ground drops out from beneath him.

  Then he is falling.

  Falls the Shadow

  The room was white, the bed was white, and the windows were rectangles of white light. A monitor somewhere out of sight electronically echoed his heartbeat.

  Bremen moaned and moved his head.

  There was a plastic tube of oxygen hissing under his nose. An IV bottle caught the light and he could see the bruises on his inner arm above where the needle was hidden under gauze. Bremen’s body and skull were one vast, integrated ache.

  The doctors wore white. His eyes refused to focus properly, so they continued to be little more than white blurs with voices.

  “You gave us quite a scare,” said a white blur with a woman’s voice. Five days of an absolutely flat EEG, came the harsher voice of her thoughts through the ragged holes in his mindshield. If we’d been able to find any next of kin, you would have been disconnected from life support days ago. Damned weird.

  “How do you feel now?” asked a blur with the voice of one of the doctors. “Is there anyone we can contact for you?” Better tell the police that Mr. Bremen has come out of what we told them was almost certainly an irreversible coma. He’s not going anywhere for a while, but I’d better tell that detective … what was his name?

  Bremen groaned and tried to speak. The noise made no sense even to himself.

  The doctor blur had left, but the white blur that was female came closer, did something to his covers, and adjusted the IV drip. “We’re very, very lucky, Mr. Bremen. That concussion must have been much more serious than anyone had guessed. But we’re all right now, a few more days here in intensive care and—”

  Bremen cleared his throat and tried again. “Still alive?”

  The blur leaned close enough so that he could almost make out the details of her face. She smelled of cough drops. “Why, of course we’re still alive. Now that the worst is past we can look forward to—”

  “Robby,” rasped Bremen through a throat so raw that he could imagine the tubes that had been forced down it. “The boy … in my room … before. Is he still alive?”

  The blur paused, then efficiently began tucking in his covers. Her voice was light, almost bantering. “Oh, yes, no need to worry about that little fellow. He’s doing just fine. What we have to worry about is ourselves if we’re going to get well. Now, is there anyone we’d like to contact … for personal or insurance reasons?”

  And what she had thought in the second before speaking: Robby? The blind, retarded kid in 726? He’s in a much deeper coma than you were in, my friend. Dr. McMurtry says that the brain damage was too extensive … the internal injuries untreated for too long. Even on the respirator, they think it’ll only be a few more hours. Maybe days if the poor child is unlucky.

  The blur continued to talk and ask friendly questions, but Bremen turned his face to the white wall and closed his eyes.

  He made the short voyage in the early hours of the morning when the halls were dark and silen
t except for the occasional swish of a nurse’s skirt or the low, fitful groans of patients. He moved slowly, sometimes clutching the buffer railing along the wall for support. Twice he stepped into darkened rooms as the soft tread of nurses’ rubber-soled shoes squeaked his way. The stairway was difficult; several times he had to lean over the cold metal railing to shake away the black spots that swam at the edge of his vision.

  Robby was in the room Bremen had once shared with him, but now the child was alone except for the life-support-system machines that surrounded him like metal carrion crows. Colored lights flickered from various monitors and LED displays flickered silently to themselves. The shriveled and faintly odorous body lay curled in a fetal position, wrists cocked at stiff angles, fingers splayed against sweat-moistened sheets. Robby’s head was turned upward, and his eyes were half-open and sightless. His still-battered lips fluttered slightly as he breathed in rapid, ragged surges.

  Bremen could feel that he was dying.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, trembling. The thickness of the night was palpable around him. Somewhere outside, a siren echoed in empty streets and then fell away to silence. A chime sounded far down the hall and soft footsteps receded.

  Bremen laid his palm gently against Robby’s cheek. He could feel the soft down there.

  I could try again. Join them in the wasteland of Robby’s world. Be with them at the end.

  Bremen touched the top of the misshapen head tenderly, almost reverently. His fingers were trembling.

  I could try to rescue them. Let them join me.

  He took a breath that ended as a stifled moan. His hand cupped Robby’s skull as if in benediction. Join me where? As memory wavefronts locked away in my brain? Entomb them as I entombed Gail? Carry them through my life as soulless, eyeless, speechless homunculi … waiting for another miracle like Robby to offer us a home?

  His cheeks were suddenly damp and he stabbed roughly with the back of his free hand, rubbing away the tears so that he could see. Robby’s straight black hair stuck up between Bremen’s fingers in comic tufts. Bremen looked at a pillow that had fallen to one side. He could end everything for them here, now, so that the two people he loved were no longer stranded in that dying wasteland. Wavefronts collapsing as all possibilities are canceled. The death of sine waves in their intricate dance. He could go to the window and join them seconds later.

  Bremen suddenly recalled the fragment of some poem that Gail had read to him years ago, even before they were married. He couldn’t remember the poet … Yeats, maybe. He remembered only a bit of the poem:

  The eyes are not here

  There are no eyes here

  In this valley of dying stars

  In this hollow valley

  This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

  In this last of meeting places

  We grope together

  And avoid speech

  Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

  Sightless, unless

  The eyes reappear

  As the perpetual star

  Multifoliate rose

  Of death’s twilight kingdom

  The hope only

  Of empty men.

  Bremen touched Robby’s cheek a final time, whispered something to them both, and left the room.

  This Is the Way the World Ends

  It took Bremen three days and three nights to drive the intern’s Volvo from St. Louis to the East Coast. He had to park frequently at rest stops along the Interstate, too exhausted to continue, too obsessed to sleep. Bradley had only three hundred dollars in his wallet when Bremen had opened his locker, but that was more than enough for gas. Bremen did not eat during the transit.

  The Benjamin Franklin Bridge out of Philly was almost empty as he crossed it an hour before sunrise. The double strip of highway across New Jersey was quiet. Occasionally Bremen would lower his mindshield a bit, but always flinched and raised it again as the roar of neurobabble lashed at him.

  Not yet.

  He blinked away the migraine pain and concentrated on driving, occasionally glancing at the glove compartment and thinking of the rag-covered bundle there. It had been at a rest stop somewhere in Indiana … or perhaps Ohio … when the pickup had pulled in next to him and the sallow-faced little man had hurried in to the rest rooms. Bremen had flinched at the cloud of anger and distrust that had surrounded the man, but he had smiled when he was out of sight.

  The .38-caliber pistol was hidden under the driver’s seat of the man’s pickup. It looked almost like the weapon that Bremen had thrown into the Florida swamp. There were extra bullets under the seat, but Bremen had left those. The one in the chamber would be all that he needed.

  The sun was not up, but morning light was paling above the rooftops when he drove onto Long Beach Island and took the road north to Barnegat Light. He parked near the lighthouse, set the revolver in a brown bag, and carefully locked the car. He set a slip of paper with Bradley’s name and address under the windshield wiper.

  The sand was still cool when it lopped over the tops of his sneakers. The beach was deserted. Bremen sat in the curl of a low dune so that he could see the water.

  He took off his shirt, set it carefully on the sand behind him, and removed the pistol from the bag. It was lighter than he remembered and smelled faintly of oil.

  No magic wand. No miracle worker. Only an absolute end to that mathematically perfect dance within. If there is anything else, Gail, my darling, you will have to help me find it.

  Bremen dropped his mindshield.

  The pain of a million aimless thoughts stabbed behind his eyes like the point of an ice pick. His mindshield rose automatically, as it had since he first knew he had the ability, so as to blunt the noise, ease the pain.

  Bremen pushed down the barrier, and held it down when it tried to protect him. For the first time in his life Jeremy Bremen opened himself fully to the pain, to the world that inflicted it, and to the countless voices calling in their circles of isolation.

  Gail. He called to her and the child, but he could not sense them, could not hear their voices as the great chorus struck him like a giant wind. To accept them he must accept all of them.

  Bremen lifted the pistol, set the muzzle to his skull, and pulled back the hammer. There was little friction. His finger curled on the trigger.

  All the circles of hell and desolation he had suffered.

  All the petty meannesses, sordid urges, solitary vices, vicious thoughts. All the violence and betrayal and greed and self-centeredness.

  Bremen let it flow through him and around him and out of him. He sought a single voice in the cacophony now rising around him until it threatened to fill the universe. The pain was beyond enduring, beyond believing.

  And suddenly, through the avalanche of pain-noise, there came a whisper of the other voices, the voices that had been denied Bremen during his long descent through his psychic hell. These were the soft voices of reason and compassion, the encouraging voices of parents urging their children in their first steps, the hopeful voices of men and women of goodwill who—while far from being perfect human beings—spent each day trying to be a better person than nature and nurture may have designed them to be.

  Even these soft voices carried their burden of pain: pain at the compromises life imposed, pain at the thoughts of their own mortality and the all-too-threatening mortality of their children, pain of suffering the arrogance of all the willing pain-givers such as those Bremen had encountered in his travels, and the final, ineluctable pain at the certainty of loss even in the midst of all the sustaining pleasures life offered.

  But these soft voices—including Gail’s voice, Robby’s voice—gave Bremen some compass point in the darkness. He concentrated on hearing them even as they faded and were drowned by the cacophony of chaos and hurt around them.

  Bremen realized again that to find the softer voices he would have to surrender himself totally to the painful cries for help. He would have to take it all in, absorb it al
l, swallow it like some razor-edged Communion wafer.

  The muzzle of the pistol was a cool circle against his temple. His finger was taut against the curve of trigger.

  The pain was beyond all imagining, beyond all experience. Bremen accepted it. He willed it. He took it into and through himself and opened himself wider to it.

  Jeremy Bremen did not see the sun rise in front of him. His hearing dimmed to nothing. The messages of fear and fatigue from his body failed to register; the increasing pressure on the trigger became a distant, forgotten thing. He concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight. For that briefest of milliseconds he had the choice of wavefront or particle, the choice of which existence he would embrace. The world screamed at him in five billion pain-filled voices demanding to be heard, five billion lost children waiting to be held, and he opened himself wide enough to hold all of them.

  Bremen squeezed the trigger.

  For Thine Is Life Is For Thine Is The

  From down the beach comes a young girl in a dark suit two seasons too small. She has been running along the edge of wet-packed sand, but now she pauses as the sun rises and breaks free of the sea.

  Her attention is on the water as it teases the land with sliding strokes and then withdraws, and she moves closer to dance with the surf. Her sunburned legs carry her to the very edge of the world’s ocean and then back again in a silent but perfectly choreographed ballet.

  Suddenly she is startled by the sound of a shot.

  Suddenly she is startled by the …

  Suddenly she is startled by the screaming of gulls. Distracted, she halts her dance, and the waves break over her ankles with the cold shock of triumph.

  Above her the gulls dive, rise again, and wheel away to the west, their wings catching the flare of sunrise. The girl pirouettes to watch them as salt spray teases her hair and splashes her face. She squints, rubbing her eyes gently so as not to rub the salt in, and pauses to watch three figures emerge from the dunes up the beach. It looks as if the man and woman and the beautiful child between them have no suits on, but they are far enough away and her eyes are blurred enough from sea spray that the girl cannot tell for sure. She can see that they are holding hands.