He straightened and looked around. He thought his heart had stopped. No… not here. Please...
He was in the Hollow Man’s dark world again. Beneath his feet lay the dirt road that stretched away through the dark. Grey trees stood tall and straight on all sides, their boughs covered thickly in yellow leaves. All was silent.
The silence was oppressive, and in addition to the desperation Garret felt because he was standing here again, he also began to feel an oppressive weight building in the forest around him. It was thickening, layering, pressing down on every leaf and branch.
The silence was more than the absence of sound, it was an expectancy, and a dread. If life was born in cries and tears of pain and then a rush of relief, then Death was born in absolute silence and emptiness. It was whelped in the dark, and it opened its eyes and drew its first breath in a place where the warmth of laughter had never been heard.
A place just like this, Garret thought as his legs became unsteady beneath him.
What happened last time? How did I get out? I know I’ve been here recently, but I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?!
A pebble began to roll towards his feet. Even with his wolf ears, Garret would never have noticed the pebble if it hadn’t been absolutely quiet around him. The pebble had been laying still on the road before him, then it began to roll all by itself. It stopped when it bumped into the toe of Garret’s navy boot.
That was the only warning he got. A split second too late, he realized it wasn’t the pebble that had moved. The road itself began moving under his feet, sliding right out from under all the other pebbles that lay atop it. Garret stumbled and dropped to his knees. There was no wind. Perhaps the air was moving with him. In fact there was no indication that he was moving at all other than the sickening lurch in his inner ear, and the fact that the trees were suddenly blurring past him on both sides. The road didn’t break loose from the surrounding turf, it simply whisked Garret smoothly away as if the laws of physics had ceased to exist.
Something was approaching by the side of the road. Or rather, Garret was approaching it. It was large, dark, and grotesquely deformed. It was not the Hollow Man, but Garret was sure he was somewhere nearby.
The road slowed to a stop as silently as it had begun to move. Garret was sick to his stomach from the motion and from fright, but not a hair on his head was mussed by the trip. Garret stared at the mutilated mass in front of him and tried to discern what he was seeing.
It was a tree, or at least it had been, short, black, and gnarled. Something was growing out of it to both sides. It looked like it had once been humanoid, but it had grown into the tree, and the tree into it, until both were deformed beyond recognition.
Yes boy, the Hollow Man said to his mind. My greatest achievement.
Garret shrank and didn’t dare turn around. The Hollow Man came closer, then he spoke aloud. Again, it was not the terrible sound that Garret would have expected, tearing the flesh from his bones. The Hollow Man’s voice was a resonant baritone. Almost human.
“This,” he said, “is beauty. Look upon them, and See what will become.”
Instantly, everything that had led up to this moment came back to Garret in a rush. The memory block lifted like a curtain. Oh my God... As clearly as if it had happened only moments ago, Garret recalled all three times that the Hollow Man had come to him on the ocean.
Garret remembered being ripped away from the Kearsarge and flung backwards through history to a snowy monastery. There he had watched an old man rip a struggling organ out of a dead body and hand it over to the Hollow Man. He’d done it to save his daughter.
Next, Garret remembered standing across a morgue table from the Hollow Man, deep in Kearsarge’s belly, and agreeing to let him have Ensign Roger’s dead body. Garret had done it to save his friends.
Finally, Garret remembered standing on this exact spot and being forced to break up the stubborn ground at the foot of the tree so that the Hollow Man could sew his demonseed. Garret had done that to save his wife.
“And now it is finished,” the Hollow Man said quietly behind him.
With that statement, the revelation came full circle, and Garret at last understood. The dawn of comprehension came full, blinding, and horrifying. Garret knew why the Hollow Man had hidden everything from him. He knew why the Hollow Man had driven him here. And finally, at long last, Garret understood why the Hollow Man had chosen him so many years ago.
The truth of it had been there, right in front of Garret, every time the Hollow Man had opened his mouth. The Hollow Man had said it in the monastery. I have come for my prize. You will give it to me. He had said it over Roogie’s body: You will give me the dead, or I will take the living. He had said it as Garret stood before this very tree. Do this, or I will bring your wife here, and she will labor in your stead. He had said it when Garret was only a small child. Come with me, and I will make you strong.
Shell-shocked, Garret turned and faced him, whatever the hell he was. The Hollow Man was standing a few feet from him, blending with the darkness. His cloak obscured everything about him but his shape. He did not move at all.
The Hollow Man had hurt Garret on several occasions, so Garret assumed that he could harm anyone he wished. Now he saw differently.
That’s not true at all, is it?
If the Hollow Man could do as he wished to people, he would simply have taken the organ he wanted. There would have been no need to involve the old monk. If the Hollow Man had the power that Garret thought he had, he would simply have taken Roogie’s body. There would have been no need to involve Garret. Yet every time the Hollow Man wanted something from our world, he came to a human being in order to get it. Moreover, he had to force them to give it to him.
“You can hurt me, because I made a deal with you,” Garret whispered. “But nobody else did. You can’t really touch my friends or family, can you? It was all a trick. A lie to get what you wanted.”
Garret’s voice became more audible as the thoughts in his head picked up speed. “You’ve tricked me since the beginning. Without my friends and my family, you don’t have any leverage. You’ve got me, but that’s it. You can hurt me, and you can bring me here, but you don’t own me, because… because I could have said no to you anytime. I just didn’t know it. My God, you… you need me!”
A small voice in the back of Garret’s head was telling him that he may have just signed his own death warrant, but the revelation was so liberating that, for the moment, it overwhelmed even his survival instinct. The Hollow Man, on the other hand, did not seem disturbed by Garret’s outburst. He stood there, his arms crossed over his chest with nothing but the chilling, alien version of desire radiating from him.
“I’m free!” Garret yelled at the dark being in front of him. “Do you hear me? I’m FREE!”
“Nearly so,” the Hollow Man said. “Because I have come for what is mine. Now give it to me.”
Garret hit the ground on hands and knees, gagging, grasping at his chest. Beneath his ribs, his heart hammered and fluttered. The wire between the hook in his heart and the invisible ring on his finger had just drawn taut. The hook felt like it was tearing his heart muscle.
The wire drew tighter. His heart stumbled, staggered, trying desperately to keep him alive. Garret gagged and retched on the road. The ring around his finger began to grow cold. So did the wire up his arm and the hook into his heart. They continued to chill until the frigid sensation was unbearable. Garret begged senselessly for mercy while his heart floundered.
The wire drew tighter and colder. His heartbeat continued to weaken. The hook tore deeper into his heart.
Garret’s vision was blurring, but as he flopped and twitched on the dirt, he could see his left hand in front of him. The ring had become visible. It was old iron, rough and rudely made, but thick and strong. It was growing so cold that frost was building up on it, then ice. Just as Garret’s heart began to falter, the ring cracked.
&
nbsp; Garret’s heart lurched, and the ring split in two. As the ring shattered, the hook ripped out of his heart, tearing it open, and he felt a warm flow of blood running along the wire inside his arm. When the ring broke, it tore his finger open. From out of it ran Garret’s blood—his heart blood—pouring onto the ground.
“Blood of the wolf’s heart,” the Hollow Man said as the red stream poured into the dirt. “Life blood from a line unbroken for thirteen generations.”
The Hollow Man moved to the tree. “Death Blood,” he said. “From the last of your kind.”
Garret’s heart, which was ripped open inside his chest, faltered. The hook and wire dissolved from inside Garret, and the broken ring fell from his finger and hit the dirt. As Garret’s life came to an end, the Hollow Man’s hold over him also ceased. The pieces of the ring laid there on the dirt, two broken half-circles of ice and frost. Then the frost and ice melted away, revealing nothing beneath them. The ring had passed into oblivion.
Garret’s heart, what was left of it, gave up. He began to fade quickly. His ring finger was still cut all the way around, but the flow of blood from it had slowed to a drip because there was no more heartbeat pushing it. Garret’s spirit began to slip from him. Within moments, his body and mind were gone. All that remained of him was his will, but he knew with every ounce of that will that he couldn’t die this way. His wife and son needed him. He groped for an answer, but couldn’t find one.
Then he realized he was looking for salvation in the wrong place. There was only one part of him that would always obey his will, as long as there was a single spark of life left in him. With his dying moment, he called upon the wolf within.
And it answered.
The change began slowly. Garret had no ability to focus its efforts on his heart. He could only pray the wolf would instinctively know what had to be done. But as the change dragged onward, slowed by his clothing, Garret’s spirit drained away like sand through an hour glass. His hearing dulled even while his ears were becoming long and triangular. His vision darkened even as it shifted from color to black and white.
As Garret died, a curious and wonderful thing began to happen. He lost sight of the dark world around him, but he began to see something else. Something much bigger and more amazing. He began to see himself, his life, and every person who had ever intersected with it. As he passed into eternity, he began to escape time and its constraints, so that every moment of his life existed before him, not in sequence, but in tandem.
It was beautiful. Beautiful and horrible and marvelous and tragic, and above all, intentional—filled with purpose. His life had seemed senseless and random before, and now he understood why. Only by seeing it in its entirety could he see the patterns. It was like looking at the most intricate mosaic ever made. Or as if every cell of every creature that had ever lived was somehow part of a living masterpiece, and Garret had been allowed to step back and glimpse it.
The early years of his life had darkness throughout them, to be sure. But even those years had great light. His brother Sarn was there with him, shining in the darkness, loving him, putting up with him, giving him the warmth and laughter that only a beloved sibling can bring to the world. Molly was there as well, as the girl he fell in love with behind the school house when they were both so young that they didn’t know how to kiss. Now she was there as his wife. His steadfast companion. She was the warmth and love that filled his world and made it good. She was also the mother of his child, the most precious bundle in all the universe.
Beyond the present, Garret’s life stretched out in front of him, growing brighter and brighter with each passing year until the final moment when he, as had Burl, Theo, Sweet Cheeks and Curtis, would pass from this dream we call life. Beyond that lay the greatest adventure of all.
But between now and then, there was still so much to do. So many wonderful things had yet to happen. Garret could see the rest of his life laid out before him, bright and beautiful with all its struggles and triumphs and joys and pains.
As he saw all this, he knew that this was not the night he would die. It was the night he had finally become free. This was the night he would walk away from the dark.
As the last shred of his spirit left him, the transformation to wolf finished, and Garret felt a tiny twitch in his chest. The twitch became a flutter. The flutter became a stumble. His spirit flooded back into him.
The hole in his heart was closing up, healed by the transformation from young man into wolf. For another long instant, nothing happened, then his heart gave a feeble, but real beat. And another. And another. His wolf lungs opened, and he sucked in a long ragged breath. It was his first in over a minute.
His paws twitched weakly on the dirt road. The scents of trees and dry dirt and blood trickled into his nose. The dirt road swam into focus before his eyes. He pulled another breath, and another. His heartbeat steadied and strengthened.
I survived.
He tried to kill me, but it didn’t work. A new anger began to kindle within Garret. With each new breath and heartbeat, Garret’s fear of the Hollow Man crumbled to dust inside him.
It crumbled because he knew the truth. He had seen and felt the truth of his own life, even though he was not allowed to remember the details of anything that was yet to come. Even so, Garret now understood. The Hollow Man had been able to cause him pain, but pain wasn’t the chain that had bound Garret. That had been fear.
Darkness had controlled him for only one reason: because he had been afraid of it.
Fear was the only control the Hollow Man ever had over Garret, probably over anyone. That was why the Hollow Man had chosen Garret in the beginning, so many years ago—because the Hollow Man knew that Garret’s fear would make him clay in the Hollow Man’s hands.
Garret was not afraid anymore.
Garret let go of the wolf form, giving his body another shift to continue healing the damage to his heart. He did not stand, but remained on the ground. Then he shifted back to the wolf again. His senses were restored, and strength was returning to his body. His joints popped into place and his face elongated and became filled with sharp teeth. Then Garret the wolf pushed himself up on four paws, shredded his way out of his clothes, and faced the Hollow Man. Garret’s hackles bristled. His lips pulled back from his teeth in a silent growl, and he flattened his ears to his skull.
Hey fuckface, Garret thought. Guess what? I’m not dead.
Maybe it was rage. Maybe it was years of sheer frustration, finally pushing Garret over the edge. Maybe it was plain stupidity. Regardless of the cause, Garret had had a belly full of the Hollow Man and his tricks and torment. The Hollow Man had lied to him since he was a child. The Hollow Man had deceived him, used and abused him, and frightened him out of his wits.
No more.
Growling, baring his wickedly sharp teeth in the dark, Garret began to circle around the Hollow Man and his perverted tree, closing in as he came.
You know what I think? I think you can’t touch me anymore. But that doesn’t say a damn thing about what I can do to you.
The Hollow Man was standing there by the tree a few feet from him. It was facing Garret’s way, but not looking directly at him. Garret closed in, but the Hollow Man ignored him. Garret crouched, shifting on his haunches, his jaws aching to tear into the Hollow Man. I think it’s damn time we all got to see what’s under that cloak. Nothing in the world was going to stop Garret from—
Garret stopped. The tree had just moved. Only then did he catch sight of his own blood. The puddle which had run out of his heart was now running across flat ground, as if by its own devices. It had separated into two streams, like red snakes wending through the dirt. Each stream ran to opposite sides of the tree and sank into the ground, whereupon Garret knew his blood was being uptaken by the roots of the tree.
Part of one of the large deformations on the side of the tree twitched again. Garret involuntarily backed up. He wasn’t growling anymore. Maybe the Hollow Ma
n couldn’t hurt Garret now, but his thralls certainly could. The creature had made that abundantly clear by injuring Garret and killing countless others.
The Hollow Man was speaking softly in a language that had not been uttered in nearly ten thousand years. It was hard and harsh, the syllables grinding and grating against one another as they filled the darkness around Garret.
Both deformations on the tree were beginning to twitch now, but it didn’t look like they were coming to life. It was more disgusting than that, as if a dead body was becoming reanimated. There was a feeling of incredible wrongness coming from the tree, as though whatever was happening was of the ultimate depravity. Garret backed up a little more, uneasy.
The deformations twitched, and the wood of the tree began to crackle with the movement.
Uh, maybe I should be running away instead of standing here. Just as Garret thought it, the last trickle of the blood disappeared into the ground and up into the tree.
The Hollow Man finished speaking in his skin-crawling, guttural tones. He raised his cloaked hands to the sky.
When he did so, the deformations began to twitch, making the tree crackle and quiver. Then they began to flail violently. Bark ripped and wood crackled and popped. Pieces of the tree fell away, revealing long black arms and legs, made neither of flesh nor wood, but perhaps something in between. They scrabbled and tore at the tree, rippping into the dark wood with long, immensely strong fingers. Even Garret could see that the deformations were moving independently.
Holy shit, it’s two of them, not one. Each half of Roogie’s body had grown into a separate creature, half-buried in the tree. Garret had once heard Father Bendetti use the word “abomination” in a sermon. Though Garret didn’t know precisely what it meant, it was the only word that came to mind as he watched.
Above their shoulders, a rounded deformation protruded from the trunk, but each was twisted grotesquely off-angle from where their heads should have been. Nonetheless, the rounded deformations began to vibrate, splitting the bark into long shreds. With a loud pop, one head ripped free of the wood, then the other. The heads were smooth and featureless.
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