The Hollow Man

There Are No Eyes Here

Bremen went up the hill in the dark, past the Jeep parked some yards from where he had left it, past the baying rottweilers in their pen—they were never left in their pen at night—and through the open door of the hacienda.

The interior was dim but not dark; light came from a single brass candlestick lamp and spilled down the hallway from the direction of Miz Morgan’s bedroom. Bremen felt her presence, the warm rush of white noise rising like the volume turned higher on an untuned radio. It made him dizzy and a trifle nauseated. It also excited him. As if sleepwalking, Bremen moved across the silent room and down the hall. Outside, the dogs had ceased their wild barking.

The lights in Miz Morgan’s bedroom were off except for a single twenty-five-watt bulb on a table lamp, and that was covered with some fabric that bled only a bit of pink light. Bremen stood in the doorway a moment, feeling his balance shift precariously as if he were on the edge of some deep, circular pit. Then he stepped forward and let himself fall into the rush of white noise.

Her bed was a four-poster, canopied with a diaphanous gauze that caught the pink light with a silken web gleam. He could see her on the far side, the light bleeding past her, her body soft and visible under its own thin folds of open lace. “Come in,” she whispered.

Bremen went in, setting his feet uncertainly as if his vision and balance were both impaired. He had started around the bed when Miz Morgan’s voice came again from the shadows. “No, stop there a second.”

Bremen hesitated, confused, on the verge of awakening. Then he saw her motion—a parting of lacy bed curtains, a leaning forward toward a glass or low receptacle on the nightstand, a brief movement of hand and mouth and a quick retreat. The shadows of her face seemed rearranged.

She wears dentures, he thought, feeling a pang of an emotion quite alien in his thoughts toward Miz Morgan. She’d forgotten to put them in.

She beckoned him forward again with a movement more of wrist than fingers. Bremen moved around to the far side of the bed, his body throwing yet another shadow across the occupant there, and paused again, unable to move forward or back. The woman may have spoken again, but Bremen’s senses were filled with the white-hot roar of her mindnoise. It struck him like a torrent of blood-warm water flying from some hidden hydrant, disorienting him even more than he had been a second before.

He reached for the bed curtains, but her long, strong fingers batted his hands away. She leaned forward on her elbows in a motion at once feline and feminine and moved her face close to his legs. As her shoulders parted the curtains Bremen realized that he could see her breasts clearly through the gaps in her gown but not her face, concealed as it was by shadows and the tumble of her hair.

Just as well, he thought, and closed his eyes. He tried to think of Gail, remember Gail, but the rush of white noise drove out any thoughts except those of lassitude and surrender. Room shadows seemed to shift around him in the last instant before his eyelids lowered.

Miz Morgan set a flat hand against his belly, another on his thigh. Bremen trembled like a nervous Thoroughbred being inspected by a rough vet.

She unbuckled his belt, lowered his zipper.

Bremen started to move then, to lean toward her, but her left hand returned to his belly, restraining him and freezing him in place. The mindnoise was a hurricane of white static now, buffeting him in all dimensions. He swayed on his feet.

With a single, almost angry movement Miz Morgan tugged his trousers down his hips. He felt the cooler air and then her warm breath on him, but still he did not open his eyes. The white noise battered him like invisible fists to the brain.

She fondled him, cupping his testicles as if raising them to a kiss, then ran a warm hand with cold nails up and down his still-flaccid penis. He grew only slightly excited, although his scrotum contracted as if trying to rise into his body. Her motions became more fluid and urgent, more from her need than his. Bremen felt her head lower, felt the touch of her cheek against his thigh and the silkiness of her hair and the warmth of her brow against the cusp of his lower belly, and then the buffeting of mindnoise lessened, then ceased, and he was in the eye of the hurricane.

Bremen saw.

Exposed flesh and raw-rimmed ribs hanging from hooks. The rictus grin and frozen eyes under white frost. The migrant-family infants on their own row of hooks, turning slightly in frigid breezes.…

“Jesus!” He pulled back instinctively and opened his eyes the instant her mouth snapped shut with a metallic click. Bremen saw the gleam of razor steel between red lips and staggered backward again only to crash into the bedside table, knocking the covered lamp over and sending high shadows flying.

Miz Morgan opened blade-rimmed jaws and lunged again, her shoulders arching and thrusting like some ancient turtle struggling free of its shell.

Bremen threw himself to his right and struck the wall, writhing aside so that her wide-mouthed bite missed his genitals but took a round chunk out of his left thigh, just above the femoral artery. He stared as blood sprayed the curtains in the pink light and fell in droplets on Miz Morgan’s upturned face.

She arched her neck in something like orgasm and ecstasy, her eyes wide and blind, her mouth opened in an almost perfect circle, and Bremen saw the healthy gum-pink of the dental prosthesis as well as the razor blades set in plastic there. His blood spattered on her red lips and on blue steel. As she opened her mouth wider for another lunge he noticed that the blades were set in concentric rows, like sharks’ teeth.

Bremen leaped to his left, blind himself from the mental images now swirling in the eye of the mindnoise hurricane, crashed into the table and lamp again, and suddenly pulled back as Miz Morgan’s steel teeth cut through his dangling shirttail, leather belt, and the thinner flesh of his side, scraping bone before pulling back, her head shaking like a dog with a mouthful of rat.

Bremen felt the icy shock but no pain, and then he pulled up his jeans and leaped again—not sideways, where she would certainly trap him, but straight over her—his right foot planting itself on the small of her back like a hiker finding a stepping-stone in treacherous rapids, pulling the bed curtains down behind him, then flailing through more curtains on the other side and falling, landing hard on his elbows and crawling toward the doorway even as she flopped and writhed and groped for his legs behind him.

The pain in his thigh and side struck him then, sharp as an electrical shock to the nerves of his spine.

He ignored it and crawled toward the door, looking back.

Miz Morgan had chewed her way through the gauze curtains and was on the floor, crawling after him with a great scrabbling of lacquered fingernails on the bare wood floors. The prosthesis thrust her jaws forward in almost lycanthropic eagerness.

Bremen had left a trail of blood on the floorboards and the woman seemed to be sniffing at it as she came at him across the slick wood.

He rose to his feet and ran, bouncing off the walls of the hallway and the furniture of the living room, leaving a red smear on the couch as he tumbled and rolled over it, got to his feet, and leaped for the door. Then he was out in the night, breathing cold air and holding his jeans closed with one hand, the other hand flat against his bleeding thigh as he ran straight-legged down the hill.

The rottweilers were going insane behind the high wire, leaping and snarling. Bremen heard laughter and turned, still running; Miz Morgan was in the dimly lighted doorway, her gown totally transparent and her body looking tall and strong.

She was laughing between the razor blades in her mouth.

Bremen saw the long object in her hands just as she made a familiar motion and he heard the unmistakable sound of the sixteen-gauge shotgun being pumped. He tried to weave back and forth, but the wound on his leg slowed him and turned the weaving into a series of awkward lurches, as if the Tin Man, half-rusted, were attempting an end run. Bremen felt like weeping and laughing, but did neither.

He glanced back to see Miz Morgan lean inside, the generator kicked on up behind the cold house, and suddenly the driveway below the hacienda, the bunkhouse area, the barn, and the first three hundred feet of field below the house were bathed in glare as huge arc lamps turned night into day.

She’s done this before. Bremen had been running blindly toward the bunkhouse and the Jeep, but then he remembered that the vehicle had been moved and was certain that Miz Morgan had pulled the distributor cap or something equally as necessary. He tried to read her thoughts—as repulsive as that idea was—but the white noise had returned, louder than ever. He was back in the hurricane.

She’s done this before. So many times before. Bremen knew that if he ran toward the river or the highway, she would easily run him down in the Jeep or Toyota. The bunkhouse was an obvious trap.

Bremen slid to a stop on the brightly illuminated gravel and snapped his jeans shut. He bent over to inspect the wounds on his leg and hip and almost fainted; his heart was pounding so hard that he could hear it like footsteps raging behind him. Bremen took deep, slow breaths and fought away the black spots that swam in his vision.

His jeans were soaked with blood and both wounds were still bleeding, but neither one was spurting the way an artery would. If it was an artery, I’d be dead. Bremen fought away the light-headedness, stood, and looked back toward the hacienda sixty yards behind him.

Miz Morgan had pulled on jeans and her tall work boots and come out on the porch. Her upper body was clad only in the blood-spattered nightgown. Her mouth and jaw looked different, but Bremen was too far away to tell for sure if she had removed the prosthesis.

She opened a circuit-breaker box on the south end of the porch and more arc lamps leaped on down by the stream, along the driveway.

Bremen felt that he was standing in an empty coliseum, lit for a night game.

Miz Morgan raised the pump shotgun and casually fired in his direction. Bremen leaped to the side, although he knew he was beyond critical range of the shotgun. Pellets pounded on the gravel nearby.

He looked around again, fighting the panic that joined with the roaring white noise to cloud his thinking, and then he turned left, toward the boulders behind the hacienda.

More arc lights snapped on up behind the rocks, but Bremen kept climbing, feeling the leg wound begin to bleed again. He felt as if someone had scooped out the flesh on his hip with a razored ice-cream dip.

Behind him, there was a second shotgun blast and then snarls and howls as Miz Morgan let loose the dogs.