The Hollow Man

The Eyes Are Not Here

Limping, still bleeding, Bremen staggered uphill toward the cold house and the boulders beyond. Arc lights had come on all over the compound now, and the only shadowed places were in the crevices and crawl spaces between the rocks. Behind him, the rottweilers were free and Bremen could hear the Dopplering of their howls as they came toward him.

Not the rocks … it’s where she wants you to go.

Bremen halted in the shadow of the cold house, wheezing and fighting away the spots in his vision again. The memories … the family of illegal Mexican immigrants she had taken in when their truck broke down … the dogs had trapped them between the boulders … Miz Morgan had finished the work with the hunting rifle from the ridge above.

Bremen shook his head. The dogs were off the road now, climbing into the loose shale and scrub brush toward him. Bremen forced himself to remember the onslaught of insane images during his seconds in the eye of the hurricane … anything that might help.

Frost-rimmed eyes … red ribs through frozen flesh … the dozen places of burial over the years … the way the runaway girl had wept and begged in that summer of ’81 before the blade descended toward her arched throat … the ritual of preparing the cold house.

The dogs came bounding up the slope, their howls shifting down in timbre toward something more urgent and immediate. Bremen could see their eyes clearly now. Below, in the light, Miz Morgan raised her shotgun and followed the dogs up.

27-9-11. For an eternal few seconds Bremen saw only the numbers floating there, part of the ritual, important … but could not place their significance. The dogs were fifteen yards from him now and growling like a single, six-headed beast.

Bremen concentrated and then whirled, running for the cold house twenty feet away. The heavy metal door was securely sealed by a thick metal hasp, a heavy chain, and a massive combination lock. Bremen spun the lock as the dogs accelerated up the hill behind him. 27-9-11.

The first of the dogs leaped just as Bremen ripped the chain free from the hasp and open lock. He dodged aside, swinging four feet of chain as he did so. The rottweiler went flying while the others came lunging, already cutting off his escape in a perfect half circle that pinned him by the door. Bremen was amazed to find that he also was growling and showing his teeth as he held the animals at bay with the blur of chain. They backed off, seeming to take turns lunging for his legs and arms. The air was filled with their saliva and the cacophony of human and canine growls.

They’re trained not to kill, thought Bremen through the waves of adrenaline. Not yet.

He looked past the largest rottweiler’s head and saw Miz Morgan striding up through the sage, the shotgun already shouldered. She was screaming at the dogs. “Down, goddamn you, down!” She fired the shotgun anyway and the dogs leaped aside as buckshot ripped into concrete block and ricocheted off the top third of the steel door.

On all fours, untouched by the blast, Bremen tugged the heavy door open and crawled into the cold darkness. Behind him, another blast slammed into the door.

In the chill blackness of the cold house he stood, swayed on his slashed leg, and tried to find a way to seal the door … a lock bar, handle, anything to secure the chain to. There was nothing. Bremen realized that the door was meant to be opened by a simple push whenever it was unchained on the outside. He felt for a light switch but there was nothing on the ice-rimmed walls on either side, nothing above the door.

Just audible through the thick door and walls, the howling ceased as Miz Morgan came up to the door, shouted the rottweilers into submission, and leashed them. The door was tugged open.

Bremen staggered through the darkness, bouncing off sides of beef, his work boots sliding on the frost-rimmed floor. The cold house was large—at least forty by fifty feet—and dozens of carcasses hung from hooks that slid along iron bars beneath the ceiling. Twenty feet in, Bremen paused, half hanging from a side of beef, his breath fogging the ice-pale flesh, and looked back toward the doorway.

Miz Morgan had pulled the doorway all but shut, only a sliver of light illuminating her legs and high boots. Two of the rottweilers strained silently at leather leashes in front of her, and the combined breath of the three rose like a thick cloud in the subfreezing air. With the shotgun cradled under the arm that held the leashes, Miz Morgan raised what looked to be a television remote-control unit.

Bright fluorescent lights came on all over the cold house.

Bremen blinked, saw Miz Morgan raise the shotgun in his direction, and then he threw himself behind the side of beef as the shotgun blasted. Pellets slammed into frozen flesh and ripped down the narrow corridor between the dangling carcasses, some swinging from his blundering flight a second before.

Bremen felt something tug at his right upper arm and looked at the bloody streaks there. He was panting, close to hyperventilating, and he leaned against the gutted beef carcass to catch his breath.

It was not a beef carcass. On either side of the parted, exposed ribs, white breasts were visible. The iron hook entered just behind the woman’s hump of spine and came out through her collarbone, just above the point where the body had been split and pried apart. Her eyes, beneath the layer of frost, were brown.

Bremen staggered away, weaving, leaping across the open rows, trying to keep the carcasses between him and Miz Morgan. The rottweilers were baying and growling now, the sounds distorted by the cold air and long cinderblock room.

Bremen knew that there were no windows and only the one door to the cold house. He was near the rear of the room now, moving to the left of the door since there were more carcasses there, but he could hear the scrabble of the dogs’ claws on the icy floor as they strained to get away and Miz Morgan moved left with him, staying near the front wall.

Bremen still held the chain, but could devise no scenario where he could use it against her unless she came into the forest of hanging carcasses. Near the back wall, the frozen, softly swaying bodies were mostly small—an entire row of children and infants, Bremen realized—and there was little cover for him there.

For a second there was silence, and then, through the rush and roar of the white noise of her insanity, Bremen caught the image of her bending over and shared her view of his own legs thirty feet away under a row of white-and-red carcasses.

He leaped just as the shotgun roared. Something kicked at his left heel as he hung, dangling by his right hand, from an iron hook that ran through what looked like the corpse of a middle-aged black man. The man’s eyes were closed. The slash in his throat was so wide and so rough-edged that the frozen edges of it looked like a broad shark’s smile. Bremen struggled not to drop the chain in his left hand.

Miz Morgan yelled something unintelligible and released one of the dogs.

Bremen climbed higher onto the swaying corpse as the dogs bounded down the slippery aisle and Miz Morgan raised her shotgun.