The Hollow Man

Sightless, Unless

Bremen dreamed of ice and bodies writhing in the ice.

He dreamed of a great beast rendering flesh, and of terrible cries rising from a sulfurous night. Bremen dreamed of a thousand thousand voices calling to him in pain and terror and the loneliness of human despair, and when he awoke, the voices were still there: the neurobabble of a modern hospital filled with suffering souls.

All that day Bremen lay abed, rode the waves of pain from his injuries, and thought about what he might do next. Nothing much came to mind.

Detective Burchill returned in the early afternoon with the promised FBI special agent, but Bremen feigned sleep and the two acceded to the head nurse’s insistence and left after half an hour. Bremen did sleep then, and his dreams were of ice and writhing bodies in the ice and of cries from the pain-racked darkness around him.

When he awoke again later that night, Bremen focused his mindtouch through the babble and rasp to find the uniformed officer left to guard him. Patrolman Duane B. Everett was forty-eight, seven months away from retirement, and suffered from hemorrhoids, fallen arches, insomnia, and what his doctors had called irritable bowel syndrome. This did not stop Patrolman Everett from drinking as much coffee as he wanted, although it meant long trips to the rest room on this floor. Patrolman Everett didn’t mind alternating this guard duty with the other two officers working eight-hour shifts, nor did he mind taking the graveyard shift. It was quiet at night, it allowed him to read his Robert B. Parker novel, he could banter with the nurses, and there was always fresh coffee in the lounge he was allowed to use.

It was almost sunrise. Alone now in his room except for the comatose patient in the next bed, Bremen rose painfully, pulled the IV drip free, and hobbled to the window. He sat there a moment, the cold draft from the air-conditioning vent chilling him under his thin gown, and stared out the window.

If he was leaving, he should leave now. They had cut away his clothes after pulling him from the wrecked Piper Cheyenne—Bremen had seen through one of the emergency-room medics’ eyes that they considered it a miracle that there had been no fire after the plane plowed into a muddy field half a mile from the airport—but Bremen knew where there were extra clothes that would fit him. He would just have to get to the interns’ locker room down one flight of stairs.

He also knew from his eavesdropping that day which of the interns kept their car keys in which lockers … and what the combinations for those lockers were. Bremen had decided to “borrow” an almost new and fueled-up Volvo belonging to an intern named Bradley Montrose; Bradley was an emergency-room intern and probably would not notice that his Volvo was gone until he got off duty seventy-two hours from now.

Bremen leaned back against the wall and groaned slightly. His arm hurt like hell, his head ached with an improbable ferocity, his ribs felt as if splinters of broken bone were pressing against his lungs, and there were countless other pains queuing up to get his attention. Even the bites on his hip and thigh from Miz Morgan’s ranch had not yet healed completely.

Can I do this? Get to the clothes? Drive the car? Stay ahead of the cops?

Probably.

Are you really going to steal the six hundred dollars in Bradley’s wallet?

Probably. His mother will make up the difference before Bradley has time to tell the cops what happened.

Do you know where the fuck you’re going?

No.

Bremen sighed and opened his eyes. Through the small part in the curtains here he could see the head and shoulders of the dying kid who shared his room. The boy looked terrible, although Bremen understood from the nurses’ and doctors’ thoughts during the day that not all of the child’s dismal appearance was from his injuries. The boy—Robby something—had been blind, deaf, and retarded even before the assault that had brought him here.

Part of Bremen’s nightmare that afternoon had been an echo of the anger and disgust from one of the nurses who took extra care in watching over Robby. The boy had been brought in after being discovered in an outhouse pit across the river in East St. Louis. Three boys playing in an abandoned field had heard weird cries coming from the outhouse and had told their parents. By the time paramedics had removed Robby from the flooded pit of feces, authorities estimated, the boy had been lying there for more than two days. He had been beaten viciously and the prognosis for his survival was poor. The nurse found herself weeping for Robby … and praying to Jesus that he would die soon.

As far as the nurses or doctors knew, the police had not found the boy’s mother or stepfather. The doctor in charge of Robby did not think that the authorities were looking very hard.

Bremen set his cheek against the glass and thought about the boy. He thought about the terminally ill children he had seen in Walt Disney World and of the brief peace he had given some of them with the help of his mindtouch. During his entire purposeless, self-centered flight from himself, those few minutes were the only time that he had helped anyone, done anything except feel sorry for himself. He remembered those moments now and glanced over at Robby.

The boy lay half-uncovered on his side, his face and upper body illuminated by the medical monitors above his head. Robby’s clawlike hands were curled in bizarre contortions above the sheets, his wrists so thin that they looked strangely lizardlike. The boy’s head was tilted in a disturbing way, his tongue lolling from between pulped lips. His face was mottled and bruised, the nose obviously broken and flattened, but Bremen suspected that the eye sockets, which appeared the most damaged part of Robby’s face, had always looked this way—sunken, blackened, with heavy lids only half covering the useless white marbles of the eyes.

Robby was unconscious. Bremen had picked up nothing from the boy—not even pain dreams—and had been shocked to learn from the nurses’ thoughts that there was another patient in the room. It was the most absence of neurobabble that Bremen had ever felt from another human being. Robby was just a void, although Bremen knew from the doctors’ thoughts that the monitors showed continuing brain activity. In fact, the EEG tracks showed very active REM activity—a busy dream sleep. Bremen was at a loss why he could not pick up the boy’s dreams.

As if aware of being observed, Robby twitched in his sleep. His black hair rose from his skull in random tufts that Bremen might have found amusing in other circumstances. The dying boy’s breath rasped out between the damaged lips in a coarse rasping that was not quite a snore, and Bremen could smell it from eight feet away.

Bremen shook his head and looked out at the night, feeling the broken-glass pain of things in the way that substituted for tears with him.

Don’t wait for Burchill and the FBI man to come back in the morning with questions about Miz Morgan’s murder. Get out now.

And go where?

Worry about that later. Just get the fuck out.

Bremen sighed. He would leave later, before the morning shift came in and the hospital got busy. He would take the intern’s Volvo and continue his quest to nowhere, arriving nowhere, wishing to be nowhere. He would continue to suffer life.

Bremen glanced back at the boy in the bed. Something about the child’s posture and oversized head reminded him of a broken, bronze Buddha, tumbled from its pedestal, which Bremen and Gail had seen once in a monastery near Osaka. This child had been blind, deaf, and brain-damaged since birth. What if Robby harbored some deep wisdom born of his long seclusion from the world?

Robby twitched, yellowed fingernails scrabbling slightly against the sheets, farted loudly, and resumed his snores.

Bremen sighed, slid back the curtains, and moved to a chair next to the boy’s bed.

Patrolman Everett will be visiting the john in about three minutes. The floor nurses are preparing medications and the station nurse can’t see me if I take the back stairs. Bradley’s in ER and the locker room probably will be empty for another hour.

Do it.

Bremen nodded to himself, fighting the pain and the painkiller fatigue. He would drive north toward Chicago and then into Canada, find a place to rest up and recuperate … someplace where neither the police nor Don Leoni’s people would ever find him. He would use the mindtouch ability to stay ahead of them and to make money … but not by gambling … no more gambling.

Bremen looked up at the boy again.

There’s no time for this.

Yes, there was. It would not take long. He need not even establish full contact. A one-way mindtouch would do it. It was possible. A moment of contact, even a few seconds, and he could share light and sound with the dying child. Perhaps go to the window and look at the traffic below, the lights of the city, find a star.

Bremen knew that such reciprocal mindtouch was possible—not just with Gail, although that had been effortless—but with anyone who was receptive. And most people were receptive to a determined mindtouch probe, although Bremen had never known anyone but Gail who could control their latent telepathic abilities. The only problem was making sure that the person did not feel the mindtouch as mindtouch, did not become aware that the alien thoughts were actually alien. Once, after days of inability to convey the meaning of a simple calculus transform to a slow student, Bremen had just given it to him via mindtouch and left the student to congratulate himself on his insight.

There need be no subtlety with this child. And no content. A few shared sensory impressions would be Bremen’s parting gift. Anonymous. Robby would never know who had shared these images.

Robby’s snore caught, stopped for an agonizingly long time, and then started up again like a balky engine. He was drooling heavily. The pillowcase and sheet near his face were moist.

Bremen decided, and lowered his mindshield. Hurry, Patrolman Everett will be headed toward the bathroom any minute. The remnants of his mindshield went down and the full force of the world’s neurobabble rushed in like water into a sinking ship.

Bremen flinched and raised his mindshield. It had been a long time since he had allowed himself to be so vulnerable. Even though the neurobabble always got through anyway, the volume and intensity was almost unbearable without the woolly blanket of the shield. The hospital neurobabble cut directly at the soft tissue of his bruised mind.

He gritted his teeth against the pain and tried again. Bremen tried to tune out the broad spectrum of neurobabble and concentrate on the space where Robby’s dreams should be.

Nothing.

For a confused second Bremen thought that he had lost the focus of his power. Then he concentrated and was able to pick out the urgency of Patrolman Everett as he hurried toward the rest room and the preoccupied fragments of Nurse Tulley as she compared med dosages between Dr. Angstrom’s list and the pink sheets on the tray. He focused on the nurse at the monitor station and saw that she was reading a novel—Needful Things by Stephen King. It frustrated him that her eyes scanned so slowly. His mouth filled with the syrupy taste of her cherry cough drop.

Bremen shook his head and stared at Robby. The boy’s asthmatic breathing filled the air between them with a sour fog. Robby’s tongue was visible and heavily coated. Bremen narrowed his mindtouch to the shape of blunt probe, strengthened it, focused it like a beam of coherent light.

Nothing.

No … there was—what?—an absence of something.

There was an actual hole in the field of mindbabble where Robby’s dreams should have been. Bremen realized that he was confronting the strongest and most subtle mindshield he had ever encountered. Even Miz Morgan’s hurricane of white noise had not created a barrier of such incredible tightness, and at no time had she been able to hide the presence of her thoughts. Robby’s thoughts were simply not there.

For a second Bremen was shaken, but then he realized the cause of this phenomenon. Robby’s mind was damaged. Entire segments were probably inactive. With so few senses to rely on and such a limited awareness of his environment, with so little access to the universe of probability waves to choose from and almost no ability to choose from them, the boy’s consciousness—or what passed for consciousness for the child—had turned violently inward. What first had seemed to Bremen to be a powerful mindshield was nothing more than a tight ball of turning-inwardness going beyond autism or catatonia. Robby was truly and totally alone in there.

Bremen took a breath and resumed his probe, using more care this time, feeling along the negative boundaries of the de facto mindshield like a man groping along a rough wall in the dark. Somewhere there had to be an opening.

There was. Not an opening so much as a soft spot—the slightest resilience set amid solid stone.

Bremen half perceived a flutter of underlying thoughts now, much as a pedestrian senses the movement of subway trains under a pavement. He concentrated on building the strength of his probe until he felt his hospital gown beginning to soak through with sweat. His vision and hearing were beginning to dim in the single-minded exertion of his effort. It did not matter. Once initial contact was made, he would relax and slowly open the channels of sight and sound.

He felt the wall give a bit, still elastic but sinking slightly under his unrelenting force of will. Bremen concentrated until the veins stood out in his temples. Unknown to himself, he was grimacing, neck muscles knotting with the strain. The wall bent. Bremen’s probe was a solid ram battering a tight but gelatinous doorway.

It bent further.

Bremen concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight.

The accidental mindshield continued to bend. Bremen leaned forward as if into a strong wind. There was no neurobabble now, no awareness of the hospital or himself; there was only the force of Bremen’s will.

Suddenly there came ripping, a rush of warmth, and a falling forward. Bremen flailed his arms and opened his mouth to yell.

He had no mouth.

Bremen was falling, both in his body and out. He was tumbling head over heels into a darkness where the floor had been only a moment before. He had a distant, confused glimpse of his own body writhing in the grip of some terrible seizure, and then he was falling again.

He was falling into silence.

Falling into nothing.

Nothing.