The Hollow Man

EYES I

Jeremy is inside. He is diving through layers of slow thermals. Colorless pinwheels tumble past him in three dimensions.

Spheres of black collapse outward and blind him. There are waterfalls of touch, rivulets of scent, and a thin line of balance blowing in a silent wind.

Jeremy finds himself supported by a thousand unseen hands—touching, exploring. There are fingers against his lips, palms along his chest, smooth hands sliding along his belly, fingers cup his penis as impersonally as in a doctor’s exam and then move on.

Suddenly he is underwater, no, buried in something thicker than water. He cannot breathe. Desperately he begins to flail his arms and legs against the viscous current until he has a sensation of moving upward. There is no light, no sense of direction except the slightest sense of gravity compelling downward, but Jeremy paddles against the resisting gel around him and fights against that gravity, knowing that to remain where he is means being buried alive.

Suddenly the substance shifts and Jeremy is jerked upward by a vacuum that grips his head like a vise. He is compacted, compressed, squeezed so tightly that he is sure his damaged ribs and skull are being shattered again, and then suddenly he feels himself propelled through the constricting aperture and his head breaks the surface.

Jeremy opens his mouth to scream and air rushes into his chest like water filling a drowning man. His scream goes on and on, and when it dies, there are no echoes.

Jeremy awakens on a broad plain.

It is neither day nor night. Pale, peach-colored light diffuses everything. The ground is hard and scaled into separate orange segments that seem to recede to infinity. There is no horizon. Jeremy thinks that the serrated land looks like a floodplain during a drought.

Above him there is no sky, only levels of peach-lit crystal. Jeremy imagines that it is like being in the basement of a clear plastic skyscraper. An empty one. He lies on his back and stares up through endless stories of crystallized emptiness.

Eventually, Jeremy sits up and takes stock of himself. He is naked. His skin feels as if he has been toweled with sandpaper. He rubs a hand across his stomach, touches his shoulders and arms and face, but it is a full minute before he realizes that there are no wounds or scars—not the broken arm, or the bullet graze or the broken ribs, or the bite marks on his hip and inner thigh, or—as far as he can make out—the concussion or lacerations to his face. For a mad second Jeremy thinks that he is in a body other than his own, but then he looks down and sees the scar on his knee from the motorcycle accident when he was seventeen, the mole on the inside of his upper arm.

A wave of dizziness rolls through him as he stands upright.

Sometime later Jeremy begins walking. His bare feet find the smooth plates warm. He has no direction and no destination. Once, at Miz Morgan’s ranch, he had walked out onto a wide expanse of salt flats just at sunset. This is a little like that … but not much.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

Jeremy walks for some time, although time has little meaning here on this orange plain with no sun. The peach-colored levels above him neither shift nor shimmer. Eventually he stops, and when he stops, it is in a place no different than the one where he began. His head hurts. He lies on his back again, feeling the smoothness under him—more like sunbaked plastic than the grit of sand or stone—and as he lies there he imagines that he is some bottom-dwelling sea creature looking up through layers of shifting currents.

The bottom of the swimming pool. So achingly reluctant to return to the light.

Peach-colored light bathes Jeremy in warmth. His body is radiant. He shuts his eyes against the light. And sleeps.

He comes awake suddenly, totally, nostrils flaring, his ears actually twitching with the strain of trying to pinpoint a half-heard sound. The darkness is total.

Something is moving in the night.

Jeremy crouches in the blackness and tries to filter out the sound of his own ragged breathing. His glandular system has reverted to programming more than a million years old. He is ready to flee or fight, but the total and inexplicable darkness eliminates the former. He prepares to fight. His fists clench, his heart races, and his eyes strain to see.

Something is moving in the night.

He feels it nearby. He feels the power and the weight of it through the ground. The thing is huge, its footsteps send tremors through the ground and Jeremy’s body, and it is coming closer. Jeremy is certain that the thing has no trouble finding its way in the darkness. And it can see him.

Then the thing is near him, above him, and Jeremy can feel the force of its gaze. He kneels on the suddenly cold ground and hugs himself into a ball.

Something touches him.

Jeremy fights down the impulse to scream. He is caught in a giant’s hand—something rough and huge and not a hand at all—and suddenly he is lifted high into the blackness. Again Jeremy feels the power of the thing, this time through the pressure on his pinned arms and creaking ribs, and he is sure it could crush him easily if it so wishes. Evidently it does not so wish. At least not yet.

He feels the sense of being viewed, inspected, weighed on some unseen balance scale. Jeremy has the helpless but somehow reassuring feeling of total passivity one feels while lying naked on an X-ray table, knowing that invisible beams are passing through one’s body, searching for malignancy, probing for decay and the seeds of death.

Something sets him down.

Jeremy hears no sound but his own ragged panting, but he can feel the great footsteps receding. Impossibly, they are receding in all directions, like ripples in a pond. A weight lifts from him and he discovers to his own horror that he is sobbing.

Later, he uncurls and gets to his feet. He calls into the blackness, but the sound of his voice is tiny and lost and later he is not even sure whether he had heard it himself.

Exhausted, still sobbing, Jeremy pounds the ground and continues to weep. The blackness is the same whether his eyelids are closed or not, and later, when he sleeps, he dreams only of darkness.