The Hollow Man

EYES I DARE NOT MEET IN DREAMS

They take a picnic lunch to the shore the next day, bypassing Big Slide Mountain to descend to the beach north of their earlier spot. The sky is a flawless blue and it is very warm. Gernisavien had wakened from her midday nap to stare at them with sleepy, disinterested eyes and had shown not the slightest interest in accompanying them. They left her behind with a command to guard the house. The calico had blinked at their foolishness.

After lunch Jeremy declares that he is going to follow his mother’s admonition to wait an hour before going into the water, but Gail laughs at him and runs into the surf. “It’s warm today!” she shouts from forty feet out. “Really.”

“Uh-huh, sure,” calls Jeremy, but he does not want to doze now. He gets to his feet, steps out of his shorts, and begins walking toward her.

NO!!!

The blast roars from the sky, the earth, and the sea. It knocks Jeremy into the surf and thrusts Gail’s head underwater. She flails, splashes to make the shallows, and crawls gasping from the receding surf.

NO!!!

Jeremy staggers across the wet sand to Gail, lifts her, and holds her against the sudden violence. Wind roars around them and throws sand a hundred feet into the air. The sky twists, wrinkles like a tangled sheet on the line in a high wind, and changes from blue to lemon yellow to a deathly gray. Jeremy hangs on to Gail as they both fall to their knees while the sea rolls out in a giant slack tide and leaves dry, dead land where it recedes. The earth pitches and shifts around them. Lightning flashes along the horizon.

NO!!! PLEASE!

Suddenly the dunes are gone, the cliffs are gone, and the receding sea has disappeared. Where it had been a second before, a dull expanse of salt flat now stretches to infinity. The sky continues to shift down through darker and darker grays.

There is a sudden flash to the east, as if the sun is rising again. No, Jeremy and Gail realize, the light is moving. Something is crossing the wasteland toward them.

They climb to their feet again, Gail starts to break away, but Jeremy holds her tight. There is nowhere to run. The beach and mountain and cliffs behind them are gone … there is only desolation stretching to infinity in each direction … and the light moves across the dead land toward them.

The radiance grows brighter, shifts, sends out streamers that make both of them squint and shield their eyes. The air smells of ozone and the hair on their arms stands out.

Jeremy and Gail find themselves leaning toward the blaze of pure light as if toward a strong wind. Their shadows leap sixty feet behind them and light strikes their bodies like a shock wave from an atomic blast. Through their fingers they watch while the radiance approaches and resolves itself into a double figure just visible through the corona.

It is a human figure astride a great beast. If a god were truly to come to earth, this then is the perfect human form he would choose. The beast the god rides is featureless, but besides its own corona of light it gives off a sense of … warmth, softness, infinite solace.

Robby is before them, high on the back of his teddy bear.

TOO WEAK! CANNOT KEEP

The god is not used to limiting himself to language, but he is making the effort. Each syllable strikes Gail and Jeremy like electrical surges to the brain.

Jeremy tries to reach out with his mind, but it is no use. Once at Haverford he had gone with a promising student to the coliseum where they were setting up for a rock concert. He had been standing in front of a scaffolded bank of speakers when the amplifiers were tested at full volume. This is much worse than that.

They are standing on a flat, reticulated plain. There are no horizons. Above them levels of translucent, gray-colored nothingness cover them like the cold folds of a plastic shroud. White banks of curling fog are approaching now from all directions. The only light comes from the Apollo-like figure before them. Jeremy turns his head to watch the fog advance; what it touches, it erases.

“Jerry, what …” shouts Gail over the rising wind that drowns out their mindtouch.

Suddenly Robby’s thoughts strike them again with physical force. He has given up an attempt at structuring language, and images cascade over them. The visual and auditory images are vaguely distorted, miscolored, and tinged with an aura of wonder and newness around a core of sorrow. Jeremy and Gail reel from their impact.

a white room

the heartbeat of a machine

sunlight on sheets

the sting of a needle

voices and shapes moving

a current pulling, pulling, pulling

With the images comes the emotional overlay, almost unbearable in its knife-sharp intensity: discovery, loneliness, an end to loneliness, wonder, fatigue, love, sadness, sadness, sadness.

Gail looks around in terror as the fog boils and reaches its tendrils for them. It is closing around the god on his mount, already obscuring his brilliance.

Gail sets her face against her husband’s. My God, why is he doing this? Why can’t he leave us alone?

Jeremy raises the volume of his thoughts above the roar all around them. Touch him! Reach him!

They step forward together and Gail extends a shaking hand. The fog obscures all but the fading corona. She jerks at the electric shock as her hand melds with the radiance, but she keeps her hand in place.

My God, Jerry, he’s just a baby. A frightened child.

Jeremy extends his hand until the three are a circle of contact. He’s dying, Gail. He’s been holding me here against terrible forces … he’s been fighting to keep us together, but I can’t stay. He’s too weak to hold me … he can’t resist the pull any longer.

Jerry!

Jeremy pulls away, breaking the circle. If I stay any longer, I’ll destroy us all. With that thought he steps closer and touches Gail on the cheek. Gail sees what he plans and starts to protest, but he pulls her closer and hugs her fiercely. They both feel Robby as part of the embrace, even while Jeremy’s mindtouch amplifies the hug, adding to it all of the shades of feeling that neither human touch nor human language can communicate in full.

Then he pushes away from both of them and turns before he can change his mind. The fog surrounds him almost instantly. One second Robby is visible only as a fading glow in the white mist, an Apollo child clutching the neck of his teddy bear, Gail little more than a gesturing shadow next to him, and then they are gone and Jeremy is plunging deeper into the cold whiteness.

Five paces into the fog and he can see nothing, not even his own body.

Three more paces and the ground drops out from beneath him.

Then he is falling.