Prayers to Broken Stones (55 page)

The manager of the Mansard House recognized me. His eyebrow went up a fraction of an inch as he noticed my disheveled appearance. The girl stood ten feet away in the foyer, half-hidden in the shadows.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I said brightly. “A Mrs. Drayton.”

The manager started to speak, paused, frowned without being aware of it, and tried again. “I’m sorry. No one under that name is registered here.”

“Perhaps she registered under her maiden name,” I said. “Nina Hawkins. She’s an older woman but very attractive. A few years younger than me. Long gray hair. Her friend may have registered for her … a young, dark-haired lady named Barrett Kramer …”

“No, I’m sorry,” said the manager in a strangely flat tone. “No one under that name has registered. Would you like to leave a message in case your party arrives later?”

“No,” I said. “No message.”

I brought the girl into the lobby, and we turned down a corridor leading to the restrooms and side stairs. “Excuse me, please,” I said to a passing porter. “Perhaps you can help me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stopped, annoyed, and brushed back his long hair. It would be tricky. If I was not to lose the girl, I would have to act quickly.

“I’m looking for a friend,” I said. “She’s an older lady but quite attractive. Blue eyes. Long, gray hair. She travels with a young woman who has dark, curly hair.”

“No, ma’am. No one like that is registered here.”

I reached out and held his forearm tightly. I released the girl and focused on the boy. “Are you sure?”

“Mrs. Harrison,” he said. His eyes looked past me. “Room 207. North front.”

I smiled.
Mrs. Harrison.
Good God, what a fool Nina was. Suddenly the girl let out a small whimper and slumped against the wall. I made a quick decision. I like to think that it was compassion, but I sometimes remember that her left arm was useless.

“What’s your name?” I asked the child, gently stroking her hair. Her eyes moved left and right in confusion. “Your
name,
” I prompted.

“Alicia.” It was only a whisper.

“All right, Alicia. I want you to go home now. Hurry, but don’t run.”

“My
arm
hurts,” she said. Her lips began to quiver. I touched her forehead again and
pushed.

“You’re going home,” I said. “Your arm does not hurt. You won’t remember anything. This is like a dream that you will forget. Go home. Hurry, but do not run.” I took the pistol from her but left it wrapped in the sweater. “Bye-bye, Alicia.”

She blinked and crossed the lobby to the door. I handed the gun to the bellhop. “Put it under your vest,” I said.

“Who is it?” Nina’s voice was light.

“Albert, ma’am. The porter. Your car’s out front and I’m ready to carry your bags down.”

There was the sound of a lock clicking and the door opened the width of a still-secured chain. Albert blinked in the glare, smiled shyly, and brushed his hair back. I pressed against the wall.

“Very well.” She undid the chain and moved back. She had already turned and was latching her suitcase when I stepped into the room.

“Hello, Nina,” I said softly. Her back straightened, but even that move was graceful. I could see the imprint on the bedspread where she had been lying. She turned slowly. She was wearing a pink dress I had never seen before.

“Hello, Melanie.” She smiled. Her eyes were the softest, purest blue I had ever seen. I had the porter take Mr. Hodges’s gun out and aim it. His arm was steady. He pulled back the hammer until it locked in place. Nina folded her hands in front of her. Her eyes never left mine.

“Why?” I asked.

Nina shrugged ever so slightly. For a second I thought she was going to laugh. I could not have borne it had she laughed—that husky, childlike laugh that had touched me so many times. Instead she closed her eyes. Her smile remained.

“Why Mrs. Harrison?” I asked.

“Why, darling, I felt I owed him
something.
I mean, poor Roger. Did I ever tell you how he died? No, of course I didn’t. And you never asked, Melanie dear.” Her eyes opened. I glanced at the porter, but his aim was steady. It only remained for him to exert a little more pressure on the trigger.

“He
drowned,
darling,” said Nina. “Poor Roger threw himself from that steamship—what was its name?—the one that was taking him back to England. So strange. And he had just written me a letter promising marriage. Isn’t that a
terribly
sad story, Melanie? Why do you think he did a thing like that? I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

“I guess we never will,” I said. I silently ordered the porter to pull the trigger.

Nothing.

I looked quickly to my right. The young man’s head was turning toward me. I
had not made him do that.
The stiffly extended arm began to swing in my direction. The pistol moved smoothly like the tip of a weather vane swinging in the wind.

No!
I strained until the cords in my neck stood out. The turning slowed but did not stop until the muzzle was pointing at my face. Nina laughed now. The sound was very loud in the little room.

“Good-bye, Melanie
dear,
” Nina said, and laughed again. She laughed and nodded at the porter. I stared into the black hole as the hammer fell.

On an empty chamber. And another. And another.

“Good-bye, Nina,” I said as I pulled Charles’s long pistol from my raincoat pocket. The explosion jarred my wrist and filled the room with blue smoke. A small hole, smaller than a dime but as perfectly round, appeared in the precise center of Nina’s forehead. For the briefest second she remained standing as if nothing had happened. Then she fell backward, recoiled from the high bed, and dropped face forward onto the floor.

I turned to the porter and replaced his useless weapon with the ancient but well-maintained revolver. For the first time I noticed that the boy was not much younger than Charles had been. His hair was almost exactly the same color. I leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips.

“Albert,” I whispered, “there are four cartridges left. One must always count the cartridges, mustn’t one? Go to the lobby. Kill the manager. Shoot one other person, the nearest. Put the barrel in your mouth and pull the trigger. If it misfires, pull it again. Keep the gun concealed until you are in the lobby.”

We emerged into general confusion in the hallway.

“Call for an ambulance!” I cried. “There’s been an accident. Someone call for an ambulance!” Several people rushed to comply. I swooned and leaned against a white-haired gentleman. People milled around, some peering into the room and exclaiming. Suddenly there was the sound of three gunshots from the lobby. In the renewed confusion I slipped down the back stairs, out the fire door, into the night.

Time has passed. I am very happy here. I live in southern France now, between Cannes and Toulon, but not, I am happy to say, too near St. Tropez.

I rarely go out. Henri and Claude do my shopping in the village. I never go to the beach. Occasionally I go to the townhouse in Paris or to my pensione in Italy, south of
Pescara, on the Adriatic. But even those trips have become less and less frequent.

There is an abandoned abbey in the hills behind my home, and I sometimes go there to sit and think among the stones and wild flowers. I think about isolation and abstinence and how each is so cruelly dependent upon the other.

I feel younger these days. I tell myself that this is because of the climate and my freedom and not as a result of that final Feeding. But sometimes I dream about the familiar streets of Charleston and the people there. They are dreams of hunger.

On some days I rise to the sound of singing as girls from the village cycle by our place on their way to the dairy. On those days the sun is marvelously warm as it shines on the small white flowers growing between the tumbled stones of the abbey, and I am content simply to be there and to share the sunlight and silence with them.

But on other days—cold, dark days when the clouds move in from the north—I remember the shark-silent shape of a submarine moving through the dark waters of the bay, and I wonder whether my self-imposed abstinence will be for nothing. I wonder whether those I dream of in my isolation will indulge in their own gigantic, final Feeding.

It is warm today. I am happy. But I am also alone. And I am very, very hungry.

Here is a preview of
THE HOLLOW MAN
by Dan Simmons

Coming in hardcover in August 1992

Dan Simmons has tried something different—and succeeded—with every book he has written. From
Song of Kali,
which won the World Fantasy Award, to
Hyperion,
which received the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, to
Carrion Comfort,
named best novel of the year by the Horror Writers of America, he has explored new landscapes and won new readers with every book.

Now comes
The Hollow Man,
which draws together elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and some of the world’s finest literature. Here is what Mr. Simmons has to say about his upcoming novel:

“The Hollow Man
is a labor of love which—like so many labors of love—proved to be back-breaking, gut-wrenching, and mind-bending. On the surface, the story is a simple one about a traumatized telepath wandering America after the death of his wife.
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead/ The other powerless to be born
” which so obsessed Dante, Thomas Aquinas, T.S. Eliot, and Joseph Conrad. Besides committing the hubris of dealing with themes suggested by these literary geniuses, I found myself wrestling with such contemporary concepts as chaos mathematics and how it applies to the human mind. The result was a unique, exhilarating, and often terrifying intellectual ride for the writer, and I hope it will prove such for the reader.”

A little over half of Bremen’s remaining money would buy him a bus ticket to Denver. He bought it and slept in the park across from the Hyatt where he had dumped the Goofy suit. The bus departed Orlando at 11:15 that night. He waited until the last minute to board, coming in through a maintenance entrance and walking straight to the bus, his head down and collar up. He saw no one who looked like a gangster; more importantly, the surge and rasp of neurobabble had not been punctuated by the shock of recognition from any of the bystanders.

By one
A.M
. they were halfway to Gainesville and Bremen began to relax, watching out the window at the closed stores and mercury vapor lamps lining the streets of Ocala and a dozen smaller towns. The neurobabble was less this late at night. For years Bremen and Gail had been convinced that much of the effect of the so-called circadian rhythm on human beings was nothing more than nascent telepathy in most people sensing the national dream sleep around them. It was very hard to stay awake this night, although Bremen’s nerves were jumping and twitching with the ricocheting thoughts of those two dozen or so people still awake aboard the bus. The dreams of the others added to the mental din, although dreams were deeper, more private theaters of the mind, and not nearly so accessible.

Bremen thanked God for that.

They were on Interstate 75 and headed north out of Gainesville when Bremen began to ponder his situation.

Why hadn’t he gone back to the fishing shack? Somehow his home of the past three days seemed like the only haven in
the world for him now. Why hadn’t he returned … for his money if nothing else?

Bremen knew that part of it was that it seemed almost certain that Vanni Fucci or Sal Empori or some of their cronies would be watching the place. And Bremen had no desire to get Norm Sr. or the old man Verge in trouble with gangsters on his account.

He thought of the rental car parked there. But Verge or Norm Sr. would have found him missing by now. And found the money in the cabin. That would certainly settle the bill with the rental people. Would Norm Sr. call the police about his disappearance? Unlikely. And what if he did? Bremen had never given his name, never shown his driver’s license. The two men had respected Bremen’s privacy to the extent that there was little they could tell the police about him other than his description.