The Hollow Man (24 page)
Authors: Dan Simmons
He ignored it and crawled toward the door, looking back.
Miz Morgan had chewed her way through the gauze curtains and was on the floor, crawling after him with a great scrabbling of lacquered fingernails on the bare wood floors. The prosthesis thrust her jaws forward in almost lycanthropic eagerness.
Bremen had left a trail of blood on the floorboards and the woman seemed to be sniffing at it as she came at him across the slick wood.
He rose to his feet and ran, bouncing off the walls of the hallway and the furniture of the living room, leaving a red smear on the couch as he tumbled and rolled over it, got to his feet, and leaped for the door. Then he was out in the night, breathing cold air and holding his jeans closed with one hand, the other hand flat against his bleeding thigh as he ran straight-legged down the hill.
The rottweilers were going insane behind the high
wire, leaping and snarling. Bremen heard laughter and turned, still running; Miz Morgan was in the dimly lighted doorway, her gown totally transparent and her body looking tall and strong.
She was laughing between the razor blades in her mouth.
Bremen saw the long object in her hands just as she made a familiar motion and he heard the unmistakable sound of the sixteen-gauge shotgun being pumped. He tried to weave back and forth, but the wound on his leg slowed him and turned the weaving into a series of awkward lurches, as if the Tin Man, half-rusted, were attempting an end run. Bremen felt like weeping and laughing, but did neither.
He glanced back to see Miz Morgan lean inside, the generator kicked on up behind the cold house, and suddenly the driveway below the hacienda, the bunkhouse area, the barn, and the first three hundred feet of field below the house were bathed in glare as huge arc lamps turned night into day.
She’s done this before
. Bremen had been running blindly toward the bunkhouse and the Jeep, but then he remembered that the vehicle had been moved and was certain that Miz Morgan had pulled the distributor cap or something equally as necessary. He tried to read her thoughts—as repulsive as that idea was—but the white noise had returned, louder than ever. He was back in the hurricane.
She’s done this before. So many times before
. Bremen knew that if he ran toward the river or the highway, she would easily run him down in the Jeep or Toyota. The bunkhouse was an obvious trap.
Bremen slid to a stop on the brightly illuminated gravel and snapped his jeans shut. He bent over to inspect the wounds on his leg and hip and almost fainted; his heart
was pounding so hard that he could hear it like footsteps raging behind him. Bremen took deep, slow breaths and fought away the black spots that swam in his vision.
His jeans were soaked with blood and both wounds were still bleeding, but neither one was spurting the way an artery would.
If it was an artery, I’d be dead
. Bremen fought away the light-headedness, stood, and looked back toward the hacienda sixty yards behind him.
Miz Morgan had pulled on jeans and her tall work boots and come out on the porch. Her upper body was clad only in the blood-spattered nightgown. Her mouth and jaw looked different, but Bremen was too far away to tell for sure if she had removed the prosthesis.
She opened a circuit-breaker box on the south end of the porch and more arc lamps leaped on down by the stream, along the driveway.
Bremen felt that he was standing in an empty coliseum, lit for a night game.
Miz Morgan raised the pump shotgun and casually fired in his direction. Bremen leaped to the side, although he knew he was beyond critical range of the shotgun. Pellets pounded on the gravel nearby.
He looked around again, fighting the panic that joined with the roaring white noise to cloud his thinking, and then he turned left, toward the boulders behind the hacienda.
More arc lights snapped on up behind the rocks, but Bremen kept climbing, feeling the leg wound begin to bleed again. He felt as if someone had scooped out the flesh on his hip with a razored ice-cream dip.
Behind him, there was a second shotgun blast and then snarls and howls as Miz Morgan let loose the dogs.
A
few weeks before Gail’s headaches are diagnosed as a brain tumor, Jeremy receives this letter from Jacob Goldmann:
My dearest Jeremy:
I am still trying to get over your and Gail’s most recent visit and the results of your offer to “be guinea pigs” for the deep-cortical mapping. The results continue to be—as we discussed in person and on the phone last Thursday—astounding. There is no other word.
I respect your privacy, and your wishes, and will make no more attempts to convince you to join me in a study of this so-called mindtouch that the two of you say you have experienced since puberty. If your simple exhibitions of this telepathy had not
been convincing enough, the DCM data that continues to flow in would be enough to turn anyone into a believer. I certainly am. In a way, I am relieved that we will not be going down this particular detour in our research, although you must see what a bombshell this revelation has been for one elderly physicist-turned-neural-researcher.
Meanwhile, your most recent mailing of mathematical analysis, while largely beyond me, has turned out to be an even more explosive bombshell. This one may well make the Manhattan Project seem like very small potatoes indeed.
If I understand your fractal and chaos analysis correctly (and, as you say, the data hardly leaves room for an alternative hypothesis) then the human mind goes far beyond our wildest dreams of complexity.
If your two-dimensional plot of human holographic consciousness via the Packard-Takens method is reliable—and again, I have confidence that it is—then the mind is not merely the self-consciousness organ of the universe, but (excuse the oversimplification) its ultimate arbiter. I understand your use of the chaos term “strange attractor” as a description of the mind’s role in creating fractal “resonance islands” within the chaotic sea of collapsing probability waves, but it is still difficult to conceive of a universe largely without form except that imposed upon it by human observation.
It is the alternate-probability scenario which you broach at the end of your letter which gives me pause. (So much so, in fact, that I have interrupted the deep cortical mapping experiments until I have thought through the tautological implications of this very possible plausibility.)
Jeremy, I wonder at the ability you and Gail
share: how frequent it is, how many gradations of it there are, how basic to the human experience it must be.
You remember when we were drinking my twenty-year-old scotch after the first results of your and Gail’s DC-mapping came in and you had explained the basis for the anomalies: I suggested—not after the first drink, if I remember correctly—that perhaps some of the great minds in human history had shared such a “universal interferometer” type of mind. Thus Gandhi and Einstein, Jesus and Newton, Galileo and my old friend Jonny von Neumann possessed a similar (but obviously slightly different!) form of “mindtouch” where they could resonate to different aspects of existence—the physical underpinnings of the universe, the psychological and moral underpinnings of our small human part of the universe—whatever.
I remember you were embarrassed. That was not my goal in suggesting this possibility and it is not my goal now that I repeat the hypothesis.
We are—all of us—the universe’s eyes. Those of you with this incredible ability, whether blessed to see into the heart of the human soul or the heart of the universe itself, are the mechanism by which we focus those eyes and direct our gaze.
Think, Jeremy: Einstein performed his “Gendanken Experimenten” and the universe created a new probability branch to suit our improved vision. Probability waves crashing on the dry beach of eternity.
Moses and Jesus perceived new motions of those stars which govern our moral life, and the universe grows alternative realities to validate the observation. Probability waves collapsing. Neither particle nor wave until the observer enters the equation.
Incredible. And even more incredible is your interpretation of Everett’s, Wheeler’s, and DeWitt’s work. Each moment of such “deep gazing” creating separate and equal probability universes. Ones which we can never visit, but can bring into actual existence at moments of great decision in our own lives on this continuum.
Somewhere, Jeremy, the Holocaust did not exist. Somewhere my first wife and family possibly still live.
I must think about this. I will be in touch with you and Gail very soon. I must think about this.
Most sincerely yours,
Jacob
Five days after the letter arrives, Jeremy and Gail receive a late-night call from Rebecca, Jacob’s daughter. Jacob Goldmann had eaten dinner with her earlier that evening and then retired to his office “to finish some work on the data.” Rebecca had run some errands and returned to the office around midnight.
Jacob Goldmann had committed suicide with a Luger that he had kept in the bottom drawer of his desk.
L
imping, 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.
