The Hollow Man (10 page)

The thief cursed and covered the pistol again with his jacket.

Bremen continued to back away.

“I fucking
mean
it!” shouted Vanni Fucci, appearing to lift both hands under the jacket.

A family from Hubbard, Ohio, stopped to blink at the strange procession—Bremen backing slowly away, the little man following him with both arms raised, the lump under the jacket pointing at Bremen’s chest—and Bremen watched incuriously through their curious eyes. The younger daughter gnawed away a bit of cotton candy and continued to stare at the two men. A wisp of white-spun sugar clung to her cheek.

Bremen continued to back away.

Vanni Fucci began to leap forward, was blocked for a
moment by three laughing nuns passing by, and started to run as he saw Bremen backing across a patch of grass toward the wall of a building. The thief let the muzzle of the pistol slide free. He’d be damned if he’d ruin a perfectly good jacket on this fucking geek.

Bremen saw himself reflected as if from a score of twisted fun-house mirrors. Thomas Geer, nineteen, saw the exposed pistol and stopped in surprise, his hand pulling free from Terri’s hip pocket.

Mrs. Frieda Hackstein and her grandson Benjamin stumbled into Thomas Geer and Bennie’s Mickey Mouse balloon floated skyward. The child began to cry.

Through their eyes, Bremen watched himself back into a wall. He watched Vanni Fucci raise the pistol. Bremen thought nothing, felt nothing.

Through little Bennie’s eyes Bremen saw that there was a sign on a door behind him. It read
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
and, beneath that,
EMPLOYEES USE SECURITY ACCESS CARD
. There was a slot in a metal box on the wall, presumably for security access cards, but the door had been left propped open an inch by a small stick.

Mrs. Hackstein stepped forward and began shouting at Thomas Geer for making them lose Benjamin’s balloon. For a second she blocked Vanni Fucci’s view.

Bremen stepped through the door, kicked the stick away, and clicked the door shut behind him. Dim lights showed a concrete stairway descending. Bremen followed it down twenty-five steps, followed a turn to the right, and descended another dozen steps. The stairway opened onto a long corridor. Mechanical sounds echoed from far away.

Morlocks
, thought Gail.

Bremen gasped as if struck in the stomach, sat on the third step for a moment, and rubbed his eyes.
Not Gail
.
No
. He had read about the phantom pain amputees suffered in their amputated limbs. This was worse. Much worse. He rose and moved down the corridor, trying to look as if he belonged there. The ebbing of neurobabble left him even emptier than he had been a moment before.

The corridor crossed other corridors, passed other stairways. Cryptic signs on the walls pointed arrows toward
AUDIOANIMLABS
6–10 or
TRANSWASTEDISP
44–66 or
CHARACTLOUNGES
2–5. Bremen thought that the last sounded least threatening and turned down that corridor. Suddenly a giant insect whine rose from an intersecting corridor and Bremen had to hustle back a dozen paces and step up onto an empty stairway while a golf cart hummed by. Neither the man nor the partially disassembled robot in the cart looked Bremen’s way.

He descended to the corridor and moved slowly, ears straining for the sound of another golf cart. Suddenly laughter echoed around the next turn and Bremen took five steps and turned into what he had hoped would be another stairway, but which was only a much narrower corridor.

He walked down the hallway, hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to whistle. The laughter and conversation grew louder behind him as someone turned into the corridor he had just vacated. He realized their destination and his mistake at the same moment.

The hallway ended at two broad doors, above which the sign read:
BE SURE TO REMOVE YOUR HEAD BEFORE ENTERING
. The doors were stenciled
CHARACTER LOUNGE
3 with a no-smoking sign under the stenciling. Bremen could hear more conversation from the other side of the doors. He had about three seconds before the voices behind him reached the hallway.

To his left was a windowless gray door with a single
word:
MEN
. Bremen stepped through just as three men and a woman turned into the long hallway behind him.

The rest room was empty, although a tall figure on the far wall made him jump. Bremen blinked. It was a Goofy suit, at least six and a half feet tall, hanging on a hook near the sinks.

Voices rose outside the door and Bremen slipped into a toilet stall and closed the door, latching it with a sigh of relief. No one would demand an ID badge in here. Doors opened and the voices receded into the Character Lounge.

Bremen lowered his head into his hands and tried to concentrate.

What the hell am I doing?
His mind’s voice was barely audible above the constant roar of neurobabble from the tens of thousands of fun-seeking souls above him.

Running
, he answered himself.
Hiding
.

Why?

The neurobabble hissed and surged.

Why? Why not just tell the authorities what happened? Lead the police back to the lake? Tell them about Vanni Fucci
.

Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, let’s have fun, goddamn it, these three days are costing me a fortune.…

Bremen squeezed his temples.

Uh-huh. Tell the authorities. Let the cops call to confirm your identity and find out that you’re the guy who just burned down his house and disappeared … then you just
happen
to be on hand when a gangster dumps a dead body. And how, pray tell, sir, did you happen to get both the gangster’s and corpse’s names?

Why did I burn down the house?

No, later. Later. Think about that later
.

No cops. No explanations. If you think this place is hell, try a night or two in a holding cell. Wonder what’s in your
bunkmates’ little craniums … do you want a night or two of
that,
Jeremy old boy?

Bremen unlocked the stall, walked to the urinal against the wall, tried to urinate, couldn’t, zipped up, and went over to the sink. The cold water helped. He was startled as the pale, sick face rose up in the mirror in front of him.

To hell with the cops. To hell with Vanni Fucci and his pals. Just go away from here. Go away
.

There were more voices in the hall. Bremen whirled, but although the door to the ladies’ rest room across the hall banged open, no one came in here. Not yet.

Bremen stood there a second, flicking water from his cheeks. The trick, he realized, was not just getting out of this labyrinth unchallenged, but getting out of the park itself. Vanni Fucci would have met up with the other gangsters by now—Sal, Bert, and Ernie, Bremen remembered—and they would be watching the exits.

Bremen found a paper towel and dried his face. Suddenly he froze and lowered the towel. There were two faces in the mirror, and one of them was grinning at him.

The golf cart came up behind Bremen in one of the main corridors. The heavyset man behind the wheel said, “Wanta ride?”

Bremen nodded and got in. The cart hummed ahead, following a blue stripe in the concrete. Other carts passed going the other way, following a yellow stripe. The second one that passed carried three security guards.

The driver shifted an unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth and said, “You don’t have to wear your head down here, you know.”

Bremen nodded and shrugged.

“It’s your sweat,” said the man. “Headin’ out or in?”

Bremen pointed upward.

“Which exit?”

“The castle,” said Bremen, hoping his voice was suitably muffled.

The driver frowned. “The castle? You mean Forecourt B-four? Or the A side?”

“B-four,” said Bremen, and stifled the urge to scratch his head through the heavy material.

“Yeah, I’m goin’ by there,” said the driver, and turned right down a different corridor. A minute later he stopped the cart by a stairway. The sign read
FORECOURT B
-4.

Bremen slid out and gave the man a friendly salute.

The driver nodded, shifted his cigar, and said, “Don’t let the little fuckers stick any pins in you like they did Johnson,” and then he was gone, the cart whining into the dim distance. Bremen went up the stairway as quickly as his limited visibility and oversized shoes would allow.

He was almost out, down the phony length of Main Street and out, when the children began to gather around.

At first he kept walking, all but ignoring them, but their shouts and his fear of being noticed by adults made him pause and sit on a bench for a moment, letting them circle him.

“Hey, Goofy, hi!” they cried, pressing in. Bremen did what he thought characters were supposed to do … overacted, stayed silent, and raised his fat-gloved, three-fingered hand to his bulging pooch nose as if embarrassed. The kids loved it. They crowded closer, trying to sit on his lap, hugging him.

Bremen hugged them back and acted like Goofy. Parents took pictures and shot video. Bremen blew them kisses, hugged a few more kids, got to his oversized, cartoon
feet, and began shuffling away toward the exits, waving and blowing kisses as he went.

The pack of kids and their parents moved away, laughing and waving. Bremen turned and confronted a quite different group of children.

There were at least a dozen. The youngest might have been about six, the oldest no more than fifteen. Few of them had any hair, although most wore caps or bandannas, and one girl—Melody—wore an expensive wig. Their faces were as pale as Bremen’s had been in the rest-room mirror. Their eyes were large. Some were smiling. Some were trying to smile.

“Hey, Goofy,” said Terry, the nine-year-old boy in the last stages of bone cancer. He was in a wheelchair.

“Hi, Goofy!” called Sestina, the six-year-old black girl from Bethesda. She was very beautiful, her large eyes and sharp cheekbones emphasizing her fragility. Her hair was her own and set in precise cornrows; she wore blue, green, and pink ribbons. She had AIDS.

“Say something, Goofy!” whispered Lawrence, the thirteen-year-old with the brain tumor. Four operations so far. Two more than Gail had had. Lawrence, lying in the dark of postop and hearing Dr. Graynemeir telling Mom in the hallway that the prognosis was poor, three months at the most. That had been seven weeks ago.

Seven-year-old Melody said nothing, but stepped forward and hugged Bremen until her wig was askew. Bremen—Goofy—hugged her back.

The children surged forward in a single movement, an orchestrated motion, as if choreographed far in advance. It was not humanly possible, even for Goofy, to hug them all at once, to find room in the circle of his arms for them all, but he did. Goofy embraced them all and sent a message of well-being and hope and love to each of them,
firing it in laserlike telepathic surges of the sort he had sent to Gail when the pain and medication made mindtouch the hardest. He was sure they could not hear him, could not sense the messages, but he sent them anyway, even while encompassing them with his arms and whispering soft things in each of their ears—not Goofy-like nonsense, although in Goofy’s voice as best as he could imitate it—but secret and personal things.

“Melody, it’s all right, your mother knows about the mistake with the piano music. It’s all right. She doesn’t care. She loves you.”

“Lawrence, quit worrying about the money. The money’s not important. The insurance isn’t important.
You’re
important.”

“Sestina, they
do
want to be with you, little kitten. Toby’s just afraid to give you a hug because he thinks you
don’t like him
. He’s shy.”

The parents and nurses and trip sponsors … a woman from Green Bay had been working on this Dream for two years … all stood back while this strange hugging and huddling and whispering continued.

Ten minutes later Goofy touched the children’s cheeks a final time, waved jauntily, and walked down the rest of Main Street, rode the monorail around its circuit, stepped off at the Transportation and Ticket Center, walked out past the ticket booths, saluted Sal Empori and Bert Cappi and a red-faced Vanni Fucci where they stood watching the crowd, sauntered out to the parking lot, and boarded a chartered bus just leaving for the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress. The elderly tourists on board the bus cheered and patted Goofy on the back.

Bert Cappi turned to Vanni Fucci. “You believe this goddamn place?”

Vanni Fucci’s gaze never left the crowd streaming out toward the shuttles. “Shut the fuck up and keep fucking looking,” he said.

Behind them the bus for the Hyatt pulled away with a hiss and a roar.

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 important, 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.