Prayers to Broken Stones

  “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.”

  At the Violet Hour

  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 som
e 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.

  A more practical reason for Bremen not returning there was simply that he did not know the way. He knew only that the fishing shack was somewhere closer to Miami than to Orlando, on the edge of a lake and a swamp. Bremen thought about phoning Norm Sr. from Denver, asking that the bulk of the money be wired to a P.O. box in Denver, but he remembered seeing no name on the little store and Norm Sr. had never thought of his own last name when Bremen was eavesdropping. The refuge of the fishing shack was lost forever.

  It was only two hundred and fifty-some miles from Orlando to Tallahassee, but it was after five A.M. by the time the bus pulled through the rain-silent streets of the capital and hissed to a stop. “Rest break!” called the driver, and quickly disembarked. Bremen lay back in his seat and dozed until the others reboarded. He already knew his fellow passengers very well and their return echoed in his skull like shouts in a metal pipe. The bus pulled out at 5:42 A.M. and leisurely found its way back to Interstate 10 West while Bremen squeezed his temples and tried to concentrate on his own dreams.

  Two rows behind him sat a young marine, Burk Stemens, and a young WAF sergeant named Alice Jean Dernitz. They had not met until boarding the bus in Orlando, but they were quickly becoming more than friends. Neither had slept much during the past seven hours; each had told the other more about his or her life than either had ever revealed to their mates, past or present. Burk had just gotten out of fourteen months in the brig for assaulting a noncommissioned officer with a knife. He had traded a dishonorable discharge from the marines for the final four months of his sentence and was now on his way home to Fort Worth to see his wife, Debra Anne, and his two infants. He did not tell Alice Jean about Debra Anne.

  Sergeant Dernitz was two months away from a quite honorable discharge from the air force and was spending the bulk of that time on leave. She had been married twice, the last time to the brother of her first husband. She had divorced the first brother, Warren Bill, and lost the second, William Earl, four months ago; he had been killed when his Mustang went off a Tennessee mountain road at eighty-five miles per hour. Alice Jean hadn’t cared too much by then. She and brother number two had been separated for almost a year before the accident. She did not tell Burk about either Warren Bill or the late William Earl.

  Burk and Alice Jean had been inching toward intimacy since Gainesville, and by Lake City, just before I-75 encountered I-10, they had ceased swapping barracks stories and gotten down to the business at hand. As they passed Lake City Alice Jean was pretending to nap and had let her head fall on Burk’s shoulder, while Burk had put his arm around her and let his hand “accidently” fall to her left breast.

  By the suburbs of Tallahassee both were breathing shallowly, Burk’s hand was inside her blouse, and Alice Jean’s hand was on Burk’s lap under the jacket he had spread like a robe across both of them. She had just unzipped his pants when the driver announced the rest break.

  Bremen had been prepared to spend the rest break in the tiny bus station rather than suffer the next stage of their slow and painful foreplay, but luckily Burk had whispered in Alice Jean’s ear and both had left the bus, Burk holding his jacket rather clumsily in front of himself. They had thoughts of trying their luck in a storeroom or … if all else failed … in the ladies’ rest room.

  Bremen tried to doze with the other sleeping passengers aboard the bus, but Burk and Alice Jean’s contortions—it had been the ladies’ rest room—assaulted him even from a distance. Their love-making was as banal and short-lived as their loyalty to their current and former mates.

  By the time the bus was approaching Pensacola it was almost ten A.M. and everyone aboard was awake and the highway sounds had taken on a new timbre. Storm clouds lay heavy in the west, the direction they were headed, but a thick, low light from the east painted the fields on either side in rich hues and threw the shadow of their bus ahead of them. The neurobabble was much louder than the hiss of tires on asphalt.

  Across the aisle and three rows ahead of Bremen were a couple from Missouri. As far as Bremen could sort out, their names were Donnie and Donna. He was very drunk; she was very pregnant. Both were in their early twenties, although from the glimpses Bremen got through the seats ahead—and occasionally from Donnie’s perception—Donna looked at least fifty. The two were not married, although Donna considered their four-year relationship a common-law marriage. Donnie didn’t think of it that way.

  The couple had been on a seventeen-day odyssey across the nation trying to find the best place to have the baby and while having welfare pay for it. They had ricocheted east from St. Louis to Columbus, Ohio, on the advice of a Missouri friend, had found Columbus no more generous in its welfare policies than St. Louis, and then had started on an endless series of bus trips—charging it all to Donna’s sister’s husband’s borrowed credit card—going from Columbus to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C.… where they were shocked at how poorly the nation’s capital treated its deserving citizens … and then from Washington to Huntsville because of something they had read in the National Enquirer about Huntsville being one of the ten friendliest cities in America.

  Huntsville had been terrible. The hospitals would not even admit Donna unless it was an emergency or proof of their ability to pay was shown in advance. Donnie had started drinking in earnest in Huntsville and had dragged Donna out of the hospital while shaking his fist and hurling curses at doctors, administrators, nurses, and even at a cluster of patients staring from their wheelchairs.

  The trip to Orlando had been bad, with the credit card approaching its max and Donna saying that she was definitely feeling contractions now, but Donnie had never seen Walt Disney World and he figured that they were close, so what the hell?

  Brother-in-law Dickie’s card lasted long enough to get them into the Magic Kingdom, and Bremen noticed through Donnie’s drunken memories that the two had been there while he had been fleeing Vanni Fucci. Small world. Bremen pressed his cheek and temple to the glass hard enough to drive thoughts away, to form a barrier between these new wavelengths of foreign thoughts and his own bruised mind.

  It did not work.

  Donnie hadn’t enjoyed the Magic Kingdom much, even though he’d waited his whole life to go there, because goddamn spoilsport Donna refused to go on any of the real rides with him. She’d ruined his fun by standing, ponderous as a cow heavy with two heifers, and waving as he’d boarded Space Mountain and Splash Mountain and all the fun rides. She’d said it was because her water broke an hour after coming into the park, but Donnie knew it was mostly to spite him.

  She’d insisted on going into Orlando that evening, saying the pains were starting in earnest now, but Donnie had left her wedged in one of the TV chairs in the bus station while he checked out the hospitals by phone. They were worse than Huntsville or Atlanta or St. Louis about their payment policies.

  Donnie had used the last of Dickie’s credit card to get them tickets from Orlando to Oklahoma City. A toothless old fart sitting near the phone banks in the bus station had overheard Donnie’s angry queries on the phone and—after Donnie had slammed the phone down for the last time—had suggested Oklahoma City. “Best goddamn place in the goddamn country to get born for free,” the old fart had said, showing an expanse of gums. “Had me two sisters and one of my wives who calved there. Them Oklahoma City hospitals just put it on Medicare and don’t bother you none.”

  So they were o
ff to Houston with connecting tickets for Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Donna was whimpering more than a little now, saying that the contractions were just a few minutes apart, but as Donnie drank more sour mash he grew increasingly certain that she was lying just to ruin his trip.

  Donna was not lying.

  Bremen felt her pain as if it were his own. He had timed the contractions with his watch, and they had moved from almost seven minutes apart in Tallahassee to less than two minutes separating them by the time they crossed the state line into Alabama. Donna would whimper at Donnie, tugging at his sleeve in the dark and hissing invective, but he would shove her away. He was busy talking with the man across the aisle, Meredith Soloman, the toothless old fart who had suggested Oklahoma City. Donnie had shared his sour mash until Gainesville, and Meredith Soloman had shared his own flask of something even stronger from there onward.

  Just before the tunnel to Mobile, Donna had said, loud enough for the entire bus to hear, “Goddamn you to hell, Donnie Ackley, if you’re gonna make me drop this goddamn kid here on this bus, at least give me a swig of what you’re drinkin’ with that toothless old fart.”

  Donnie had shushed her, knowing they’d be thrown off the bus if the driver heard too much about the drinking, had apologized to Meredith Soloman, and had let her drink heavily from the flask. Incredibly, her contractions slowed and returned to pre-Tallahassee intervals. Donna fell asleep, her dimmed consciousness rising and falling on the waves of cramping that flowed through her for the next few hours.

  Donnie continued to apologize to Meredith Soloman, but the old man had shown his gums again, reached into his soiled ditty bag, and brought out another unlabeled bottle of white lightning.

  Donnie and Meredith took turns drinking the fierce booze and sharing views on the worst way to die.

  Meredith Soloman was sure that a cave-in or gas explosion was the worst way to go. As long as it didn’t kill you right away. It was the layin’ there and waitin’, in the cold and dank and dark a mile beneath the surface with the helmet lights fadin’ and the air getting foul … that had to be the worst way to go. He should know, Meredith Soloman explained, since he’d worked in the deep mines of West Virginia as man and boy long before Donnie’d been born. Meredith’s pap had died down in the mines, as had his brother Tucker and his brother-in-law Phillip P. Argent. Meredith allowed as how it was a terrible shame about his pap and brother Tucker, but no cave-in had served humanity better than the one that took that low-life, foulmouthed, mean-spirited Phillip P. in 1972. As for sixty-eight-year-old Meredith Soloman, he’d been caved in on three times and blown up twice, but they’d always dug him out. Each time, though, he’d sworn he was never goin’ down again … no one could make him go down again. Not his wives … he’d had four, one after the other, y’understand, even the young things don’t last too long back in the hollers of West Virginia, what with pneumonia and childbirth and all … not his wives, or his kin … real kin, not bastards-in-law like Phillip P.… nor even his own children, them grown up nor them still in bare feet, could talk him into goin’ back down.