The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page A

Sr. had packed, and had offered one to Verge. The old man did not refuse, and Bremen basked in the warm glow of the old man’s wordless thoughts as they sat in the warm twilight and sipped their equally warm beers.
    Later, after his guide had left, Bremen sat on the dock and fished. Not worrying about choice of bait or strength of line or what kind of fish he was going after, he had dangled his legs off the rough planks, listened to the swamp and river come alive with bullfrogs in the fading light, and caught more fish than he had ever dreamed of. Bremen knew that some were catfish from their whiskers, that several were longer, thinner, and tougher fighters, and that one actually looked like a rainbow trout, although he considered that unlikely … but he threw them all back. He had enough for three nights’ dinners and he needed no fish. It was the
process
of fishing that was therapeutic; it was
fishing
that lulled his mind intosome vestige of peace after the madness of the preceding days and weeks.
    Later on that first day’s night, sometime after it grew dark (Bremen did not consult his watch), he had gone into the shack, prepared a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich for dinner, washed it down with another beer, cleaned the dishes and then himself, and had gone to bed, to sleep for the first time in four days, and to sleep, without dreaming, for the first time in many weeks.
    On the second day Bremen slept late and fished from the dock through the morning, caught nothing at all, and was as satisfied as he had been the night before. After an early lunch he had walked along the bank almost to a point where the river drained into the swamp, or vice versa … he could not tell, and fished for a few hours from a bank. Again, he threw back everything he caught, but he saw a snake swimming lazily between the half-submerged cypress and for the first time in his life was not afraid of the serpent.
    On the evening of the second day Verge came put-putting upriver, coasted into the dock, and let Bremen know through simple signs that he was there to take him fishing back in the swamp. Bremen had hesitated a moment—he did not know if he was ready for the swamp—but then had lowered his rod and reel to the old man and jumped carefully into the front of the boat.
    The swamp had been dark and overhung with Spanish moss, and Bremen had spent less time paying attention to his fishing than in watching the huge birds flapping lazily overhead to their nests, or listening to the evening calls of a thousand varieties of frogs, and even watching two alligators move lazily through the dusk-tinted water. Verge’s thoughts were almost one with the rhythms of the boat and swamp, and Bremen found it infinitely soothing tosurrender the turmoil of his own consciousness to the damaged clarity of his fishing partner’s damaged mind. Through some strange way Bremen had fathomed that Verge, although poorly educated and far from being a learned man, had been a kind of poet in his earlier days. Now, since the stroke, that poetry showed itself as a gentle cadence of wordless memories and as a willingness to surrender memory itself to the more demanding cadence of
now
.
    Neither of them had caught anything worth keeping, so they came out of the swamp into a lighter darkness—a full moon was rising above cypress to the east—and tied up to the little dock at Bremen’s shack. A breeze kept the mosquitoes away as they sat in companionable silence on the porch and finished the last of Bremen’s beers.
    Now, on the third morning, Bremen rose and came out into the light, blinking at the sunrise and wanting to get a little fishing in before breakfast. Bremen jumped down from the dock and walked a hundred yards south along the bank to a grassy place he had found the previous afternoon. Mist rose from the river and the birds filled the air with urgent cries. Bremen walked carefully, one eye out for snakes or alligators in the weeds along the bank, feeling