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

the air warm quickly as the sun rose free of the trees. There was something very close to happiness turning slowly in his chest.
    The Big Two-Hearted River
, came Gail’s thought.
    Bremen stopped and almost stumbled. He stood, panting slightly, closing his eyes to concentrate. It had been Gail but had
not
been Gail: a phantom echo, as chilling as if her actual voice had whispered to him. For a minute the dizziness grew worse, and Bremen had to sit down quickly on a hummock of grass. He lowered his head between his knees and tried to breathe slowly. After awhile the humming in his ears lessened, the pounding in his chest moderated, and the wave of déjà vu bordering on nausea passed.
    Bremen raised his face to the sun, tried to smile, and lifted his rod and reel.
    He did not have his rod and reel. This morning he had carried out the 38-caliber pistol instead.
    Bremen sat on the warming riverbank and considered the weapon. The blue steel looked almost black in the bright light. He found the lever that released the cylinder and looked at the six brass circles. He clicked the cylinder shut and lifted the weapon higher, raising it almost to his face. The hammer clicked back with surprising ease and locked into place. Bremen set the short barrel against his temple and closed his eyes, feeling the warm sunlight on his face and listening to the buzz of insects.
    Bremen did not fantasize that the bullet entering his skull would free him … would send him to some other plane of existence. Neither he nor Gail had ever believed in any life but this one. But he did realize that the gun, that the single bullet, were instruments of release. His finger had found the trigger, and now Bremen knew with absolute certainty that the slightest additional pressure would bring an end to the bottomless chasm of sorrow that lay under even this brief flash of happiness. The slightest additional pressure would end forever the incessant encroachment of other people’s thoughts that even now buzzed around the periphery of his consciousness like a million bluebottle flies around rotted meat.
    Bremen began to apply that additional pressure, feeling the perfect arc of metal under his finger, and, despite himself, converted that tactile sense of arc as a mathematical construct. He visualized the latent kinetic energy lying in the gunpowder, the sudden translation of thatenergy into motion, and the ensuing collapse of a much more intricate structure as the complex dance of sine waves and standing wavefronts in his skull died with the dying of the brain that generated them.
    It was the thought of destroying that beautiful mathematical construct, of smashing forever the wavefront equations that were so much more beautiful to Bremen than the flawed and injured human psyche they represented, that caused him to lower the pistol, lower the hammer of the pistol, and toss it away from him, over the high reeds, into the river.
    Bremen stood and watched the ripples widen. He felt neither elation nor sadness, satisfaction nor relief. He felt nothing at all.
    He sensed the man’s thoughts only seconds before he turned and saw him.
    The man was standing in an old skiff not twenty-five feet from Bremen, using an oar as a pole to move the flat-bottomed boat out of the shallows near where the river entered the swamp (or vice versa). The man was dressed even less appropriately for the river than Bremen had been three days before: he wore a white lounge suit with a black shirt, sharp collars slashing across the suit’s broad lapels like raven wings; there were layers of gold necklaces descending from the man’s thin throat to where black chest hair matched the black satin of his shirt; he wore expensive black pumps of a soft leather never designed for any surface more hostile than a plush carpet; a pink silk handkerchief rose from the pocket of his white lounge suit; his pants were held up by a white belt with a large gold buckle, and a gold Rolex gleamed on his left