The Writing on the Wall CH30

With the spider gone, and the Hollow Man standing before me, I could see the difference between the two.  The spider had been like a pet, almost.  It had held parts of me in it.  What the general had said shuddered through me, even as I backed away, scooting on my rear into a corner between two humming machines.

The Hollow Man did not harbour gratitude as the spider might have.  Where the spider had hoped, and had some sort of... at least an illusion of fellow feeling, Hollow Man had nothing.  His name had been given by an astute person.

Howling in a dry, cracked voice like icy smoke eking out of a frozen pipe, he advanced upon me.  Each step appeared to pain him, but it was an act.  I couldn't read his intentions anymore, nor did I have any feeling inside that even connected me to him, but this Hollow Man was not a creature struggling to survive.  He was a thing with prey in sight and within reach.

I didn't have anything that connected me to him.  That meant he was no longer connected to me either.

The feeling of sick that had plagued me since our first attempt to find the Hollow Man was gone.  Though it had been replaced with the nausea of intense fear, it was nothing like the same thing.  I wet my lips, and then used the machine to lever myself off of the ground.  Standing up, I could see that the Hollow Man was not an infinitely tall shadow.

There were still traces of the helpless, hopeless thing that I had seen on the table.  But even that was fading fast away.  His clothes, hanging like rags, were more like skin.  They were almost prehensile flaps of it, great grey skin that would one day transform into wings.

He leapt at me, without even bending his knees first.  Like a nightmare, or an animation missing a few frames.

I barely managed to push myself out of the way.  My landing was graceless and painful, stopping with my face on the floor and my shoulder out of its socket.  Agony shoved the breath out of my body as I hit the floor.

"You don't know the meaning of anything, do you?"

It was speaking.  I shut my eyes and shook my head.  Not answering it, but trying to shut out that horrid voice.  It was not a real voice, he wanted to eat me, the way he had the general.

But even as I thought of it, I felt my eyes push themselves open, felt my head force itself to turn and look at the wreckage of the man that had been left.

It was like looking at a salad of clothing and limbs.  He had not been eaten.  What had happened was worse.

Bile burbled up the back of my throat, but I didn't have time to give in to it.  Hollow Man was no longer stalking about, but moving with that same nightmarish speed, dropping frames from his movement.  Like a ghost.

But ghosts were not solid.  A ghost did not want to do more than affect the world or go back to living, like a person with dementia who shouted at people in order to impact them.  "You could have had it all and yet you took nothing.  What shall we give you, my pretty thing?"

Hollow Man wasn't talking.  It was something else.

My mouth went slack with horror, greater than my terror of the skulking Hollow Man.  He wasn't coming after me.  He was waiting for something else to do it.

The general twitched.  His broken body stood up, unfolding and straightening up like a marionette being lifted up off the floor by its strings.  His face was bloody and torn, his arms hanging like useless things.  I thought of the Hollow Children and gasped so sharply that I might have swallowed my own tongue.

General Thornbehr had gotten his wish.  The Hollow Man had reproduced, just as he had wanted.  He had just done it a different way than the general could have possibly expected.

I walked like a crab around him, seeking a door, a way out.  I tripped over something and screamed, but no reaching fingers took hold of my skin.  The white-shrouded body of a scientist lay under me, bruises on his neck.  I pulled off his shoes and pitched one of them at the general.

It hit him in the head, glancing off like a rubber ball off of concrete.  The old Hollow Man turned its head one way, then the other, looking about like a lost thing, still emitting that awful howl.  But it was growing quieter.  It had passed its essential self on into the general's body.  His hollowed out body.

Whimpering in fear, I pushed myself to my feet once more and ran to the opposite wall.  There was a door in here, there had to be.  But everywhere I looked, there were only machines.  How had the general even come in here?

"Get away from me!" I screeched at the dying Hollow Man.  It gave me a confused look, and then lifted its arms.  As if to embrace me.

I threw my other shoe missile at it, with the same result.  My shoulder brushed against a low monitor, reminding me of my fall and drawing a twist and a cry out of me, as if someone were wrenching me about.

Then I realised that someone was doing just that.  The Hollow General held an arm out towards me, his broken fingers outstretched and moving.  Marionette or master? I thought, and I didn't know if it was a thought originating from my own mind, or somehow put there.

Tears sprang to my eyes.  I still wasn't free.  And neither was Hollow Man.  He hadn't done anything but make things worse.  Something told me that it had must have just been too late for either of us.

The pulling sensation that had started in my stomach filled my entire body, but from the outside, like wearing a glove over my skin and clothes.  It forced me to the ground, my knees hitting the stone hard enough to make me curse aloud.  Hollow Man wandered into a corner, walking backwards, reaching for first me, and then the Hollow General.

He let out one final rattling cry of what I could almost imagine was dismay, and then began shaking.  The Hollow General pointed to him with his fingers so intent that they trembled as well.  Like neck muscles going taut and pulsing.  As he shook, the Hollow Man twitched and writhed as he had done on the table.

Then, without a sound, he fell to pieces.  His bones clattered to the stone floor, and his skin-clothes fell with them, the latter making no sound at all.

I reached for the machine nearest me and tried desperately to pull off a piece of it, but nothing happened.  All I did was press a lot of buttons and send the machine into some kind of loudly beeping frenzy.  Its screen flashed blue and white.  In the gloom, it was as if some cosmic storm were rising out of a single point, increasing in intensity to swallow the entire world.

"Couldn't leave well enough alone, could you?  Had to have things your way.  Had to meddle!"

I didn't understand anything he was saying.  They were words, but I didn't think they had anything to do with me.  Maybe they didn't even have anything to do with the general.  He continued moving like a marionette, his arm still stretched out to me.  The closer he came, the harder it was for me to move.

Pressure around my neck, so much like warm, sweaty fingers that I slapped at my own skin trying to beat the hand off, closed off my air.  I gasped, clawing at air.

The monitor for the machine I had broken suddenly stopped flashing, casting the room into a deep darkness.  Or perhaps it was just my own personal world going black.  My lungs burned for air, and a part of me left intact throughout it all laughed at the irony of a Zurhykeh village girl going so far to escape the beaches was going to die of asphyxiation.  Drowning on land.

But then the pressure released, as sudden and with as much force as when it had closed over me.  I gasped and choked, coughing as I hit the ground.  Light flooded the room, so bright that I thought immediately of heaven and tried to remember what monks said about it.

I was fairly certain that whatever they said about it, the light involved was not supposed to come from the floor.

A conglomerate silhouette rose up through this large source of light, cutting off bits of it, but not enough that I could see very well.  I shaded my eyes and squinted through it.

Chrysander bowled into me, so fast and hard that he may as well have been tackling me.  I cried out in pain as his embrace reminded me of my dislocated shoulder, but he just held on as if even relaxing his grasp would allow me to disappear.  My eyes slowly adjusted to the light, and I realised that the floor had indeed opened up, making way for Chrysander and the others.

His elephant, made to be the size of a large dog, stood guard in front of us, trumpeting angrily.  Dr Cordet's voice rang out over the clamour of machines and the horrible cries of the Hollow General.

"Pin him down!"

Obliging, graceful movements of Kosmo's shadow flung blades at the Hollow General, sending the dead man turned monster flying back over the table.  Thin slivers of gleaming metal stuck out of his face and arms.  He struggled against them, reaching for me.  A throwing dagger popped free, and liquid from the machine spilled out on the floor like blood.

Chrysander tried to make a cover of himself, but the Hollow General's influence passed right through him.  The invisible hand that had been crushing my throat reached inside this time, trying to find some vital internal organ to crush.

"Demetrius, restrain him!"

Words that sounded like a holy gibberish, or a frustrating lecture on the edge of my understanding came from another silhouette that I had not recognised as Demetrius.  He was holding up a shield, or something that had been made into one, advancing on the pinned Hollow General.  He turned the shield like a dish, and then ran up to the monster to push the shield into his neck.

The arm dropped.  But the Hollow General was not dead.  He wasn't like the Hollow Man, or even the spider.  He was too human still, too ambitious and full of purpose.

I scrabbled at Chrysander's arm, trying to pull him off so I could warn them.  He was too warm and close and comforting for me to even try to speak.  "He's not just a Hollow Man," I rasped.  My own voice sounded foreign and strange.  "Thornbehr wanted to make Hollow Man breed.  He wanted soldiers."

"He became one," Dr Cordet said, and I realised that she was kneeling with us.

"You can't just cage him up and study him."  I managed to get Chrysander to let go, but he just grabbed me again, looping an arm around my waist.  Keeping me back, away from the Hollow General.

"I never meant to study him.  There is nothing to be learned from whatever the Hollow Man has become over the eons."

Grandmaster Trevino knelt on the other side, flanking us.  "No one will study this new Hollow Man," he said, as if he doubted Dr Cordet's words.  There was a quiet firmness in his voice that somehow carried over the screaming urgency of the machines.  Half of them were broken, the screens were all dark.  "End it, Demetrius."

"Yes, do," Dr Cordet said, her voice tired and almost unlike her.  "This got so far away from me, Kiron..."

He didn't answer her.

Demetrius dug the shield into the Hollow General's neck, repeating the holy words that I could not comprehend.  The Hollow General kicked out at him, hands grasping and clawing at the young man's face.  Kosmo ran up to help, but a flail of the monster's arm sent him careening backwards.  His head slammed into the edge of a tall machine and he fell to the floor.

Shouting the words, Demetrius restrained the Hollow General with his foot, pulling the improvised shield back.  He used both arms to swing it at the Hollow General's neck.

I shut my eyes against the overwhelming light as the darkness was finally extinguished.

It seemed that Chrysander would never let me go again.  Although he had to, just long enough that Dr Cordet could help him pop my shoulder back into alignment.

The elephant, still dog-sized, gambolled about like a lamb as he carried me out, exiting that awful room through the elevator in the floor.  There was indeed no door, had never been.  We had been in an upside-down tower, that had been driven into the ground like a spike.  Dr Cordet explained it, but I didn't really listen.  It had to do with darkness.  It always had to do with darkness.

She wanted to turn around and go back, to collect samples, or something to do with science.  The remains of the Hollow Man were as intact as any corpse.  They had to be taken to the king, she said.  It all had to be taken to the king.

I let her and the grandmaster argue about it, bickering in big words.  Grandmaster Trevino adopted a gruff manner that seemed out of place, and Dr Cordet held to her science.

I hugged Chrysander's neck and made sure that I could see Demetrius at all times.  He had dragged Kosmo up off the floor and draped the taller man over his shoulders, and then Chrysander out of the room.  The four of us made an odd picture.  An incomplete one, without Noni and Soterios.  But no one mentioned them, and I had to force myself to take that as sufficient proof they were safe.

We were told to wait in the front room, but I couldn't bear to stay in there.  The tubes that had contained the Hollow Children had experienced some kind of energy surge or spike, according to Demetrius.  "We had to create some kind of distraction," he explained.  "So we ran around pressing buttons wherever we could find them."

A few of the tubes were still intact, but most of them had shattered open.  I could see the little bodies, limp and lifeless, crumpled half inside their tubes and half on the floor in front of them.  From the look of repressed horror on Demetrius's face, he could see them now as well.  Creatures that had never been properly alive had been able to die at last.

I supposed I could have taken it as consolation, but it only made me think of dead children.  I rested my chin on Chrysander's shoulder and asked him to just take me outside or let me walk there myself.

He did not let my feet touch ground, even when we had hurried outside.  The grass looked inviting from my perch in his arms.

Demetrius grunted as he dragged Kosmo out.  Both of their faces were paler than I had ever seen them, and Demetrius's ginger hair was matted to his head so that he nearly looked like a matchstick.  A lumpy one that no self-respecting person would use to light a campfire, let alone a candle, but a matchstick all the same.

"Is Kosmo all right?" I asked.  I still sounded odd to myself, but my voice no longer shook.

"He's just unconscious.  Bleeding a little, but it doesn't look too bad."

"Good.  Put me down."  The latter was addressed to Chrysander, who did not seem to have let his eyes focus for days.  He shook his head, but I held to my resolve, and then I was standing on the ground in front of him, wiggling my toes in the soft, too-warm grass.

He held my cheek in his hand and sighed, looking as though he might start scolding me.  Instead, he held his other hand against the small of my back.  As ever, Chrysander's intentions were clear as glass in front of the sun, light shining right through.  Never thinking ahead farther than the moment.

I reached up and put a finger over his lips, raising my eyebrows at him.  "Don't you have something you have to ask me first?"

Eyes widening, he staggered back a half-step.  "I... I could ask...  There's plenty of things I could ask, but there's nothing that you'd answer the way I hope you would."

"Then why not wait a bit until you're less certain of me?"  I pinched his cheek.  There was finally time for silliness, but that didn't mean I had to rush into it.

Especially with Demetrius trying to pretend he wasn't listening and watching.

"Athena!"

Chrysander did not let go when Noni ran up to hug me, but she just included him in the hug, without a word of complaint.  Soterios drifted behind her, standing on the edge of joining the mass of relief and limbs.  I jerked my head to him and Demetrius both.  We had to hold one another up in any case.

I didn't breathe properly for quite some time.  None of us smelled even remotely pleasant.  Sweat and fear would never make it as a cologne combination.

Suddenly balance stopped being an issue, and we all tumbled over.  I was careful not to land in anyone's lap, and hugged Noni closest so that she would land in mine.  We both laughed, though there was less mirth in it than just blind, stupid relief.

Kosmo sat up, holding his head.  Apparently, Demetrius had just dropped him on the ground.  It wasn't at all funny, but I laughed anyway.  It was too hard to stop.  Kosmo stared at us as if we had all gone mad, and then dusted himself off, still sitting on the ground.  Looking like a butler who had been shipwrecked on a grassy island, he said, "Well, Mistress Idony, since you no longer have need of an assassin, am I to be a driver again?"

I glanced over at the general's automobile.  It sat on the shoulder of the road like an unpaid debt awaiting collection.  I looked back at my friends, taking in their bright, dirty faces one by one.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dr Cordet and Grandmaster Trevino coming out of the castle, the scientist survivors in tow to the doctor's loudest, bossiest voice.

"For now, I think a driver is all you would want to be," I said.

"Quite so.  Where to?"

This time I didn't look around.  "Home."

/The End