Read Online The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons - Free Book Online

sense that he hears her mindtouch messages, although she is all but overwhelmed by the complex tapestry of his daydreamed memories. Through them all there has been a sense ofsadness and loss, much of it centered around the sister, Beanie, who was Uncle Buddy’s one friend in a hostile world.
    Uncle Buddy
, Gail sent over and over,
if it’s not all a crock of shit … heaven and all … send me a sign. Send me a thought
. The experiment thrills and terrifies her. She lies awake for three nights wishing she had not sent the thought to her dying friend, half expecting his ghost to awaken her each night, but on the fourth night after Buddy died, there is nothing in the night—no whisper of his husky voice or warm thoughts, no sense of his presence “elsewhere”—only silence and a void.
    Silence and a void. It remains Gail’s conviction of death’s dominion through the rest of her life, including these final weeks when she cannot hide the bleakness of her thoughts from Jeremy. He does not try to dissuade her from that view, although he shares sunlight and hope with her even while he sees little of the former and feels nothing of the latter.
    Silence and a void. It is Gail’s sense of death.
    Now it is Jeremy’s.

Where the Deadmen Left Their Bones
    V anni Fucci led Bremen from the skiff to the shore, from the shore through the screen of trees, and from the trees to the roadside where a white Cadillac was parked. The man kept the revolver down at his side, but visible, as he opened the car door on the passenger side and waved Bremen in. Bremen did not protest or speak. Through the shield of cypress he could see the small store where Norm Sr. was drinking his second cup of coffee and where Verge was sitting and smoking his pipe.
    Fucci slid into the driver’s seat, started the Caddy with a roar, and peeled onto the tarmac, leaving a cloud of dust and a pattering of gravel on foliage behind them. There was no other traffic. The low morning light touched treetops and telephone poles. Sunlight glinted on water to their right. The gangster set the pistol near his left leg on the plush leather seat. “You say one fuckingword,” he said in an urgent whisper, “and I’ll blow your fucking head off right here.”
    Bremen had no urge to say anything. As they continued to drive west, the Cadillac idling along at an easy fifty-five, he settled back into the cushions and watched the scenery go by to his right. They left the swamp and forest behind and entered an open area of saw grass and scrub pine. Weathered farmhouses sat back in the fields and, closer to the highway, perched the occasional roadside stands, empty of produce and people. Vanni Fucci muttered something and turned on the radio, punching buttons until he found a station with the right blend of rock and roll.
    Bremen’s problem was that he hated melodrama. He did not believe in it. Gail had been the one to enjoy books and television and movies; Bremen always found the situations unlikely to the point of absurdity, the action and characters’ reactions unbelievable, and the melodrama banal in the extreme. Occasionally Bremen would argue that human beings’ lives revolved around carrying out the garbage, or setting the table, or watching TV—not around car chases and threatening others with guns. Gail would nod, smile, and say for the hundredth time, “Jerry, you’ve got the imagination of a doorknob.”
    Bremen had imagination, but he disliked melodrama and did not believe in the fictional worlds that depended upon it. He did not believe all that much in Vanni Fucci, although the gangster’s thoughts were clear enough. Unstructured and frenzied, but clear.
    It was a shame, Bremen thought, that people’s minds were not like a computer, that one could not call up information at will. “Reading people’s minds” was more analogous to trying to read hasty scrawls on scraps of paper scattered on a bobbing sea than calling up cleanlines of information on a