The Hollow Man Read Free Page A

to California on the visit to Gail’s sister there—and then he carried the cage out to the passenger seat of the Triumph.
    He had bought the eight jerricans of kerosene on Monday, before dressing for the funeral. Now he lugged four of them to the back porch and twisted off their lids. The sharp fumes sliced through the cold morning air. The sky suggested rain before nightfall.
    Bremen began with the second floor, dousing the bed, the quilt, the closets and their contents, the cedar chest, and then the bed again. He watched the white paper wrinkle and darken in the study as he slopped liquid from the second jerrican, and then he left a trail down the stairs, soaking the dark banisters that he and Gail had so painstakingly stripped and refinished five years before.
    He used another two cans on the downstairs, sparing nothing—not even Gail’s barn coat still hanging on the hook by the door—and then he went around the outside of the house with the fifth can, soaking front and back porches, the Adirondack chairs out back, and the doorway lintels and screens. The final three cans were used on the outbuildings. Gail’s Volvo was still in the barn they used as a garage.
    He parked the Triumph fifty yards down the drive toward the road and walked back to the house. He’d forgotten matches, so he had to go back into the kitchen and rummage in the junk drawer for them. The kerosene fumes made tears stream down his cheeks and seemed to cause the very air to ripple, as if the butcher-block tableand Formica counter and tall, old refrigerator were as insubstantial as a heat mirage.
    Then, as he retrieved the two books of matches from the tumble of stuff in the drawer, Bremen was suddenly and blissfully certain of what he should do.
    Stand here. Light them. Go lie down on the couch
.
    He had actually removed two matches and was on the verge of striking them when the vertigo struck. It was not Gail’s voice denying him the act, but it was
Gail
. Like fingers scratching wildly on a pane of Plexiglas that separated them. Like fingers on the mahogany lid of a coffin.
    You aren’t in a coffin, kiddo. You were cremated … as
per your request when we drank too much three New Year’s Eves ago and got all weepy about mortality
.
    Bremen staggered to the table and closed the cover of the matchbook over the two matches, ready to strike them. The vertigo grew worse.
    Cremated. Pleasant thought. Ashes for both of us. I spread yours in the orchard out beyond the barn … perhaps the wind will carry some of mine there
.
    Bremen started to strike the matches, but the scratching intensified, grew magnified, until it roared in his skull like a runaway migraine, shattering his vision into a thousand dots of light and darkness, filling his hearing with the scrabbling of rats’ feet on linoleum.
    When Bremen opened his eyes, he was outside and the flames were already working on the kitchen and a second glow was visible in the front windows. For a moment he stood there, his headache throbbing with each pounding of his pulse, considering going back into the house, but when the flames became visible at the second-story windows and the smoke was billowing out through the screens of the back porch, he turned and walked quickly to the outbuildings instead. The garage went up with amuffled explosion that singed Bremen’s eyebrows and drove him back past the pyre of the farmhouse.
    A line of crows from the orchard rose skyward, scolding and screeching at him. Bremen hopped in the idling Triumph, touched the cage as if to calm the agitated cat, and drove quickly away.
    Barbara Sutton was red-eyed as he dropped the cat off. A line of trees blocked the sight of smoke rising from the valley he had left behind. Gernisavien crouched in her carry cage, slat-eyed and suspicious, trembling and glaring at Bremen. He cut through Barbara’s attempt at small talk, said that he had an appointment, drove quickly to the Import Repair shop on Conestoga Road, sold the