The Hollowing Read Free

disappeared, over a year ago, now.
    Alex came bounding up to the front door and rang the bell. Richard folded the note and tucked it into his trousers pocket, then opened the door to the wet, excitable thirteen-year-old. The boy ran straight to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice, then crashed upstairs to get ready for the school play.
    On impulse, Richard followed his son to the “treasure house,” as he and Alice called Alexander’s room.
    “Do you want tea?” he asked from the door, watching the boy poring over some typewritten sheets.
    “No thanks. Had crisps and two Lion bars.”
    “Well, that sounds healthy enough.” Alex didn’t respond. “We’ll be leaving at six, if they want you there at six-thirty, so don’t lounge around reading for long.”
    “I’m not reading—I’m memorising. Mr. Evans and me wrote a new scene today.”
    “Mr. Evans and I …”
    Alex groaned tiredly.
    Richard looked around the room, reaching out to flick one of the many model planes that were suspended from the ceiling. Alexander’s costume—he was to play the red-bearded Lord Bertolac in the third year’s production of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight —was draped around a tailor’s dummy. The red beard and hair had been fashioned from two very old wigs and looked hilarious upon the boy. Another pupil would be playing the Green Knight himself (who was, in fact, Lord Bertolac in otherworldly form) as the change of costuming was too difficult.
    There was something about Alex’s den that both embraced and unnerved Richard. It was a difficult feeling—there was so much obsession here, so much passion, from the paintings of knights, with odd insignia and helmet crests, to the drawings of dinosaurs and the carefully ordered trays of fossils and crystals, gathered from all over Britain, all labelled and all imbued with mystery. Chunks of iron marcasite from chalk pits were questioningly labelled “Spacecraft remains?” The intricate patterns of fossils were related to Star Creatures, lost in the chalk seas in primordial times. Models, in plastic and wood, were everywhere, and the boy could tell a story about each one.
    It was an imagination inherited from his grandfather (along with a love of toy soldiers), but a trait completely missing from Richard himself, although he tried hard to remember what had been his own childhood dream: he had walked, lazed in the sun, and swum in the freezing seas off the Welsh coast. He had very little to show for growing up.
    He realised that Alex was watching him anxiously. He asked, “What is it?”
    Alex said simply, “You can come in, if you want. You can test me.”
    Feeling awkward, for no reason he could identify, Richard turned to go downstairs. “I’ll test you in the car, shall I? I’d better get some tea going.”
    Leaving Alexander to memorise the final few lines of his part in the heavily adapted play, he went down to the kitchen, taking out the note and re-reading it. It had an odd, foreign quality to the language— Lytton reckons he knows how to locate the boy’s protogenomorph. It had an American twang to it. And what on earth was a protogenomorph?
    The rain drummed monotonously. He heard the sound of the family car, an old Rover that roared and spluttered as the engine was turned off. Alice struggled out onto the kerb and cursed the rain.
    He had hidden the note before she entered the house to begin her relentless domestic routine and preparing for the evening out. She had little time for idle chat. Richard prepared tea and wrote two letters, but he was distracted and disturbed—indeed, he was enjoying a welcome if vicarious experience.
    The note had surely been intended for someone else, not for Richard Bradley. But he couldn’t get over the odd and thrilling sensation that nine words in the woman’s hand gave him.
    I really hoped you’d be here. I miss you.
    *   *   *
    Alice was half-asleep in the passenger seat, her head rocking as the car