The Hollowed Read online

  The Hollowed

  Jay Caselberg

  Copyright © 2018 Jay Caselberg

  Published November 2018

  Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.

  All rights reserved. 2nd Edition

  ISBN-13 (Paperback): 978-1-988863-94-8

  ISBN-13 (Kindle): 978-1-988863-93-1

  For Artemisia

  Contents

  Contents

  Chapter One Space

  Chapter Two Visitors

  Chapter Three The Dead Actress

  Chapter Four The Ice Cream Van

  Chapter Five Bleeding

  Chapter Six A Fuck Off House in the Suburbs

  Chapter Seven A Bolt from the Blue

  Chapter Eight Conquest

  Chapter Nine Bubbles

  Chapter Ten The Tramp

  Chapter Eleven Skeletons

  Chapter Twelve The Vigil

  Chapter Thirteen Creating a Following

  Chapter Fourteen Dancing at a Distance

  Chapter Fifteen Revelation

  Chapter Sixteen Shared Space

  Chapter Seventeen The Wheels Within Wheels

  Chapter Eighteen Alliance

  Chapter Nineteen Life Has a Way of Sticking in Your Throat

  Chapter Twenty Going the Distance

  Chapter Twenty-One Appealing

  Chapter Twenty-Two Growth

  Chapter Twenty-Three The Commune

  Chapter Twenty-Four Another Place, Another Time

  Chapter Twenty-Five The Bridge

  Chapter Twenty-Six A Narrow Path

  Chapter Twenty-Seven Confidence

  Chapter Twenty-Eight On a Sea Becalmed

  Chapter Twenty-Nine The Cathedral

  Chapter Thirty Something for the Weekend

  Chapter Thirty-One What Happens Inside

  Chapter Thirty-Two That Which Lingers

  Chapter Thirty-Three Severance

  Chapter Thirty-Four Secrets

  Chapter Thirty-Five Framing Glass

  Thank You!

  Also from Digital Fiction

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Space

  Sometimes it’s hard to know whether it’s a man thing or a woman thing. Perhaps it’s neither, that impossible distance from reality, that hollow inability to touch feeling. You might notice it after a while, as you get older, as the world creeps up and assaults your inner senses. How exactly does it manifest? As a void inside? As a gap stretched from wall to wall of the inner self?

  Imagine, if you will, a sheet of thick plastic, draped, like on the inside of a building site, suspended like a parachute or tent just above your head and hanging down around you. You can see the impression of faces and noses pressed against the sheet beyond—sometimes, pale palm prints marked out in the dust. Behind this formless definition lies truth. The problem being, that in reaching for that truth, you risk suffocation. To get close enough to see clearly, you have to press your face hard against the sheeting, and that cuts off your ability to breathe.

  And so it is inside.

  Chris first noticed his own sense of removal in his late twenties. Palpably, tangibly, the gap from reality began to grow inside, stretching across the dusty space of his inner walls. What once had been a mere footstep had become a leap, a bound—to step impossibly across a yawning void. How was he to know or suspect that it was preparation? How was he to know where that understanding might lead him?

  He’d been married for about four years when he first really noticed the distance. Anastasia and Chris got on well. They got on like a house on fire. Though they had differences, in the things they liked and the things they found interesting, difference was a healthy thing. There were those tiny shreds of interaction that held them together and made the relationship what it was: the half-startled expression she seemed to get when she looked up and saw him; the vague quirk of her lips that showed something he had said had sparked something inside. He found them all appealing. Somehow, he stirred her, and she stirred him in return.

  “Stase,” he’d say to her. “What would my life have been without you?”

  He simply couldn’t imagine it. She’d smile and get that stupid grin, and he’d know that what he’d said had touched her. She’d run her long fingers through her hair and look away, still with that half smile upon her lips.

  Then came work, and the mortgage, and the bills, and gradually, over time, that smile faded. They never got around to having kids. The time was never right, or their position wasn’t secure, or there were things they had to achieve with their lives first. So many things stood in the way. Perhaps if they’d managed it, the kids would have brought them together, strengthened the glue between them. Perhaps.

  All relationships go through their transitions, growing, shaping, morphing into places where they had never been before, or where you might not have expected them to go. Once in a while, that path takes you to a locale not seen in your imaginings, nor mapped out in those fragile hopes and dreams that make up your wished-for future. Stase and Chris were no different.

  The night he slapped her, when her fingernails scored his cheek, dragging clear lines into his flesh, he knew the void had grown too great. He pulled his hand away from his face and looked dumbfounded at the pale-brown blood stripes across his palm. He lashed out, shocking himself by the action. Where had the violence and hollow lack of feeling come from? He looked at her then with narrowed eyes. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul, but all he saw in hers was dark emptiness, the softness gone hard. Perhaps there should have been tears, but there weren’t.

  They half made up—a tension-filled truce—but the damage had been done and they knew it without saying a word. The secret knowledge of what lay between then now lived silently within the both of them.

  When he walked out of the house the next morning, he understood that a bridge had been crossed, but even though there was no going back, knowing it wasn’t enough. He had a life like any other—streets, and buildings, and offices, and all the other rituals of adulthood. There was the daily trek to work, the obligatory drinks at the end of the week, and all of the pseudo-social engagements that come with the network that supports life. And with it came the work colleagues that became part of your existence whether you wanted them to or not. He was forced to use her foundation to cover the marks, dabbing lightly with one fingertip across the ridged lines on his cheek, working it palely across the intervening skin as he leaned across the bathroom sink close to the mirror, the slightly perfumed scent filling his nostrils. As he pulled the door shut behind him on his way to work, Chris was concocting stories in his head.

  He didn’t know what made him take the alternative route to the office. Perhaps it was an urge to shield his wounded pride, avoid the crowds. As he walked, he struggled with the compulsion to lift his hand and hold it to the side of his face, shielding his indignity from the world. He needn’t have worried. That morning, hardly a soul trod the roads he traveled, but he was painfully conscious of the marks and his awareness walked with him, prompting him to be vigilant for passers-by.

  Halfway along Sydney Street, on a grassy verge, lay a man, his pale, distended half-moon belly pressing towards the sky. Some drunk, was Chris’s first thought, catching a blessed few moments of unconsciousness. The man wore jeans and running shoes, silver stripes against black. His maroon tee shirt had ridden halfway up across his middle, exposing pale, flabby flesh. The man’s head was turned away from him and Chris couldn’t see his face, only stringy hair flopping across a balding pate.

  Looking at the figure lying there, he had second thoughts and he stopped. Everything looked too new—none of the stains, or the soiling, or the greasy disheveled aura that hangs around the itineran
t alcoholic like a bedcover. He waited, watching, looking for some sign of life, going through that internal debate about whether he should see if the guy was all right or simply walk away, pretending he hadn’t seen.

  The man didn’t move. Not even the slightest stir to show he was breathing.

  After a while, Chris shook his head and moved on, feigning the fact that he hadn’t seen the man at all, even though there was no one to see, but as he neared the corner, he glanced back with a tinge of guilt. The guy was still lying there. A large white truck was just rounding the corner at the other end of the street, so he quickened his pace so as not to become involved.

  His workday went as any other, and he forgot about the guy in the street. He spent most of it huddled over his desk, his head angled to conceal the tell-tale marks on his cheek, avoiding the inquiring glances. On public show, he had far more important things to worry about than some unconscious derelict on the street. He finally made up some story about a tree branch in the garden, though he knew the marks were spaced the wrong distance apart, and he tried uneasily to ignore the knowing glances that passed between his co-workers.

  The uncomfortable day drew to a close and he returned home by his normal route. He needn’t have bothered. He was back to a Siberia of silence and avoidance of eye contact. The walls of their mutual lack of conversation sparked and shorted in the air between them. Eventually Stase went upstairs and closed herself in her room—her room now—leaving Chris slumped in front of the television in the steel-blue semi-dark. That night, just like the previous night, he slept on the couch, the television voices intruding into his unconsciousness, whispering things to him in the colored darkness and populating his dreams. He was up early and gone before she rose.

  It was a full three days before another word passed between them.

  He was tired and snappy at work, and he felt that hollow space grow and echo within. Stase, in her silence, expressed her tension by the set of her shoulders and the stiffness of her back. He wished he could get inside her head for just a few moments. In the end, it was a household account that drew the first words.

  “Yes, I’ll look after it,” he told her, short and clipped.

  They were bonded then by their domesticity. Words passed between them, but they were hollow, utilitarian. The hollowness was a whisper of that which had taken up residence inside them.

  Another week crawled by and the marks on Chris’s face faded daily. It was then that he saw his second. It was a Saturday, leaden grey and filled with an opalescent chill. He’d gone out to get the newspaper, and Stase was still in bed. They were still sleeping in separate rooms. He’d tried on the previous evening to start a conversation, but she wasn’t interested—almost as if she just didn’t have the energy to bother. As he walked to the store, he bunched his coat around him; protection from the cold or the way his life was going, he didn’t know.

  He almost didn’t notice the woman lying at the bus shelter as he passed. She was young, dressed in a long coat, her hair shining in the morning light. A wave of blonde strands draped across one cheek and her blue eyes stared straight ahead, out into the road. One leg was exposed where the coat had fallen away. He hesitated, remembering the fat man on Sydney Street. There was nothing there to say that there was anything wrong with the girl, but he stopped anyway. After a few moments, standing there and staring, he walked in front of her. There wasn’t a flicker of recognition from her eyes—nothing to say she even saw him. He walked back in front of her, looking for some sort of reaction, then stood at the side of the bus shelter, debating. Nothing moved, not her chest, her eyelids, nothing. A slight flurry of breeze lifted a screwed-up piece of paper and dragged it scraping across the gutter.

  He crouched down in front of her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Nothing. It was cold, and she seemed to be wearing very little under the coat. She kept staring, straight ahead, right through him. If it hadn’t been for the crisp cold and the color in her cheeks, he could have thought she was dead. He’d seen a dead man, pale, chill. You know when they’re dead. The color’s different, the skin waxy. You know when they’re dead.

  Still crouched in front of her, Chris looked up and down the street, but there was no one in sight. He waved a hand in front of her face, but there was nothing, not even a flicker. Hesitantly he reached out with one hand and touched her cheek. It was warm, barely, but warm.

  “Hey,” he said. He stood staring down at her. Maybe she was on something.

  Hesitation. Lack of involvement. Safety.

  There was nothing he could do for her, was there? If she was still there when he got back from buying the paper, then he’d call someone. That would be the right thing to do, he told himself. So he headed away from the bus shelter and up the road. Secretly, he was hoping she’d be gone by the time he got back. It wasn’t his problem. Let it please be someone else’s. Or that’s what he told himself.

  On the way back, as he neared the shelter where she’d been lying, he could see she was gone. Inside himself, Chris was relieved, but he was struck by a sense of wrongness. He hadn’t a clue what had happened to her. Perhaps someone had come past and had the goodness to do something. It had only been twenty minutes. How long did it take for an ambulance to arrive and depart? Was twenty minutes long enough? He didn’t know. He felt the guilt all the same.

  He was chewing it over all the way back to the house. The fact that he’d walked away, just left her, and was filled with a callousness of action that surprised Chris, a something he had trouble recognizing in himself. He didn’t think he’d always been that unfeeling. What had happened to him in the intervening time? He wondered if it was a symptom of the general emptiness he’d been experiencing, of the deterioration of his relationship and everything else. It was almost as if life conspired to drain you of the capacity for anything but numbness, assaulting you at every turn with images and pictures that filled your head until one became indistinguishable from the other.

  He slipped inside the front door, still thinking about it, wandered in from the hallway and tossed his keys and the paper onto the kitchen table. Front page was a story about ethnic cleansing and the associated atrocities, all in lurid color. He barely glanced at it. Stase was already out of bed, sitting hunched in her robe and sipping at a cup of tea. She didn’t look up and he avoided looking at her. Instead, his head was full of the too-still woman at the bus shelter. If he hadn’t seen her, he wouldn’t have thought about the man on Sydney Street. He wouldn’t have made the connection. But once the connection was made, it was there for him to hold on to and for it to hold on to him.

  “Stase,” he said. “Can I talk to you about something?”

  “Yeah, what?” she said, without looking up from her tea.

  “I saw something on the way to get the paper.”

  “And what might that be, a lonely future staring you in the face?”

  “Yeah, right,” he said, holding back the urge to snap with difficulty. “Not quite.”

  Chris wondered for a moment how far she was from the truth, and a hollow nestled inside. “There was this woman. She looked like she was dead, but she wasn’t. She was just lying there staring into space.”

  Stase looked up from her cup then. Her face was stony. “What do you mean, she looked dead but wasn’t? What, like us, you mean?”

  “Cut it out,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I,” she said quietly, drawing the moment out. “So did you do anything?”

  “I thought about it, but by the time I got back she was gone.”

  “What, you just left her there? Typical.” She pursed her lips, shook her head, then stood and carried her cup to the sink. That was it. She left him standing there, looking at the empty chair where she’d been.

  What like us? he thought.

  That was the extent of their interaction for the rest of the weekend. He felt the ringing space solidify inside and between them. But what she’d
said had started him thinking.

  Like us.

  Knowing there was little he could do to address it then, until he’d worked out what was happening between them, he turned his attention to other things, to the mystery of the girl at the bus shelter, to the fat man on Sydney Street. At the start of the following week, he started watching, looking for other examples, trying to see if the suspicion he was feeling was mere imagination, or maybe something else

  Both of them, the young woman at the bus stop, the man on Sydney Street, they were the same, and in some strange way, deep in his guts, he knew it. It was as if life had drained all the identity from them—just worn it away. In the back of his mind, he was aware that there was an echo there in what he was seeking. There was a strange parallel with what seemed to be happening in his own life, but he tried very hard to dismiss that particular connection as imagination.

  So he started watching for signs. He looked in doorways and bus shelters, in the hollow, shadowed places beneath subway steps. He didn’t go out of his way to search for them; he just kept himself aware. That awareness paid off, and one by one, he started to find them.

  The next one he found was sitting inside a doorway. A down-and-out, he thought. Then he looked closer and saw the blank gaze, the slack face, simply staring into nothingness. Chris stood in the middle of the commuter crowd, fascinated as people passed, their eyes averted, denying that they had even seen the person hunched in the doorway. It was so easy for him to go unnoticed. It was as if he didn’t really exist at all—invisible. But Chris saw.

  He crossed the road and took up position on the opposite side of the street, propping himself against the low window ledge of a huge department store. The occasional bus or truck slid past, obscuring the man briefly from his view, flashing advertising images and clever graphics in slipstream motion past his eyes, but he refused to be distracted. If this one was going to disappear, he wanted to see how. Maybe he should have crossed the street and gone to help him, but he didn’t know if there was anything he could have done. Passers-by strode past, studiedly oblivious.