The Hollow Skull Read online

  Mary was thin like many girls her age, a waif with tan skin and hopping energy. She had long shiny brown hair that was the envy of proud mothers everywhere. Her eyes were brown and large. Cass often thought she could see a center of love in Mary’s eyes. Her sister was sweet without being boring, precocious without being rude. Really, she was a dear, and Cass sometimes felt a sharp pull in her chest thinking about how much she loved her sister. She knew if anything ever happened to Mary, she wouldn’t be able to bear the pain. Life would end; the sun would go out.

  “What?” Cass asked.

  Mary cringed and tears sprang into her eyes. “He’s been drinking all night. He’s been yelling at me and I can’t get him to stop.”

  Cass felt a stab of fury. “Did he hit you?”

  Mary bit her lower lip and shook her head. “No.”

  Cass took her by the shoulders. “Did he hit you? Tell me.”

  “He just pushed me; he didn’t really hurt me,” Mary sobbed. “But he’s scaring me, and he’s breaking things.”

  Cass stood straight. “Stay here; I’ll take care of him.”

  Mary grasped her hand. “Don’t go inside—he might hurt you.”

  Cass shook her off as she stepped toward the door. “He’s a drunken slob, he can’t hurt me. Just don’t come inside, no matter what.”

  Cass left Mary looking very worried.

  Inside, the house was dark and quiet. Their place was a three-bedroom collection of uninspired boxes— a typical Madison dream castle. Cass liked paintings and posters—her father ripped down her favorites whenever it suited him. As a result the walls were largely bare and the vibes sucked. She had to fight to calm herself, Cass wasn’t afraid of him so much as she was afraid of what she would do because Cass had no doubt that Daddy had wacked Mary a few times.

  She found him in the living room sitting with a bottle of clear liquid before a fuzzy TV. He favored vodka straight from the Russian udder—the quart bottle was three-quarters empty. He hardly looked at her as she came in but his voice was belligerent.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

  Her father was extremely handsome, despite the abuse he had heaped on his forty-year-old body. His features were like hers—light and blond. His blue eyes were a thing of legend among the local women, who were always ready at his beck and call. Her mother, who had died in a car accident a year after Mary’s birth, had been obsessed with him in strict defiance of her better judgment. He hadn’t started drinking after her death, but had been an alcoholic since he was a teen, and his total unrepentance and lack of motive made it impossible for Cass to feel much sympathy for him. Yet there was a tiny thread of compassion deep inside her because she knew he had loved her mother very much. Of course that hadn’t stopped him from beating her. Cass sometimes thought her mother had been driving too fast on purpose—when she ran that fatal red light.

  “Out,” Cass replied coolly.

  He snorted. “Yeah.”

  She stepped between him and the blurry TV. “Mary’s on the porch crying. Why?”

  He drank from his bottle. “Beats me.”

  Cass felt scorn. “You shit. You can’t just drown yourself to death, you have to wreck a little girl’s life in the process. You know, as she grows up, she’s never going to forget nights like this. You scar her, permanently, and you piss me off.”

  He didn’t like that. He set his bottle down and stared hard. “You go to bed this minute, if you know what’s good for you.”

  Cass put her hands on her hips. “Did you hit her? Or did you just shove her so hard she accidentally ran into the wall?”

  Daddy took a breath and stood slowly. He had half a foot on her, fifty pounds. Yet she wasn’t afraid of him. When he was drunk his nervous system responded like a puppet with elastic strings. He had taken many a swing at her over the years and he usually caught air. She held her ground as he took a step forward.

  “You have a lot of nerve accusing me, you good for nothing bitch,” he swore.

  She chuckled. “What’s the matter, Daddy? Did I hit the last remaining sober nerve in your body?”

  He took a swing at her. She successfully ducked and kicked him hard in the left knee. He toppled like Jello on Valium. For a moment he lay helpless before her, grimacing in pain. Her anger right then was poison in her brain. She wanted to kick him again and again, in the face, in the groin, until he was a gory lump of quivering flesh, begging for mercy. Yet in the same instant she was overcome by a feeling of revulsion, at herself as well as at him. She was becoming like him, she realized, working out her anger through violence. And all the while Mary was probably trembling on the front porch, praying that neither of them got hurt. Cass took a step back and drew in a ragged breath.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m sorry you hate me and I hate you. Because I don’t really, I just don’t know how to deal with you, and I’m afraid I never will. For that reason I’m leaving tonight. I was leaving next week anyway. But I’m taking Mary with me, I can’t trust you with her. I’m taking the cash in the jar above the refrigerator; we’ll need it when we get to Los Angeles. I think you owe us that at least.” She stepped past him and spoke in a deadly tone. “Don’t try to stop me—it would be a mistake.”

  She went in the kitchen and got the money first, seven hundred and forty dollars in cash, all wadded up and smelling of alcohol. Mary walked in when she was stuffing it in her pocket and just stared. Cass spoke firmly.

  “We’re moving into Fred’s trailer tonight,” she said. “We may not be coming back here, I’m just not sure. At least not for a week. We’re definitely not coming back here to live. I want you to go into your room and pack as much of your stuff as possible. Use the big green garbage bags from the kitchen if you need them. Load up my car.”

  Mary trembled. “He’ll try to stop us.”

  Cass shook her head. “He won’t try anything.”

  Her words had power. Their father remained in the living room the whole time they packed. Cass was careful to get her own cash as well, another eight hundred bucks that had taken her a year to save. Both she and Mary worked quickly and efficiently. Cass didn’t bother to call Fred and tell him they were coming; he would accept them gladly, he was that kind of guy. But his trailer was smaller than a loaf of bread, and they would be on top of one another until they could get a place in Los Angeles. Cass was more determined than ever that Fred was to come with them.

  When the car was all packed and Mary was sitting in the front seat wrapped in a blanket, Cass went in the house one last time. She wasn’t even sure why. She was sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Her lifestyle was streamlined, and she didn’t really have that much stuff. Hopefully she wouldn’t have to come back to the house at all.

  She went into the living room because she supposed she had to say goodbye. She was shocked to see that her father had turned off the TV and was sitting seemingly sober in the dark. It was not obvious but she could tell he had been crying. He was staring at a blank TV screen and maybe it was a metaphor for his internal state.

  “We’re going now,” she said.

  He didn’t look over as he spoke, his voice croaking. “Cass?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t go. Don’t take Mary.”

  She sighed. “I have to. And it’s better this way, you know that’s true.”

  He did look at her then, and she could see the red in his eyes even in the dark. “I’ll stop drinking. I’ll do whatever it takes. Please don’t do this to me.”

  Her eyes burned but she shook her head. “It’s too late. We’ll always be your daughters, and maybe one day we’ll come back to visit. I’d like that, and I know Mary would. But right now you have to try to put your life back together, alone. I can’t give you the chance to hurt Mary any more than you already have.” She paused. “I’m sorry I kicked you, I should never have done that.”

  He lowered his head and wept. “Cass.”

  She stepped to his side and patted
his back.

  “I love you, Father. But we have to go. Take care of yourself.”

  He tried to take her hand as she turned but she didn’t let him. There was no sense prolonging the agony. He wasn’t an evil man, just sick. She told herself that Mary and Fred and the rest of her life were waiting for her.

  She vowed that everything would be great.

  3

  The day that Sio made what she thought was the greatest discovery of her life, she made the worst. The day she discovered how to remake humanity, she also discovered how flawed humanity really was, at least in her opinion. Later many were to wish these two discoveries hadn’t come together—collided so to speak, like asteroids in space—because so much else might have been different. But strange fates guide physical reality, and Sio was about to open doors that should never have been found, never mind touched.

  Sio was a queer breed of scientist, a molecular biologist on the theory side and a computer specialist on the practical side. The synergy of these two disciplines made her experiment in ways others had not even imagined. Sio was a genius, there was no question, she was also a little erratic. Not only had she conceived of molecular microchips to amplify human DNA, she had the nerve to build them and inject them in her own veins.

  But that was later. The day of her greatest discovery, which happened to be her thirtieth birthday, she was still experimenting with mice. Still building tiny robots that the eye could not see but which nonetheless had the power to seek out the master genes of mice tissue and instruct them to perform their jobs a hundred times more efficiently. How did these technological marvels accomplish such a daunting task? The old-fashioned way, by projecting streams of magnetism and electricity in cohesive and coherent packages. Packages dictated by onboard chips that thoroughly understood the design of the DNA they were trying to intimidate. Sio had studied genes and silicon all her life, or at least since she was a young girl.

  Now that she was thirty, though, she had finally taken the time to fall in love. And it wasn’t that she was an unattractive woman, far from it. Sio looked a bit like an older version of Cass, with dark blond hair and blue eyes that were as clear as they were intelligent. Sio was thinner than most women and had never really learned to power her walk with feminine energy. She didn’t dress well—she was too busy studying her research books, a few of which she had written.

  It came as no surprise that when she did fall in love—his name was Tet and he was tall, dark, and handsome—it was with a guy who was very educated. Tet was a highly respected university professor, his disciplines threefold. He knew chemistry, computer software, and physics. He had once been a teacher of Sio’s, and she had never quite forgotten his easy charm. It had seemed a blessing to Sio—who was a vehement atheist and didn’t understand why everyone wasn’t—that she had run into him accidentally. This was six months prior to her crucial mice experiments. Yes, she had fallen in love, and he had sworn to her that he was falling as well. Why, he’d even spoken of children and marriage. The day her experiments with the mice and molecular microchips reached their shattering climax, he was supposed to take her to dinner and a movie for her important birthday.

  The first moment of eerie alchemy occurred for Sio two hours after she injected her dozen mice with her latest batch of toys. They were playing games—running mazes and solving crude puzzles that offered cheese cubes as rewards—when she noticed that the mice were all staring at her. That they had stopped playing and were waiting for her to give them more serious jobs. As she bent over their glass cage and returned their unique gazes, she couldn’t help but feel that they could read her mind and thought she was a fool. That they were in some strange way experimenting on her.

  “What do you want?” she whispered.

  They showed her by gathering at the end of the glass cage where the door was and beginning to paw the metal latch. They wanted their freedom. Even though they were mice, they had understood her question and were communicating their desire to her. The chill she felt right then made her wonder if they were not demanding she do what they asked. A portion of her mind bent to their will—she almost let them out. But the truth was she didn’t really like mice.

  Sio forced them to perform games: every maze in her arsenal, every puzzle that could be manipulated by mice paws. If they didn’t cooperate she tortured them with a cigarette lighter, a crude but efficient tool of inspiration. They didn’t like her at all, the way she swiftly brought the fire; they only cooperated because they were forced. But within a few hours they had proved that she had created not only brilliant mice, but ones that could seemingly anticipate what was going to happen next—prescient mice. They solved her mazes before she was finished building them. No matter what their level of intelligence, what they were doing was physically impossible.

  What had her chips done to their brains? What could her chips do to larger brains?

  But she had no time to answer these profound questions because she had a date with her true love. An encounter she had been thinking about all week. She thought Tet might officially propose to her tonight, and if he did, she was going to accept. Just before she left her laboratory, she placed all the mice in an extra-strong container. She would dissect them the next day to see what her implants had done to their nervous systems. It seemed by the way they watched her that they knew she would kill them without mercy. Perhaps they were cursing her. She felt a cold chill as she left the lab.

  On the way home in her car she decided to surprise Tet and swing by his place instead of waiting for him to pick her up. He lived in a spacious apartment owned by the university, one with a gracious view of the campus and the latest in energy-efficient devices. She had been to his place before, but only once. She was new to love and didn’t understand what that might mean.

  She was climbing the stairs to his apartment when she saw him standing on his porch kissing an attractive young woman goodbye. Sio recognized the woman—she was one of Tet’s students, a superb physicist in the making. Tet had previously spoken of her with enthusiasm, in an academic sense. Watching them kiss, seeing how much more passionate Tet was with the student than he had ever been with her, a portion of Sio died. The death was not a metaphor for pain, but a physical and mental reality. Truly, it was as if something inside her perished in that moment and began to rot.

  Sio turned and walked down the steps. She went back to her laboratory. Back to her experiments on the human molecular microchips. She wanted revenge, she swore in her fury. She needed power, but the thing she didn’t understand was that there was no limit to the power a vengeful person craved. Yet that theory of human behavior did not really apply to her because in a matter of days she would push her experiments beyond all limits to arrive in a place where no human standards applied. Sio was about to embark on the galaxy’s greatest experiment of all. Yet she herself was not yet prescient and couldn’t feel the future tremble. Had she known her ultimate destination, she probably would have gone forward still.

  He had lied to her, and Sio was very bitter.

  4

  The next day in Madison, Tim and Jill decided to go to the reservoir, which was located five miles out of town in a direction opposite from that of the Shaft. The reservoir was created by underground streams—no surface water dared brave the scorching Nevada sun to add to it. The water was remarkably cool and clear, most of the town’s young had enjoyed swimming in it at one time or another. Even though Tim’s hand was still too painful to go in the water, Jill believed the reservoir would make a nice afternoon hangout. If they were alone, she thought, they could make love and lie naked in the sun. Because Tim looked a little tired, she drove to the spot.

  But what she didn’t know was that Tim wasn’t merely feeling tired. He had had a strange night. He had awakened only an hour after falling asleep, not because his hand hurt, but because the noise of the desert was bothering him. Of course, where he lived all alone at the edge of town in a shack that pretended to be an apartment, there was virtually no sound.
But that was the odd thing because as he sat up in bed it was as if he could hear every little movement out in the desert: grains of sand being stirred by the faint breeze; a lizard scraping its way into a dusty burrow; the night sounds of a thousand invisible life forms buzzing. For a long time he sat then listening to the various noises, and each tone, each pitch had seemed so distinct, more than his ears or brain should have been able to process and differentiate. It wasn’t merely that his hearing had expanded, but his brain had expanded as well.

  Then, when he had lain back down, he had dreamed the most curious things. The images had been so vivid he was to wonder the next day if the pot he had smoked before they went down the Shaft had been laced with exotic chemicals. He had no sooner closed his eyes than he found himself in space, soaring among the stars, searching for green and blue worlds. Yet he did not seek them to explore them, but rather, to destroy them, or at least change them in some hideous way. As he traveled, seemingly without the aid of a vessel, he felt nothing but disdain for every kind of living organism. For him they existed merely to be collected, to be used as material. Occasionally he would pass a world that had already been conquered, and the vibrations from it filled him with deep bitterness.

  His dreams grew even more dark. In one he was walking along a street in Madison in the middle of the afternoon, carrying a hidden butcher knife. And everyone he passed on the road, he privately thought of disemboweling, imagining exactly what it would be like to cut into them and pull out their guts, eat them even, red and dripping and disgusting, right there in the middle of town. The odd thing was, the gross images did not cause him to awaken, but brought an unbidden smile to his face. For he felt happy in this dream, it was not nightmarish to dream such possibilities.