A new short story! (Okay, I guess it is not so much a short story and really just an uneven exercise, but hey, those can be fun too). I was trying to write something that would be kind of like a horror movie, but without any of the things that go into a horror movie. I hope that you will think about the Hollower tonight when you lay down to go to sleep.
Bon appétit!The Hollower
By James Bezerra
The doctors were solemn when they came back into the room, their white lab coats seemed more gray now, like the men were leaking their moods, and that – Appel knew, because he was a pretty smart guy – was never a good sign. And maybe he was just imagining it, but they were purposefully not standing as close to him as they had before, back when this was all just a nominal but curious exercise.
“Doc?” He asked at Doctor Stegoralph.
“Mister Appel …” Stegoralph started to say, making the words very long. Very loooooooong. Apple could tell that Stegoralph had even pronounced the word
Mister and not
Mr. “What is it Doc?” Appel liked calling doctors Doc.
“Mister Appel, we have some … troubling news.”
*
Appel is short, but not funny short, just normal short. The kind of short that when you see him with a woman, you imagine that he’s either rich or funny or disproportionately endowed. He is all muscle, but not comically so, just in really good shape. You can tell that he takes his physical fitness seriously. You wonder if he is compensating for being so short. He has red hair, but it is cut short and close to the scalp, so he doesn’t look like one of those pale-skinned ginger men with thin wavy red hair that catches the sun and lights him up like a ghost. Basically he is not the kind of red-headed man that you have been terrified of your entire life. You wonder to yourself, sometimes when you have a quiet moment alone to contemplate, why they have always frightened you so much. You are never sure.
Appel never wears blue jeans. He wears nicely tailored suits sometimes, but most of the time he wears a good pair of slacks and a T-shirt. It is a good look for him you decide. Also, his body is covered in tattoos. His back and chest and arms and legs are a patchwork of inky lines. But you can’t tell that when he’s dressed. And you have not seen him undressed. Yet.
*
Stegoralph said, “Mister Appel, we have some … troubling news. Perhaps you should sit down.”
“I’m already sitting down,” Appel replied.
“Right. Well, Mister Appel, the MRI has given us a pretty clear picture of your situation, but we are not entirely sure how to proceed with treatment.’
“I don’t understand . . .” Appel was trying to keep it cool, because he was a cool guy, “. . . what the fuck you are talking about?”
“There’s no reason to use that kind of language,” one of the other doctors said.
“What are you, a fucking Mormon?”
“Yes,” the other doctor answered.
“Oh, well I don’t want a Mormon doctor, okay? Anybody whose brain can swallow that kind of bullshit should immediately be banned from any kind of scientific or medical profession. Get the hell out of here.”
After the doctor left the little room Appel asked, “Okay, are any of you guys Scientologists?” and when two of the doctors raised their hands Appel said, “Well you two get your asses out of here too. What about the rest of you? Amish? Moonies?”
“I’m a Southern Baptist,” one of them volunteered.
“I’m gonna let that slide for the moment, but you’re on notice.” Then, turning back to Stegoralph (whom Appel already knew was agnostic) he said, “What’s up Doc?”
*
Stegoralph covered his mouth with his hand and then squeezed his lips and then finally said, “Mister Appel, you have what we call a Hollower. Have you heard of it before?’
“No.”
“It’s quite rare, so that’s not surprising. You have a parasite in your body. Do you know what a tapeworm is?”
“It’s a worm,” Apple said.
“Yes,” Stegoralph answered.
“And it can live inside a person’s intestines or something. Do I have a
tapeworm?”
“No. No,” Stegoralph answered, “you do not have a tapeworm. What you have – what we euphemistically call a Hollower – is not a worm so much as it is, well, it’s more like a monkey, in shape you understand. It isn’t actually a monkey. It’s actually a kind of fish, or reptile. No one is really sure.”
“Excuse me?”
“It is quite rare.”
“I should fucking hope so.”
“Mister Appel,” Doctor Stegoralph asked, very seriously, “were you recently in the Amazon? Or Africa? Or Pittsburg?”
“Yes.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
*
You wouldn’t know it from the eloquence of his language or his demure manner, but Appel was a Texan, though he often called himself a lapsed Texan. He grew up on a barren and rocky eighty-eight and a half acres of land in West Texas where his daddy was a well witcher. In less Christian places they would have called him a Dowser, but in West Texas, a grown man who could use a stick to find water under the ground was surely some kind of witch, so it stuck.
Appel had memories of going out with his daddy, out to some remote rocky pasture somewhere and watching him bend a wishbone-shaped stick backward over his wrists and then follow it until it led him to some nondescript spot. Then Appel’s daddy would scratch out an X with the tip of his boot. A day later the rancher paying Appel’s daddy would have somebody sink a well and the cool, clear water would come burbling up.
When Appel was getting old enough to know that that was weird, he asked his daddy, “How do you know how to do that?”
“I have no earthly idea,” his Daddy had answered.
As much as he had hoped, Appel did not inherit that particular skill, so instead he went off to college. Growing up on all that rocky land, with just his Daddy, a couple of dogs and a .22 for company, he’d taken up an interest in rocks. Largely out of boredom and the plentifulness of rocks. He majored in geology at Texas A & M, where he first started having sex with women, which he liked doing very much. Around that same time, he also became interested in oil, or rather, the hunt for oil. He learned that easily-accessible oil reserves were a thing of the past and that the new frontiers of the hunt were in almost obnoxiously dangerous and exotic places, like the Orinoco Basin, smack in the middle of the Venezuelan rainforest, or below war-ravaged Nigeria, or in the tar fields of the Athabasca Oil Sands, or under 8,000 feet of water off the continental shelf of North America. And those were just the places that people were looking when Appel graduated and got snatched up by the Company. They were always looking for good young geologists, who were fluent in the latest ideas and technologies. But that’s not why they hired Appel. What they were really always on the lookout for were good young geologists, fluent in the latest and greatest, who also had the itch of uneasiness. Men (they were almost always men) who enjoyed the hunt for oil, who wanted the challenge. Men who once would have sailed around the world in leaky wooden ships or hiked to the North Pole steadfastly while their compasses trembled with indecision. Men who once would have played golf on the Moon. Not thrill-seekers, but well-educated and capable men who liked doing that which could not be reasonable asked of anyone else. They knew that Appel was one of these men. They knew it because he said so during the interview, “I would like to do the things that other people can’t.”
“So do you consider yourself an out-of-the-box thinker?” the interviewer had asked.
“I think that question is pretty insulting to the man who invented boxes. That guy was a fucking genius.”
The interviewer vigorously checked a box on his form and grinned.
“You know who else was a genius?” Appel had asked, “The guy that invented pockets. Brilliant! A real mad scientist, that fucker.”
*
“Why were you in Pittsburgh?” Stegoralph asked.
“I like Pittsburgh. I like the Tower of Learning, okay? I like Gothic Revival architecture.” This was true. The walls of Appel’s apartment were covered in photos he’d taken of Gothic and Gothic Revival structures all around the world. “But is that what’s really important right now?”
“Right,” Stegoralph agreed. “The point is that you have a Hollower.”
“And that is?”
“Well – and I’m a little ashamed to admit this – there is not a wealth of reliable medical information available on these things. Basically you came into contact with the eggs or larvae somewhere. We think that it is transmitted either in water or food. Or possibly through the air like pollen. Or perhaps it is transmitted by infected mosquitoes . . .”
“Are you serious with this vagueness?”
“As I said, we don’t know a lot about it. But once it is in you, the eggs or the larvae . . .”
“Stop saying larvae, that word bothers me.”
“Sure. So once it is in you, it matures very quickly into a kind of slug – that’s usually inside your large intestine and then once it grows a mouth – or a few of them – it begins to consume your internal organs . . . uh, entirely . . . and it keeps on growing – into a more mammalian-like form, with arms and legs – and eventually it hollows out your entire chest cavity.”
“Seriously, are you screwing with me? I’m on some fucked up TV show right now?”
“Um, no.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. How am I alive if it has eaten my organs? Well? How am I processing piss if it has eaten my kidneys?”
“See, that’s what’s really interesting. It seems to be capable of replicating all of your internal functions with its own. So you aren’t processing urine anymore, it is processing it for you. The same with your stomach, the same with all of your digestion . . .”
“But I’m breathing! What about that?”
“Yeah, no. It has already eaten your lungs. You just think you’re breathing. See, when it is in its slug stage it starts producing a kind of natural anesthesia so that you don’t feel it eating you. Um, but its chemically similar to dopamine, so you probably feel good all the time and it appears to have hooked into your central nervous system, so it is probably making you think that you can feel yourself breathing, but you’re actually feeling . . . um . . . its lungs breathing.”
“My Central Nervous System? That’s my brain, right?
“Well, your brain is part of it.”
“So it’s not just in my chest, it’s in my brain too?”
“Well, its body is situated inside your chest cavity, but really it is consuming your entire body. Yeah.”
Appel was quiet for a moment.
Stegoralph placed his hand tenderly on Appel’s shoulder and said, “There is something else . . .”
“Oh good.”
“Your Hollower . . .”
“Can you not say
your Hollower, like its mine?”
“Sure. Um. The Hollower, it is nearing what we think is an early stage of maturity and – now mind you, this is rare, so we aren’t quite sure – we think that we see, on the MRI, a structure similar to a larynx.”
“It is going to talk?”
“Well we don’t think that it will talk, exactly. But it is going to have the ability to modulate the pitch and volume of sound. So it may start to generate noise. Um. Conceivably it could purr or growl. There was a report once from Bolivia of a man who said that he could hear his hum.”
“Hum?”
“To music,” Stegoralph explained.
“So hold on, inside my body there is a creature that looks like a monkey but is probably a fish and it has eaten my organs and stuck its fingers into my brain and pretty soon it is going to start humming along to music? From inside my chest? While it eats me?”
Stegoralph nodded.
Appel touched his chest with his hands. He kneaded his skin and pushed on his belly with his fingertips. Finally he looked up at Stegoralph. “How do we kill it?” He asked.
“Ummmmmmmmmm,” Stegoralph said.
Appel absently tweaked his own nipple while he thought, then he stated, “Killing it would kill me? Right? There’s not enough of me left to live without it?”
“Right,” Stegoralph said.
“Should I kill myself?”
“No! Of course not! Or … well … maybe. We don’t know. We are kind of hoping that you don’t.”
“Why?”
Stegoralph shrugged sheepishly.
“Because I’m a pretty rare case?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ll get on Oprah or something!” Appel jabbed a finger at Stegoralph and then at the Southern Baptist doctor, “You fuckers are the parasites!” Then Appel tore off the flimsy paper gown that he was wearing and the Southern Baptist looked away, but Stegoralph studied Appel – scientifically, of course, while he jerked on his pants.
“Fuck you guys,” Appel said and then he was out the door of the little room. He skipped the elevator, s he always did, and bounded down the stairs and as he hit the street he wondered out loud, “Is it still my sperm?”
Appel hailed a taxi and hopped into the back.
“Where to?” The cabbie asked.
“Do you know any witch doctors in the city?” Appel asked.
“Of course!”
“The closest one then”
The cabbie merged smoothly into traffic and as he did he cranked up the radio.
“…strangers in the night …” the radio sang.
Dooo-do-do-do-duuuu, Appel heard from somewhere within his body.
“Fuck,” He said.
“What?” The cabbie asked.
“It’s a god damn Wayne Newton fan. Drive faster please.”
END
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