The Hollow Skull

by Christopher Pike

  “No, Tim!” she cried.

  He threw her face-first into the hole. Clawing on her knees, she tried to stand but he brought the shovel down hard on her mid-back. There was a loud crack—it sounded as if he had broken her spine. Rolling onto her side, she realized that she could not feel her legs, that she was paralyzed. In the ghastly light of the flashlight, she watched him pick up a shovelful of dirt and toss it on her midsection.

  “Tim,” she gasped through her pain. “You can’t do this. It’s Jill, it’s the girl you love. Don’t kill me.”

  He paused in his labor, and for a fleeting moment it was as if a look of recognition disturbed his features. He stared down at her and then at his shovel and indecision seemed to grip him. He was shaken by a spasm, it appeared to come from deep inside.

  “Tim?” she whispered.

  The moment passed. His face became impassive once again.

  “This is observation mode,” he said. “It is like this in the beginning on each world. Reactions are tabulated and data is gathered. But your continued existence is not useful to the greater design. You know too much and you have demonstrated that you will not cooperate. It is better your physical form be disposed of in this isolated spot.” He paused. “Goodbye, Jill.”

  “No!” she screamed as the next shovel of dirt hit her in the face and her mouth was filled with choking sand. She continued to scream and thrash with her arms until he had completely covered her head. She did not stop until she was dead and buried.

  8

  The next day Cass, Fred, and Mary visited Tim at the hospital. They were shocked to see him sitting up in bed and flirting with a young nurse. She ran out giggling as they came in. Tim was paler than usual but otherwise appeared to be in robust health. He had the TV on—an old X-Files rerun—but clicked it off as they entered.

  “Hi, guys,” he said cheerfully.

  “You don’t look sick,” Cass exclaimed, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “I’m not sick. I’m trying to get myself checked out of here,” he replied.

  “I hate hospitals,” Mary said.

  Tim beamed at her. “Thanks for coming to see your uncle Tim.”

  Mary smiled nervously. “You’re not my uncle.”

  “Hey, buddy,” Fred said, patting Tim’s arm. “You gave us all a big scare yesterday.”

  Tim shook his hand. “Didn’t mean to. They still don’t know what was wrong with me. But I tell you, I feel great now. I’m getting out of here.”

  Cass sat on the edge of his bed. “Right. You were throwing up blood yesterday and you want to go home today. No way.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his expression going flat. “I will leave if I want to leave.”

  “Better do what the doctors say,” Fred remarked.

  Tim glanced over and quickly smiled, although it seemed forced.

  “Whatever you say,” he replied.

  “I bet you’re wondering where Jill is,” Cass said. “We swung by her house to pick her up but she wasn’t home. Her parents didn’t know where she was and guessed she had got up early to come here to see you.”

  Tim hesitated. “She was here earlier. She said something about going somewhere today.”

  “That’s a suitably vague statement,” Cass said. “Where was she going?”

  Tim shrugged. “I don’t know. But when she saw I was well, she seemed anxious to go do her own thing.” He added, “You know how Jill is.”

  Jill was actually very caring, Cass thought. She was surprised that her friend would take this day to go off.

  “Cass and Mary and I are thinking of leaving town soon,” Fred said carefully. “I’ve decided I want to go with them to L.A. But none of us wants to leave until we know you’re OK.”

  Tim was easy. “Honestly, I could not feel better. Why last night I was up and walking everywhere, I couldn’t sit still. The nurses actually thought I had left the hospital.” He added, “If you want to leave town, go ahead.”

  “Are you able to eat?” Cass asked.

  Tim paused. “I’m eating plenty.”

  “But what tests have they done on you?” Cass persisted. “They must have at least done an MRI and CAT scan.”

  “What are those?” Mary asked, keeping a suitable distance from Tim.

  “Special kind of X-rays, honey,” Cass said. “They let you see inside the body.”

  Mary made a face. “Gross.”

  “They want to do all kinds of tests today,” Tim said. “But I said no way, I don’t have insurance, I don’t have any money. I keep telling you but you don’t believe me, I’m getting out of here today.”

  Cass gestured to his bandaged right hand. “How’s your cut?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not infected?”

  “No.” Tim paused. “Why do you think it’s infected?”

  “I was just asking.” Cass continued to feel troubled. Something wasn’t right but she couldn’t place it. “What were your symptoms before you started throwing up blood?”

  Tim hesitated. “I didn’t have any.”

  Fred chuckled. “No physical symptoms you mean. We talked to Jill, she said you almost drowned her at the reservoir. That’s why she drove away and left you.”

  Tim shrugged. “You know Jill, she always exaggerates.”

  Cass would not have said that was one of her qualities.

  “No one throws up blood and doesn’t feel sick beforehand,” Cass persisted. “You must have had pain of some sort?”

  “No,” Tim said flatly. “None. “

  They chatted a few minutes more but Cass felt Tim was resisting them. All his answers were either vague or short, yes or no. Leaving Fred and Mary to socialize with him, she went in search of a nurse or doctor taking care of Tim. After a few minutes she found the harried nurse from the previous day. The woman was more pleasant today, she actually had lovely dark hair and eyes when she wasn’t all covered with medical masks. Cass asked her if she had any opinion about Tim’s condition. The woman frowned.

  “He’s a mystery to us all,” the nurse said. “We did an EEG on him this morning and got a reading that we’d never seen before. His blood work is all off, and his blood pressure is practically through the roof.”

  “That’s odd, he says he’s feeling great.”

  “We don’t know how he’s feeling, but we do know he isn’t eating.”

  Cass frowned. “But he just told us he was eating.” The nurse took her aside and spoke in a confidential tone. “You can’t believe anything your friend is saying. He’s an odd character; he says one thing and means another. He is thwarting us on all sides. The tests we have taken we had to fight for. And he went off last night for several hours. We don’t know where he was. Then he denied that he had gone anywhere.”

  “For hours?” she asked, amazed.

  “Yeah, he just got up and left.”

  “But he says he never left the hospital.”

  “He was gone, sister.”

  “Then he lied to us at least twice. Tim doesn’t lie, if anything he’s too bluntly honest.” Cass considered. “When you say his EEG was odd, what do you mean exactly?”

  The nurse shook her head. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this without the doctor’s permission, so please keep this conversation private. I just told you what I did because I know you’re close friends and I don’t want him leaving this hospital until he’s been thoroughly examined. But I can say the EEG readings must have been distorted. I mean, he had brain waves that aren’t in the textbooks.”

  “Interesting,” Cass muttered.

  Cass returned to fetch Fred and Mary. She found the guys laughing together, but Mary continued to stand apart, as if she was afraid of Tim for some reason. Tim nodded to her as she returned but didn’t really speak to her. After another few minutes they told him they would come to see him later.

  Fred walked Mary and Cass out to the parking lot, but he wasn’t riding home with them. He was going to drive his car,
which was still parked on the other side of the hospital. Cass insisted on giving him a ride to it. She was shocked to see how filthy the car was, and that the front bumper and portions of the lower hood had been scratched.

  “What is this?” she exclaimed.

  Fred got out and eyed the car. He didn’t look happy.

  “It looks like someone ran it through a sandstorm,” he said.

  Cass circled the car, inspecting it for further damage. “This is impossible. It didn’t have any of these scratches on it yesterday.” She paused. “Do you think Tim took it and went off? The nurse said that he left the hospital.”

  “But he said he didn’t.”

  “Trust me, the nurse said he was lying.”

  “That’s an extraordinary idea… . ” Fred said, his speech trailing off.

  “What is it?” Cass persisted.

  “Well, Tim does have a set of my keys on his key chain, just like I have a set of his. You know we’ve always done that.” Fred shook his head. “But why would he mess my car up so much?”

  Cass frowned. “Tim is acting strange. I wish Jill was here. I need to talk to her. She also surprised me. She told me specifically that she would wait for us and go with us to the hospital.”

  “I wouldn’t make much of that,” Fred said. “Jill’s an early riser. Yesterday scared her. She was probably here at dawn to make sure he was breathing. If it had been you who was sick, I would have stayed all night.”

  His remark touched her. “You’d do that for me?”

  He grinned. “If you let me sleep in the same bed with you.”

  “You love me for my body. You don’t care about my mind.”

  Fred rubbed dust from his car. “You have a mind?”

  Mary put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear about your sex lives.”

  Cass patted her on the back. “We’ll try not to corrupt you.” She paused and spoke to Fred. “But where do you think Jill went?”

  “Anywhere. Maybe to Las Vegas.”

  “I’d like to go to Vegas,” Mary piped up, taking down her hands. “I want to learn to play the slot machines.”

  “They don’t let little kids gamble,” Fred said.

  “I’m not a little kid,” Mary said stubbornly.

  “I want to go back up to the Shaft,” Cass blurted out.

  Fred was unenthusiastic. “Do we have to? It’s just something else that will delay us if we’re leaving today.”

  Cass shook her head. “We’re not leaving today.”

  Fred obviously found her puzzling. “But you’ve been so hot to get on the road. You said if Tim was OK, we were out of here. I already pissed my boss off by calling him and telling him that I wasn’t going to be able to give him notice.”

  Cass stared at Fred’s scratched car. “Tim took this car somewhere last night. I want to find out where. Jill might know.”

  “You’re only guessing,” Fred said.

  “I’m a pretty good guesser.”

  “But what does this have to do with visiting the mine?” Fred asked.

  Cass put her hand to her head. She felt a headache coming on.

  “I can’t explain it,” she said seriously. “But I think that mine has a lot to do with this whole situation.”

  9

  The first thing Cass did when she returned to Madison, after placing Mary in Fred’s competent care, was to drive over to Jill’s house. There was no answer at the door and Cass was about to leave when she noticed that the garage door was shut. Jill had a thing about keeping her car in the garage—she was always afraid it was going to get stolen. Jill didn’t have an automatic door opener—she usually left the garage open when she was out in her car. Peering in through the space between the frame and door, Cass was surprised to see that Jill’s car was still there. She wondered if it had been there earlier when they swung by on the way to the hospital. Of course it was possible Jill was out with her parents, but Jill socialized with her mommy and daddy as often as she exercised, which was never.

  Cass’s disquiet continued to grow. If Jill’s car had been there earlier it meant that Jill had not visited Tim at the hospital, that he had lied to them a third time. For the first time she began to entertain the idea that Tim had met Jill during the night. She didn’t understand why the possibility filled her with dread. After all, they had been going together for a long time. On impulse Cass left town and drove out to the Shaft. She was alone and didn’t have a flashlight. She had no intention of exploring the mine by herself, brave soul that she was. She just wasn’t that adventurous. Yet she hoped to get a sense of what was going on by visiting the spot. It was intuition that was guiding her.

  Parking not far from the mine opening, Cass was surprised to see that there were additional tire tracks in the dust, at least two sets, one fresher than the other. Yet they were identical tracks in the sense that the tread was from the same brand of tire. That meant that someone had been back up here in Fred’s car. As the afternoon sun burned down on the top of her head, Cass studied the dirt more closely, trying to make sense of the various footprints, but they all blurred, in the sand and in her mind. She was not happy to spot what she thought was a drop of dried blood. Of course it could have been from when Tim cut his hand. Yet the drop was closer to the fresh set of tire tracks. She considered lifting the drop and giving it to the police to type. But she thought she might be taking the super-girl-criminologist idea too far.

  Cass did not go in the mine, but started back to town.

  Driving out of the hills, Cass was puzzled to see a cleared place off the dirt road where a car had plowed through the wall of dry tumbleweed. She didn’t know how she had missed it on the drive up to the Shaft. Getting out and going down on her hands and knees, she saw that the tire tracks were the same as those made by Fred’s car. For the life of her she couldn’t imagine why Tim would borrow his friend’s car and drive it through such rough terrain. Such a move would definitely have scratched the car and coated it with dust. Unless Tim was simply off his rocker, what could his motivation have been? Tim’s earlier comments about the miners who had gone nuts working in the bottom of the Shaft returned to haunt her. She wished she had insisted on looking at Tim’s hand at the hospital. The fact that the doctors must be constantly checking him for signs of infection did nothing to soothe her anxiety.

  When Cass got back to town it was after one o’clock. Once more she swung by Jill’s house. Her friend’s parents were home now, but they said they hadn’t seen their daughter all day. When Cass pointed out that Jill’s car was still in the garage, they didn’t act worried. Jill wasn’t close to her parents; they figured she was eighteen and could do what she wanted. Cass left frustrated. Jill’s mother and father had not even asked about Tim.

  Cass went to see Sheriff Sam. His full name was Sam Strucker but everyone called him by his first name. Sam was fat and forty and patrolled Madison’s fast-food joints ceaselessly. There wasn’t a lot of criminal activity in town so he seldom got to practice his policing skills. He had a big old friendly face and a home-grown manner that would have put a drug dealer at ease. But Cass knew he wasn’t foolish, merely slow and methodical. She had twice seen him solve mysteries that had the rest of the town’s intellectuals stumped: once when someone had burned down the doughnut shop, and the second time when the gas station had been robbed. Of course both times it had been the same culprit. The doughnut shop had been a favorite of Sheriff Sam’s, so he could put in the hours when he was inspired.

  Cass found Sheriff Sam sitting in his office in front of his air conditioner, a favorite spot of his. Like most overweight people, he didn’t do well in the heat. He had picked a hell of a place to make a living. He was eating a Ding Dong and sipping a carton of milk. Not even trying to hide the indulgence from her, he just waved her to have a seat. There was a baseball game on the tube. It was the bottom of the ninth—it seemed that nowadays it always was. His mouth full, Sheriff Sam asked by gesturing if she’d like the other Ding Dong. She s
hook her head and let him finish chewing. Small town law enforcement at its finest.

  “What can I do for you, Cass?” he asked as he wiped his hands on a paper napkin. Sheriff Sam was a neat slob, he kept his office and patrol car tidy, but the interior of his house looked like a doughnut shop. He actually had a housekeeper to help him keep it clean, but she was blind and had severe arthritis in her hands.

  “Jill is missing,” Cass blurted out. There was raw emotion in her voice, and Cass hadn’t realized how upset she had made herself with all her sleuthing. Sheriff Sam sat up at her pain.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” he asked.

  “Yesterday evening. She’s not at home and her parents don’t know where she is, but her car is in the garage. I think it’s been there all day. I know that doesn’t sound like much but we planned to meet her today and visit Tim in the hospital. She didn’t show, and that’s not like Jill.”

  “I heard Tim went through a bad patch yesterday. How’s he doing?”

  “Physically he’s feeling better, but I’m worried about him as well. Yesterday, before he got sick, Jill said he tried to drown her. Then when we went to see him today, he lied to us about several things.” Cass paused. “Am I confusing the issue?”

  Sheriff Sam took out a yellow legal notepad and pencil.

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything that’s bothering you. Maybe between the two of us we can make some sense of it.”

  Cass told him the whole story, starting with their late-night visit to the Shaft, and finishing with the dried blood drops and crushed tumbleweed she had discovered. When she was done she half-expected Sam to give her the usual lines about not worrying and waiting for Jill to return. But he seemed genuinely concerned about the damage to Fred’s car and how it tied into the evidence at the Shaft.

  “You’re sure the tire tracks are the same?” he asked. “They seemed identical to me. It must have been Fred’s car that was driven back up there, and Tim was the only one close to the car who could have driven it.”