The Hollow Hunter

VII.

In the fathomless black he dreams of her. Her smell. Her eyes. The bright glow of her smile. He dreams that they are together again, that she is standing over him, leaning down, trying to rouse him from his sleep with a kiss on the forehead. She is icy to the touch. "Wake up my love," she says.

"Wake up."

Slowly he rises from the depths of his unconsciousness. He feels the cold and hard floor beneath him. Smells the scent of phosphorus and death. The figure is still standing over him, features backlit by the soft flickering glow of sunlight. Except it's not sunlight. And it's not her.

The hunter jolts awake, drenched in blood and sweat and reaches for the pistol on his belt and comes up empty. A woman leans over him but it is not her. Instead it is the dead sheriff, the coin-sized bullet hole still perfectly placed in the center of her forehead like some ritualistic prayer marking. Her skin is withered and papery and it cracks and peels away in places like old wallpaper to reveal the pulsing tendrils of black muscle underneath. Her face stretches to reveal a maw of black-stained teeth in a crude imitation of a smile above focused and milky eyes.

"Welcome back child."

He jerks upright and scoots away from her across the stone floor. She stands and watches him, ghoulish smile still plastered across her lips. The scene unfolds around him. He sits in an octagonal stone chamber.  What he had initially thought to be golden sunlight is actually the flickering glow of several gas lamps ensconced on the walls. Hollows line the chamber, chittering and laughing to themselves like feral hyenas. Finally, before him on a crudely hewn throne of obsidian, sits a withered and ancient man. He is little more than a skeleton wrapped in wrinkled and translucent skin. Bulging inky black veins trace every inch of his exposed flesh like a spider's web. The Baron of Black Bellows.

"Well well, what a right mess of things you've made, my son." The Baron's voice comes from the sheriff's lips. The Baron does not move at all, he does not speak. He has invested all of his essence into his brood and is now little more than an immobile shell. An anchor point that tethers them to his will.

The hunter leans forward and vomits onto the cold stone floor.

"And for what?" The Baron continues, pacing the sheriff's corpse back and forth across the stones. "Vengeance? Are you so naïve that you think killing me will afford you any relief, any emotion other than more of the shame and self-loathing that already consumes you?"

The hunter spits and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "It's not for me."

The sheriff scoffs. "Oh really? Tell me then, if not for you, then for whom? For her? You think that if she were here this is what she would ask of you?"

"It's because of you," he says, spittle flying from his lips, rage hot in his belly. "She's dead because of you."

At this the sheriff chuckles. "Such conviction. You say that as if I am the one who slew her."

"Your curse did."

"It is a shoddy craftsman who blames his tools. What happened to her was not the fault of the power I bestowed unto you. The fault lies with the practitioner who failed to control it."

The hunter doesn't have an answer for that.

"So you can continue to say that you reap these lives in memory of her, but we both know that it stopped being about her long ago, my son."

"Stop calling me that," the hunter replies, gritting his teeth. "I am not your son."

The Baron's laugh courses through the hollows. "And why not? Because we share no blood? Oh, but my child, we share something far greater. Drought. The power to raise bodies from the grave and bend them to our will." The sheriff gestures with a fragile hand to the hollows assembled around the room. "A gift that binds our souls together tighter than any bond of blood ever could."