The rain pattered soft and endless, a
whispering curtain over a street that had forgotten joy. At the far end of the
cobbles, beneath a crooked lamp that buzzed and spat, a figure crouched. His
arms dangled long, his back curled forward like a snapped bow. In the gutter's
glow, his face seemed carved from pale wax—thin lips peeled back from yellowed
teeth, cheeks caved and raw with lines that went nowhere. But the eyes were
worst of all: two black pits without glint or glimmer, eyes that did not
reflect the world but devoured it.
He looked monstrous, yes. But he had
not always been so. Once, he had been Elias Hart.
Elias had come into the world plain
and quiet, and the world had punished him for both. Other children in the
village of Whitcomb had voices like bells—bright, carrying laughter, brimming
with the surety of being wanted. Elias's voice cracked and tripped over itself.
When he spoke, he was met with rolled eyes or smirks, so he learned to speak
less, until silence became a habit, and habit became a cage.
He was never striking to look at. Not
handsome enough to be admired, not strange enough to be memorable. A mop of
flat brown hair, eyes the colour of dishwater, skin that burned red under sun
and blotched under cold. He was a blur at the edge of every group, the one
people forgot to name when counting who had been there.
At twelve, when boys first began
daring the girls with flowers stolen from their mothers' gardens, Elias plucked
a single violet and tried to give it to Ruth, a girl with freckles and a laugh
like spring. She looked at him for only a second before bursting into cruel
laughter, and the other children joined her. Elias dropped the flower into the
dirt, his ears burning so hot he thought he might faint. That night, he swore
he would never try again.
By sixteen, he had retreated into
himself completely. When the others played games in the square, Elias lingered
at the edge of the fields, watching shadows stretch. When the village gathered
for festivals, he feigned illness and lay awake in his empty bed, listening to
music and voices drift through his shutter. Self-isolation wrapped him like a
second skin—part comfort, part curse. It was easier not to try. It was easier
not to hope.
Yet hope gnawed at him still. He
carved little animals from scraps of wood, imagining the day he might give them
as gifts to someone who would smile, just once. He practiced conversations in
whispers, hoping that if the chance came, the words would not trip. Sometimes,
in moments of weakness, he trailed behind couples in the lanes, watching the
way their hands brushed, the way laughter leapt between them like sparks. He
felt like a starving man staring into feasts he would never taste.
The world moved without him. Boys
became men, men became husbands, husbands became fathers. Elias remained Elias:
overlooked, unwanted.
He tried to pray. At first, his
prayers were gentle—asking only for someone to talk to him, someone to notice
him. As the years passed, they grew sharper. Why not me? What is wrong with me?
By thirty, his prayers had become pleas shouted into the trees beyond the
village, words breaking from his chest like cracks in stone.
No one answered. Until one night,
someone did.
The clearing was drowned in fog when
she appeared. At first, Elias thought he had gone mad from loneliness. She was
too sharp, too bright—eyes glowing red like banked coals, lips curling into a
smile that promised and threatened in the same breath. She listened to him pour
out his heart, his years of isolation, the bitterness, the aching hunger for
love. She did not laugh at him. She did not turn away.
"I can give you time," she whispered.
"All the time in the world. Live long enough, Elias, and someone will love you.
Someday, you will be chosen."
It was the first kindness he had ever
been shown. He agreed before she even told him the price.
The decades came and went like tides. Elias moved from town to
town, always searching, always waiting for that "someday." But while the world
spun on, he withered. The curse revealed itself slowly: his hair thinned to
nothing, his teeth yellowed and twisted, his skin turned pasty and stretched
tight over bone. The scent of decay clung though no illness came. Time did not
take him, but it carved him into something grotesque.
He
could feel himself rotting, but never ending. He sometimes pressed a knife
against his chest, but the flesh healed, slow and mocking, as if death itself
recoiled from him.
Where once he had been invisible, now
he was unforgettable—people stared not because they admired, but because they
recoiled. Children screamed at him in the streets. Markets drove him away with
thrown stones. Priests called him an omen of God's wrath.
He drifted through
villages where children he once knew had grown into wrinkled elders, then into
graves. He watched houses crumble, rebuilt, crumble again. Wars rose and ended;
kings lived and fell. And always Elias remained, unchanged, as if time circled
him like a river flowing around a stone.
The dream of being chosen curdled into
mockery. The longer he lived, the less he was seen as a man. And what is a man
without the possibility of love? Elias learned the answer: he was nothing.
He built himself a shack in the woods,
hidden beneath twisting branches, where no one could find him unless fate
willed it. His bitterness festered there, growing sharp as a blade.
Now, when he crouched under the
lamplight in the forgotten streets, he was not Elias Hart, the man who once
carved wooden trinkets and prayed for tenderness. He was the Hollow Man, a husk
filled with rage at the sight of others' joy.
And it was in this state—broken,
starving for what he could never have—that he would one day see her. Elise. A
young woman whose laughter might have once saved him, and whose love for
another man would instead damn him further.
But that would come later. For now, he
crouched in the rain, remembering a flower dropped in the dirt, a prayer left
unanswered, and a demon's smile.