Bards and Sages Quarterly (April 2018)

A Hollow in the Dark

By Erin Cole

CONSCIOUSNESS BROKE with a guttural shriek in Dessa’s ear, and she died all over again. The scream might have been her own or those who looked upon her dead baby. Either way, the world had unwound, if just for a split second, and she fell into the nucleus of it. Reborn of the hollow dark.

Dessa laid in a sweat and blood-soaked bed, hipbones as pliable as warmed beeswax. Josephine and Leah gathered towels in the back room, whispered under their breath about her condition and what to do with her, the girl with sinuous scars and raven eyes. They’d not wanted to let her stay at their communal manor on the outskirts of the village, but it was difficult to refuse her with a swollen belly.

Dessa knew she’d never fit in but try she did. It was a roof over her head, and the work provided her three meals. Now that she was without child, Dessa sensed it wouldn’t be much longer before she saw the way of the streets again.

The girls rounded the corner with an armful of linens and washcloths careful to keep their gazes anywhere but on her. Lessen the burden of empathy. Anne boarded up the windows with the help of two other caretakers. The manor backed up to Alsea Grove, the city park where the clawed slopes of the Nestucca Mountains dug into the north side of it. Arcane tales of witches and monsters surrounded the steep, forested hills, but recent sightings of a night creature worried residents. It wasn’t just myth anymore. Something had attacked three people in the last month, drained them of their years as a vampire would blood.

Jenny Fisher, a local dressmaker, said it came out of the trees late one night, quiet as a panther and more beautiful than anything she’d ever seen, ... ‘exquisite symmetry’. She’d managed to escape because a watchman in the grove happened to approach. He never saw the creature, only something that looked to be wearing the ratty, black feathers of a condor.

This will be the fourth consecutive night, Anne said. She latched the top of a window and then rechecked the others once more.

Why hasn’t the sheriff’s men caught it? Leah asked. Why haven’t they seen what it is?

Dessa let her head fall to the side, still numbed by her own cruel world, one that had sent Devils to steal her child from her blood-thickened womb. They might as well have sucked the ovaries from her uterine, snapped them at the stem and whirled them around their tongues like soft raspberries.

With William gone to war, the pain only deepened sharpened feelings of abandonment and loneliness. If he weren’t dead, he would mourn the news of their child’s death alone. Maybe the news of a child had never reached him, so Dessa prayed.

Leah sat next to Josephine at the foot of Dessa’s bed. She dipped washcloths in a porcelain chamber pot and began to bathe Dessa with a sense of detachment, as if she were a mangy dog, sponging away dried blood from her thighs and stuffing cloth between her legs. It wasn’t just that Dessa’s baby was born silent and unmovable, but that he was nothing but stretched skin over bones as if he had starved in the womb. This only deepened the women’s resentment and aversion to Dessa.

Leah spoke in a hushed voice to Josephine. How can we stop it if we don’t even know what it is?

Josephine shook her head at Leah. Don’t go speaking of monsters again. This thing is a real person and probably a traveler at that. He’ll be caught and punished accordingly. A scowl shadowed over her eyes. Dessa saw that Josephine had a darkness in her too, scars unseen, but she seemed to want to control it, keep it secured behind a locked door. Tonight, Dessa left those doors wide open. She wanted the darkness to consume her, to nurse the cold hollow growing in place of her baby boy.

Josephine brought a teacup to her cracked lips. Drink.

Pungent tea dribbled into Dessa’s mouth and wet her tongue with the tang of boiled root and nettle.

No more, Dessa said, pushing the mug away.

You want to take your own life too? Josephine said, seemingly more irritated than concerned.

I’ve no want for anything anymore, Dessa replied, squinting through another wave of pain twisting sharply in her abdomen.

Josephine set the mug down. Then you are a dead thing, just like— she stopped herself.

There was no need to finish her sentence. Dessa turned to the room where her little dead thing lay. In truth, she had been dead for a long time too. The pain coursing through her was only a reminder that she was still alive, that and the hollow in the cavern of her belly gnawing with hunger. Longing for the light of life again.

IN THE CORNER OF THE windowsill, a spider fed on a silken pod, suckling the sweetness of life from its prey just as the thing in the woods did. Feeding the hollow. Inside Dessa, her hollow thrived, channeling deeper, growing ever hungrier. The gravity of something savage pulled at her and she let it. The pain lessened when given a path to traverse.

The thing that everyone and the Alsea Gazette called the ‘Nestucca Night Fiend’ grew hungry too, two more strikes in the last week. Though withered and bed-ridden from pressing old age, both victims survived. News of the attacks circulated through hushed hearsay and village gatherings. The town’s emotions were a thick coagulation of paranoia and fear. The sheriff’s men scoured the woods bordering Alsea Grove, but no one witnessed anything. Whatever the thing was, it was more agile and vigilant, more attuned to the night than them. Whatever it was, Dessa needed to see it with her own eyes. She needed something as hollow as she, an infinite darkness she could climb into and never be found again.

That night she woke clawing at the air. Her belly ached, and her breasts hardened with repressed milk. A fierce hunger slid against her spine and wormed its way deep into the marrow of her being. A change was taking place inside her. All the pain and sadness she’d felt began to metamorphose into something of a strength. She wondered if the night fiend had a hollow too.

OUTSIDE, THE MOON SPILLED pewter light over rooftops. Dessa dressed for the cold and shadows. She stuffed pillows beneath the covers of her bed and then waited for the longcase clock in the study to clang its twelve, heavy tolls so she could sneak out unheard through the back door and across the field to the grove.

At the back of the park, the low limbs of oaks gave access to branches above. She climbed partway up and waited. The black of night was an arm around her thoughts. She didn’t worry about what she would do if the night fiend attacked her. She only wanted to know why she did it.

She traced the edge of the woods. A glimmer of light flashed, so subtle that one not staring directly at it would have missed it. A silhouette moved between the dappled shadows. Dessa wiped at her eyes. It was Norman Denney. He strolled along a path that joined a trailhead into the woods. He held a gas lantern in one hand and a shotgun in his other.

Dessa stiffened at the sight of another figure, a shadow like no other. A fluid motion of absent light. A trailing mane of tattered, black hair and a dark cloak of feathers and leaves and twigs. Half woman, half something else—cinereal, scaled skin and metallic lips, obsidian-slick eyes, and unnaturally long, thin limbs poised like a web crawler. Nestucca’s Night Fiend. The hollow thing.

The woman emerged from the shadows as silent as snowfall. Norman ceased walking as if sensing a darkness closing in on him. He spun around, the shotgun aimed in front of him. He saw the woman but did not shoot. He was frozen stone-still as if awed by the sight of her, the same as Dessa.

The woman moved closer to him, though not upon walking feet. She drifted swiftly with an unseen force. Norman didn’t so much as twitch, which to Dessa, didn’t seem right. Given a chance, which he looked to have had, he would have shot the night fiend without pause but he was enraptured. Spun tight into a silken cocoon.

The woman advanced on Norman and whirled him around like the venomous recluse. Her shadowy cloak pleated around him. She brushed pale, sterling lips along the soft rim of his ear with what must have been the whisper of divinity. Dessa yearned to know what she’d said to him, what otherworldly knowledge she shared. A stitch twisted inside her then, deep in the flesh of her being, the place that still ached for her baby, yet she wished not to hold supple, velvet flesh in her arms anymore. She hungered for the woman’s dark embrace.

Norman remained unmoving and enslaved by the woman’s feral will. She lifted his chin to the side and took his mouth into hers. Violent and provocative. Trenchant heat poured through Dessa’s veins like an irresistible scratch. Her grip flexed around the tree limb. Bark indented into her skin, and her chest swelled with excitement.

Norman’s knees bowed, and his limbs slackened in the woman’s arms. When the woman let go of him he collapsed to the ground, near dead. The woman craned her head up to the sky, opened wing-like arms, and vanished back into the forest.

Dessa imagined drifting away on the night’s wing the same and almost fell from the limb of the tree. She gripped her arms around the branch and swung her legs down. She hurried over to Norman. His head was crooked to the side, pulse faint but present. Spit drooled from his mouth. Lines had gathered and deepened at the corners of his eyes and mouth, and his flaccid skin sagged at the jawline.

She peered through the grove for the woman but saw nothing. This morning, she had wanted death, had prayed for it. Tonight, she couldn’t wait for tomorrow’s evening.

ANNE PACED THE PERIMETER of the kitchen, careful not to step outside the tile borders, especially avoiding the solid black squares. She folded a white linen cloth with absentminded, habitual movements. Square upon another square until she couldn’t fold it anymore. The compacted fabric seemed to reflect her thoughts. Dessa had overheard discussions about the fire that killed her family, and so she supposed Anne kept many dark things folded up tight. Like Josephine, like her. But not the woman from the woods. She unfurled her darkness, let it bloom and thrive.

Norman couldn’t remember anything, except that there was a beautiful woman with long, black-ribbon hair who told him that he was full of light. He didn’t mention her tousled feathers or scaled skin, nor her steely lips and black tongue slipping against his neck. What he saw was not the same as what Dessa saw, but it didn’t matter. Dessa thought her true nature was just as extraordinary.

NIGHT FELL EARLY WITH a nebula of slate-blue clouds. Dessa laid in bed thinking of the night woman instead of her dead son and missing husband. Both another lifetime ago. She was a different person now, and the women of the manor not only could sense it, but they feared it too. They used their fears to shield themselves and stave off the darkness, but not Dessa and the woman. She sought it out as if it were the only way to be whole again.

Once the women were asleep, she crept from the room, waited for the longcase clock to strike twelve tolls again, and out the back door she went. She cut through the field and followed the back road towards the grove, then receded into the shadows of oak and pine. A lantern lit up the grove’s well to her right. Farther down the road, she heard the sheriff and his deputies searching the area, led astray by what they thought was the woman’s pattern. Dessa knew the woman was wiser than them, and so she went where they didn’t.

Before long, a man walked to the well with a bucket in his hand, presumably unruffled by the recent headlines, The Nestucca Night Fiend Strikes Again! The very fiend closed in on him then, without his knowing. The night woman, moving without sound or step. A hollow in the dark.

The man fastened his bucket to the line and reeled it down into the well. When he drew the bucket back to the top, he flinched at the sight of the woman standing next to him. Like Norman, the man froze by what he likely perceived to be the rarest of beauty. He wouldn’t remember the strewn, tangle of her feathers and hair, the cold hues of her skin or the aberrant nature of her limbs. He would only recall the magic of her presence. Everything else was just a hazy reflection, an image achromatized.

The man dropped the bucket of water and let the woman fold herself around him. He was a willing participant, even brought his hands to her waist, surrendering himself to her completely. Her mouth skimmed his ear, throat, and lips for ten hard beats of Dessa’s heart. A rush of elation flowed through her as she watched. She couldn’t remember feeling so alive, so immersed in anything as she did then.

Radiant, olivine light emanated from the woman’s opened mouth as she kissed him, obscenely and full of hunger, pushing her tongue into his mouth. When she let him go, he collapsed to the ground. His once dark hair grayed to ash.

Dessa had been so knotted in the moment, she didn’t realize that the woman stared at her, a hypnotic gaze that stunned and dizzied her. The woman drew closer to her, as though shortening the distance between them without physically doing so. Dessa knew then that she was peering into the woman’s hollow, an extraordinary moment that was painfully interrupted by the blast of a whistle.

The sheriff and his deputies shouted at the other end of the park. Dessa broke from the woman’s trance. The men advanced towards them. She turned to the woman, to reach for her, but she had already disappeared.

Wanting not to have to explain herself, especially to the likes of Josephine, Anne, and Leah, Dessa retreated into the darkness the same and returned home. She waited for the longcase clock to conceal her entrance, but once inside, she wished for the deep shadows of the Nestucca Mountains.

THAT NIGHT, DESSA DREAMED of flying into a dark chasm, a fissure sowed with things silken and malleable. A place to keep secrets. She said not a word to Josephine, Anne, or Leah the next morning. Neither did she tell them about the single, black, tattered feather lying against the stark white of her sheets when she pulled back her covers or how when she picked it up and brushed the stiff tip of it against her cheek, she imagined it was the mouth of the woman. They would not understand, and for once, she didn’t care.

Another knew her better.

JOSEPHINE AND LEAH argued even though they were on the same side. The night fiend’s repeated attacks had rattled the town into a panic. Plans for a midnight march passed through the market and streets. Anne pleaded for Josephine to stay, but she wanted to join them. She had something to prove, more to herself than others.

Dessa glimpsed between the window curtains. Down the road, men and women suited up outside a storefront. They passed around spears and blades, all the sharp, bright things needed to kill a night fiend with. Josephine held torches with the other women. She hoped to warn the woman before they found her, no matter if she was her next victim.

Dessa told Leah and Anne that she wanted to join them. Without a plea for her to stay as they’d done with Josephine, the women let her go. Dessa avoided the streets, and instead, followed her instincts, steering for the shadows of the mountain. She could sense the woman’s presence, her dark pull as inviting as the grass beneath her feet. The trees thickened in the distance, and there, under the shade of cedar, the woman waited for Dessa.

Dessa walked to her, startled that she could, that the woman let her get close enough to observe her heinous nature, the night fiend that she truly was. But underneath her tangled guise, Dessa detected a frailty, a delicate wing among thorns.

Entranced by the woman’s magic, Dessa had almost forgotten why she’d come. They are looking for you, she said to the woman.

The woman shifted closer to her, in the time of a blink. You have been watching me, she whispered. Her voice was cold as the icy gusts of winter.

Dessa couldn’t move. I’m sorry. I cannot help it.

The woman circled her. She smelled of cardamom, mint, and wood. Your darkness is a path. She touched her hair and then her cheek. Dessa waited for the inevitable, her kiss of death. Instead, the woman faced her. I cannot take you. her mouth moved, but not in ways of speech. You are not like them.

Dessa held her gaze, knew what she meant—she was without light, a dead thing or worse, a thing of death.