Hollow Hunter
by Jonathan "DreamDecay" Soule

   Visions… Visions within dreams had been haunting Michael every night, at this point. At first they were rare occurrences, but now they consumed even his waking world as he pondered what was wrong with him, what in God’s name they could mean. Visions of a ritual purification through pain using hooks and rope rigs and devices of old. They twisted and ripped apart the same man every time, a man of roughly his own age, for some unknown crime, or perhaps none at all. Visions of massive centipedes, each bearing three unnaturally glowing eyes and spinnerets at the rears of their bodies as if to weave webs with. Visions of heavy, conscious winds flowing into a corpse stripped bare of flesh, invading it, corrupting it, enhancing and ruining it eternally. And finally, visions of a creature most foul and unnatural, an undead beast of a man reborn through the blackened womb of death itself, its transformed body now home to a multitude of the blasphemous insects. Its eyes were glazed, uneven, pale and sick. They looked upon Michael across time and beyond dimensions of life and death, wakefulness and sleep, as if to announce a connection, an affinity, and a promise that the two would meet, that Michael and the Hunter would in due time complete each others destinies.
And that was when he awoke.

   Every time, after staring at the beast for far too long, Michael awoke covered in cold sweat. And while the dreams were vague, the visions obscured at first, as they became more common they also became more clear. He sometimes felt the Hunter somehow drawing closer to him, while other times he wondered if he was going insane. But he always just went to work as usual. He didn’t have very many people in his life; he wasn’t religious, he wasn’t married or dating. And lately all he did was work. He worked overtime every day, assisting the manager of an assembly line in a factory from morning to night to keep his mind off of the visions. His weekends were starting to turn into drunken hazes. He was breaking down, fearfully awaiting… something.

   The day it was to come, he knew something was wrong. His visions came as usual the night before; fast, vivid. But when he awoke, he found he couldn’t move. Feeling incredibly vulnerable, he laid still, bathed in sweat and immersed in near-silence. Despite the cars he knew were passing outside, the ticking wall clock and his own heaving breathing, there was only one sound in Michael’s ears. It was a ringing, a dull distant ringing he couldn’t understand, slowly but steadily growing louder and approaching. Eventually it hit him, entered him. The noise transcended vision as he felt some unearthly quintessence intoxicate his soul and race through his veins. Time blurred and lost all meaning. Eventually, Michael blacked out.

   When he awoke again, an hour had passed. Exactly one hour. Realizing he was late for work, Michael bolted out of his bed. Although he was a filthy wreck, he had no time to shower. The assembly line needed him. He hurriedly entered his bathroom, applied deodorant and left. By the time he was in the car he had somehow forgotten the event that took place after he awoke.

   The Hunter didn’t.

   Michael arrived at the factory, parked, and jogged up to the entry gate. He pushed through the entryway and was greeted by a scene of disarray. None of his coworkers were anywhere to be seen- or at least none alive. Three lay dead on the ground, brutalized. One was laying face down in a pool of his own blood, large puncture wounds present in his back. A second was slumped against a gore-spattered control panel, slash marks visible across his face and chest. The third had been decapitated. Two centipedes, wandering around the steel floor plates, turned to look upon Michael with their glowing triple-eyes. They paused, glaring at him hatefully, purposefully. Michael screamed. He turned to the door again, hoping to make it back to his car before the creature returned. He pulled the doors open.

   The Hunter stood on the other side.

   Seven feet tall, stripped of skin, only barely recognizable as having once been human. It had no blood coating its exterior, only thick strips of sinew overlapping, tightly pulled across its skeleton. Its body was torn in several places, loose tendons swaying in the wind. Its twisted face bore the pale, uneven eyes in his dreams, perpetually half-open and framed between spiraling horns on the sides of its head. Its arms were instruments of destruction: One ending in a ball of misshapen flesh with short, bone spikes jutting out from it, the other hollow, open at the end like a mouth, with four clawed fingers radially arranged around it. Something writhed inside the arm, pushing at its inner walls.

   Michael stood still, frozen by fear, staring at the creature’s eyes for the first time without the security of a dimensional border separating their bodies. Through the gaping wounds in the beast’s body, centipedes could be seen crawling about, giving diabolical life and intellect to the centuries-old dead flesh of the former man. When one of the bone spikes in the hunter’s arm thrust itself out to a length of well over a foot, Michael ran like the wind.

   The creature tromped along behind him, its footsteps pounding like steel. Michael looked behind him just in time to spot something whip out from within the Hunter’s hollow arm. A tentacle, connected at the end to some sort of flesh and bone blade, cut through the air over Michael as he dropped to the ground, then returned to its sheath, leaving Michael lying prone on the floor. He scurried to his feet and continued. Michael knew all too well that the creature, having found him across time and dreamscapes, would now hunt him down for hours or days if necessary. It had to be destroyed, wounded most grievously. Only then might it cease its pursuit.

   Knowing the assembly lines like the back of his hand, Michael eyed a steam-powered piston. He knew it to have a malfunctioning pivot point that could turn it almost 360°, completely away from the rollers of the assembly line and potentially towards the Hunter. It drove a piston half a foot in diameter through, at most, three inches of sheet metal per trigger pull, or a foot of air.

   It was a start.

   As Michael neared the piston, he stopped, turned on his heel, and watched as the creature caught up to him. Two tentacles were now hanging partway out of its now-limp hollow arm, the second ending in bone-and-flesh mandibles. Just as it raised its solid arm in the air to strike, Michael turned back to the piston and dove at it. The hunter’s bone spike struck only air and Michael caught the handles of the piston with both hands, the weight of his body twirling it around on its axis. As his side crashed into the assembly line, Michael closed his eyes tightly and pulled the trigger repeatedly, as fast as he could manage. Each press punched the piston clear through the torso of the beast and out its back. The strikes hit close enough together to form one huge hole in the Hunter’s body, spanning about a foot in width. Michael awaited his death or salvation. He heard a dull ‘thud’ as the creature crashed into the ground and opened his eyes to look upon it.

   The Hunter was torn open seriously enough that its torso might very well have collapsed had the creature attempted to stand much longer. Movement inside indicated the centipedes still lived. The beast lay still, though, frayed sinews scattered behind and beneath it. Michael knew this was his only chance to get away from it. But as he sat up, prepared to jump off of the line and run for his car, the beast weakly raised its hollow arm in his direction. He turned, but it was too late. A tentacle shot out and spun clear around the piston. Bone mandibles pierced through Michael’s arm, clamping down on him so tightly he could feel the creature’s bone scrape against his own. In an instant he was hurled through the air, around the piston, and thrown into the ground, the air leaving his lungs so violently he feared if it would ever return. The other tentacle followed, firing at Michael like a bullet. It stopped at his throat, though, a razor-edged bone blade pressed against his quaking windpipe. Michael looked down at the blade, and a marble-sized pale eye set into its side rolled up to meet his gaze. The intelligent blade followed Michael’s throat as it expanded and contacted, somehow not content to let him die yet. Behind him, the Hunter pushed itself weakly up off the ground and stood shakily looking down at its trapped victim.

   Michael’s visions came back to him: He remembered look in the Hunter’s eyes as he woke up, not vengeful but simply purposeful and knowing. He remembered the terrible, powerful noise that had moved through his body as he awoke that morning. And he remembered the brutalized bodies of his coworkers that he found upon entering the building. Not tortured bodies, exploited and tormented for any considerable length of time, but massacred bodies. Killed quickly, massively, without method or ritual. Michael stared at the Hunter, some of the fear suddenly giving way.

   "You can’t kill me", Michael proclaimed.

   The insects within the beast scurried faster than ever now, and near to the surface. The Hunter’s exterior flowed liquid, like chaotic ocean waves.

   "Part of you is inside of me", he continued.

   The centipedes replied in chorus, verbalizing in perfect unison as a sickening, high-pitched parody of human speech.

   "Not yet".

   And with that they issued forth from the fiend, pouring out of the tears and holes in its body in great numbers and streaming towards Michael. Somehow summoning forth breath from his damaged lungs, Michael howled. With his good hand, he grabbed for the blade at his neck, hoping to slit his own throat before he could find out what the infernal vermin had planned for him. The Mandible clenching his arm interjected with blinding speed, catching his hand out of the air and crushing it. The first of the insects reached him, crawled up his leg and towards his abdomen. In seconds more than a dozen had reached the same point and begun to burrow inwards with their own mandibles, eating him alive. As he writhed on the ground, Michael saw the Hollow Hunter start to crumble. It collapsed inward, tumbling into a heap of flesh as the last of the centipedes left it. Michael could feel them now within his own body: warm, heavy and constantly moving. A remarkably small portion of his exterior had been harmed, but inside they were hollowing him out, chewing up and dissolving everything except his skeleton.

   Michael felt for sure he should be dying any second, but the seconds continued to pass like centuries and his life refused to slip away. He could feel his eyes transforming, though. They reverted to the same pale sickness of the Hunter, fulfilling its destiny to be resurrected from a failing form, to maintain an evil strong enough to transcend life and death, timelengths and dreamscapes. And with his new eyes came new vision, the vision of darkness emanating from the hole in his stomach. And from his mouth and fingertips light, humanity, innocence funneled and spun away from him and the accursed insects and off seeking deliverance in some other world, some heaven.

   Michael tried everything in his mental power, every exertion of will not to accept his change. He wanted desperately to repel the insects from their conquest, but he knew he was fighting a losing battle. The insects’ secrets became clear to him: new visions, visions of the Hollow Hunters before him that had passed their curse on repeatedly when their times had drawn to a close. Visions of the rituals of the origin of what he was becoming, in more vivid detail than ever. The most atrocious purification through pain imaginable, defying every law of God and every kind of cosmic decency and righteousness, all in God’s own name. Visions of the new Hunter’s destiny, the crimes he would soon be committing and the man, roughly his age at the time of death, who he would eventually hunt down, be he anywhere in existence. And visions of the destruction he would long for more than anything in the world from that point on, the collapse and liberation from Unlife that he would be granted when the insects decided that his body was wearing down, and his time was no more.

©2003 Jonathan "DreamDecay" Soule

Jonathan Soule (DreamDecay@artandentropy.com) maintains a dark art and humor website called Art and Entropy (www.artandentropy.com), which showcases his stories, poems, drawings and other such work. An illustration of the Hollow Hunter can be found at http://www.artandentropy.com/drawings/hollowhunter.htm. He has been featured in other online publications, including TheWeirdCrap.com and Darkhalf.com, but has not yet been published in print. Jonathan Soule enjoys long walks on the beach, writing tributes to his favorite serial killers and attempting to start campfires using a calculator, a potato masher, and a cat, a task which he has not yet succeeded at.