Scene: Encounter with a Hollow Man

The basement of St. Catherine's Hospital had been abandoned for renovation three years earlier, then mysteriously defunded. Now it sat in administrative limbo—not officially condemned, yet not in use. The perfect place to hide something that shouldn't exist.

Mick's flashlight beam cut through the darkness, illuminating peeling paint and outdated medical equipment draped in dust-covered sheets. The silence was unnerving—not just quiet, but a void where sound should be. Even his footsteps seemed muffled, as if the air itself was thicker here.

He missed Marchosias's presence with a physical ache. It had been four days since the demon had gone silent within him, and the absence felt like losing a limb. No sardonic commentary, no supernatural insights, just a hollow space in his mind where another consciousness should be.

"Pull yourself together," he muttered, the sound of his own voice providing minimal comfort. "Just find evidence and get out."

According to the documents he'd pieced together from Judge Blackwood's files, this site was connected to the Blackthorn Initiative—possibly one of their early experiments before they'd refined whatever process they were using. He'd been hoping for records, documentation, anything to explain what had happened to Marchosias and how to reverse it.

What he found instead was infinitely worse.

The corridor ended at a reinforced door marked "Radiation Therapy," left slightly ajar. Yellow light spilled through the gap, accompanied by a low, rhythmic sound that took Mick a moment to identify.

Breathing. Wet and labored, like someone drowning in slow motion.

Every instinct screamed to turn back, but Mick forced himself forward. Without Marchosias's power flowing through him, he felt almost unbearably vulnerable, but he couldn't afford to indulge that fear.

He eased the door open with his shoulder, baton extended in his right hand, flashlight braced against it for both light and as a makeshift weapon if needed.

The room beyond had once been a radiation treatment chamber, but the medical equipment had been replaced with something that looked like a cross between an operating table and a medieval torture device. Leather restraints hung open at the sides. Tubes and wires connected to machinery that hummed with barely contained energy, gauges and monitors displaying readings in a script Mick didn't recognize.

And on the floor beside the table, a figure in a hospital gown was trying to crawl toward the door.

"Jesus," Mick whispered, hurrying forward. "Are you all right? I can get you out of here."

The figure stopped moving at the sound of his voice. Slowly, with jerking movements that suggested severe injury, it began to turn.

"Don't..." a ragged male voice warned. "Don't... look..."

Too late. The man rolled onto his back, and Mick's flashlight illuminated what remained of his face. It seemed normal at first glance—middle-aged, pale with shock and pain—but then the skin below his right eye began to sink inward, collapsing like fabric suddenly pulled from behind.

"They did something to me," the man gasped, his voice distorted as the left side of his throat similarly depressed, creating a concave hollow where solid flesh should be. "Put something inside... taking up room..."

Mick fought the urge to back away. "Who did this to you? The Blackthorn people?"

A terrible, broken laugh escaped the man. "Doctor Crane. Said I was... perfect candidate. Strong enough to... survive transition." His body convulsed suddenly, back arching unnaturally. "It's moving inside me!"

The man's hospital gown had ridden up during his collapse, exposing his abdomen. As Mick watched in horror, the skin rippled and bulged, as if something large was shifting beneath it—not like the movement of organs or muscle, but like an entity attempting to find its way out.

"What did they put in you?" Mick asked, desperately trying to understand what he was witnessing.

The man's eyes focused on Mick with sudden clarity. "Not what they put in... what they took out." He grabbed Mick's wrist with surprising strength. "They scooped parts of me away. Made... room."

The skin of the man's chest suddenly collapsed inward, creating a depression the size of a fist. Within the hollow, Mick caught glimpses of something moving that wasn't flesh—something dark and fluid that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.

"Can you walk? I can get you to a hospital." Even as Mick said it, he knew conventional medicine would have no answers for this.

"Too late for that," the man said with terrible certainty. His gaze drifted to something behind Mick. "They'll be coming back. They know... when the transition progresses."

Mick turned to see a security camera in the corner, its red light blinking steadily. He smashed it with the handle of his baton, but the damage was likely already done.

"How many others?" Mick asked, turning back to the man. "How many have they done this to?"

"Dozens," the man whispered, more of his face sinking inward, creating a geography of impossible hollows. "Started with... volunteers. Now they take... who they need."

Another convulsion racked his body, more violent than before. His back arched at an angle that should have broken his spine, but instead, his torso seemed to flatten and expand simultaneously, the hospital gown tearing as his ribcage visibly collapsed inward.

"Kill me," the man pleaded, his voice changing in pitch and texture as his throat distorted further. "Before I'm not... me anymore. Before I'm one of... them."

Mick had seen death in many forms during his years as a detective. He'd witnessed Marchosias consume souls, had traveled to Hell and back. But nothing had prepared him for the desperation in this man's eyes—the horror of someone experiencing their own transformation into something inhuman.

"I can't," Mick said honestly. "But I can try to find who did this. Stop them from doing it to anyone else."

The man's expression crumpled, not with disappointment but with something worse—understanding. "Then go. Now. Before—" His words cut off as his jaw dislocated with a sickening pop, opening wider than humanly possible.

From the impossible darkness within his mouth, a sound emerged that wasn't a scream—too modulated, too structured. Words in a language Mick couldn't understand but that resonated with a familiarity that made his skin crawl. The language of Hell.

The transformation was accelerating. Where the man's right shoulder had been, there was now only empty space beneath the hospital gown, as if someone had erased part of him from existence. The darkness Mick had glimpsed earlier was spreading, flowing through the hollows like liquid shadow.

"Who were you?" Mick asked, backing toward the door, knowing there was nothing he could do but bearing witness seemed important somehow. "Before this?"

Something sparked in the man's eyes—a final flicker of human consciousness. "Jeffrey Watts. I was... an accountant." A ghastly smile spread across his face, skin stretching too wide. "I handled Judge Blackwood's finances."

Of course. A connection—exactly what Mick had been looking for, though not like this. Never like this.

"I'll remember your name," Mick promised. "I'll make them pay for what they did to you."

"Run," Jeffrey Watts answered, his voice now layered with harmonics that made Mick's teeth ache. "What's coming... isn't me anymore."

Mick didn't wait to see the final stages of the transformation. He backed through the door as the thing that had been Jeffrey Watts began to rise from the floor, its movements becoming more fluid, more coordinated. Its body still looked partially human, but the proportions were wrong, limbs bending at impossible angles, torso flattening to no more than a few inches thick.

The last thing Mick saw before he slammed the door was the creature's eyes—still human, still Jeffrey's—filled with terror at what it was becoming.

He ran, the sound of his footsteps echoing through empty corridors. Behind him, something moved with liquid grace, making no sound at all—a predator that knew the value of silence.

The Hollow Men weren't just weapons or experiments, Mick realized with sickening clarity. They were crimes against both humanity and whatever demonic essence was being used to fill the voids hollowed out of their bodies. Two forms of existence, forced together in a grotesque union neither had chosen.

Without Marchosias's power, Mick was just a man—vulnerable, limited by human frailties. But as he burst through the emergency exit into the cold night air, a fierce determination settled over him.

He would find a way to wake Marchosias. He would stop the Blackthorn Initiative. And he would remember Jeffrey Watts—the man who, even in his final moments of humanity, had tried to help a stranger understand what they were facing.

Because some horrors demanded to be witnessed. Demanded justice. Demanded an accounting that would come, one way or another.

Behind him, in the darkened corridors of St. Catherine's basement, something that was neither fully human nor properly demonic began to hunt.