"The Hollow Men"

The candles guttered in the ritual chamber as young Thaddeus Beaumont lay on the stone altar, watching his father's face disappear behind a ceremonial mask.

He was twelve years old. The same age his father had been when the ritual was performed on him. The same age Beaumont men had been for seven generations, receiving "the burden and the gift" that made their family what it was.

Immortality. Or something close to it.

The robed figures around him began to chant in a language older than English, older than Latin, older than any tongue still spoken by living men. Symbols carved into the walls began to glow with a sickly light. And something began to change in the air a pressure, a presence, as if the universe itself was leaning in to watch.

Thaddeus didn't want this.

He'd seen what the ritual did to his uncles, his grandfather, the generations of Beaumont men who had received "the gift." They lived, yes lived far longer than any human should. But something was missing from them. Some essential spark that made life worth living.

As the ritual reached its climax, as power surged through his body like lightning made of ice, Thaddeus made a choice.

He resisted.

The ritual shattered.

Light turned to darkness, then to wrongness a color that had no name, a sound that had no frequency. The chanting became screaming. Robed figures collapsed, their bodies twisting into shapes that weren't quite human anymore.

Thaddeus's father died first. The power meant for his son rebounded into him, and he simply... stopped. His heart, his brain, his soul all ceased at the same moment, leaving nothing but an empty husk that crumpled to the floor.

And in the shadows, the failed cult members began to change.

They didn't die. That would have been a mercy. Instead, they became something else. Their faces smoothed away. Their identities dissolved. They became hollow shells that walked and moved and hungered but were no longer truly alive.

Thaddeus survived. His resistance had broken the ritual, but it had also interrupted it leaving him changed, but not transformed. He would live longer than any normal human. But he would never walk again. The ritual had taken his legs as payment for his defiance.

And the Hollow Men? They retreated into the darkness beneath the manor, waiting.

Always waiting.

Thaddeus woke from the nightmare to find Clara at his bedside, her ageless face creased with concern. He whispered that they were coming back. After all this time. The Hollow Men were coming back.

Clara's voice was gentle as she acknowledged she knew. She had felt them stirring. The destruction of the other creatures this season had released energy they could sense. They were waking.

After sixty years, Thaddeus thought he had buried them. Buried all of it. Clara reminded him that some things refused to stay buried. He of all people should know that.

The symptoms started appearing around town within days.

Memory loss. But not random not the gradual forgetting of old age or the sudden blanks of head injuries. This was targeted. People forgot the things that made them unique. Favorite songs. Cherished memories. The particular laugh of a loved one.

They forgot themselves, piece by piece.

Abigail felt it too. Her visions showed her empty shells walking the streets of Nowhere, faces blank as masks, voices hollow as wind through empty rooms. And beneath them all, she saw the Beaumont crest. The ritual chamber. The terrible night sixty years ago when Thaddeus's resistance had created monsters.

She went to him for answers. For the first time, he gave them.

Thaddeus's voice was heavy with decades of guilt as he explained that his family didn't just settle Nowhere. They created it. A laboratory for their darkest ambitions. Every horror she'd seen here traced back to Beaumont hubris.

He told her everything. The Mithraic Order a cult that had existed since Roman times, seeking immortality through forbidden rituals. The Beaumont family's role as American leaders of the sect. The generations of experiments, of creature harvesting, of supernatural manipulation that had made Nowhere what it was.

Abigail identified the Hollow Men as cult members. Thaddeus confirmed they were his family his uncles, his cousins, the loyal servants who had participated in the rituals. When he resisted, when the ritual broke, it didn't kill them. It emptied them. Took everything that made them human and left only the shell.

Abigail observed that now they were coming for him. Thaddeus met her eyes and explained they were coming for what he had decades of memories, a complete identity, everything they lost when he destroyed the ritual. They wanted to steal it to become whole again by taking pieces of others.

The Hollow Men emerged at dusk.

They wore clothes from different decades suits from the fifties, dresses from the twenties, military uniforms from wars long ended. Their faces were smooth, featureless, blank as mannequins. But their movements had purpose.

They remembered Thaddeus. They blamed him. And they were hungry.

The final confrontation took place in the ritual chamber beneath Beaumont Manor the same chamber where Thaddeus had broken the ritual sixty years ago. He faced them with Abigail at his side and Clara behind him, ancient and powerful and keeping her own secrets.

The Hollow Men spoke in unison, their voices like wind through empty halls. They accused Thaddeus of doing this to them, of breaking the ritual, of stealing their futures. Thaddeus responded that he had tried to stop something monstrous. He didn't know it would trap them.

They demanded he give them back what he took. His memories. His identity. Let them be whole again.

Thaddeus looked at the featureless faces of things that had once been his family. His uncles, who had taught him to ride. His cousins, who had played with him in these very halls. Servants who had known him since birth, now reduced to empty shells that hungered for what they had lost.

He refused not because he wanted to keep what was his, but because giving it to them wouldn't make them whole. It would just make him hollow too.

Abigail discovered something in the Hollow Men's emptiness.

Her visions pierced through the blankness, finding remnants of who they had been before. Fragments of identity, buried so deep even they had forgotten. She spoke their names names that hadn't been uttered in sixty years.

She addressed one as Edward, telling him he was Thaddeus's favorite uncle, that he had taught Thaddeus to fish. The Hollow Man shuddered. Something flickered in its emptiness a ghost of recognition, of memory, of self.

She addressed another as Margaret, telling her she was engaged to be married, that the wedding was supposed to be the week after the ritual.

The recognition spread. The Hollow Men trembled as fragments of their stolen selves resurfaced, brought to light by Abigail's visions. It hurt them terribly remembering what they had lost was agony beyond description.

But it also brought them something they had lacked for six decades.

Peace.

Clara stepped forward, and in that moment, Abigail glimpsed something ancient behind her eyes something that had existed long before the Beaumont family, long before the Mithraic Order, long before recorded history.

Clara explained she could release them, give them the death they'd been denied. But only with Thaddeus's permission. They were his family. His responsibility.

Thaddeus looked at the Hollow Men his uncles, his cousins, the people his resistance had trapped between life and death for sixty years. He had carried the guilt of their fate his entire adult life. And now he had the power to end it.

His voice breaking, he told Clara to do it. Let them rest.

Clara performed the ritual softly, gently, with words that predated human speech. One by one, the Hollow Men's forms began to dissolve. And as they faded, their faces returned for just a moment their real faces, the faces of the people they had been before the ritual took everything.

They looked at Thaddeus. And they smiled.

Forgiveness. After sixty years. Forgiveness he had never dared hope for.

Thaddeus Beaumont wept for the first time since 1955.

Afterward, Abigail asked Clara how she had learned to release souls like that. Clara smiled her mysterious smile and said she'd been doing this for a very long time. The Beaumonts weren't the only family with secrets.

Before Abigail could press further, the Big Ear's equipment came to life. Static resolved into a voice a voice that had been silent for years, warning that something was coming. The Wendigo was done waiting. It was ready to feed.

David Margolis. Broadcasting from wherever he had disappeared to. Warning them.

Abigail looked toward the Big Ear, visible through the manor's windows, its great dish pointed at the stars. The Hollow Men's destruction had released energy that flowed toward it like water toward a drain. The Wendigo had been feeding on their suffering for decades. Now, freed from that duty, it could turn its attention elsewhere.

Something was coming. Something that had been patient for a very long time.

And it was finally ready to stop waiting.