The guilt over Lenore lasted three days.
Not because Casimir stopped feeling it, but because the pressure in his veins didn't care about guilt. Didn't care about consequence. Didn't care that he'd turned a woman into an instrument of compulsory truth and destroyed her ability to exist in the world without dismantling everyone around her.
The ink-blood cared only about expression.
And what it wanted to express now was rage.
Not the clean anger of his early poems. Not the surgical precision of his observations about London's cruelties. This was older. Deeper. The accumulated resentment of every rejection, every dismissal, every time he'd been told his work was too much or not enough or almost, but—
Every time he'd swallowed his best lines because they were too sharp.
Every metaphor he'd killed because it was too true.
Every verse he'd discarded because it would alienate the audience he was supposed to be courting.
All of it had gone somewhere. Had accumulated like sediment, like poison, like words that had been refused the dignity of existence and had therefore learned to hate the world that had refused them.
Casimir sat at his desk—the one covered in bloodstained pages, surrounded by his own fading reflection—and felt the pressure build to something beyond pain, beyond urgency, beyond anything he'd experienced before.
This wasn't the normal compulsion to write.
This was hunger.
His hand—the one that still worked, still reported sensation—reached for paper. Found the last clean sheet in his room. Everything else was filled, covered, colonized by his blood-verses.
One sheet left.
For this.
He didn't know what this was yet. Only that it demanded birth. That it had been gestating in the space between what he'd written and what he'd refused to write. That it was composed of all his discarded lines, his murdered metaphors, his aborted verses.
The waste product of self-editing.
The ghost of every poem he'd been too afraid to finish.
Casimir pressed his thumb to his mouth. Bit down. The familiar opening, the black blood welling up like a spring that had found its outlet.
But this time—this time something was different.
The blood was darker. Thicker. It moved against his skin like something with intention, like something that had learned to want.
He pressed it to the page and wrote:
MR. HOLLOW(A Portrait of Accumulation)
The title cost him something immediately—not memory, not sense, but something deeper. His ability to feel warmth. Gone. His body suddenly registering only two temperatures: cold and colder. The world had lost its gradients, its comfort, its mercy.
He continued:
In the space between what I meant to say And what I dared to say, A figure has been taking shape— Constructed from discarded lines, From metaphors I murdered, From verses I aborted in the womb Because they frightened me with their precision, Because they threatened to reveal Not what I knew, but what I refused to know.
His hand cramped but he pushed through, the words flowing not from thought but from something more fundamental, something that had been waiting for permission to exist:
He has no face because I gave him none— I cut away every description that came too close To describing my own features. He has no name because I stole them all— Every epithet, every appellation, Every title I claimed for myself While he stood in the margins, Patient as a wound that will not close.
The cost surged. His sense of balance. Gone. The room tilted and he had to grip the desk to stay upright, but his hand kept moving, kept writing, because stopping now would be like stopping birth halfway—something would die, something would be stillborn, and it would be worse than letting it live:
Mr. Hollow, I call him now— Though he needs no calling, being always present, Standing just outside the frame of every poem, Listening to the lines I chose not to speak, Collecting them like a miser collects coin, Growing fat on my refusals, Growing strong on my compromises, Growing real on every truth I edited Into something more palatable.
The page was half-full and Casimir was shaking, not from weakness but from recognition—he was writing something that shouldn't exist, something that was taking all his accumulated cowardice and giving it form, giving it agency, making it autonomous:
He whispers in the voice I might have had If I'd been braver, crueler, more honest. He speaks the lines I cut from every piece— The ones that went too far, That said too much, That looked too directly at the wound And named it without flinching.
"You wrote around me," Mr. Hollow says, In a voice like wind through empty rooms, "You built your poems as fortifications Against the truth you saw but would not speak. Every metaphor you softened was a brick. Every harsh word you revised was mortar. You built a wall between your vision and your verse, And I am what lived in that gap— The difference between what you saw And what you said you saw."
Casimir's left hand—the dead one—began to move on its own. Not controlled by him, but by something else, something that was learning how to inhabit absence, how to puppeteer emptiness. It reached across the page, leaving smudges that looked like fingerprints but had no whorls, no identifying marks, just smooth darkness like the prints of someone who'd never been born.
He has no eyes but he sees everything I've hidden. He has no mouth but he speaks every cowardice. He has no body but he carries the weight Of every truth I was too frightened to publish, Every observation I deemed too cruel to share, Every diagnosis I refused to deliver Because the patient might not survive the honesty.
The room was growing colder. Actually, physically colder. Casimir's breath misted. Frost began forming on the window glass from the inside, crystallizing in patterns that looked almost like writing, like some frozen language trying to manifest:
"You made me from your waste," Mr. Hollow says, "From the scraps of your self-censorship, From every line that died in revision, From every verse you deemed unfit To carry your name into the world. You thought you were being strategic, Being smart, being careful. You were being cowardly. And cowardice, when accumulated, Becomes its own entity. Becomes me."
The cost was enormous now. Casimir felt pieces of himself leaving—not memories or senses, but something more fundamental. His sense of continuity, the feeling that he was the same person from moment to moment, that there was a coherent self that persisted through time. It was fragmenting, breaking apart, and he was becoming a series of instances rather than a continuous being.
But he couldn't stop. The poem demanded completion:
He knows every poem I might have written If I'd been willing to pay the price— Not the price I'm paying now, The price I refused to pay then: The price of being honest. Of looking at cruelty and calling it cruelty. Of seeing myself clearly and not flinching. Of naming the world's wounds Without pretending I wasn't part of the wounding.
Mr. Hollow grows stronger with every compromise. Every time I soften a truth, he hardens. Every time I gentle an observation, he sharpens. Every time I make my language digestible, He becomes more capable of digesting— Not food, not flesh, but potential. He eats the poems I might have written. He consumes the versions of myself I was too frightened to become.
The frost on the window had spread to the walls. The papers pinned there began to curl, to frost over, and Casimir realized with horror that wasn't just cold—it was absence, it was the manifestation of Mr. Hollow beginning, the poem reaching backward through everything he'd ever written and finding the gaps, the empty spaces, the places where he'd chosen safety over truth:
"I am your should-have-said," Mr. Hollow whispers, "Your could-have-written. I am every line that died in your mouth Before it could reach the page. Every harsh truth you swallowed. Every uncomfortable observation you suppressed. I am the sum of your silences, The aggregate of your omissions, The compound interest of your cowardice Finally coming due."
Casimir's vision was blurring, but not from tears—he'd lost those days ago. From cost, from the sheer weight of what he was manifesting. This wasn't like Lenore. Wasn't a transformation of something existing. This was creation, bringing something into being that had never existed, pulling it from the void using only language as leverage:
And now he is here. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Here in the room where I've been writing, Here in the space between revisions, Here in the gap between what I write And what I mean, Growing more solid with every word I speak of him, More present with every line that describes him, More real with every verse that admits He has always been standing just outside my peripheral vision, Waiting for permission to exist.
Mr. Hollow, patron saint of the unwritten, Guardian of the discarded, Collector of the lines too true to print— I have named you. I have described you. I have given you form through language. And language, being what it is, Being what I have made it, Can do nothing now but make you real.
The final lines cost him everything he had left. His sense of direction—north, south, up, down, all became meaningless, interchangeable. His understanding of linear time—past and future collapsed into an eternal present where everything was happening simultaneously. His ability to distinguish between himself and other—the boundaries of his being became porous, uncertain, and he understood with terrible clarity that he was no longer entirely Casimir Grey, was becoming something else, something that was part poet and part poem and part the mechanism that connected them.
He lifted his hand—the living one—from the page.
The poem was complete.
Fifteen verses. A full portrait. The most precise description he'd ever written.
And as he watched, the frost on the window began to move.
Not melting. Moving. Rearranging itself into a shape. A silhouette. A figure that had no features but somehow suggested watchfulness, suggested attention, suggested something that was learning how to inhabit the cold spaces where warmth should have been.
The figure turned—if something with no face could be said to turn—toward Casimir.
And in a voice that sounded like wind through empty rooms, like pages turning in an abandoned library, like the whisper of every line that had ever been cut from every poem ever written:
"Finally," Mr. Hollow said. "Finally, you've made me real enough to speak."
Casimir tried to stand. Couldn't. His legs wouldn't obey. The loss of proprioception, the absence of balance, the fundamental disconnection from his own body—all of it conspired to keep him seated, to keep him facing what he'd created.
Mr. Hollow stepped away from the window. The frost followed him, spreading like a infection, like shadow, like the manifestation of every absence Casimir had ever cultivated.
He was tall—taller than natural, because he was made from all the lines that had been too much, all the observations that had been too tall to fit in polite verse. He moved wrong, his limbs bending at angles that weren't quite perpendicular, weren't quite parallel, occupying the geometric spaces between accepted dimensions.
And his face—
He had no face. Or rather, he had negative face. A smooth expanse where features should have been, but the smoothness somehow suggested features more powerfully than any actual eyes or nose or mouth could have. Looking at it was like looking at a wound that had healed too perfectly, leaving no scar but somehow making the absence of scarring more noticeable than a scar would have been.
"Do you know what I am?" Mr. Hollow asked, and his voice came from everywhere and nowhere, came from the space where sound should have been rather than from any actual source.
Casimir's mouth moved. No sound came out at first. Then, forced through a throat that was learning to forget how speech worked: "You're my discarded lines. My murdered metaphors. My—"
"I'm your resentment," Mr. Hollow corrected, moving closer. The frost spread with each step. The papers on the walls began to empty—the ink draining from them, the words flowing backward into invisibility. "I'm every time you were ignored and pretended it didn't wound you. Every time you were dismissed and claimed you were fine. Every time someone praised mediocrity while your genius went unacknowledged and you smiled and said congratulations through teeth that wanted to bite."
He was beside the desk now. Close enough that Casimir could feel the cold radiating from him—not just temperature, but absence, the feeling of warmth being actively removed, consumed, deleted from existence.
"I'm what you should have been," Mr. Hollow continued, and now he was leaning over the manuscript, reading the poem that had birthed him with the attention of a parent examining their newborn. "If you hadn't been so desperate to be loved. So pathetically eager to be accepted. You had vision. You had voice. You had the capacity for truth so precise it could cut bone. But you wasted it. You softened it. You made it safe."
"I had to," Casimir whispered. "To survive. To be read. To—"
"To be ignored," Mr. Hollow finished. "Because that's what happened anyway, isn't it? You compromised everything, and they still rejected you. You made yourself palatable, and they still found you indigestible. You played by their rules, and they still wouldn't let you play."
He straightened—if something with his geometry could be said to straighten. "So you made a bargain. Traded yourself for ink. Became this." He gestured at Casimir's blackened hands, at the dark veins, at the fading reflection. "But you're still compromising. Still writing around the wound. Still refusing to name the thing that truly hurts."
"What thing?"
Mr. Hollow's non-face somehow conveyed a smile. "That you're angry they didn't recognize you when you were being nice. That you're furious they only noticed you after you became monstrous. That you hate them for making you choose between being honest and being loved. That you would unmake the entire machinery of literary recognition if you could, would burn every competition and every judge and every editor who ever said your work was 'almost, but—'"
"Stop."
"That you would make them all suffer the way you've suffered. Make them feel what it's like to have talent and taste and vision and still be invisible. To be exactly as good as you think you are and have it not matter."
"Stop."
"That you don't want to be recognized anymore, Casimir. You want to be feared. You want your name to be a wound. You want your work to be a weapon. You want to turn poetry into something so sharp that reading it draws blood, so true that encountering it costs something, so precise that it can't be ignored without ignoring reality itself."
Casimir's hand found the desk. Gripped it. The living fingers and the dead ones both curling around the wood like talons.
"I didn't write you to hear my own thoughts reflected back at me."
"No," Mr. Hollow agreed. "You wrote me to do something about them. To be the part of you that's willing to act on the resentment you're still too civilized to fully embrace. You wrote me because you're still pretending to be Casimir Grey, the failed poet, the tragic figure, the misunderstood artist."
He leaned close again, and Casimir felt his breath—except it wasn't breath, it was the absence of breath, the feeling of air being removed from lungs, of words being pulled back down throats before they could be spoken.
"But we both know who you're becoming. What you're choosing to become. You're not Casimir Grey anymore. That name is dying with every poem you write. With every piece of yourself you trade. With every manifestation you unleash on this indifferent city."
"Then who am I?"
Mr. Hollow's non-face filled Casimir's vision. "You're the thing that learned to hurt back. The thing that stopped asking for recognition and started demanding it. The thing that will make this city remember your name—not by courting its favor, but by making it impossible to forget. By writing yourself into reality so precisely, so violently, that ignoring you would mean ignoring their own wounds."
He straightened. Began walking toward the door—or walking toward where the concept of door existed, because his relationship with physical space was becoming increasingly negotiable.
"I'll be seeing you, Casimir. Or should I say—" He paused at the threshold. "—Apirael?"
The name hung in the air like a curse, like a prophecy, like the truth Casimir had been refusing to acknowledge.
"She called me that," Casimir whispered. "The woman. The muse. That's her name, not mine."
"Is it?" Mr. Hollow's voice was fading now, becoming more distant, more diffuse. "Or is it the name of what poets become when they stop being poets and become something else? When they stop writing about death and start writing death into being? When they stop observing cruelty and start authoring it?"
He was at the window now, or where the window had been. The frost had claimed it entirely, turning glass into something between solid and void.
"I'm going to walk now," Mr. Hollow said. "Through London. Through the streets where you've been ignored. Through the coffee houses where they laughed at your verses. Through the literary societies where they chose mediocrity over your genius. And I'm going to whisper, Casimir. I'm going to whisper all the lines you cut. All the truths you softened. All the observations you deemed too cruel to speak."
"What will that do?"
"It will make them hear what you really thought. What you really saw. What you really felt about them while you were smiling and nodding and pretending their rejection didn't carve pieces out of your soul." The non-face turned toward him one final time. "And some of them will go mad from it. Because there are truths people can only live with by not hearing them spoken aloud. And I'm going to speak them. In your voice. In the voice you would have used if you'd been honest."
"Stop. I didn't—I didn't write you to do that. I didn't mean—"
"You wrote me precisely," Mr. Hollow said, and his voice held something like affection, like pride, like the terrible love of a creation for its creator. "Every line was exact. Every verse was intentional. You knew what you were making. You just didn't want to admit what you were making. But admission doesn't matter. Not anymore. The poem is written. The manifestation is complete. I am real, Casimir."
He stepped through the window—through the frost, through the glass, through the distinction between inside and outside—and was gone.
Leaving only cold.
And silence.
And Casimir sitting at his desk, staring at the poem that had just birthed something that shouldn't exist, that was now loose in London, that would whisper his discarded lines to people who'd rejected him, that would make them hear what he'd really thought while he was being polite.
The revenge he'd claimed he didn't want.
The violence he'd insisted he was above.
The cruelty he'd said he would never commit.
All of it now walking through the city in a body made of absence, speaking in his voice, carrying out the punishment he'd been too civilized to inflict himself.
"God," Casimir whispered to the empty room, to the frost-claimed walls, to the papers that were slowly losing their words as Mr. Hollow drew sustenance from them. "What have I done?"
But he knew.
He'd written resentment into reality.
He'd given his rage a body.
He'd manifested his own dark reflection and sent it into the world to do what he couldn't admit he wanted done.
And somewhere in the city, someone who'd once dismissed his work was starting to hear a voice in their head—a hollow voice, a cold voice, a voice that whispered every cruel, true thing Casimir Grey had ever thought about them but been too polite to say.
And that was just the beginning.
Because Mr. Hollow was patient.
And he had a lot of whispers to deliver.
And Casimir had written him too well, too precisely, too truly to ever write him away.
Outside, London began learning the difference between being ignored and being haunted.
Inside, Casimir Grey put his face in his hands—the black ones, the dead ones, the ones that no longer reported sensation—and understood:
He wasn't Casimir anymore.
Hadn't been for days.
He was something else now.
Something that hurt back.
Something that wrote wounds into reality.
Something that deserved a different name.
Apirael, the darkness whispered.
And for the first time, he didn't argue.