The Hollows

He smiled at you across the kitchen table. It was a good smile, warm and easy. You saw the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the way one tooth slightly overlapped the other. You’d seen that same smile in a film once, an old black-and-white thing, but you couldn’t remember which one.

He laughed at your joke. It was a rich, full sound that made you feel clever. It was the laugh of a man you’d met at a party last month, a laugh you’d admired and he must have heard.

He remembered your favorite coffee order, the one with the extra shot and the cinnamon. He recited a line of poetry you loved. He listened, his head cocked in a way that made you feel like the only person in the world. But his listening had a weight to it, a kind of hunger. He wasn't hearing you to understand; he was taking the words, swallowing them. He was a collector of phrases, of inflections, building a nest inside himself with scraps he’d pulled from others.

You’d go to a restaurant, and he’d order a dish he’d heard you describe with pleasure weeks before. He’d develop a sudden, fierce opinion on a book you were reading, an opinion that was, word for word, your own from a previous conversation, played back to you like a recording.

There was nothing behind it. No core. No heat. No engine in the room humming on its own power.

One night, you looked at him. Really looked. The conversation had lulled, and for a moment, the performance stopped. The smile faded from his mouth, but not slowly. It was like a light being switched off. The features were still there�"the nose, the lips, the brow�"but they were just… things. Arranged on a face. Like furniture in an empty house.

And you looked into his eyes.

You expected to see anger, or sadness, or even boredom. But there was nothing there. It wasn't a blankness you could project onto. It was a different kind of dark. A still, deep water with no bottom. A place where nothing lived and nothing ever would. You had the dizzying thought that if you leaned too close, you might fall in.

He was not a man. He was a shaped emptiness, a walking silence. A creature condemned to wear the skin of others, to speak with their stolen voices, because the alternative was the terrible, soundless vacuum of what he really was. And he would hold onto you, this warm, breathing thing, and he would take your warmth, your breath, your likes and dislikes, until there was nothing left of you to take.

Then he would move on. A mere man. A weird animal. Looking for the next meal.