hollow.lexicon

He named his knives after biblical plagues and swore each blade whispered secrets in a language only the meat remembered. Brine-Eyed Solomon, birthless and unslept, lived beneath the carbon pulse of the city’s nailbitten alleys, where vermin whispered sermons into mildew rot and pigeons wept blood from their beaks when he passed. His smile was a dislocated thing, all tendon and suggestion, like a thought half-formed in the throat of an animal mid-slaughter.

They said he killed thirteen. But they miscounted. Thirteen was only the mirror.

He woke each dusk with the chittering of dead tongues nested in his eardrums. The sounds weren’t speech, not as humans meant it. No phonemes, no grammar. Just wet-click-clack, like beetles dreaming in Morse. He answered in kind, humming between his teeth, which had names, too—Ezekiel, Plinth, Maria-of-the-Warm-Gum. They whispered back. He learned.

Victim four spoke sparrow. He carved her into seven pieces and arranged the limbs into a cage. When the wind blew just right, they chirped her apologies.

Victim nine was a stenographer. Her final breath came not in screams, but legalese—“res ipsa loquitur,” she moaned, and the walls wept ink.

Each death a grammar correction. Each murder a red pen across the bloated corpus of a dying world’s prose.

The first time he saw It—The Thing With the Unfinished Mouth—it was not in dream but in the linoleum pattern of a gas station floor. A tongue of stain spoke a glyph no alphabet could own. His mind hiccuped, and language blinked. From that day, he couldn’t say “clock” without vomiting feathers.

He called the thing Effugium, but the name wriggled. It changed with each syllable spoken, reversed itself mid-utterance, and sometimes it bled.

One night, Solomon sliced a man who had no shadow. As the blood pooled, it hissed a poem in semaphore. He spent the next six days amputating his own ears to better understand the silence between the pulses. By then he no longer needed bodies, just reminders. A fingertip here, a vowel shaved from a spine.

The murders became harder to track. Language itself bent around them, growing brittle. Newspapers printed names that didn’t exist. Witnesses spoke in backwards beesong. One woman, who had only seen the killer's silhouette, forgot her own daughter’s face and began worshipping parking meters as gods of judgment.

He knew he was a tool, a conjugation in the mouth of something older than speech. He loved It, as a word might love the silence before it is spoken. His hands were decline and syntax. His blades corrected misusage in flesh.

And deep in the pulse of a mutilated tongue, a message unfurled.

“In the beginning was the Word. And then came the Unword.”

Solomon did not die. He unoccurred.

And in his place: a humming absence, vibrating at the frequency of forgotten alphabets. Fish swam sideways in aquariums. Dogs howled only verbs. The wind grew teeth.

And in the night sky, a new punctuation mark was born. It screamed.