hollow.lexicon

Alton Greaves sat in the community room of Shady Glen Assisted Living, watching the collapse of coherence. Eleanor sat across from him, staring at her tea as if trying to remember what liquid was. She moved her lips, shaping the air into something approximating language but never arriving at meaning. Next to her, old Phil Watkins mumbled a river of syllables, his hands fluttering against the table like broken-winged birds. They were losing the words. Not in the natural way of age, of slow memory loss and gentle decline, but in a way that made Alton’s skin prickle.

“Phil, you alright there?”

Phil looked up, eyes glassy, lips working soundlessly, like a fish caught in some forgotten current.

Alton had lived among the slow unraveling of language for years now, watched it happen in the little ways: the repetition of phrases, the slow slurring of syntax, the breaking down of names into nothing but vowels. But this was different. The others—the nurses, the orderlies—pretended nothing was amiss, but Alton saw it clearly. It was not just age taking them. It was something worse. It was the letters themselves slipping from the bones of their words, consonants like brittle leaves shaken free, verbs losing their anchor and drifting apart.

And the worst part—the truly chilling part—was that they seemed aware of it, in the dim corners of their unraveling minds. Eleanor would sometimes clutch the arms of her chair and whisper, “I used to know this,” and Phil had taken to scribbling in a notebook, pages filled with clawed letters that sank into meaninglessness the longer Alton looked at them.

One night, he found himself staring at a crossword puzzle, pen in hand, unable to recall what letters were. The clues swam in unfamiliar waters. The words twisted, reforming in his mind into alien shapes. He could feel it happening to him.

No, he thought, not me too.

The next morning, he heard the staff whispering about Mr. Delacroix in room 3B, who had stopped speaking entirely, communicating only in rhythmic taps on his bedside table. A nurse laughed uneasily. “Morse code,” she joked, but her eyes were uncertain. Later that day, Alton saw Delacroix in the hall, knocking softly against the wall, staring at nothing.

The days grew heavier. He tried to hold onto words, write them down, sound them out in his mouth like stones on his tongue, but they felt alien, unstable. The news channel in the rec room was a blur of nonsense syllables, the subtitles rearranging themselves when he looked away. The newspaper headlines seemed printed in a language that almost—but not quite—existed.

Then came the day when he looked at his own name on his door plaque and could not read it.

He turned, breath shallow, to find Eleanor staring at him. She knows, he thought. Her lips trembled. “You’re… you’re the last one,” she murmured, and then she shuddered, as if she had said something terrible.

Alton stumbled back to his room, heart hammering, mind unraveling. He repeated his name over and over, tried to write it, but the letters turned to dust beneath his pen. He shut his eyes and let out a long, trembling breath.

The door creaked. A soundless shape stood there.

It had no mouth, no voice, but it spoke in the void where words had once been.