In the city of Hollow, as far south as south dared to go, in a crack of Mexico that felt barely clung to the earth itself, Dr. Malcolm Greaves had set up his life and his ruin. Hollow, that place where the street slants like it wants to slip right off the planet, where light hovers like old gauze, never quite sure if it should stick around or die out. Greaves had come to Hollow with a plan once — a vision, even, though it had long since fled him like a ghost from a broken bottle.
His practice was barely marked, a sooted window smeared with dust and an almost mocking sign, “Optique Greaves,” though he rarely got visitors who weren’t shadows or drunk. When he did get a real client, it was more curse than blessing.
One evening, just as the sky turned that yellowish-brown that seemed Hollow’s permanent twilight, Greaves was jolted from his stupor by a pounding on the door. In stumbled a wild-eyed man, his face smeared with dirt and desperation, his clothes hanging like they’d been torn from a scarecrow. Before Greaves could speak, the man staggered towards him, mouth hanging open like he was trying to chew the air.
“Cigars!” the man screamed. “CIGARS!” His voice echoed in the cramped room, bouncing off the walls like it was trying to escape. He jabbed a finger at Greaves, shaking it with a strange, ritualistic vigor. “You, you don’t know nothing about cigars, Doc, nothing at all! You think you can see? You’re blind as the rest of us! Cigar smoke’s the only thing clear in this world, the only way to see the lines, to see through the muck, see the devils crawling out in plain sight!”
Greaves recoiled, as though the words themselves carried a stench. The man kept screaming, his voice growing thick and ragged. “You think you got sight, eh? But you’re blind! Blind as a corpse! The only way you see is in the smoke, Doc, you hear me? The smoke, all those ashes rising and falling, twisting in the air like spirits!”
Then, just as suddenly, he fell silent, stumbling back into the shadows, his eyes rolling back until only the whites showed. His mouth hung open, still mouthing “cigars” over and over, softer and softer, as he dissolved into the dimness. Greaves didn’t dare follow. His skin felt tight, his head buzzing with some murky terror he couldn’t name.
As he tried to steady himself, Greaves left the shop and wandered down the crooked alleys of Hollow, his feet carrying him without direction. He felt a hollow urgency, the need to escape something that clung to him, a shadow within his own shadow.
It was then he saw him — a figure bent low by age or weight or both, a blind man with a filthy coat, a cloud of tobacco-smoke wafting off him like an aura. The man turned his head as if he could see, even though his eyes were a milky, opaque white. A hand emerged from the coat, clutching a cigar held together by frayed edges and sheer will.
“Señor, cigar for you, best in Hollow, best in all Mexico,” the man wheezed, his voice damp and oily, like wet earth.
Greaves shook his head violently, trying to pull himself out of whatever fever dream this felt like. “I don’t need your Mexican memorabilia,” he spat, his voice clipped and thin. “No souvenirs, no trinkets, no smoke.”
But the blind man only grinned, his lips curling back to reveal teeth more mold than bone. “Ah, señor, this is no trinket. This is the only way to see in Hollow, the only way to see what’s in the dark. You take it, yes? For a price?”
“Leave me!” Greaves hissed, recoiling. “You’re mad! I don’t want your trinkets or your smoke!”
The blind man cackled, his laughter filling the street like a choked wind, scattering the dirt and litter that piled up in Hollow like memories no one wanted to keep. But as Greaves turned to flee, he heard the man’s voice again, soft and lilting, like a lullaby turned rancid.
“You’ll come back, señor. They always do. Can’t see in Hollow without a little smoke, a little shadow.”
Greaves fled, his footsteps uneven, stumbling like the earth beneath him was slanting, pulling him down to the heart of Hollow. He knew he’d heard that phrase before, that talk of “Mexican memorabilia,” whispered by the shadows in the alleys, repeated like an incantation by the drunks at the edge of his shop, but he could never place it, never put a reason to it. Hollow itself seemed to hum with it, that desperate, ridiculous urgency.
His steps took him in a loop, round and back to his shop, his head ringing with the blind man’s words, and when he finally burst back into his cramped quarters, he saw something there, sitting squarely in the center of his desk. A box. Small, squat, dusted with an ancient mold that seemed to breathe.
A box he recognized.
Greaves approached it slowly, the musty scent hitting him like a punch. He reached out a hand, trembling, fingers grazing the moldy surface of the tape. It was an old VHS cassette, the label nearly worn off, but the word scratched in jagged letters was still clear: Apocryphos. The word sent a chill through him, a sickly thrill, like a memory he’d never lived but couldn’t shake.
With the care of a man handling dynamite, he took the cassette and slid it into an ancient, barely-functioning player he kept for reasons he could never explain. The screen flickered, static bleeding into a faint, ghostly image.
There, on the screen, was himself, but young, barely more than a child. He was wandering through a vast, empty field — no, a desert, Hollow’s own cracked and sprawling earth, beneath a sky like yellowed parchment. The boy Malcolm was clutching something in his hand, a small, unlit cigar, and as the image distorted, twisted, he seemed to be staring straight at Greaves, at the man watching him, his eyes wide with some awful knowing.
“You were always here,” the boy on the screen whispered, his mouth opening in slow, silent syllables, his voice slipping through the static like a specter. “Always looking. Never seeing. The smoke, the shadow, it’s all you need.”
The image sputtered, flickered, twisting in on itself. The boy’s face contorted, stretched, till his eyes were black pools swallowing the screen, and then, for a brief, impossible instant, Greaves saw himself as he was now — an old man, hollow and lost, clutching at a handful of ashes. The boy’s face warped, split into a grin that was nothing but teeth.
“Apocryphos,” the boy whispered, laughing, and then the screen went black, leaving Greaves alone in the dim, moldy room, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
Outside, Hollow seemed to hum with a new urgency, a pulse in the dark that had no rhythm but its own. He heard footsteps, voices, that desperate cry — “Cigars!” — echoing through the alleys, fading into the night as the city held him, the smoke, the shadows, the secrets of Hollow curling tighter around him.