“The Wound-Tenders of Black Hollow”

“The Wound-Tenders of Black Hollow”

By Jake Bannerman

CHAPTER ONE: THE WHISPERS IN THE WOODS

They whisper it different depending who’s telling. The locals call them the Hollowed Ones. Bone Nurses. Bark Saints. They say the mountains eat the wicked, and leave no bones for God to find.

The story always starts the same: a scream in the forest. Something tearing through the dark. Blood. Then silence.

Teenagers tell it at bonfires to scare girls into their arms. Rangers tell it at bars when they’ve had too many shots and too little sleep. Hikers tell it like it’s legend.

But every version ends the same.

“They weren’t monsters ‘til they saw what he did.”

Uncle Ray shoved a woman down a ravine for her gear. She was crying, bleeding. Left to die. Ray lit a cigarette and kept walking.

Then came the rustle. The cracking of branches.

He said he saw them—tall as trees, wrapped in moss and bone. Faces stitched from leaves and lips made of bark. Hands with too many fingers, all trembling with the need to heal or destroy.

They didn’t speak.

They took him apart.

Not fast.

Bit by bit. Layer by layer. Skin turned inside out like a wet sock. Eyelids peeled and nailed to a birch tree so he could watch. His jaw dislocated with a sound like splitting wood. They fed him his own fingers like communion.

They used his intestines as ropes—strung him upside down, swung him into trees until his rib cage broke open like a rotten gourd. They stuffed his body with mushrooms and twigs and let beetles feast while he screamed.

He was still alive when they bored a hole in his chest and whispered inside it.

Uncle Ray died knowing what monsters looked like—and knowing he deserved every second of it.

CHAPTER TWO: THE PATIENT

Jenna fell.

Simple as that. Rock gave out. Tumble. Snap. Her ankle turned to pulp and her knee screamed with each pulse of her heart. The bone had pierced the skin like a white dagger. Blood soaked her boot.

She screamed for help. Nothing but trees. Her voice bounced off trunks and came back smaller.

Then they came.

Three of them. Shaped like men but too long. Bark-skin armor. Empty holes for eyes. Limbs that bent in ways no human could survive.

She passed out.

When she woke, she was somewhere else. The air smelled of honey and rot. Mushrooms glowed on the cave walls. Her leg—cleaned, stitched with sinew and spider silk, splinted with bone, leeches wriggling beneath her skin to drain infection.

A greenish paste filled her mouth, thick and sweet and tinged with iron. It slid down her throat like warm sap.

One creature sat beside her. Humming. Stroking her hair with a hand covered in bark and flesh. Fingernails were beetles.

She cried.

It whispered something—words she didn’t understand. Language older than lungs. It tucked her in with moss. Wrapped her in vines that pulsed with warmth.

They kept her sedated. Cut away the dying flesh. Burned infection with glowing stones. Fed her poultices made from crushed bone marrow and powdered teeth.

When she could stand, they fed her a final drink. Bitter. Blue. Tasted like betrayal.

She blinked. Forgot.

Woke up near a ranger station.

Foot healed. Scars vanished. No memory of how she got there.

Just a dream. That’s what they said.

CHAPTER THREE: THE BUTCHERED MAN

Tommy was a poacher. Big, loud, dumb fuck with a shotgun and a hate-on for anything that breathed. He hunted for sport. Set traps for fun. Left carcasses for the buzzards.

He caught a kid.

Didn’t mean to. Just a stupid mistake. A father and son on a trail. The trap was meant for coyotes. But kids don’t know better.

The boy screamed.

Tommy ran.

They found him the next morning.

Or what was left.

Skinned alive—his epidermis nailed to trees in a perfect circle. Skull hollowed and filled with fire ants. Tongue impaled on a pine branch. Eyes melted into sap.

Every rib cracked outward. His stomach opened, intestines wrapped around his neck like a scarf.

His penis was severed and used as a worm-filled bandage on a tree stump.

The word “SICKNESS” was carved into his spine, each letter stitched with crow feathers.

Carved into the dirt near his corpse: “We are the scalpel. You are the sickness.”

The boy survived. No one knows how.

But he doesn’t talk anymore. Just hums. The same tune every night. Sounds like wind through dead trees. Sometimes he bleeds from his ears when it gets too loud.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CONVERSION

Jenna came back.

Years later. She didn’t know why. Just knew something in her bones pulled her to the Hollow.

She was a nurse now. Still walked with a limp. Sometimes her blood smelled like moss. Sometimes her dreams bled sap.

She set her pack down near the tree line. Waited.

No flashlight. No GPS. Just silence.

They came.

She cried. Thanked them.

Offered her hands.

They took her.

Not violently. Not gently either.

They cracked open her chest like a book. Read her lungs. Removed her fear and replaced it with spores.

They sewed her shut with vines. Pushed new organs inside her. Things that pulse in time with the earth.

Now she sings their song.

She tends the lost. Wraps wounds in moss. Feeds the dying crushed petals and venom.

And when the bad ones come—the ones with knives, the ones with greed—

She shows them what healing feels like in reverse. She unthreads their skin. Turns marrow into glue. Screams their names into their open arteries.

And plants them like seeds.

EPILOGUE: THE FORGETTING

Dozens of hikers. All with stories.

“I fell… woke up healed.”

“I got bit by a rattler. Should’ve died.”

“My leg was broken. Now it’s perfect.”

But none of them remember the how.

Just fog. Dreams. Music that wasn’t music. Something brushing their thoughts like fingers made of rain.

The blue herb burns memory clean. Erases trauma replaces it with peace. The Hollowed Ones tend the wounded. But God help the ones who cause the wound.

They remember everything.