Chapter 4 – Cain – A Signature in Meat:
The railroad grading camp sat in a shallow bowl of land, a raw wound of churned mud and stripped timber. The dawn mist clung to it like a shroud, reluctant to reveal what was left. Cain rode down the slope, the grulla mare picking her way through stumps and discarded equipment. The air here was dead. No birdsong, not even the buzz of flies yet. Just the wet, heavy silence of a slaughterhouse after the killing's done.
A deputy, young and trying hard to swallow his own throat, met him at the edge of the tents. The boy's face was the color of old cheese.
"Mister Hart? Sheriff Mack said you'd be coming. Told me to… to show you." He wouldn't meet Cain's eyes.
"Where's the sheriff?"
"Rode back to town 'fore first light. Said he had… municipal affairs." The lie was as thin as the mist. Mack had seen it, and he'd run.
Cain dismounted, handing the reins to the deputy. "Stay here. Don't follow unless I call."
The boy nodded, gripping the leather like a lifeline.
Cain turned towards the heart of the camp. The residue here wasn't just a smear. It was a geyser. A column of that bruise-violet energy, shot through with threads of something black and sticky, pulsed upward from a central point, visible only to his cursed sight. It stained the very air, a spiritual scar. And the smell. Beneath the pine and mud, it was there. Wet chalk. Old meat. And the cold, dry scent of a deep cave, the kind where no breath forms.
He followed the stench to a larger tent, set slightly apart from the others. The flap was tied back. Inside, the darkness was absolute.
He struck a match on his belt buckle, the scritch obscenely loud. The flame's small light pushed back the dark, revealing the edges of things, making the shadows deeper.
The tent wasn't a living space. It was a larder.
The two men hadn't just been killed. They had been disassembled. What was left of them was laid out across the dirt floor and on a rough-cut plank table, not in a frenzy, but with a terrible, deliberate care. Bones, scraped gleaming white, were arranged in interlocking patterns—circles within triangles, connected by lines of gristle and dried blood. Muscles, sliced with unnatural precision, were fanned out like petals of some obscene flower. The organs were missing.
Cain's gut tightened, but his mind detached, sliding into the cold, clinical space where the work lived. This was not hunger. This was grammar. This was a sentence written in meat.
He moved the match slowly, tracing the patterns. The residue clung to everything, but it was thickest on the bones. He bent close, ignoring the sweet-rot smell. There, etched into the surface of a femur with something finer than a knife, were symbols. They were not the natural gnaw marks of a beast. They were angular, deliberate. A series of converging lines that ended in a void. A spiral that inverted halfway through. The same sigil that had been on the tarnished silver dollar.
The Hollow Men's signature.
A low thrum of understanding vibrated in his skull. This wasn't a Wendigo's work. Not purely. The creature was the pen, but something else was the hand guiding it. The ritual Malkin had mentioned, the funnel. This was part of the ink.
His match guttered out. He lit another, his movements economical in the dark.
He examined the ground. The earth was packed hard, but there were tracks. Human boots, coming and going. And overlaid on them, the unmistakable spoor: the long, splayed, almost-human foot with a terrifying dewclaw set too high on the heel. The pad was cold, leaving a faint, crystalline frost that melted slowly into the mud. Wendigo. But the stride was wrong. It didn't lope or charge. It walked, heel-to-toe, with a purposeful, almost processional gait, between the two… displays.
The creature had been directed. Controlled.
The second match died. Cain didn't light a third. He had seen enough. He stood in the perfect dark, the images burned into his mind, the cold from the tracks seeping through his boot soles. The silence was a weight. It was the silence of the void in those symbols, the silence the Hollow Men worshipped. It pressed in, seeking a crack in his own walls.
He turned and walked out, blinking in the gray morning light. The deputy stared at him, wide-eyed.
"Well?"
"Burn it," Cain said, his voice flat. "The tent, everything in it. Pour coal oil on the ground where the tent stood and burn that too. Then have every man salt the earth in a ten-foot circle."
"Salt? But the sheriff said—"
"The sheriff isn't here. Do it. Unless you want what did this coming back for a second sitting."
The boy paled further and scurried off, shouting orders.
Cain rode back to Perdition's Fall at a hard pace, the cold from the camp still lodged in his bones. The town, bustling under the morning sun, felt like a painted backdrop—bright, false, and fragile. He went straight to the sheriff's office, not bothering to knock.
Sheriff Mack was at his desk, pretending to study a wanted poster. The smell of strong coffee and weak courage filled the small room.
"Hart." He didn't look up.
"You saw it," Cain said, closing the door with a soft click that was more final than a slam.
"Saw a godawful mess is what I saw. Some animal. A bear, maybe, gone mad."
"A bear that arranges bones in geometric patterns? A bear that carves symbols into femur bones?" Cain's voice was dangerously quiet. He placed his hands on the desk, leaning forward. "You know what it is, Sheriff. You may not have a name for it, but you know it ain't natural."
Mack finally looked up, his eyes bloodshot. Fear and stubbornness warred in his face. "I know I got a town full of people who need to believe in bears and madmen. I know I got a railroad superintendent breathing down my neck wanting this swept under the rug so his workers don't flee. I know what happens to lawmen who start talkin' about boogeymen on official reports."
"This won't be swept. It's just starting."
"Then you deal with it!" Mack snapped, standing up. "That's what you're for, ain't it? The thing they send for when the law runs out of answers. You deal with your… your thing. But you do it quiet. And you don't bring that talk in here. I got a town to run."
Cain stared at him, this big, soft man clinging to the edges of a world that was already crumbling beneath his feet. The dismissal was complete. It wasn't just refusal; it was a willful retreat into blindness. Mack had chosen the painted backdrop.
"They're using it," Cain said, straightening. "The creature. They're guiding it. Making it build something with the parts. It's a ritual, Sheriff. They're not just killing. They're preparing."
"I don't want to hear another damn word about rituals or symbols!" Mack's fist came down on the desk, rattling the coffee cup. "You find the animal. You put it down. You send the railroad my bill. That's the start and end of it."
Cain knew the conversation was over. He'd gotten what he needed from the man: confirmation that he was alone. He gave a short, grim nod. "Then I'll be about my business. Don't expect it to be quiet."
He turned and left, stepping back into the noisy, sunlit street. The confrontation left a bitter taste, not of anger, but of ash. Mack was a symptom too, of a world that would rather be eaten by a familiar monster than face an unfamiliar truth.
He needed information the sheriff wouldn't have. He needed to understand the symbols, the pattern. He needed to find the funnel.
The memory of the tarnished coin pulled at him. Monsieur Valencourt. The Archivist. Someone who trafficked in old knowledge. If the Hollow Men were using old magic, a vampire of the Courts of Dust might have a ledger entry on it.
He made his way to the Grand Rail Hotel. It was the town's arrogant jewel, three stories of clapboard and false grandeur. He ignored the disdainful look from the clerk and took the stairs two at a time. The door to Suite 3 was polished oak, unmarked. He knocked, the sound hollow.
No answer.
He tried the handle. Locked. Not just with a physical lock; he felt a subtle resistance, a whisper of a ward. A keep away spelled into the wood grain. He could break it, but that was a conversation-ender.
He leaned close to the doorframe. "Valencourt. Cain Hart. The thing at the rail camp isn't hunting. It's praying. And it's carving your symbol into the pews."
He waited in the silent hallway. A minute passed. Then, from within, a smooth, accentless voice, not loud, but clear as ice water in the quiet. "The service is over, Mister Hart. The collection has been taken. I am not in the habit of receiving callers before sundown."
"The collection is still going on," Cain replied, his voice low. "And it ain't coin they're collecting. It's parts. You want to observe, fine. But you're in the front row now. Might want to know the hymn."
Another pause, longer. Then a series of soft, intricate clicks. The ward dissolved with a faint scent of bergamot and cold stone. The door opened an inch.
The room inside was dark, every heavy curtain drawn. In the slit of darkness, he saw a sliver of a pale face, eyes that reflected the hallway's dim light with a faint, ruby luminescence.
"You have ten minutes," Lilith Valencourt said. "And you will not cross the threshold."
Cain nodded. He had her attention. It was a start, in a town where everyone else was determined to look away. He began to describe what he had seen in the tent, in the cold, precise detail of a hunter reciting a trophy's measurements, leaving nothing out, especially not the void in the center of it all.