Reginald Tierney picked a bad way to die.
He’d been sick for the better part of ten years before he finally went blind and could no longer get around without help.
People were happy to do it, mind you. Reginald was a decent man, and folks are always willing to help a decent man.
I wasn’t.
I wasn’t because I knew he wasn’t a decent man.
Far from it.
Reginald was a bastard, and if he hadn’t been suffering from his illness, I would have put him out of my misery years earlier. As it was, I didn’t mind him lingering about the edges of town, not so long as he was in agony, and he was.
Reginald had been one of those rotten men who helped hunt down the slaves escaping from the southern states before we put down the rebellion. I’d even heard him brag about going all the way to Canada to bring a slave back. Not for the money, mind you, but for the sheer pleasure he experienced when he inflicted pain on another human being.
So, no, I didn’t mind his suffering. Not a bit.
He asked a stranger for a ride this morning, and the stranger helped him up into the wagon he was driving. They rode out of town along North Road, and it was there that both men took a short respite from the broken springs in the seat. They stretched, and when it was time to go, the stranger helped Reginald through a hole in the fence. The blind man had stumbled forward, suddenly bereft of the stranger’s guiding arm.
The monsters in the Hollow made short work of him, ripping his limbs from their sockets and feasting on his flesh even as Reginald begged them to stop.
They didn’t, of course. And why should they?
It’s not often I bring them meat that’s still alive.
#horror #fear
