Blake Lancet listened to his stomach.
He shouldn’t have.
I suspect that the Hollow – and more than likely my mother – had a hand in what happened to Blake, but I don’t feel particularly bad about it either way.
He was an ass.
Did he deserve to die the way he did? Probably not. But deserve has nothing to do with it, does it?
No.
Well, I can see I’ve had a bit too much whiskey this evening, and I’d best to get this down before I finish the bottle and fall asleep on the desk again.
Blake lived a few houses up from Cross Cemetery, and he was known to keep to himself as much as he could. That was fine by me and by most of those who knew him. He had a face that you punch, and when he spoke, well, it made it all the more difficult.
Around dinner time today, his neighbors heard a racket over the sound of their own children, and they sent their oldest to find me. I happened to be close by, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I was in their parlor when they had first heard the noise.
When I went onto Blake’s porch, I found the door ajar, and I called out to him before I nudged it open the rest of the way. I didn’t have to go far before finding him. Or, rather, what was left of him.
He was in his kitchen, and he appeared to have bled out on the floor. His left arm was on the butcher’s block. There were a few bites out of the bicep, and it seemed as though Blake had decided to have a taste of himself.
Evidently, his arm wasn’t quite to his liking.
Blake was on the floor in front of his stove, his face a mask of blood and the cleaver was beside him. He had dropped it there after cracking his own skull open, the fingers of his right hand still crammed into the crevice he had made.
Whether he had died from the severed arm or the broken skull, I’ll never know.
I like to think that he died disappointed, fishing around for something to snack on in his brain and finding nothing there at all, just like the rest of us.
#horror #fear #art
