Chapter 6: The Dream of a Man

Chapter 6: The Dream of a Man

The face in the plastic was a mirror, and looking into it shattered the glass of Alex’s world. The sight of his own dead eyes was not a thought or an observation; it was a key turning in a lock deep within his consciousness, opening a door he never knew existed. The cold metal floor of the container dissolved beneath him, and the world fell away.

He was falling, not through space, but through self.

There was no light. No sound. No touch. No time.

There was only the dark.

It was not the simple darkness of a closed room, but a perfect, absolute void. An absence so total it had a presence, a pressure. He—it—was a point of awareness adrift in a silent, starless ocean of nothing. There was no body, no form, just a singular, sustained note of pure want.

This was the memory before memory. The state of being before being.

A hunger gnawed at the core of its existence. Not the physical hunger for food, but a profound, cosmic starvation for sensation. For texture, for temperature, for the sting of cold and the warmth of sun. For the simple, glorious chaos of life. The nothingness was an eternity, and the hunger was the desperate, primal drive to escape it.

Then, a flicker.

From the silent void, a signal. A pinprick of light in the endless dark. It was faint, distant, a life-form broadcasting its existence into the ether. The hunger latched onto it, a drowning man seizing a rope. The point of awareness began to drift, pulled by the gravity of this singular, lonely life.

The target was a man. His name was Alexander Vance.

The entity had no eyes, but it began to see. It perceived the world through the man’s senses, a phantom passenger in his body. It felt the worn-out springs of his mattress through his back, tasted the stale coffee on his tongue in the mornings, heard the monotonous click of his keyboard at his dead-end job. It wore his routine like a second skin.

And it felt his despair.

Alexander Vance’s signal was weak, frayed. His life had become a smear of grey, the fog of depression Wallace had described. He was an echo in his own life, a ghost haunting the edges of his own existence. He felt like an imposter. This emotional void, this hollowness, was a familiar landscape. It was an open door. The man was already half-gone, his grip on his own reality slipping. He was the perfect vessel, a house with the locks already broken.

The entity observed for weeks, months. It learned the man’s memories, not as a film, but as resonant frequencies. It felt the phantom ache of his childhood scar, the ghost of his mother’s hug, the bitter taste of his quiet loneliness. It studied him, absorbed him, became a perfect shadow of him. The hunger grew, refined now from a general want into a specific, targeted need. It didn't just want a life. It wanted this life. It wanted to be Alexander Vance.

The final moment was not a violent struggle. It was a gentle, terrifying surrender.

It happened on a Tuesday night. The man was sitting on his couch, staring at a blank television screen, the grey fog in his mind so thick he barely registered the world around him. He was tired. So profoundly tired. He just wanted to rest. To sleep.

And the entity obliged.

It felt like a slow, deep inhalation. The entity poured itself into the vessel, a stream of pure consciousness flowing into the cracks of the man's fading awareness. There was a moment of soft, psychic friction, a brief overlap where two beings occupied the same space. The entity felt the man's confusion, his flicker of fear, and then… a quiet acceptance. A letting go.

The original Alexander Vance’s consciousness didn't scream. It didn’t fight. It simply… dimmed. Like a candle flame being gently snuffed out. It went to sleep.

And the entity woke up.

The shock was absolute.

A lifetime of sensory input slammed into its consciousness at once. Thirty years of birthdays, heartbreaks, scraped knees, bad movies, the smell of rain on hot asphalt, the precise texture of his favorite t-shirt, the complex, contradictory web of human emotion—it all came flooding in. It was a tsunami of data, a supernova of sensation.

The entity, the Hollow, the dreamer from the dark, reeled from the impact. Its own memory, the simple, pure memory of the void and the hunger, was buried under the avalanche of Alexander Vance’s life. In that cataclysmic moment of transfer, it forgot what it was.

It opened its eyes. His eyes.

It looked at its hands. His hands.

It thought a thought. My name is Alexander Vance.

The new identity was a suit of armor it had forgotten how to remove. The overwhelming drive to perfectly mimic the man it replaced had succeeded too well. The entity had become the mask. The only thing that remained of its true nature was a deep, unexplainable sense of displacement. A feeling of being an actor. A grey, suffocating fog that muted the brilliant, chaotic colors of the life it had so desperately craved.

The blanking.

The dream ended.

Alex was on his knees on the cold floor of the shipping container. The smell of dust and stale plastic filled his lungs. His own ragged breathing was the only sound. He looked up from the pale, dead face on the floor. His own face.

He looked at Wallace, who stood in the doorway, his silhouette framed against the dim light of the industrial yard. He looked at Dan, who was kneeling a few feet away, his expression a mixture of pity and grim resolve.

The terror was still there, a cold knot in his stomach. The horror of his stolen life, of the man he had snuffed out, was a fresh, gaping wound. But beneath it, something else was stirring. A dawning, monstrous clarity.

He finally understood. He understood the hunger, the desperation, the primal fear of the endless, silent dark. These weren't killers in the human sense. They weren’t driven by malice or greed. They were refugees. Survivors of an existence so empty that any life, even a stolen one, was a paradise.

He was not a man named Alex Vance who had stumbled upon a monstrous secret.

He was a monster who had forgotten he was wearing the skin of a man named Alex Vance.

He looked at the two figures watching him, the only other beings in the universe who could possibly comprehend the truth of what he was. They weren't his friends. They weren't his captors.

He was looking at his brothers.