Ripper & Rayne - Episode 6: The Hollow Man
What's taken doesn't always come back.
London, 1979
They found the man near Finsbury Park, just after dawn. Standing on the pavement, smart buttoned coat, clean shoes. He flagged down a policeman calmly, and said he thought he might be unwell.
The hospital ran some checks. Steady pulse, normal blood pressure. Not intoxicated. No signs of drug use. No visible injuries.
The nurse who attended to him couldn’t remember his face ten minutes later.
Department C rang Giles before lunchtime.
“Perfectly responsive,” Judith Hall said over the line. “He can answer questions. Knows his name, knows the date. But there’s no variation, no reaction.”
Giles rubbed his forehead. “Reaction to what?”
“To anything.”
The ward smelled like disinfectant and vegetables boiled for too long. The man sat propped up on pillows, hands folded neatly. Somewhere in his early thirties, and an ordinariness that also defied description.
“Good afternoon,” the man said as they approached. Voice calm, and flat.
Ethan leaned in towards Giles, arms folded. “He looks fine.”
“He looks intact, certainly,” Giles said. “That’s not always the same thing.”
Simple questions. The man answered all of them. Childhood. Employment. Favorite foods. All facts, no emphasis.
Giles raised his voice suddenly. “Fire!” he snapped.
The man blinked once. Not even a flinch. No spike in a heart rate on the monitor beside the bed.
“He should have been startled,” Giles murmured, after they’d said their goodbyes to the man.
Ethan tilted his head. “Maybe he’s just very polite.”
“More than that, surely,” said Giles.
They played back the tape recorder from their short interview. The man’s voice was thin, level, and already less recognizable. Stripped of inflection, as if something had been sanded away. Still human, but empty.
“The machine recorded him,” Ethan said. “But it doesn’t sound like it keeps him.”
Giles didn’t smile.
His work history was easy enough to trace. By mid-afternoon they had his maintenance contract records. Mostly night shifts. Working on tube lines that intersected with too many other incident reports for them to believe it was coincidence. He cleaned platforms after accidents. There were notes about how he stayed to listen to other staff who’d seen suicides.
“He’d linger,” Giles said quietly, looking over the file. “Sometimes people just start talking to anyone who stayed.”
“And something listened back,” Ethan added.
The diagnosis seemed clear, once they’d discussed it.
“Someone’s emptied him,” Giles said. “He’s not possessed. Not taken. Just…worn down. Emptied.”
“Until he’s almost nothing left to give,” Ethan said.
They prepared the ritual that evening, in a sealed utility room beneath the hospital. Simple chalk circle. Salt. A dispersal ceremony - release whatever remained, and sever any further drain.
“It won’t restore him,” Giles said, checking his notes. “It’ll stop any further damage.”
“And then?” Ethan asked.
“I’m afraid that’s as good as it gets.”
Ethan nodded, once.
The ritual went smoothly. Too smoothly.
The air pressure eased. The lights steadied. The man’s breathing shifted - not dramatically, but enough.
The heart rate monitor ticked upward, a fractional change Giles hadn’t expected.
Later, the doctor said the man was speaking with a little more variation. Asked for some tea. Smiled faintly at a joke.
Giles stood in the corridor, uneasy.
“That shouldn’t have been possible,” he said. “Or at least drained me if he was taking something back.”
Ethan leaned beside him, his cigarette ash stark on the hospital corridor floor. “Cities absorb things, too, Rupert. Noise. Heat. People. Maybe it can give back, too.”
“That’s not how the ritual works.”
“It’s how London works.”
Giles didn’t answer.
They walked out into the night together. Traffic hissed along wet streets. There was a distant siren that wailed and then fell silent.
Giles stopped under a streetlamp. “If we treat people like conduits…”
“We already do,” Ethan said gently. “Hospitals. Offices. Government. You just prefer it when it’s mundane, when it has rules.”
Giles looked at him. Really looked, catching his eye.
“He gave too much of himself away,” Giles said.
“That’s not a crime, if he chose it,” Ethan replied.
There was a pause. The city breathed around them.
Giles spoke again, quieter. “Do you ever worry? That there won’t be anything left?”
Ethan didn’t answer straight away. When he did, he kept his voice light, almost careless. “Only when I stop moving.”
Their eyes met. Something fragile and unspoken hung between them. Desire, and recognition. Giles reached out, tentatively, to touch Ethan’s cheek.
A bus roared past, spraying water onto the pavement. The moment broke.
“We should file the report,” Giles said.
“We should,” Ethan agreed.
They walked on.
Behind them, the hospital lights hummed. The hollow man slept - alive, stable, but incomplete.
And beneath London, grief continued to spread a little thinner. Pulled into places already heavy with it.
But nothing looked wrong.
Which might have been the most troubling thing of all.
Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.