The Hollow Stag

In the autumn of 1987, my family moved into a sprawling, dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of the Blackwood Forest. I was twelve, and my younger sister, Eva, was six. Our room was on the second floor, a narrow corridor that connected the main hall to the kitchen below via a creaking staircase. At night, the only light came from a single streetlamp at the end of the gravel drive, casting long shadows through the bare windows.

One night, I woke to a strange sound—a soft, rhythmic tapping, like hooves on hardwood. I sat up and peered through the open doorway into the hall. There, illuminated by the sickly yellow glow, stood a deer. But it was wrong. Its body was translucent, like frosted glass, yet I could discern every vein and sinew beneath its ghostly hide. Its eyes were hollow pits, and its antlers were twisted, bone-white, and dripping with a black ichor that sizzled where it touched the floor.

It moved with a predatory grace, not grazing but stalking, each step deliberate and silent, heading toward the master bedroom where our parents slept. I shook Eva violently, whispering, ‘Eva, Eva, look!’ She woke, and her face went pale. She saw it too. The deer paused at the threshold, its head swiveling toward us. For a moment, it seemed almost surprised, then it took a slow step back, its form dissolving into the darkness of the window, leaving behind a faint scent of rot and wet earth.

We pulled the covers over our heads, trembling, and didn’t dare move until dawn. In the morning, the floor beneath the window was stained with a black, tarlike substance that wouldn’t wash away. We never spoke of it to our parents, but Eva and I began to see it more often—always in the corner of our vision, always retreating when we looked directly at it.

Years later, after we moved away, I learned from the local history that a widower had once lived there, a man who kept a pet deer that he had raised from a fawn. When the deer grew old and sick, he refused to put it down, and it died in the house, in the very spot where I had seen its spirit. Some say that the man’s grief bound the creature to the land, and that it still searches for him, forever creeping through the halls, forever hunting for a love that death has taken. I only know that on certain nights, when the wind is right, I can still hear the soft tapping of hooves outside my window, and I never, ever look.”}