The Stag That Feeds

Hollow Ridge wasn’t just a forest—it was a wound in the world, a place where the soil pulsed faintly, as if something beneath it still breathed. The locals called it cursed, said the trees drank blood and the shadows moved on their own. Elias Crowe didn’t care. He was a hunter, a predator forged by years of bloodlust, his cabin walls lined with skulls and hides. The ghost deer they called the Stag? Just another notch for his belt. He’d heard the tales—antlers like rusted iron, eyes that burned through your soul—but he’d also heard it bled when it died, centuries back, before it rose again. That meant it could bleed now.

He entered Hollow Ridge at dusk on a moonless night, the air so thick with damp rot it coated his tongue. His boots sank into the earth, leaving prints that oozed black before sealing shut. Rifle in hand, machete at his hip, he moved toward the quarry—a pit where miners once vanished, their screams echoing long after the last lantern went out. That’s where the Stag lurked, or so the drunkards at the bar had slurred.

The quarry loomed ahead, a jagged maw ringed with splintered trees. Elias crouched low, his breath a faint plume in the chill. Then he saw it—the Stag, standing motionless on the far rim. Its body was a ruin: patches of translucent flesh hung like wet rags over a skeleton that shimmered with decay. Its antlers twisted upward, barbed and dripping with something dark and viscous. Its eyes—two searing coals—fixed on him, and Elias felt a jolt, like a nail driven into his spine. He grinned, aimed, and fired.

The shot split the silence, and the Stag dissolved into a cloud of ash and mist. Elias spat into the dirt, annoyed but undeterred. He’d expected tricks. He tracked it into the woods, following hoofprints that glowed sickly green before melting away. The forest responded—branches creaked like breaking bones, and a stench of rancid meat rolled over him. The ground trembled faintly, a heartbeat he couldn’t place. Then the hoofbeats started, slow and deliberate, circling him in the dark.

“Come on, you bastard,” he muttered, spinning with his rifle raised. The Stag appeared yards away, its head tilted unnaturally, neck bent at a spine-snapping angle. He fired again—nothing. The bullet sailed through it, and the Stag’s form unraveled into tendrils of smoke that slithered toward him. They wrapped around his legs, cold as a grave, and burrowed under his skin. He clawed at them, but his fingers came away bloody, his flesh peeling where they touched. The pain was a living thing, gnawing up his nerves.

When the smoke retreated, the Stag was gone, but the forest had turned feral. The trees loomed taller, their bark split open to reveal glistening red innards, pulsing wetly. Sap ran thick and dark, staining the ground like spilled guts. Elias’s compass spun uselessly, and his flashlight flickered, casting shadows that stretched and snapped like whip cracks. The air grew heavy with a drone—a guttural chant that clawed at his skull, words he couldn’t understand but felt in his marrow.

He pressed on, driven by rage and the Stag’s taunting appearances. Each glimpse was worse—its flesh sloughing off in strips, exposing ribs that writhed like worms; its mouth splitting wider, revealing teeth that shouldn’t fit. Every shot he fired warped the woods further. The ground softened into a mire of black sludge, sucking at his legs. His boots came up trailing threads of something alive, squirming against his skin. The Stag’s eyes followed him, unblinking, and the chant grew louder, a chorus of voices from nowhere and everywhere.

By midnight, Elias was a wreck—his hands raw, his breath ragged with panic he’d never admit. He stumbled into a clearing and froze. The quarry again, but wrong. Its edges were lined with figures—hunters, their bodies decayed to husks, skin stretched tight over skulls with no eyes. Their mouths hung open, leaking the same black sludge that pooled below. The Stag stood among them, its form collapsing into something worse. Its legs bent backward with a wet crack, its torso stretched, and its face—Christ, its face—became a man’s, eyeless and lipless, a cavern of jagged teeth dripping tar.

“You wanted me,” it hissed, the voice a blade scraping bone inside his head. “Now I have you.”

Elias roared, emptying his rifle into it. The bullets tore through, splattering the ground with ichor, and the Stag shrieked—a sound that burst blood vessels in his ears. The ground buckled, and he fell, plunging into the quarry’s depths. He landed hard in a pool of that black filth, thick and warm, clinging to him like a second skin. Above, the eyeless hunters leaned closer, their mouths stretching wider, and the Stag descended.

It didn’t kill him—not at first. Its antlers pierced his shoulders, pinning him as the sludge crawled up his body. It seeped into his mouth, his eyes, his ears, filling him with the forest’s rot. He felt it take root, tendrils burrowing through his veins, splitting his mind. The Stag’s face hovered over his, and he saw himself reflected in its eyes—his own flesh peeling away, his bones bending, his humanity unraveling.

Days later, a search party found his truck, untouched. His rifle washed up near the quarry, its barrel fused shut with hardened tar. The Stag roams still, its antlers heavier with each kill, its eyes brighter with each soul it claims. And in Hollow Ridge, where the trees groan and the earth pulses, Elias Crowe walks among the eyeless—his mouth a gaping wound, his hands clawing at nothing, forever hunting, forever hunted, devoured by the ghost he dared to chase.