The Hollow Men

Chapter Three: Igor Karkaroff

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Igor sees things in black and white.

His wife holding his child beside the flickering oranges and reds of a winter fire are fading around the edges as he watches them pace within his memories.

They had erased him with a blink, turned their back on him; and who could blame them?

Even as he denies it himself, he could not hide to her his murderous qualities, his scolding hatred from those with unmagical blood.

She had left a rose painted black and the burnt stubb of the child’s toy broomstick.

He has no future now, as he flees to a small dilapidated shack in the Highlands, surrounded by browning heather and smooth stones.

He has no future now.

For everything is tainted by his past, by the dark maroon stains that refuse to budge from his otherwise pale fingers.

His life is merely a background and the stench of death is forever in the foreground, shaping the laughter and the smiles and turning them putrid.

Sour and molding, his life crumbles around him like the broken battlements of Durmstrang.

His feet take him to mountain tops and to raggered cliffs by the wallowing sea, and he lifts his hands to the cream coloured sky and knows there is nothing there that would forgive him.

In his sleep he unconsciously scratches the ink upon his forearm.

They do not forgive him as the curses hit his sleeping heart, for to them he is a traitor, alone in the depths of this eternal coldness.

The others find him weeks later, the wild thistles growing through rotted floorboards, his body frozen to the disintegrating sheets.

The dark mark sailing into the wild untamed sky.