Black Vein

The moon hung low like a bruised eye over the forest, its light clawing through finger-like branches. Turpin, shrouded in a muddied cloak, leaned against his mare, her eyes like polished obsidian in the dark. He felt a loose tooth at the hinge of his jaw, a dull ache that never left. A faint metallic taste lingered in the back of his throat. He coughed suddenly into the night air, his skull twisting at the smell of rotten, damp earth and coming rain. Tonight wasn’t about trophies—it was about the game.

Hooves thundered in the distance — a stagecoach, its lanterns swinging like hanged men in the fog. Turpin’s pistol gleamed in the darkness, a cold promise of ruin, as if it could unravel fate with a single twitch. In a moment of stillness, like a falling grain of sand, a hair triggered the gun’s hammer. The mare spooked and bolted, slicing the low mist into a crescent as he was suddenly upon them. 

“Stand fast and empty your pockets!” His voice, a low growl, as raw as torn flesh, froze the driver mid-whip.

Inside, a merchant murmured, clutching a purse. His gaze snagged on a woman draped in black. There was a distinct loathing in her eyes, searching for vindication, both victim and predator, her focus sharp as a hungry wolf’s. 

“Late again…” she rasped. She tossed him a locket—bone, not gold, carved with runes that seemed to writhe. “For the last job.”

His smirk faded, unease crawling beneath his skin. The locket pulsed in his hand, hot as a dying coal. 

“What’s the price?” he asked. Was it one last chance, one last ride, one more death? A price on his own head to start? 

“Get yourself beyond the woods, back into town, and find the notary in return for his signature.”

He forced a laugh, but it drowned in his lungs. Mounting his mare he hung the locket around his neck, where it seared against his chest. He knew she was asking for leverage, a makeweight in the notary’s dirty bribes. The only place for murder was the gallows, and time was finally catching up.

The forest hissed his name as he rode, the road a black vein under an emptying sky, shadows twisted behind him. The names of all his ghosts rang loud in his ears, overwhelming the rider, until he leaned over to retch. 

“If I’m the scapegoat, so be it,” he thought. “I know where I belong—in fear, in fairytales, on moors and empty roads. You’ll find me one day, and I’ll be remembered. Charlatan. Persecuted. Devil?”

Like the boy who cried wolf, this is how liars are rewarded.

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From dark fiction and gothic art to alternative heavy music, Garrow Hill are a creative collaboration from York, UK.

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