Chapter Text
People talk about Deadpress like he was always a monster. Like he was born with blood on his hands and that gouge in his pocket. They act like he just showed up, some ghost with a broken face and purple streaks in his hair, carving symbols into the dead like it was his thesis project.
But I knew him before all that.
I knew Elliott Cross.
We were friends. Not best friends, not like childhood buddies or anything. We met in a printmaking elective freshman year. He sat next to me, always chewing on the end of a pencil, always sketching weird crap in the margins of his notes. We clicked fast. Both kind of loners, both into horror movies and art that made people uncomfortable.
Elliott wasn’t creepy. Not then. He was quiet, yeah, but funny in this dry, deadpan way. Smart, too. His art? It was insane. Hyper-detailed. Dark as hell, but smart dark — like he was always working through something. I remember the first time he let me flip through his sketchbook… It felt like reading someone’s nightmares. Beautiful ones, though.
He once told me, “Art should hurt a little. Otherwise it’s just decoration.”
At the time, I thought that was deep.
Second year, things started… shifting. Elliott stopped showing up to parties — not that he ever stayed long before. Then he stopped hanging out altogether. He’d ghost me for weeks. Said he was working on a “series that mattered.” I didn’t get it. We were still kids, just trying to pass midterms. But Elliott talked like he was trying to build a legacy.
One day I caught him in the studio alone, hours after closing. He looked like a corpse already. Pale, sunken eyes, hands shaking from too much caffeine and too little sleep. His arms were covered in tiny cuts — not the wrist kind, more like angry little slashes, like he’d been testing how deep he could go with that gouge of his.
He said something that’s stuck with me ever since.
“Eyes are the weakest part. People pretend to see you, but they never really look.”
I thought he was just venting. I told him he needed a break. He laughed — this dry, rasping thing like he was choking on dust — and said, “You’ll see. They all will.”
Then came the critique.
It wasn’t even that bad. A professor gave him crap for his final print. Said it was “overindulgent” and “morbid for the sake of morbidity.” One of the other students laughed. Elliott didn’t.
He stormed out.
That night, he disappeared.
Campus thought he dropped out. I thought he went home.
Then the first body showed up.
Eyes gouged clean out. Carved up like a woodblock. A weird symbol on the chest — like an eye with a line through it.
I knew that mark.
He used to doodle it in his notebooks. Said it was his “artist’s seal.”
They called the killer Deadpress on the news. Nobody put it together — the hair, the tool, the symbol — except me.
I’ve seen him once since then.
I was walking home after a late shift, back in town visiting my folks. I felt like someone was watching me. I turned — nothing. Just dark trees and wind.
But then I saw it.
Stamped on the side of a dumpster, clear as day in what I hope was red paint:
That symbol. His symbol.
He hasn’t killed me. Not yet. Maybe he remembers me. Maybe, in that warped mind of his, I’m not a blank canvas. Maybe I’m a finished piece he doesn’t want to ruin.
Or maybe he’s waiting.
If I vanish, if they find me eyeless and carved up like a project… tell them this:
His name was Elliott Cross. He was my friend. And he made pain into art.