The Empty Quarter

I never put much stock in places being haunted. Land is just land; water is just water. So when my friend Mira’s dad, Professor Ellery, insisted we camp at the Ashburn Flats, a stretch of salt flats and scrub that had once been a mining town, I shrugged. He was an anthropologist, a collector of folklore, and he loved dragging us to spots with ‘resonance,’ as he called it. Mira and I planned to debunk everything he said, to turn his own game against him.

The Flats were eerie in a way that had nothing to do with ghosts. The ground was cracked and pale, like a dried-up seabed, and the few trees were bent permanently away from the prevailing wind. We pitched our tents near the skeleton of the old general store, its windows like vacant eyes. The only other structure was the empty stone foundation of a church, its bell tower long gone. Professor Ellery lit a small fire and began his tales. He told us about the town’s collapse after the silver vein ran dry, about a prospector who went mad and buried his family alive in the hills, about a bride who hanged herself from the bell tower on her wedding day. Mira and I rolled our eyes when he wasn’t looking. We planned our prank: we’d wait until he was asleep, then rustle the tents and moan like the wind through the ruins, pretending to be the bride.

By 10 p.m., the fire was low, and the only sounds were the wind and the sudden, unnerving silence that descends on empty places. I felt a prickling on the back of my neck, the sense of being watched. I blamed the stories and the dark. I asked Professor Ellery if there were any real incidents out here. He got this glint in his eye and said, ‘In 1987, a father and son were camped exactly where we are. The father found a human jawbone near the church, and he took it back to his camp. That night, he claimed something spoke to him through the child, something that wanted to be whole again. The next morning, the father was found dead of a heart attack, and the son was never recovered. They searched for weeks, but the salt flats swallowed any trace.’ He smiled. ‘The jawbone is still missing, they say.’ Mira and I laughed, but I noticed her glance over her shoulder.

At 11:00, we had to be quiet to respect the other campers—though there were none, the Flats were technically a public reserve. Professor Ellery retired to his tent, leaving us by the dying fire. Mira and I hatched our plan. We waited until his breathing evened out, then we crept to the edge of the foundation, where the ground dipped into a shallow depression. We started to make low keening sounds, hoping to spook him. But after a few moments, the sounds we made began to echo back. Not our own echo, but a deeper, wetter sound, like a groan muffled by earth. We stopped. The sound continued.

Then the fire went out, as if a breath had snuffed it. We stood in sudden pitch black, the stars overhead blotted out by a thick fog that rolled in from nowhere. Mira grabbed my arm. I could feel her heartbeat. And then, from the ground beneath our feet, something shifted. A faint scraping, like something dragging itself across the salt. We didn’t wait for each other—we bolted toward the professor’s tent. But the tent was gone. In its place was a dark hole, a perfect circle in the earth, about a foot wide. From inside that hole, a hand emerged, pale and bloated, the fingers moving like pale eels. It groped blindly, then pointed toward the church foundation.

Mira screamed. That broke the silence. The hand withdrew, and the hole started to close, the edges crawling inward like the wound of a living thing. We ran, not toward the car, but away from the hole, because the car was on the other side. We scrambled onto the church foundation, the stones cold and slick under our feet. I looked back. The hole was still there, but now another one opened beside it, and another. The whole area was pockmarked with these openings, like the skin of a diseased face. And from each, a pale hand reached up, the fingers twitching, as if searching for something to pull down.

We huddled in the center of the foundation, clinging to each other. The hands grew longer, the arms stretching impossibly, like tendrils. They began to reach up the sides of the foundation. I grabbed a loose stone and hurled it at the nearest hand. It passed through without resistance. But the hand paused, as if sensing the disturbance, then began to climb faster. Mira whispered, ‘The jawbone. He said it wants to be whole. This place is a mouth or something. It’s trying to swallow us.’

I didn’t have time to answer. The ground beneath us started to tremble. The foundation stones began to sink, as if the earth was hungry. The hands were now at the edge, curling over the top. In the darkness, I saw Professor Ellery’s tent flap open. But it wasn’t him stepping out. It was a shape—a tall, gaunt figure, its skin patchy like an old man’s, its eyes as empty as the sockets of the church windows. It walked toward us, and with every step, the ground beneath it cracked and split, opening new holes. The hands stopped reaching for us and instead reached for the figure, caressing its legs, as if greeting a master. The figure opened its mouth, and a voice came out, dry as dust, but layered with the squeal of a child, ‘We are all whole now. You have brought us the last piece.’ It pointed a long finger at me.

I felt a cold weight in my chest, like something was clawing up my throat. Mira grabbed my hand and yanked me forward, off the foundation, past the figure, through the forest of hands. The hands grasped at our ankles, but we kicked and stumbled, and somehow, we reached the car. We locked the doors, and I saw the figure standing at the edge of the campfire ring, its head tilted, watching us. The holes in the ground began to close, one by one, like eyelids sliding shut. The figure’s mouth moved, but no sound came. Then it turned and walked back toward the church, which had begun to rise again, its stones reassembling from the ground like a stop-motion film reversed. As we drove away, the headlights caught the last image: the figure vanished into the growing church, and the church vanished into the fog.

We drove through the night, not stopping. The next morning, we reported it, but no one believed us. The story was filed as a missing persons case: Professor Ellery vanished from the Ashburn Flats. They found his tent, his belongings, even a half-eaten meal. But no jawbone. No holes. No trace. I don’t think about it most days.

But last night, I was walking through my kitchen, and I heard a faint scraping sound. I looked down. The linoleum was cracking. A small hole had opened, just the size of a coin, and from it, a pale finger was curling upward, reaching for me. I grabbed a hammer and smashed it, but the hole didn’t close. It just sat there, breathing. And today, I rented a cabin in the mountains, in a place with no history, no stories. But as I unpacked, I saw a small dark spot on the bathroom floor. I stared at it. It grew. And I knew: you don’t choose a haunted place. A haunted place chooses you. The Empty Quarter has found me, and it wants to be whole.