The Harvest of Hollow Creek

The first time I noticed it was the summer I turned twelve. My family had just moved to Hollow Creek, a town that seemed to exist in a perpetual state of autumn. The leaves never quite turned, but they hung in a sickly yellow, and the air always carried the smell of damp earth and woodsmoke. My room was in the attic, with slanted ceilings and a window that looked out over the creek itself, which was less a creek and more a sluggish, black ribbon that wound through the town like a scar. That first night, I lay in bed, the sheet pulled up to my chin, and I felt it. A series of cold, horizontal lines tracing across my back, like someone dragging their fingernails in a straight line, over and over. It didn’t hurt. It just felt wrong. And then there was the breath. A chill, cadaverous breath that washed over my neck and face, no matter how tightly I pulled the comforter over my head. It smelled of old pennies and rotting leaves. I would lie there, frozen, counting the seconds until I could slip into uneasy sleep. This went on for maybe two months, and I started to think I was just imagining things, until one afternoon when I was running through the house in just a T-shirt, and my mom grabbed my shoulder.

‘Jesus, Ellie, what happened? Did you get into a fight?’ She spun me around, and her face went pale. She pointed at my back. ‘There are scratch marks. Dozens of them. Some are old, some are new.’ I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them now, the faint sting of broken skin. I had no explanation. I hadn’t been fighting. I had barely been out of the house. The marks were in straight, parallel lines, like a rake had been dragged across my skin.

As I got older, the marks never went away. They faded into a lattice of pale, raised scars, like the map of some forgotten river system. When I was seventeen, I finally worked up the courage to ask my doctor about them during a sports physical. She looked at them, her brow furrowed, and said, ‘These aren’t stretch marks, Ellie. They look like someone dug their nails into you. Deep. Over a long period of time.’ I felt a cold knot tighten in my stomach.

But the worst thing happened when I was nineteen, visiting my best friend, Riley, who lived on the other side of the creek in a crumbling colonial house that had been in her family for generations. It was a late night, around 2 or 3 AM, and I was driving home along the old dirt road that hugged the water. The car headlights cut through the fog, and I felt it. A presence. Something sitting in the back seat, just behind my head. The feeling was suffocating, a wave of despair so pure that I nearly drove off the road. It was the feeling of death, like when you learn a loved one has died and the world turns gray. I didn’t dare look in the rearview mirror. I just pressed the accelerator, my knuckles white on the wheel, and the feeling stayed with me all the way to my driveway. I practically tumbled out of the car and ran inside, bolting the door behind me.

After that, I couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched. I started having dreams, if you could call them that. Dreams of a figure standing at the foot of my bed, a tall, gaunt shape with long, spidery fingers, its face obscured by shadows. It would reach out and trace those same lines across my back, and I would wake up with new marks. In desperation, I did some research on Hollow Creek. I found an old library archive that mentioned the town’s founding, how the original settlers had built their homes along the creek, and how they used to tell stories of a spirit that lived in the water, a jealous entity that would mark those who strayed too far from it. They called it the ‘Harvest Man,’ and they said he would collect the souls of the living, scratching his tally marks into their backs as a promise.

I realized then that my back wasn’t just a canvas of scars. It was a ledger. Each mark was a debt, and the debt was coming due. The last thing I remember before the darkness took me was lying in bed, feeling the cold breath on my neck, and the weight of an impossibly long finger tracing a final, thick line down my spine. Then everything went silent. The next morning, my mom found me in my room, curled up on the floor, my back bare, and the skin on my back was smooth, unblemished, as if I had never been marked at all. But there was a new sound in the house. A wet, sucking sound coming from the creek, and a faint, rhythmic scratching on the windowpane, like a thousand fingernails asking to come in.