The Harvest of Hollow Grove

Nora and I moved to the old farmstead outside Hollow Grove for peace. The house, with its peeling paint and sagging porch, felt like a forgotten relic, but Nora loved it. She said the land had a quiet pulse. That was before the mailbox incident.

It started with a flickering porch light, a rhythm like a heartbeat. Then the wooden pins began to slip from the door hinges, one by one, as if something was pulling them out with meticulous care. Nora laughed it off, blaming faulty hardware. But the banging came next, deep thuds that rattled the windows, always at 3:15 AM, the hour her grandfather died in a grain silo accident. She never told me that until later.

One night, I woke to Nora’s scream. She was sitting up in bed, trembling, pointing at the corner. ‘It’s watching us,’ she whispered. I saw nothing, but the air felt thick, like breathing syrup. She told me then about the Ouija board session with her friends two years ago. They’d contacted someone claiming to be her grandfather, a man named Elias, who answered every question with chilling accuracy. She never said goodbye. She thought it was just a game.

Nora’s dreams turned violent. She’d wake with scratches on her arms, sometimes arranged in patterns like runes. One morning, she found a lock of her hair tied with a piece of hay on the pillow. I started noticing the crops in the field moving in waves with no wind, and the smell of rotting grain clung to the house. My research into Hollow Grove’s history revealed a grim past: Elias hadn’t died in an accident. He’d been murdered, ritually, by his own family, who feared his obsession with an old growth spirit. They buried him beneath the silo, unmarked, and the land had been cursed ever since.

Desperate, I tried to reason with the presence. I burned sage, placed salt lines, even recited prayers. Nothing worked. The scratching intensified, now on the walls, long talon marks that appeared overnight. Nora’s eyes grew hollow, and she’d mutter in a voice that wasn’t hers: ‘The fields are hungry.’ I found her one night standing over the kitchen sink, her hands gripping the edge, her knuckles white, staring out at the corn. She didn’t blink.

I decided we had to leave. But as I packed the car, I saw the scratches on Nora’s back spelled a word: ‘STAY.’ I turned to confront her, but she was gone. A trail of footprints led into the cornfield. I followed, the stalks closing in like a maze. At the center, I found her kneeling before a crude effigy of straw, its face a burlap sack with two burnt holes. She was chanting in a language I didn’t know, and the ground beneath her began to crack, releasing a chorus of whispers. Then, her head snapped toward me, and her eyes were black.

The effigy began to move. It raised a skeletal hand, and the corn around us swayed, as if bowing. I grabbed Nora, but she fought, her strength inhuman. I dragged her back to the house, locking every door, but the banging started again, louder, and the pins fell from the hinges one by one. The lights went out. In the dark, I heard a voice, old and dry, like dead leaves: ‘She is mine now.’

I don’t know how we survived that night. We fled at dawn, driving without looking back. But in the rearview mirror, I saw the effigy standing at the edge of the field, watching. And Nora hasn’t spoken since. She just stares at nothing, her hands trembling. Sometimes, at night, she wakes up and whispers, ‘He says the harvest is coming.’ And I know, we didn’t escape. We only delayed the reaping.