The Harvest of Hollow Hills

The summer I turned seven, the world was a place of golden light and long shadows, and I, Mara, believed in nothing I couldn’t see. My parents, ever practical, had no time for fairy tales, and I took their skepticism as gospel. We lived in the lowlands, where the fields stretched like patchwork quilts to the horizon, and the only mysteries were the ones you could solve with a magnifying glass and a bit of patience. But that summer, we went to visit my grandfather in the hills, and I learned that some things are not meant to be seen.

The hills were a different country. My grandfather’s farm clung to a slope of gray stone and stubborn grass, and the air was thin and cold, even in July. The house was a hulking thing of dark timber and crooked chimneys, and behind it, the land dropped away into a deep, wooded valley that was always shrouded in mist. I was warned not to go there, but of course, that only made it more alluring. One afternoon, while my parents helped Grandfather patch a fence, I slipped away, following a narrow path that switchbacked down the hillside.

The mist was thicker than it looked from above, and the trees were old, their roots like grasping hands. I thought I heard a noise, a rhythmic thumping like a giant’s heart, and I followed it to a clearing where a great stone sat, moss-covered, with a hollow at its center. In the hollow was a collection of small, white objects that I at first took for pebbles, but as I drew closer, I saw they were teeth – human teeth. I screamed, and the sound was swallowed by the mist, and then I heard a voice, low and guttural, from somewhere in the trees: ‘Mine.’ I ran back up the path, my heart pounding, and when I burst through the kitchen door, Grandfather looked at me with a strange mix of fear and resignation.

He told me, in a voice that was barely a whisper, about the Hollow Man. He said the Hollow Man was not a ghost, not a spirit, but something older, a thing that had always been in the hills. He said it lived in the valley, and it waited for a child to stumble into its clearing. And when it took a child’s teeth, it claimed a piece of that child forever. He showed me a small wooden box in his bedroom, filled with teeth, each one wrapped in a scrap of cloth with a name and a date. ‘These are the children it took from,’ he said. ‘And they were never the same. They grew up hollow, empty, forever looking for the piece of themselves that was stolen.’

I dismissed it as an old man’s tale, a story to frighten a child from wandering. But that night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept feeling a cold draft on my face, and I thought I saw a shape in the corner of my room, a tall, thin figure with deep, empty eye sockets. I buried my head under the pillow, and when I finally slept, I dreamed of the clearing, and the Hollow Man was there, and he was reaching out to me, his fingers long and white, and he said, ‘You left your tooth behind.’ I woke with a scream, and my parents rushed in, but I couldn’t tell them what was wrong. I just pointed to my mouth, and for the first time, I felt a gap where one of my baby teeth should have been – but I was too old for that, I had all my adult teeth. Except now, I was missing one.

I told Grandfather the next morning, and he went pale. He opened his worn leather journal and made a note in a spidery hand. ‘It’s started,’ he said. Then he told me that the Hollow Man didn’t just take teeth; it took the part of you that grows, that changes. You would never truly grow up; you’d be stuck, a child inside, while your body aged. And that was the horror – to live forever with a child’s heart in an old body, never able to quite understand the world, always haunted by the memory of that moment in the clearing. He had a drawing in his journal, a self-portrait from when he was a boy, and in the corner, he had written ‘me at 10,’ but the face in the drawing was an old man’s. That was the first time I saw my grandfather cry.

I left the hills with my parents a week later, but I was not the same. I had nightmares, and I would often wake up feeling a cold pressure on my jaw. I begged my parents to take me to the doctor, but they found nothing physically wrong. As the years passed, I tried to forget, to rationalize. I told myself it was a vivid dream, a childish fear. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was incomplete, that a vital piece of me was gone. When I was fifteen, I returned to the farm for Grandfather’s funeral. He had died alone, and in his will, he left me something: a small, velvet pouch. Inside was a single tooth, wrapped in a note that said, ‘Return it, or be doomed to stay a child forever.’

I knew I had to go back to the clearing. The valley was as I remembered, the mist thicker, the trees more twisted. The stone sat in the center, and in its hollow, there was a single tooth – mine. I reached in, and the moment my fingers touched it, I felt a warmth spread through me, and the world snapped into focus. The edges of things became sharp, and I realized I had been living in a fog, exactly as Grandfather had described. I placed the tooth in my pocket, said a prayer for the Hollow Man, and walked out of the valley. As I reached the hilltop, I saw my reflection in a puddle: I was a woman now, truly. But behind my image, I saw a tall, dark shape with a gaping maw, and it was smiling. Its voice echoed in my mind: ‘There is always a price.’ I never told anyone what I did with the tooth. I buried it under the porch, in a jar with a note that said ‘DO NOT OPEN.’ But some nights, I swear I feel a warm breath on my neck, and I know the Hollow Man is waiting for me to come back. And I fear, one day, I will.