The Hill’s Hollow

The summer I turned nine, my family moved into a house that squatted at the bottom of a long, winding hill. The structure itself was old, built sometime in the 1950s, with a low-pitched roof and peeling white paint. The yard was overgrown, and the hill behind it was thick with oak and locust trees, casting the house in perpetual shade. We were there because my father had found work as a groundskeeper at a nearby estate, and the rent was cheap. My sister, twelve at the time, and I shared a room on the first floor, a damp-smelling space with a single window that looked out onto the hill. Because of the slope, the window sill was about eight feet above the ground outside, giving us a view of the grass and roots that clung to the earth.

We’d barely unpacked when my father insisted on installing an alarm system. It was a clunky thing, all wires and magnetic sensors, and he placed them on every window and door. The sensors were placed at the top and bottom of each window frame, and each door had its own set. He was paranoid, always checking the doors at night, and he told us it was because of the previous tenants, who had been burglarized. I didn’t mind the alarm; it made a soft beep when we armed it, and I liked the sense of security. But the window in our room was the most sensitive, and it would sometimes go off if the wind rattled the glass just right. We’d gotten used to its occasional shriek, but we’d always silence it quickly.

One muggy night in August, the air thick with humidity and the hum of cicadas, I woke to the blaring of the alarm. It was a shrill, piercing sound that cut through the silence like a knife. My sister and I sat up in bed, heart pounding, and my father’s heavy footsteps thumped down the hall. He shouted for my mother, and together they moved through the house, their flashlights cutting through the dark. The alarm was coming from our room. I looked at the window, expecting to see it open, but it was closed. The sensor light blinked red, then green.

My father checked every window, every door, muttering under his breath. He even went outside, circling the house with a lantern, but found nothing out of place. The only anomaly was that the window in our room, which I had left open a crack to let in any breeze, was now firmly shut. My mother, her face pale in the dim light, turned to me and said, ‘You must have shut it in your sleep, honey. You need to get back to bed.’ I wanted to argue, but I felt so tired, and the alarm had rattled me. I slid back under the covers, but sleep wouldn’t come. I lay there, listening to the ticking of the alarm clock and the creaks of the settling house.

The next morning, I found my father on the porch, nursing a cup of coffee. He told me that he’d checked the camera footage—he had installed a small camera overlooking the back of the house. He didn’t say much, but there was a tightness to his jaw that told me something was wrong. He said he saw a shape moving by the window, but the quality was too poor to make out any details. He called the police, but they found nothing. Still, he insisted on tightening the locks. Over the next few nights, the alarm went off again and again, always triggered by the window in my room. Each time, the window would be shut, though I never opened it after the first night. I began to feel like the hill itself was watching me, its dark mass looming outside.

One night, I decided to stay awake. I propped my pillow up and stared at the window, waiting. Hours passed, and the house was still. Just as I felt my eyes growing heavy, a sound came from outside—a soft rustling, like leaves scraping against the glass. I saw it then: a glint of metal, a face pressing against the window, skin the color of soil, eyes like hollow pits. It was a man—or something shaped like a man—peering in, its breath fogging the glass. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The thing raised a hand, its fingers long and brittle, and tapped on the glass. Then it slid sideways, vanishing into the darkness of the hill.

I ran to my parents’ room, sobbing, and told them everything. My father went outside with a flashlight, but there was nothing to find—no footprints, no sign of disturbance. He dismissed it as a nightmare, but I saw the concern in his eyes. The next day, we went to the local library, and my father dug through old newspaper archives. He found a small article from 1958: ‘HILL RESIDENT REPORTED MISSING.’ A man had lived in a small shack on the hill, and he’d gone missing. The shack was long gone, but the article mentioned something odd: the man had been a recluse, and there were rumors he’d been a grave-robber. He’d never been found.

That night, as I lay in bed, I noticed a foul smell rising from the cracks in the floorboards, like damp earth and something rotten. The alarm went off again, but this time, I didn’t stay under the covers. I crept to the window and looked out. There, pressed against the glass, was the face again, but now it was smiling—a wide, mirthless grin full of dirt. It spoke, a voice like wind through dry leaves: ‘I’ve found a new home.’ I screamed, and this time, my parents burst in. They saw the face, too, and my father struggled with the window sash, but it wouldn’t budge. The thing tilted its head, then dissolved into the ground, leaving a dark smear like dirty water on the glass.

We moved out the next week. The alarm system came with us, but we never installed it. My father refused to talk about what we saw, and my mother stopped sleeping. But even after we left, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the hill had a hollow, and that something had found a way in. To this day, I rarely open my windows at night, and I wake up at the smallest sound. But the worst part is this: when I look out any window at night, I sometimes catch a glint of light at the edge of the darkness, as if eyes are watching, waiting for the moment when my guard drops. And I know that the thing on the hill is patient, and it always finds a way.