The Hollow Behind the Hill

The house at 13 Raven’s Crest wasn’t old—only fifteen years, which in the language of architecture is a toddler. My mother, an architect with a penchant for symmetry and light, had designed it herself, a sprawling Queenslander perched halfway up a hill, its wide verandas like open arms. But the land had a past that clung to it like damp soil. Before our family, two couples had owned it, both ending in rancor and ruin—the first in a bitter divorce, the second in financial collapse. And before the neighborhood sprouted, the area had been a favored spot for the mob’s quieter business, or so the whispers in the town went. I never paid them much mind. Whispers were just that.

Our backyard, unfenced, rolled straight into the green gloom of the Crowden Forest, a name that felt more like a warning than a description. I was twelve when I first noticed the hum. Not a sound, exactly, but a vibration under the porch, like a giant’s tuning fork stuck in the earth. It came at night, starting faintly after dusk and crescendoing to a low throb by midnight. My father dismissed it as underground pipes; my mother blamed the wind. But I knew better. It came from the woods.

The first incident was small. I lost a favorite toy—a tin robot with a missing arm—somewhere near the back steps. I searched for days, but the grass seemed to swallow it. A week later, I found it on the kitchen counter, standing upright, its missing arm restored, but the paint was wrong. The red was too bright, the metal ice-cold. My mother insisted she’d bought a new one, but she looked at me with a flicker of something unreadable.

Then the lights began to fail. Not all at once, but in a pattern. Every night, the hallway light flickered exactly three times at 2:17 AM. I timed it. After a month, the flickering stopped, and the hum grew stronger. I began to feel watched. Not by anything visible, but by the house itself. The walls had ears, and the floorboards were tongues.

The first real sign came from the forest. I had a friend, Leo, who rode his bike over one Saturday. We decided to explore the woods for the first time, despite my mother’s warning to stay out. The trees were thick, their branches intertwining like clasped hands. We found a clearing, perfectly circular, where the grass was a sickly yellow and the air was still. In the center was a stone, half-buried, covered in moss. On it, a single word was carved: ‘EAT.’ We laughed, nervous, and left. That night, I had a dream of roots crawling through my veins, and Leo didn’t come back. His parents said he ran away, but I saw his bike in our shed a week later, its tires flat, the chain rusted in a way that spoke of years, not days.

My mother’s behavior shifted. She would stand at the kitchen window, staring at the forest for hours, her teacup growing cold in her hands. Once, I heard her murmuring to the wall, a stream of words in a language I didn’t recognize. She started gardening, obsessively, but everything she planted died within days, rotting from the root up. She blamed the soil, but I saw the dirt on her hands was black, like tar, and it smelled of copper.

The hum became a voice. At night, I’d lie in bed, and the vibration would resolve into words, just at the edge of hearing. ‘Feed us,’ it seemed to say. ‘Feed us the hollow ones.’ I covered my ears, but it went deeper, into my bones.

Then the paintings began to change. We had a portrait of my grandmother in the dining room, painted when she was young. One morning, her face was subtly wrong—her eyes too wide, her smile too sharp. Over the weeks, the entire painting transformed. The background, once a bland studio backdrop, became the forest, and her hands grew long, gnarled fingers like twigs. My mother insisted it was the same painting, but I knew better. I wanted to burn it, but she screamed at me, protecting it as if it were a child.

The final straw was my father. He was a pragmatic man, a civil engineer who believed in solid ground and concrete facts. The night the hum reached its peak, he went into the forest with a flashlight and a shovel. He said he was going to find the source of ‘the noise.’ He never returned. The next morning, the police searched, but found nothing. My mother didn’t cry. She just nodded, as if she’d expected it.

Now, I’m alone with her. She’s taken to wandering the forest at dusk, her silhouette merging with the trees. The house feels bigger, emptier, but never alone. Something lives in the walls, in the floors, in the marrow of the house. I write this in my room, the door locked, but I can hear it outside my window, a scratching, like roots on glass.

The forest is closer now. Every night, the trees inch forward, their branches brushing the veranda. And the hum has a new rhythm, like a heartbeat, and it’s calling my name. I don’t know if I’ll last until morning. But if you find this, don’t come looking for me. The house is hungry, and I think I hear it now, sliding through the keyhole.

Yesterday, I found my mother’s diary in her closet, hidden under a loose floorboard. The last entry read: ‘We were wrong. The couples didn’t divorce. They ran. But the house keeps them. It wants the hollow ones. And I have hollowed a place for us.’ There was a sketch on the next page—a map of the forest, with an X marking the stone. ‘The sacrifice must be willing,’ she wrote. ‘And I have made you willing, my child.’

I didn’t understand until tonight. She drugged my tea with crushed leaves from her garden. I looked in the mirror and saw my reflection waving at me from the other side, a slow grin spreading across its face. And then I heard a voice, not from outside, but from within my own skull: ‘Welcome home.’ The hum is in my blood now, and I can feel the forest’s roots reaching up through my feet, anchoring me to the stone. I know what I have to do. Tomorrow, at dusk, I will walk into the clearing, and I will join them. But I won’t let the house have you. This is my story, and you are now its witness. Run.