The Hollow Bend

The road they called the Hollow Bend wasn’t just a stretch of asphalt in the pine barrens; it was a wound in the earth that never healed. My friend, Lena, who had the sight since she was a girl, knew its history. The locals whispered about a busload of children that had gone over the embankment in the ’50s, their screams swallowed by the creek below. Other tales spoke of a hermit who lived in the hills and fed on the lost. Lena, a Wiccan with a reverence for the liminal, always felt a pull to that place.

One razor-edged night in late October, with the moon a thumbnail of bone, she drove her beat-up Corolla down the Hollow Bend, not for the thrill, but because she’d left her grimoire at her sister’s cabin and needed it for the next night’s ritual. The wind kept a low, keening hum in the pines, and the air smelled of wet stone and cold moss. She passed the ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ sign, its warning faded and pockmarked with rust.

Halfway down, her headlights caught a figure at the edge of the trees—a girl, no older than twelve, in a soaked dress that clung to her like seaweed. Lena’s heart lurched. This was the same spot where the bus had gone down. She braked slowly, the gravel crunching under her tires. The girl didn’t move, her face in shadow but her eyes reflecting the headlights like those of a deer.

Lena rolled down her window, the cold air biting her cheeks. ‘Are you lost, honey?’ she asked. The girl just pointed down the embankment, toward the black water. Lena’s instincts screamed, but her training as a Wiccan told her to listen to the pull of the other side. She got out, leaving the engine running and the door ajar.

She slid down the slope, gripping ferns and roots, the earth cold and ungiving. The creek was a sliver of silver between dark banks. And there, caught on a low branch, was a small, mud-caked shoe. Lena’s breath hitched. She reached for it, but as her fingers closed around the soaked fabric, the creek began to rise, slowly but relentlessly, as if the water itself was alive and angry. The girl’s voice drifted down, no longer sweet but layered, with something thick and wet underneath. ‘They’re waking up.’

Lena scrambled back up, slipping twice, her hands raw. She reached the road and turned to look at the girl, but the girl was gone. However, the car’s headlights now pooled on nothing but the empty road. Then, in her rearview mirror, she saw the shoe she’d almost grabbed sitting on the backseat, perfectly dry. The dress the girl had worn was draped over the passenger seat, and from its folds, a tiny, rust-worn whistle rolled onto the floorboards.

She floored it, the engine whining as she fled the Hollow Bend. The whistle rattled against the pedals. She didn’t dare look back. But for the rest of her life, every time she closed her eyes, she saw the face of that girl, and it wasn’t the face of a child. It was the water, and the hunger, and the sound of a thousand small voices humming in the dark.