The Hollow Between

I was never one for faith, not in the way Daniel was. He’d talk about grace and redemption with this quiet urgency, as if the words themselves could build a bridge from our cramped apartment to something vast and eternal. I’d listen, nodding, while the radiator clanked and the city hummed outside, and I’d feel a strange, hollow sort of curiosity. Maybe it was the late nights, the way I’d watch the moon trace the window, but I started to wonder if there was something more than the peeling paint and the smell of old coffee.

It was during one of those sleepless spans, around 3 a.m., that the hallway became something else. Our apartment had this odd little nook between my room and the bathroom—a sort of passage that turned a corner, barely wide enough for one person, with a deep shelf that collected dust and forgotten things. I called it the ‘hollow’ because it felt like a gap in the world, a place where you could step out of time for a second. That night, I padded to the bathroom, the floorboards creaking under my feet, my mind still half-lost in a book I’d been reading. As I stepped out, I stopped at the mouth of the hollow, and the hair on my arms stood up.

There was something in the hollow. It wasn’t a shadow you’d explain with a trick of light; it was a black so dense it seemed to drink the dim lamp glow from the hallway, a shape that didn’t quite have edges. It was tall, about as tall as me, but it felt bigger, like a weight pressing on the air. I couldn’t see a face or limbs, just a presence that was all negative space, a hole in the world. Panic rose in my throat, but I forced myself to breathe, to tell myself it was a jacket on a hook, a play of shadows. I blinked, and it was still there, unwavering. I felt a cold draft wrap around my ankles, and then it shifted—not moved, but coalesced, becoming more solid, more defined. A whisper of static filled my ears, like a radio tuned to nothing, and I caught a faint scent of iron and dust.

I took a step back, and the thing’s mass seemed to lean toward me, as if it were tethered to my movement. My heart hammered; I wanted to scream for Daniel, but my voice was a dry rasp. I managed to back away slowly, keeping my eyes on it, and when I reached my door, I slammed it shut, my fingers fumbling for the lock. I pressed my ear to the wood, listening, but there was only silence, a heavy silence that felt like a held breath. I sank to the floor, shaking, and for the first time in weeks, I prayed—not to Daniel’s God, but to anything that would listen, to the hollow space between my own ribs.

I didn’t sleep that night, and in the morning, I told Daniel, expecting him to dismiss it or offer a logical explanation. But he grew pale, and he asked me to describe the hollow in detail, the exact spot where I’d seen the shape. When I finished, he was quiet for a long moment, then he said, ‘That’s where I used to kneel and pray when I was a kid, every night before bed. I thought I’d left that place behind, but I guess it followed me.’ He looked at me with a haunted expression, and I saw that his faith was not a shield but a bandage over an old wound. We both knew what I’d seen was real, and it was tied to him, to the very concept of belief itself.

That night, I couldn’t stay in the apartment. I went to a friend’s place, but I couldn’t sleep there either. When I returned the next day, the apartment felt different—thinner, like a membrane stretched over something vast. I entered through the main door, and the hollow was just a dusty nook, but I could feel a weight in the air, a pressure in my ears. I walked to the bathroom, and as I passed the hollow, I saw a small, dark thing scurry into the shadows—a mouse, I told myself, but it moved with too much intention. I stopped and looked into the hollow, and for a moment, I saw a pair of pale eyes staring back from the blackness, wide and unblinking, like the eyes of a thing that had been waiting a long time.

I called Daniel, but he didn’t answer. I left a message, telling him I couldn’t stay, that the hollow was becoming more than a shadow. The next morning, his sister called to say he’d been found in his car outside a church, unharmed but disoriented, muttering about a ‘hole in the floor of the world.’ When he finally came home, he was changed. He didn’t speak of God or grace anymore; he just stared at walls, and at night, I would find him standing at the edge of the hollow, as if listening. I tried to convince him to move, but he said, ‘It’s not the place, it’s me. I brought it with me. It’s always been there, only I gave it a name and a prayer, and it fed on that.’

I began to see it more often, not just in the hollow but at the edge of my vision—a black stain in the corner of the kitchen, a dark shape blending with the curtains. It was patient, waiting for me to fall asleep, to let my guard down. I started sleeping with the lights on, and I developed a twitch in my neck, a constant feeling of being watched. One night, I woke to find Daniel standing over me, his face inches from mine, his eyes black and empty. He whispered, ‘You shouldn’t have looked. You made it real.’ I screamed, and he blinked, and then he was himself again, horrified by what he’d done.

We moved out a week later, but I knew it wasn’t over. I could feel it following us, coiled in the moving boxes, in the new apartment’s shadows. It didn’t need the hollow; it had been born from faith and fear, and I had opened the door. Now, whenever I walk down any corridor, I look for the darkest corner, the one that seems a little too deep, and I see it there, waiting. It’s not a ghost or a demon; it’s the shape of belief turned wrong, a hunger for the soul that you discover when you start to question. And the worst part is, I still can’t bring myself to believe in anything enough to make it go away. So I just keep walking, from room to room, never looking too long at the hollow between, because I know it’s growing, and one day, it will fill the world.