The Hollow in the Hill

The house at the end of Maple Hollow Road had always been mine, inherited from my grandmother, and before that, her mother. I was born in the upstairs bedroom with the crooked window, and I had never known any other home. For as long as I could remember, the place hummed with a low, watchful presence. Shadows would drift at the edge of my vision, doors would creak open on their own, and my mother often spoke of hearing faint, joyful laughter from my empty room. My father, a pragmatic man, swore he saw ‘boxy black lumps’ skulking in the kitchen at night, but they never did anything but watch. I once saw a tall, dark figure flanked by two slender silhouettes in the living room, and they seemed to be dancing, their movements slow and rhythmic, as if to a distant melody. I never felt fear, only curiosity, as if I were a guest in someone else’s memory.

Then Marcus moved in. He was my fiancé, and his arrival was like throwing a stone into still water. Within a week, the gentle whispers became harsh growls that shook the walls. Objects would fly off shelves, and doors slammed with violent intent. One evening, we were sitting in the den, and the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed thirteen times at midnight, its pendulum swinging in reverse. Marcus, a skeptic, tried to laugh it off, but his hands were shaking. The next morning, we found every mirror in the house covered in a fine layer of dust, and the word ‘LEAVE’ scrawled across the bathroom mirror, written in a substance that smelled like burnt copper.

It was the clay that truly changed things. Our property sloped down to a creek, and beyond that, a wooded hill where the soil was so rich and red it looked like dried blood. As a child, I used to play there, molding the earth into shapes, but now, Marcus and I discovered that the clay was rising from the ground in unnatural blobs, forming themselves into crude, androgynous figures with no faces. They would appear overnight in our yard, arranged in a circle around the oak tree where I used to have a swing. When we destroyed them, they would reappear the next night, closer to the house, their limbs contorted into angles that defied anatomy.

Then Marcus started sleepwalking. I would find him standing at the edge of the hill, naked, his hands deep in the clay, muttering in a language I didn’t recognize. When I confronted him, he had no memory of it, but he’d wake with scratches on his arms and a profound exhaustion. Our lovemaking, once passionate, became frantic and desperate, as if we were trying to outrun something. But it wasn’t us that was being driven out; it was the others.

One night, I woke to hear Marcus’s voice coming from the living room. I crept downstairs and saw him standing before the tall, dark figure I’d seen years ago. But this time, the figure wasn’t dancing; it was towering, its head nearly touching the ceiling, and its two female companions were now skeletal, their fingers like thorns. They were pointing at me, and Marcus was chanting, his eyes rolled back to white. I screamed, and he collapsed. When he came to, he begged me to leave, saying the house was evil, but I couldn’t; it was the only home I knew.

The final straw came when I found a clay figure in our bed, lying between us, its shape unmistakably pregnant, with a hollow cavity where its belly should have been. I heard a child’s giggle from the closet. I opened the closet door, and inside, a clay child with my face was sitting, holding its hands out. It spoke in my mother’s voice: ‘She will be beautiful.’ I turned to run, but the bedroom door slammed shut. I looked in the mirror, which I had cleaned, and my reflection smiled back at me, but wrong—too wide, too many teeth. And I realized the activity wasn’t territorial; it was seductive. It wanted Marcus to plant a seed, a new life for them. The house wasn’t haunted; it was a womb.

I do not know how I escaped, but I did. I woke up on the lawn, covered in clay, with no memory of the past week. The house stood silent and dark, its windows like dead eyes. And I knew that inside, something was growing. I ran, and I never looked back. But sometimes, I feel a wet, clingy sensation in my palms, and I see a lump of red clay in the corner of my vision, waiting. And I wonder if I left a piece of myself there, or if I brought something out with me. The house on Maple Hollow Road is still there, but I am not. And I fear that one day, I will have to return, to face the hollow that calls my name.