The Hollow Repast

The cottage my grandmother lent me sat at the edge of a birch wood, its northern wall only a stone’s throw from the derelict Langley house. The place had been empty since I was a child, its windows like vacant eyes, its porch sagging under the weight of neglect. I never thought much of it beyond its gloom, until the first morning I heard the clicking.

It started as a soft, dry sound, like a hundred tiny claws on slate. I woke to it, my skin prickling with the chill that always seeped from that direction. On the floor by my window, where the old air conditioning unit hummed its eternal rattle, I saw them: dark circles, no bigger than coins, skittering across the floorboards. They moved with a strange, jointless haste, darting toward the shadows beneath my bed. I blinked, and they were gone, but the clicking persisted for a full ten minutes before ceasing as abruptly as it began.

The next day, I was ready. I sat on the edge of my mattress, bare feet on the cold wood, and watched the floor. The circles came again, as if summoned by the sound of the air conditioner’s wheeze. They poured over the windowsill like liquid shadow, leaving no trace, and scattered across the room. I felt a faint, feather-light touch as they passed through my legs—a shiver, nothing more. Then, as if at an unseen signal, they reversed course, streaming back toward the window and out into the grey morning, vanishing among the weeds that choked the Langley house.

I told my brother’s girlfriend, Elena, about it over tea. She laughed until I showed her, and then she went pale. She agreed to stay the night, to see for herself. We sat in the dark after midnight, the air conditioner groaning, and at 3:07 AM exactly, the clicking began. The circles appeared, not just by the window but across the floor, as if they had been waiting all along. Elena gasped and pointed—one of the circles paused, then turned, as if aware of our gaze. It moved toward her, passed through her outstretched hand, and she jerked back, shaking. ‘It felt like for a moment, I wasn’t alone,’ she whispered. We watched until dawn, and when the last circle slipped back into the Langley house, we found something in the dust by the window: a small, polished bone, no bigger than a tooth, with a perfect circle drilled through its center.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were feeding. On the fourth morning, I decided to follow them. I dressed in heavy boots and a coat, and when the circles streamed toward the window, I was waiting outside, pressed against the wall. I watched them flow into a crack in the Langley house’s foundation, vanishing into the dark. I crept closer, peered through a broken pane, and saw a room filled with dusty furniture, but at its center, a circle of the same dark shapes, rippling over a patch of floor. They were not shadows—they were tiny, furred things, like mice made of darkness, with glinting eyes. And they were all facing a single point, where the floorboards had rotted away entirely, revealing a shaft that dropped into the black earth. A wet, sucking sound rose from below, and the creatures tensed, then vanished one by one down the hole.

I brought Elena to the house the next day. We pried up the floorboards, and found the shaft. It was not natural—it was lined with obsidian, smooth and unnaturally cool. We dropped a flashlight down, and it clicked on a staircase, spiraling into the dark. The air that came up smelled of moss and old meat. I knew we had to see, or it would haunt us forever. We descended, our footsteps echoing, and found a crypt. In the center, on a stone altar, lay a figure—a woman, embalmed, her skin stretched taut over bones, her mouth open as if in a silent cry. Around her neck hung a string of the same bones we had found, each with its drilled hole. And on her chest, a cluster of the dark creatures, pulsing slowly, as if they were breathing. I realized then that they were not leaving the house at dawn—they were returning to her, to the thing that had made them. And in that moment, her eyes opened.

We ran. We climbed out of that pit, through the broken window, and back to the cottage, slamming the door. But as we stood panting, the air conditioner rattled, and the clicking began—not at the window, but from inside the walls. The dark circles seeped through the plaster, the floor, the ceiling. They didn’t seem hostile, just curious, as if they wanted to show us something. Elena screamed, and I threw a chair at the wall, but they kept coming. And then a voice, thin and dry like leaves, whispered from the air conditioner: ‘You’ve worn my old bones. Now wear me.’

I looked at the bone I had pocketed, and saw that its hole was not empty—it was filled with a tiny, writhing shadow. The creatures converged on us, and we felt ourselves being pulled, gently, toward the floor. We fought, but they were countless. The last thing I remember was the smell of dust, and the sound of clicking, and then nothing. Now I am writing this from a room without windows. I can hear them under the floorboards. They are waiting for me to stop writing, so they can take me home.