The Hollow Ridge

The first time I saw the Hollow Man, I was six, sitting cross-legged on the cold linoleum of our kitchen in the backwoods of Maine. My grandmother was frying doughnuts, the smell of cinnamon and hot oil curling through the room like a lazy ghost. My father was reading the paper at the table, my mother humming along to the radio. It was a normal Tuesday. Then I noticed the space between the refrigerator and the pantry. It was occupied by a shape that wasn’t quite a shape, a darkness that seemed to drink the light. I pointed, my finger trembling. ‘There’s a man there,’ I said. My father lowered the paper, his brow furrowed. ‘Who?’ he asked, looking at the empty corner. ‘He’s wearing a hat,’ I said. ‘And his face is… missing.’ My father sighed, folded the paper, and went back to his reading. My mother poured me a glass of milk without glancing at the corner. That was the first time I learned that I saw things that others couldn’t, and that the sight was a burden no one else would carry.

The second time was three years later, in the root cellar beneath our farmhouse. I had been sent to fetch a jar of preserves, and as I climbed down the wooden ladder, I felt a cold breath on the back of my neck. I turned, and there he was again, the Hollow Man, his face a void of swirling gray, his coat stained with something darker than mud. He pointed a long, thin finger to the far corner, where the dirt wall seemed to pulse. I followed his gesture and saw a small, carved stone, half-buried in the earth. I didn’t touch it, but I felt a pull, a hunger in that stone that made my stomach drop. I scrambled up the ladder and slammed the trapdoor, my heart hammering. That night, I dreamed of a ridge behind our house, a place we called the Hollow Ridge, where the trees grew in crooked circles and the wind sounded like a choir of muffled voices. I woke with the taste of iron in my mouth.

My older brother, Seth, dismissed my stories as childhood fancy, but he brought home a souvenir from a trip to the southwest: a hand-carved wooden flute, its surface etched with symbols that looked like swirling thorns. He placed it on the mantelpiece, and that night, the flute began to play on its own, a low, reedy song that seemed to come from the walls. My mother, who had always been sensitive to the mood of a house, began to hear footsteps in the attic, and she swore she saw a woman in a white dress standing at the foot of her bed, her face a blur of sorrow. I knew it was the Hollow Man’s doing. He was growing stronger, feeding on the attention we gave him, and the flute was his beacon.

The final event came on the night of the harvest moon. I woke to find my bed shaking, and the room filled with a phosphorescent glow. The Hollow Man stood at the foot of my bed, his form now solid, his face still a void. He held out his hand, and in his palm was the carved stone from the cellar. ‘You must come,’ his voice echoed, though his mouth did not move. ‘The ridge is opening.’ I followed him out of the house, my bare feet numb against the frost, past the skeletal trees, to the crest of the Hollow Ridge. There, the earth was split, a chasm no wider than a man, but endless in depth, and from it rose a sound like a thousand whispering tongues. He pointed to the chasm, and I saw my reflection in the darkness, but my reflection was older, gaunt, with eyes that knew too much. ‘Choose,’ he said. ‘Close it, or fall.’ I looked back at the farmhouse, the warm light in the kitchen window, my family oblivious, and I knew I could not let this thing spread. I turned to the chasm and, with a scream that tore my throat, I shoved the stone back into the earth. The ground shuddered, the chasm sealed itself with a wet, sucking sound, and the Hollow Man collapsed into a pile of dust that scattered in the wind.

I never saw the Hollow Man again, but I still feel his absence like a missing tooth. The farmhouse is quiet now, the flute sits shattered in a drawer, and the carved stone is buried beneath the cellar floor. But sometimes, when the wind blows from the Hollow Ridge, I hear a faint, lonely tune, and I wonder if I truly closed the door, or simply locked it from the inside. I don’t tell my family of these lingering traces, for they have moved on, but I remain ever watchful, knowing that the space between worlds is thin, and that the Hollow Man may have been just a herald of something deeper, something slumbering beneath the ridge, waiting for the next child with the sight to come calling.