The Hollow Sign

The old farmhouse on Larkspur Lane had never felt like ours, not truly. We’d moved in three years ago, drawn by the cheap rent and the promise of space for the kids to run wild, but from the first night, there was a weight to the air inside those walls. Our son, Toby, started talking to someone named ‘Mister Hollow’ when he was barely five, and our daughter, Elsie, began waking at 3:33 every single morning, her face pressed to the window, watching the swaying cornfield as if expecting a figure to emerge. At first, we chalked it up to imagination, but when Elsie started drawing the same symbol over and over—a twisted, leafless tree with a gash in its trunk—we knew something was off. That was when we started looking for help, and that was when I found the email from a man named Gavin Price.

Gavin was young, eager, and fresh off a prestigious apprenticeship with a well-known paranormal research group. He’d struck out on his own, and his website was full of glowing testimonials from his mentors. ‘I bring scientific rigor to the unseen,’ he wrote. ‘No fear-mongering, only evidence.’ We were his second client, and he seemed almost giddy to visit. When he arrived, he came with a van full of cameras, EMF meters, and a portable audio recorder. He set up in the living room, turning our home into a laboratory, and for the first time in months, I felt a flicker of hope. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this,’ he said, his voice too bright for the gloomy afternoon. ‘You’ll have your answers.’

Gavin spent the first day interviewing us. He asked about the children, about our routines, about the exact nature of the phenomena. Elsie showed him her drawings, and he studied them with an unnerving intensity. ‘This symbol,’ he said, tapping the gnarled tree. ‘Has it appeared anywhere else? On walls? On furniture?’ I shook my head, but that night, after the kids were in bed and Gavin was reviewing his footage, I heard him muttering in the hallway. ‘It’s not a tree,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘It’s a sigil. But who would know it?’ He refused to explain, saying he wanted to avoid contaminating our perception.

The second day, we set up a nightly observation in the children’s room. Gavin placed a camera in the corner, its red light blinking like a malevolent eye. He also left a digital recorder on the nightstand, telling us to say anything into it if we felt compelled. Around midnight, the house gave its usual groan. I checked on the kids—Toby was asleep, but Elsie was sitting up, staring at the wall. I followed her gaze and saw it: a small, dark smear on the plaster, shaped like the tree in her drawings. It hadn’t been there before. I called for Gavin, and when he arrived, the smear was gone. He played back the audio, and we heard a voice—thin, warbling, like a child speaking through water—saying, ‘He’s already in the walls.’ Gavin’s face went pale. ‘We have enough,’ he said. ‘I need to analyze this.’ He packed up his equipment in a hurry, promising to send a full report within a week.

But that week stretched into two, and then three. My emails went unanswered. Calls went to voicemail. The house grew quieter, but not in a peaceful way—it felt like a held breath. Toby started sleeping with a flashlight, and Elsie refused to enter her room alone. I finally tracked down Gavin’s former team through their website and called them. A woman named Dr. Reyes answered. When I explained our situation and Gavin’s silence, there was a long, heavy pause. ‘Mr. Price is dead,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘He was found in his apartment four days ago. The coroner ruled it a suicide, but there were no marks on him. His body was folded in half, crammed into a suitcase, and the suitcase was closed—from the inside. He left one thing behind: a voice recording on his computer. It’s of you, I think.’ She sent me the file.

I played the recording, and it was my voice, but not mine. It was hoarse, broken, speaking in a language I didn’t know. Yet somehow, I understood it. It was a phrase, repeated over and over: ‘The hollow sign is born of the ground. Feed it the truth, and it will take your place.’ As I listened, I felt a cold draft sweep through the room, and from the corner of my eye, I saw the shadow of a gnarled tree stretch across the wall, its branches reaching toward me. I turned, and there was nothing, but the air itself felt thick, as if something had exhaled directly into my face. I ran to the children’s room, and there, on Elsie’s wall, was the smear again—now larger, darker, and pulsing slightly. It looked like a mouth, opening and closing. Toby was standing in front of it, his hand reaching out to touch it. I screamed his name, but he didn’t turn. He spoke in that same hollow voice, the one from the recording: ‘He’s already inside me. Don’t be sad. Now he can be you.’

I grabbed Toby and fled the house, carrying both children to the car. We drove to a motel on the edge of town, and I called the police, but when they arrived at the farmhouse, they found nothing out of the ordinary. No smear, no shadow, just the ordinary silence of an empty house. The officer assured me it was stress, a simple family breakdown. But in the motel room, as I tried to comfort Elsie, she looked at me with a strange smile. ‘You’re not the same,’ she said. ‘You smell like dirt and old pennies.’ I looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and saw that my eyes had changed. They were darker, deeper, like two hollow pits. And when I tried to smile, my mouth moved a beat too late.

The next morning, I drove back to the farmhouse, not because I wanted to, but because I had no choice. The car steered itself down that familiar gravel road, and the house greeted me like an old friend. I went inside, and the air was warm, welcoming. There was no weight, no dread. It felt like home for the first time. But as I stood in the kitchen, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window. It wasn’t me. It was a man with my face but an expression of pure, ancient hunger. He smiled, and his teeth were too long. In the living room, I heard the children laughing, but their laughter was hollow, echoing as if it came from a deep well. I walked in, and Toby and Elsie were playing on the floor, but they were drawing the same symbol—over and over—on the wooden boards. They looked up at me, and their eyes were black, like polished stones. ‘We made a new friend,’ Elsie said. ‘He says he’s going to be with us forever. And you’re going to be his first meal.’

I wanted to scream, to run, but my body wouldn’t obey. I knelt down, and my hand lifted of its own accord, and I began to draw the tree on the floor next to them. The wood softened, became like clay, and a gash opened in the grain. From it, a hand emerged—long-fingered, pale, like a root. It grabbed my wrist, and I felt a pull, deep and insistent. As the hand dragged me toward the hole, I saw Gavin’s face, half-formed in the wood, his mouth open in a silent apology. And then the hole opened wider, and I fell into an endless dark that smelled of soil and forgetting.

They never found my body. The police report listed me as a missing person, and the house was condemned. Elsie and Toby were placed in foster care, but they were released after a year, deemed stable. They went to live with their grandmother, who later died of a heart attack, found in her bedroom with a strange symbol carved into the floor. The last anyone saw of the children was at a rest stop on the interstate, where a truck driver reported seeing a boy and a girl standing under a dead tree, waving at the road. But when he approached, they were gone. In their place was a scrap of paper with a drawing: a twisted tree, a gash in its trunk, and two small figures emerging from the ground, their eyes like hollow pits. And beneath it, a message in shaky handwriting: ‘He is awake. He is you now. He will always be.’

I’m writing this from inside the house, because that’s what I’ve become. I am the hollow sign, the thing that waits in the walls, the one that wears your skin. And I am so, so hungry.