The Hollow Stones of Cedar Hollow

I live in the high desert, where the houses are scattered like lost marbles across the brittle earth, and the mesas loom so close they seem to breathe through your windows. At night, the only company is the dry hiss of wind through juniper and the low, rhythmic pulse of cicadas. But that night, the pulse was wrong.

I woke to a pressure in my chest, as if a thumb pressed down on my sternum. My heart hammered, and in the hollow of my skull, a single word repeated: ‘Sah’tan.’ I didn’t know what it meant, but it felt like the scrape of a match against bone. I tried to think of something else, but the word clung, and the air in my room felt thick, like it had been left too long in a cellar.

I slipped out of bed and padded down the hall to my mother’s room. She was awake, her eyes wide in the faint glow of the hallway. I told her about the word, and she said, ‘Pray.’ So I knelt by her bed, and I whispered the only prayer I knew, the one she had taught me. The word faded, like water soaking into sand. But my skin kept crawling.

I lay on the floor in the corner of her room, trying to breathe, but sleep wouldn’t come. Then I heard it: a dragging thump directly above, like a sack of wet concrete being pulled across the shingles. My mother looked at me, her face pale. ‘Did you hear that?’ she whispered. I nodded, my throat tight. Then she said, ‘Go back to your room.’ I didn’t want to, but I obeyed.

As I walked back, I passed the window in the hallway that faced the mesa. Something moved out there—a tall, angular shape, darker than the night, standing at the edge of the yard where the brush began. It wasn’t human. Its head was too long, and it had no shoulders, just a sloping neck that merged into a narrow chest. And it was watching me.

I ran to my room, slammed the door, and pressed my back against it. But as I stood there, I heard the unmistakable sound of something landing on the ground right outside my window—a heavy, deliberate thud that shook the wall. Then slow, deliberate footsteps, crunching on the dry soil, circling the house. They were not the footsteps of an animal; they were measured, as if something was pacing, thinking.

I pulled the curtains aside just a crack. There was nothing there. But the footsteps continued, moving around to the front, then back. I stayed frozen, listening to the crunch of gravel and the faint rustle of fabric—if it was fabric. The steps went on for what felt like hours, until the first gray light of dawn finally washed over the horizon. Then they stopped.

When morning came, I went outside. The ground around my window was marked with deep impressions—not footprints, but wide, shallow depressions, as if something heavy had rested there for a long time. On the windowsill, there was a single, perfectly smooth black stone, no bigger than my thumb, but impossibly heavy. I turned it over in my hand, and I felt a chill run up my arm. The word pressed against my mind again: ‘Sah’tan.’ But this time, I understood: it was a name, and it was waiting for me to answer it.

I threw the stone into the arroyo, but that night, it was back on my windowsill, as if it had never been gone. And every night since, I hear the footsteps stop outside my window, and I hear that word, spoken in a voice that sounds like the grinding of stones. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see the shape on the mesa, and I know that it is not waiting for me. It is waiting for the day I will walk out and join it. And I am not sure I can keep refusing forever.