The Hollow Sway

My grandmother, Elara, was a woman of secrets and sideways smiles. She claimed her own grandmother had married a circuit preacher at fifteen, a man who could charm frost off a windowpane with a sermon. Elara’s childhood was a caravan of tent revivals and dirt-road wanderings, but one night in the autumn of 1929, she said, the road itself turned against them.

They were on the old Wren Hollow Trace, a scratch of dirt that switchbacked through the pine barrens of eastern Texas, a place where the trees leaned in like they were listening. The preacher, my great-grandfather, a man named Josiah, pulled the Ford off the track into a clearing that the locals called the ‘Devil’s Pocket.’ It was a bowl of red clay ringed by live oaks, their branches draped with Spanish moss that hung like tattered shrouds. They had no tent that night, just bedrolls and a canvas tarp stretched between the car and a fallen log, because the sky was clear and Josiah said they needed the stars to guide their prayers.

Elara, then just a girl of twelve, shared a pallet with her sister Ruth and her two brothers, Ezra and Levi, while their mother, Mary, a fidgety woman with nerves like wire, tried to settle them with lullabies. The fire was low, just a bed of coals, and the air was heavy with the smell of pine and damp earth. They drifted off to the hiss of the embers and the creak of the oaks.

Elara woke to a woman’s voice, low and urgent, right by her ear. ‘They’ll be coming over the ridge at dusk, I tell you. The men won’t listen, but they’re packing their war paint. We’ll be gone by morning if we’re wise.’ Elara’s eyes snapped open. The fire was dead, leaving only a faint orange glow on the ashes. The clearing was silver with moonlight, and she could see the shapes of her brothers and sister, all sitting up, wide-eyed. She heard other voices now, a chorus of women, trembling, and then a man’s voice, calm and deep, like river stones, ‘Hush now, the Lord will keep us. They’re not coming for us; they’re coming for the travelers on the other side. We’ll be safe in the hollow.’

Ezra, the oldest, was already shaking Josiah awake. ‘Pa, there’s folk talking about Indians attacking. We need to move.’ Josiah sat up, his hand going for the shotgun he kept by his bedroll. He was a stout man with a voice that could boom a hymn, but now it was a whisper. ‘I heard it too, son. But there’s nobody out here. The nearest settlement is twenty miles.’ He walked the perimeter of the clearing, his boots crunching on dead leaves, the gun held low. He found nothing. No footprints, no cigarette butts, no sign of any other campfire. When he came back, the women’s voices had faded to a low hum, like a distant chant, and then the wind picked up, rustling the moss into a sibilant hiss.

They all tried to sleep again, but Elara couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched. She lay on her back, staring at the patchwork of sky through the canopy, when she heard the sound again, but this time it was different. It was a low, rhythmic swaying, like many bodies moving in unison, and a soft, dusty thumping—like bare feet on packed earth. She sat up and saw, beyond the dying coals, a line of figures emerging from the trees. They were tall, gaunt, wrapped in gray cloth that seemed to be made of mist, their faces long and featureless as smooth stones. They moved in a slow, shuffling line, as if they were marching to an inaudible drum. They didn’t look like Indians, or anything human; they looked like the trees themselves had uprooted and were coming to claim the clearing.

Elara screamed. That broke the spell. The figures stopped, and for a moment, the entire clearing was still. Then, one of the figures turned its blank face toward her, and she saw that its eyes were tiny, glowing embers, like the last sparks of the fire. It raised a finger to where its mouth should have been, and a hiss escaped—’Shhhh.’ She felt a cold wash, and then the figures dissolved into the dark, leaving only the moss swaying.

Josiah woke again, and this time he saw the mist, a strange, low-lying fog that had gathered around the edges of the clearing, glowing faintly in the moonlight. He raised his gun and fired into the mist. The shot was followed by a terrifying silence, then a chorus of whispering from all directions, in a language that sounded like no human speech, full of sibilants and glottal stops, but some words were clear: ‘go,’ ‘stay,’ and ‘the hollow is hungry.’

They didn’t sleep anymore that night. As the first gray light began to seep through the trees, the mist receded, revealing the ground beneath it. The coals of their fire were gone, replaced by a patch of blackened earth in the shape of a perfect circle. And in the center of that circle, there was a single, hand-carved wooden doll, no bigger than a finger, with its face scratched out and a tuft of mouse-colored hair stuck to its head. Elara knew that hair looked like hers.

They packed in frantic silence and drove out of the pocket, but the road seemed to loop back on itself. They drove for hours, the same tree appearing again and again, a gnarled oak with a split trunk that looked like a screaming mouth. It was only when Josiah remembered a psalm his own father used to holler—the twenty-third Psalm—and he began to sing it at the top of his lungs, that the road finally let them go. They broke out onto a paved highway just as the sun was setting, and behind them, they saw the Dark Hollow retreat into the haze.

Elara kept that doll for years, hidden in a tin box under her bed. She swore that on nights when the wind was right, she could hear it whispering, ‘Stay,’ and she would feel a bony finger trace the curve of her ear. She said the preacher’s family never stayed in one place for long after that, but the hollow sway of those figures never left her dreams. And when she told me the story, she would always end with a smile and a shrug: ‘Some places are not for the living, child. They’re just for passing through.’ And I could never look at a stand of moss-covered oaks the same way again.