The Hollow Wail

The house at 13 Barlowe Lane had a name: the Hollow. It wasn’t just the way the wind moaned through the gaps in the weatherboarding, or how the floorboards creaked even when no one walked. It was deeper, like the house itself was a mouth that had swallowed a scream. When I was six, my parents moved us there, to the edge of a town that was mostly marsh and fog. The house stood on stilts above the black water of the Cinderbog, connected to the shore by a narrow, rotting plank bridge. Inside, it was surprisingly bright, with big windows and a fresh coat of paint, but outside, the wood was dark, the roof sagged, and the windows seemed to stare like empty eye sockets.

I was thrilled to get my first real bedroom, with a proper bed and a flower-patterned quilt. My mother, a practical woman who didn’t believe in ghosts, painted the walls a cheerful yellow. But the room had a window that faced the bog, and at night, the fog rolled in, thick as cotton, and the sound of frogs was punctuated by the occasional splash of something heavy.

Three nights after I moved in, I woke to a tickling sensation on my face. I opened my eyes and saw three faces pressed against the glass, hovering at the level of my bed. They were not human faces, but they were not quite animal either. They were pale, like slugs, with mouths stretched into impossibly wide grins that showed too many teeth, black and needle-sharp. Their eyes were like wet stones, without whites, and they stared with a hunger that made my blood freeze. I didn’t scream; I couldn’t. I just pulled the covers over my head and lay there, shaking, until dawn.

I never slept in that room again. I crawled into my parents’ bed every night, and they never questioned it, only accepted my vague excuses. But the dreamworld, the one I visited after I finally drifted off, was worse. I would be standing in the middle of the bog, the water up to my ankles, and the fog would part to reveal those three figures, now more solid, their grins stretching wider, and they would begin to hum. It was a low, grating sound, like a saw on bone, and it made my teeth ache.

My mother began to notice. I would flinch at shadows, refuse to be alone in any room. She thought it was just a phase, but then she started having her own experiences. One night, I woke to find her standing at the foot of the bed, staring at the corner. ‘Who’s that lady?’ I whispered, because I saw her too – a tall woman in a ragged dress, her face obscured by hanging hair, her hand extended as if asking for something. My father snapped awake, grabbed my mother’s arm, and the figure vanished. But my mother’s eyes remained locked on the corner, and she whispered, ‘She wants the child.’

The next day, my mother dug through the house’s old records in the town library. She found that the house had been built on the site of an old orphanage that had burned down in the 1920s. A fire caused by a faulty stove, but the official report was vague. A caretaker, a woman named Magda, had perished attempting to save the children, but they found no bodies. The only survivor was a girl of about seven, who was found wandering the bog, mute, her pajamas singed. She was adopted by a family in the next town, but she never spoke again.

My mother started sleeping with a rosary under her pillow, even though she never went to church. But the things in the bog, the faces, they didn’t care about her talisman. One night, I woke to find the window open, the wind blowing the curtains, and a smell of smoke and wet earth. My mother was gone from the bed. I found her in my old room, standing at the window, staring out at the bog. The three faces were there, their grins wider than ever, and the woman in the corner was pointing at me. My mother turned to me, and her eyes were black, and she said, in a voice like gravel, ‘We need to give her the child.’

I screamed, and my father ran in, and he shook my mother until she blinked, and she had no memory of getting up. But the damage was done. The house had marked me. I started seeing the faces in the dark even when I was awake, in the reflection of the toaster, in the ripples of the bog. I stopped sleeping altogether, and my parents, terrified, decided to move.

Our last night, I was lying in my packing-box bedroom, the one with a window that faced the land instead of the bog, and I heard a hum. It was soft at first, then louder, and I looked over to see the woman standing in the corner, her wet hair dripping onto the floor. She sang a lullaby, a broken melody, and the tears on her face were black. ‘I only wanted them back,’ she sobbed. ‘The river took them, the fire took me, but you can see them. You can see my children.’ And I realized the three faces weren’t the monsters. They were the children. They had been trying to reach me, to ask me to help them reach for their mother, but I had been too frightened to listen.

As the moving truck pulled away the next morning, the woman and the three children stood on the bridge, watching. They didn’t grin. They waved. And I waved back, a single, small wave, and I felt a coldness leave my chest. But I know they’re still there, waiting for the next child who can see, the one who will not run away. And I know that someday, I will have to go back.