The House at the Base of the Hollow

I’m writing this now, at twenty-nine, because I’m afraid of what I’ll forget. The details are already fraying at the edges, like an old photograph left in the sun. But some images are burned in, and those are the ones I need to set down before they fade too.

When I was eight, my mother married a man named Carl, and we moved from our cramped apartment in the city to his house in a small township in the Pacific Northwest. The house itself was nothing special: a modest 1970s split-level with wood paneling and shag carpet, set at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a steep, forested hill rising directly behind it. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down the road. I remember being excited about the space, the woods, the quiet. But that excitement curdled within a week.

It started with the humming. Not a sound you heard so much as felt, a low vibration that seemed to come from the ground itself, especially at night. I’d lie in my new room, which faced the hill, and I’d press my ear to the floor, trying to locate it. My brother, Danny, who was six, said he heard it too, but he described it as a song, a ‘lullaby from the dirt.’ Our mother told us it was just the water pipes or the wind. But there was no wind those nights. The air outside was dead still.

The hill was the first thing you noticed from the back windows. It wasn’t a gentle slope; it was a steep, almost unnatural rise, covered in dense fir and hemlock. The trees were old, their roots gnarled like arthritic fingers clutching the earth. At the base of the hill, just at the edge of our property, was a shallow depression, a kind of bowl-shaped hollow that collected rain and dead leaves. Danny and I called it the ‘mud pit,’ but we never played there. Something about it made our skin crawl. The few times we got close, we’d smell something sweet and rotten, like overripe fruit left to decay, and the ground would feel spongy, as if it might swallow our feet.

One afternoon, about a month after we’d settled in, I was exploring the back yard while Danny napped. I noticed a patch of bare earth in the hollow that I hadn’t seen before. It was perfectly circular, about a foot across, and at its center was a small, white object. I thought it might be a bone or a rock, so I went closer. It was a tooth. Not an animal’s tooth, but a human’s molar, with a small piece of gray root still attached. I stared at it, my heart thumping, and then I heard the humming again, louder this time, and it seemed to come from the ground beneath my feet. I backed away, and as I did, the tooth sank into the soil as if pulled by an invisible string.

I told my mother, of course, but she dismissed it. ‘Probably a deer tooth, or a lost baby tooth from a bird,’ she said with a laugh. But her eyes were uneasy. Carl didn’t say anything; he just looked at the hill and then at me, and I saw something flicker in his face, something like recognition. But he turned away without a word.

That night, I woke to a sound outside my window. It was a rustling, like something dragging itself through the dry leaves on the hill. I sat up in bed, my room bathed in the pale blue of the moon through the trees. The window was right above my head, and I could see the slope of the hill, the dark shapes of the trees, and at the base, the hollow, now a black, yawning cavity. And there was something standing in it. I couldn’t make out details, just a silhouette, hunched and too long, its head tilted at an impossible angle. The humming was so loud now that it vibrated in my teeth. Then the thing took a step toward the house, and another, and I knew, with a child’s certainty, that it was coming for me.

I screamed, and my mother burst in, flicking on the light. The silhouette vanished, but the humming remained, low and thrumming, like it was coming from the walls. My mother held me, but she was trembling. Carl stood in the doorway, his face pale, and he kept looking at the window, as if he could see something I couldn’t. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, but his voice was hoarse. ‘Just a deer. Go back to sleep.’

But I didn’t sleep. I lay awake for hours, listening. And I began to notice other things. Danny started sleepwalking. I’d find him standing in the hallway, facing the back door, his eyes wide open but unseeing. When I’d shake him awake, he’d murmur, ‘She wants us to come down.’ I’d ask who, but he’d just shake his head and stumble back to bed.

A week later, Carl went missing. He had gone out to the shed to get a tool, and he never came back. We searched the property, the woods, the hill. The police came, but they found nothing. No sign of him, no struggle. Just that sweet smell lingering in the hollow, and the soil, which looked freshly turned.

My mother fell apart. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. She’d sit at the kitchen table, staring at the back yard, and when I asked her what was wrong, she said, ‘The house is hungry.’ She said it in a flat, monotone voice, as if it were a fact she’d always known.

The night Carl’s car was found abandoned on a distant road, I woke to a sound outside my window. This time it was different. It was a tapping, soft and rhythmic, like fingertips on glass. I didn’t want to look, but my body moved on its own. I turned my head slowly. The window was covered in a thin fog, and through it, I could see the silhouette again, closer now, its face pressed against the glass. It had no eyes, just hollow sockets, and its mouth was open, filled with teeth like the one I’d found. It smiled, and I saw that its gums were black, and there was a piece of cloth caught between its teeth. Carl’s shirt. I could see his plaid pattern, like a flag of surrender.

The humming was deafening now, and the house seemed to groan. The walls creaked, the floor shook, and I heard Danny screaming from his room. I ran to him, and he was pressed against his headboard, pointing at his window. There was something there too, but it wasn’t the same. It was smaller, more childlike, and it was scratching the glass with long, dirty nails. ‘It wants us to join it,’ Danny whispered, and his voice was not his voice. It was deeper, older, and it made me cold to my bones.

My mother came running in, and for a moment, she looked at the window, and her face twisted with a horrible understanding. ‘We have to give something to the hill,’ she said. ‘We have to feed it.’

I didn’t understand then, but I do now. The house was a threshold, a place where something old and hungry had burrowed into the earth. The previous owner, a old man who had died alone in the house, had known about it. He had built that house at the base of the hill, and he had made deals with the thing, sacrifices to keep it at bay. But when he died, the hill grew restless. It had already taken Carl, and it wanted more.

I don’t remember the rest of that night clearly. I remember my mother dragging us out the front door, into the cold, foggy night. I remember her driving us to a Motel 6, her hands shaking on the wheel, and her telling us we would never go back. But as we left, I looked in the rearview mirror, and I saw the silhouette standing at the end of the driveway, and it raised a hand, as if waving goodbye. And the humming finally stopped.

We never returned. The house is still there, I assume, at the base of that hill. I’ve looked it up on satellite maps, but the image is always fuzzy, as if the camera can’t quite resolve it. I’ve tried to tell people about what happened, but they smile and nod, and I can see them thinking, ‘A child’s nightmare.’ But I know it was real. I know because of the tooth I found, and the fact that it was a human molar. I know because to this day, I have a faint humming in my ears, a tinnitus that doctors can’t explain. And I know because sometimes, in the quiet of my apartment, I’ll hear a tapping on my window, soft and rhythmic, and when I look, there is nothing there. But the sound continues, and I feel that old, familiar dread, and I know that the hill is not done with me. It has my name. And one day, it will call.