The Hymn of the Hollow Man

At twelve, I shared a room with my older sister, Elsie, in a cramped apartment above a laundromat that never quite lost its smell of bleach and mildew. Mom worked double shifts at the diner, and Dad was gone—not to jail, but to a job up north that never seemed to send enough money. We had a narrow hallway that connected our bedroom to the living room, and on the left, just past the bathroom door, was the spot where Mom kept her small collection of gospel tapes. She’d play them in her old sedan on our way to school, singing along off-key to songs about grace and salvation.

One night, I woke with a start, not sure what had pulled me from sleep. The clock on the nightstand glowed 3:03 AM. Elsie was a lump under her blanket, snoring softly. I turned my head toward the door, which was ajar, and my breath caught. A figure stood there—a tall man, barely fitting under the frame, his face in shadow but his eyes fixed on me. He began to hum, then sing, a melody I knew from Mom’s tapes: ‘Amazing Grace.’ But his voice was unlike anything I’d heard—it was warm and resonant, like a cello, yet it carried a sorrow that chilled the air. He sang with perfect pitch, each note wrapping around me, almost lulling me back to sleep despite the wrongness of his presence.

He didn’t blink. He just sang and stared, his lips moving with the words, and then he took a step back into the hallway, turning left toward the living room. The song faded as he moved, but I could still hear it, now seeming to come from the living room itself, as if he were continuing to sing there. I wanted to call for Mom, but my voice was stuck. I just lay there, frozen, listening to that beautiful, haunting hymn until it stopped. Then silence. I didn’t move until dawn.

The next morning, Mom found us huddled together. When I told her about the man, she said I’d had a night terror and made us pray. She even played that same tape on the way to school, but the song didn’t bring me peace; it felt like a veil, hiding something darker. That pattern repeated: every few nights, I’d wake at 3:03, and the man would be there, singing a different hymn—’How Great Thou Art,’ ‘It Is Well with My Soul.’ His voice never wavered, and his presence never felt threatening, but the air around him seemed to hum with a warning I couldn’t articulate. Elsie never woke, and Mom dismissed my tales as imagination.

Then one night, I decided to follow him. When he turned and walked toward the living room, I threw off my covers and crept after him. The apartment was dark, but I could see him clearly by the faint light from the streetlamp through the blinds. He stopped in front of the old transistor radio on the shelf where Mom kept her tapes. He was still singing, but now I could see his mouth moving with the lyrics, and I realized he wasn’t just singing—he was mimicking the exact radio static, the precise warble of the recorded voice. It clicked: he was a reflection, a hollow echo of the hymns Mom played, given form. He turned to me then, and for the first time, his eyes were visible—not white, but a void, like empty night. His mouth moved, but instead of a new song, a single word emerged, in a voice that was suddenly not beautiful but broken: ‘Why?’

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. He tilted his head, then faded, dissolving like mist. The radio clicked off by itself. I stood there for a long time, my heart pounding. Mom found me the next morning there, asleep on the floor. When I told her what I’d seen—the man made of music, the hole where his eyes should be—she went pale. She brought out an old photo of her grandfather, a choir director who’d died in the 1960s. ‘He always sang,’ she whispered, ‘but he never spoke. Not once.’ She looked at me, and I saw fear in her eyes for the first time. We moved out a month later, but I never told her the full truth: that when the man faded, he left something behind—a tiny piece of his melody, humming in my veins, waiting to be sung. And sometimes, when I’m alone and the night is quiet, I find myself humming the same hymns, and I feel his eyes upon me, asking that same question.