The Imprint of the Hollow

I first stumbled upon the forum about a month ago, a digital graveyard of anonymous confessions and eerie encounters. It was a rabbit hole I couldn’t resist, each post a new thread pulling me deeper into the collective dread of strangers. Last Tuesday, the eleventh of November, I was scrolling through a particularly unsettling thread about half-remembered dreams when I felt it—a presence. It materialized behind my desk chair, a cold weight that pressed against the back of my neck. I refused to turn around, my eyes glued to the screen, my jaw tight. It lingered, feeding on my fear, sapping my energy until my eyelids grew heavy and my thoughts turned to molasses. I shook my head, cleared my throat, and rolled my shoulders, dismissing it as fatigue. But as I drove home through the fog-slicked streets of Ashfield, my left arm began to prickle, a nagging itch that burrowed under my skin. I scratched through my flannel sleeve, but the sensation only sharpened into a stinging burn. When I finally stumbled into my apartment and shed my jacket in the narrow hallway bathroom, I saw it—a mark etched into my forearm, just below the elbow. It wasn’t a scratch or a rash; it was a perfect, three-fingered impression, as if something had gripped me with impossible precision. The skin within the indentation was pale and waxy, and a faint, sickly sweet smell clung to it. My mind raced to a documentary I’d watched months ago, about a ghost hunter who’d found a similar ‘mockery of the trinity’—three claw marks arranged in a diagonal slash. But this was different. This was a single, deliberate imprint, like a brand from a hand that didn’t exist. I tried to wash it off, but the water ran cold and the mark remained, a permanent reminder that something had left its trace on me. That night, I lay awake, the mark throbbing in time with my heartbeat, and I knew it wasn’t over. It had found a way to latch onto me, and it was only a matter of time before it came back to finish what it started.