The Last Marker in Redwood Hollow

I’m nineteen, and until three months ago, I believed I had the world figured out. I grew up in Redwood Hollow, a small town in Oregon so deep in the woods that satellite maps still show it as a blur of green. My family has been here for generations, running a modest logging business that has seen better days. I never minded the isolation; I loved the smell of pine and the way fog rolled off the hills like a living thing. But now, I can’t look at the trees without feeling watched, and I haven’t slept through the night in weeks.

My troubles didn’t start all at once. It began with small things, like finding my alarm clock turned off even though I never touched it, or waking up with dirt under my fingernails when I had stayed in bed. I dismissed it as stress, the result of my part-time job at the local diner and my mother’s recent illness. But then the nightmares started. Not the vague, terrifying kind—I’ve had those since childhood, along with bouts of sleepwalking that my parents used to laugh off. These were different. They were too real, too vivid, and they always featured the same thing: a specific tree on the hill behind our house, a massive oak that was struck by lightning decades ago and left a blackened husk. In the dream, I would stand before it, and I could feel its roots pulsing like veins, and the ground would split open to reveal a staircase of smooth, wet stone leading down into darkness.

I began to write in a journal, hoping to track the dreams and maybe find a pattern. I would sketch the tree and note the details that felt important: the way the bark seemed to coil like a serpent, the faint whispering sound that came from the leaves even when there was no breeze, the sensation of being pulled. One night, I wrote the line, ‘The steps are wet, and I can hear water dripping somewhere below.’ I thought nothing of it. The next morning, I found that page of my journal crumpled on the floor, and on the blank opposite page, in my own handwriting, was the same line, but with an addition: ‘And the water is red.’

That was the first time I felt true fear, the kind that sits in your chest and makes you question your sanity. I tried to rationalize it—maybe I wrote it in my sleep—but the ink was wet when I found it, as if I had just finished. I went to the hill, something I had avoided since the dreams started. The tree looked the same, but as I approached, I noticed that the ground around it was churned up, as if something had recently dug there. And that’s when I saw the first one: a small, hand-carved wooden marker, painted white, with a single word burnt into it—’Here.’

I told my best friend, a practical guy named Andy who worked at the hardware store. He laughed and said I needed a vacation, but then he saw the marker I’d brought back, and his face went pale. He grew up here too, and he knew the old stories that the town’s elders whispered about when they thought we weren’t listening. They spoke of a hollow, deeper than any of the mines, where a family had gone missing in the 1920s, and of the thing that came out of the ground to claim them. He made me promise to stay away from the tree, and for a while, I did. But the dreams got worse, and one night I woke up in the middle of the forest, barefoot, my night clothes soaked with dew, standing at the base of that oak. I had walked there in my sleep, and I could see that many more markers had appeared, forming a line that led down into a trench I had not dug.

I decided to face it. I took a flashlight and a shovel and went to the hill during the day, ready to dig up whatever was there. I thought if I uncovered the source, I could end the nightmare. The markers led me to a patch of ground that looked disturbed, and when I started to shovel, I hit something hard. It wasn’t roots; it was metal—an old, rusted tin box. I pried it open and found a collection of trinkets: a child’s doll, a wedding ring, a pair of glasses, and a stack of faded photographs. In one photo, a family stood in front of the same oak, but they had no faces—their features were blurred, as if they had been scratched out. On the back of the photo, in pencil, was a date: 1923. And below it, the words: ‘They come for the sleepwalkers.’

I fled, but the dreams continued. Every night, I would descend those stone steps in my sleep, and each time, I would see a new marker buried in the dirt of the tunnel, each with a name on it. Until last night, when I found one with my own name. And this morning, when I woke, I was holding a small, sharp stone, and there was dirt under my nails, and on my nightstand was a handwritten note in my own hand, the same handwriting that had added that line to my journal, and it said: ‘You have always been here. Let us in.’ I don’t know what I am anymore, or what is waiting in the hollow, but I can’t stop thinking about those photographs, and the way the trees at the edge of town seem to lean closer every day. I’m writing this as a record, because I don’t expect to be awake much longer. If you find this, please, stay away from Redwood Hollow, and whatever you do, never sleep with your windows open.