The Old Quarry’s Bargain

My name is Elias, and I’ve spent my whole life chasing ghosts. It started when I was eight, on a sun-scorched afternoon in the summer of ’92. My stepmother-to-be, Carol, had a house on the edge of a town called Millbrook, and her backyard opened onto a vast, overgrown pit—the old granite quarry. The locals whispered about it, said the quarry’s cliffs had swallowed more than one careless soul over the centuries. But to me, it was just a forbidden playground.

That day, we were all drenched from a water fight—me, my brothers, and Carol’s boys. I was giggling, sprinting to the far corner of the yard, where a low wooden fence separated us from the quarry’s rim. I vaulted it and stood on the edge, peering down into the basin. The sun was blinding, the air thick with the smell of dry grass and dust. I was happy—so happy—and then she was there.

She stood on the opposite rim, fifty feet away, but I saw her as clearly as I see you now. She wore a brown woolen dress, torn and patched, the kind you’d see in a history book about peasants. Her hair was a matted white mess, and her face was gray with grime. But it was her eyes that froze me—black, bottomless pits, like the quarry itself. She didn’t move, just stared. Then she raised one hand, finger pointing at me, and I felt a cold wash of fear so sudden it knocked the breath from my lungs.

I stumbled back, fell into the grass, and when I looked up, she was gone. My brothers found me whimpering, and I told them what I saw. They laughed it off, said I was seeing things from the sun. But that night, I woke to a whispering, like dry leaves skittering across a floor. It said, ‘He sees the hollow ones.’ I couldn’t sleep for days.

As I grew older, I researched the quarry. I found old newspapers in the library, yellowed and brittle. In 1887, a woman named Agnes Field had been a quarry worker’s wife. She’d lost her husband to a collapse, and then her two children to a fever. She’d gone mad, they said, and one night walked into the quarry, never to be found. The papers called it ‘The Hollow Bargain’—she’d made a pact with something in the dark, trading her grief for a chance to see her family again. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to my core, that the woman I saw was Agnes.

Years later, I returned to Millbrook, a grown man, still obsessed. The house was abandoned, the quarry fenced off with rusty warning signs. But I climbed over, determined to find her. The sun was high, just like that day. I stood at the spot where I’d seen her. ‘I’ve come back,’ I said, not knowing if I was more afraid or hopeful. ‘I see you.’

The air turned cold. A whisper crawled from the depths: ‘Then you owe me. The bargain must be paid.’ I saw her then, right in front of me, her skeletal hand reaching for my chest. I tried to run, but my feet were rooted. Her fingers brushed my sternum, and a searing pain shot through me. ‘You’ve seen the hollow,’ she hissed, ‘Now you must fill it.’

I don’t remember how I got out. I woke in a hospital, three days later, with no memory. But now, I can’t shake the feeling of something inside me, a hollow place that yearns to be filled. And every night, I hear a whisper, not from outside, but from within: ‘One more soul, and I’ll be free.’ I’m not chasing ghosts anymore. I’m running from one. And I know, deep down, that the quarry’s bargain is not yet settled.