The Oracle of the Hollow

I hadn’t thought about Maya in years until I ran into her cousin at the pharmacy. We were both in our mid-twenties, and the recognition was instant, but the warmth was dulled by time. We exchanged pleasantries, and then she said, ‘You know, Lena’s not doing well.’ Her name was Lena, not Maya—I had to correct myself. We used to call her Maya because of a silly nickname from our prank-calling days. Lena was the quiet one, always sketching, always reading about the paranormal. I remembered her obsession with automatic writing and spirit boards. Her cousin, Tara, looked worried. ‘She’s been having these… fits. She predicts things. It started after she moved into that old house on Hemlock Road. The doctors are useless. They say it’s stress. But you should see her eyes during an episode. It’s like she’s not there.’ I promised to visit, though a part of me dreaded it.

Lena’s house was a Victorian relic, all crooked gables and peeling paint. The porch sagged, and the windows were dark, like empty sockets. She opened the door before I knocked. She was thinner, her hair lank, but her eyes had a feverish brightness. ‘I knew you’d come,’ she said, her voice oddly flat. ‘I saw it. You were wearing that blue coat.’ I was, indeed, wearing a blue coat. A chill crept up my spine. ‘Come in,’ she said, leading me through a hallway cluttered with books and dusty figurines. The air smelled of mothballs and something else—something metallic, like old pennies.

We sat in her parlor, a room crammed with candles and notebooks. She clutched a tarnished silver locket. ‘It started with dreams,’ she said, not meeting my eyes. ‘Then the dreams bled into waking. I would see a flash—a car crash, a spilled cup, a stranger’s face—and then it would happen. I thought I was going mad. But the more I fought it, the stronger it got. And now…’ She paused, her jaw tightening. ‘Now I hear them.’ ‘Who?’ I asked. She pointed to the locket. ‘The ones in the hollow. This house is built over a hollow—a place where the ground gives way to something older. They want out.’

At that moment, a tremor shook the room. Candles flickered, and a low hum filled the air. Lena’s eyes rolled back, and she began to speak, but the voice was not hers. It was deeper, older, like gravel and rust. ‘The seventh name will open the door,’ it said. ‘You, the witness, must write it down.’ She lunged for a pen, her hand moving across a notepad in frantic, jerky strokes. I grabbed her shoulders, trying to shake her out of it, but she was strong. When she collapsed, I looked at the page. It was covered in symbols I didn’t recognize, and a single name: ‘Elias Thorne.’

I spent the next days researching. I dug through local archives and found that the house was built in 1892 by a man named Elias Thorne, a recluse who studied ‘spiritual telegraphy.’ He disappeared in 1920, and the house had a history of strange occurrences. I tried to tell Tara, but she dismissed it as Lena’s imagination. I realized I had to help Lena myself. I went back to her house, armed with a plan to break the cycle. But Lena was worse. She was pale, her skin taut over her bones. ‘The hollow is expanding,’ she said, her voice a rasp. ‘He’s almost through. He needs a body.’ Her hand reached out to grab mine, her grip cold. ‘Promise me you’ll burn the house down,’ she whispered, her eyes desperate. ‘Burn it all.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing a scratching sound, like something clawing at my window. I pulled back the curtain and saw Lena’s face, pressed against the glass, her mouth open in a silent scream. But the face wasn’t quite hers—the eyes were wrong, too dark, too wide. I stumbled back, and the phone rang. It was Tara, hysterical. ‘Lena’s gone! She walked into the woods behind her house. I called the police, but they can’t find her.’ I grabbed my coat and drove there, arriving at dawn. The woods were thick and foreboding, but a trail of broken branches led me to an old well, half-hidden by brambles. I peered over the edge and saw Lena at the bottom, her body twisted, her eyes open but unseeing. And around her neck, the locket. I reached down to touch it, and a cold wind gusted, sending a whisper from the well: ‘Too late.’

I ran back to the house, grabbed the gasoline from the shed, and soaked every floorboard. I lit a match and tossed it, watching the flames consume the house, the locket, and the hollow beneath. But as the fire raged, I heard Lena’s voice in my head, but it was layered with that other voice, the one from the well: ‘The names are already written. You’ll be the next.’

I moved away, changed my number, tried to forget. But every night, I see the same dream: a dark shape in the shadows, watching me, whispering a list of names. And sometimes, when I look in the mirror, my reflection whispers back, ‘Let me in.’