The Salt Man of Hollow Creek

My brother and I still argue about what we saw that night on County Road 9, two winters ago. We were driving back from our aunt’s house in the old pickup, just past midnight, and the road was a ribbon of black ice between fields of dead corn. I was sixteen, he was twenty-two, and we’d been laughing about something stupid until we hit that long stretch where the county forgot to fix the lights. That’s when we saw it.

It was standing on the opposite shoulder, about a hundred yards ahead, where the road curved past the hollow. At first I thought it was a scarecrow, but it was too wrong for that. It was tall, taller than any man, and it was covered in something white, like it had been dusted with salt or ashes. Its arms hung too long, almost to its knees, and it stood perfectly still, facing our side of the road. My brother slowed down, and I rolled down my window to get a better look, even though the cold bit at my face.

‘What is that?’ I asked. He didn’t answer. He just gripped the wheel and kept the truck at a crawl. As we got closer, I saw that the thing’s face—if you could call it that—was smooth, like a blank white mask, and its eyes were two dark holes that seemed to look right through us. I felt a chill that wasn’t from the wind. My brother muttered something under his breath and gunned the engine, but the truck sputtered and died right as we passed it. We rolled to a stop in the middle of the road, and the silence was so total I could hear my own heartbeat.

I looked in the side mirror. The thing hadn’t moved, but it had turned its head to follow us. My brother tried to start the engine, but it just clicked and wheezed. Then we heard a sound from outside, like the crunching of dry leaves, getting closer. I turned to see the figure walking toward us, its movements jerky, like a marionette. Its feet left no prints in the frost. My brother finally got the engine to turn over, and we sped off, the tires spinning on the ice. I looked back and saw the thing standing in the middle of the road, its head tilted as if watching us go.

We told our father when we got home, but he just said we’d seen a deer or a trick of the headlights. But I couldn’t shake it. A week later, I found a small bag of salt on the truck’s dashboard. Neither of us had put it there. And the next time we drove down that road, in daylight, we saw the hollow was filled with dead animals—crows, rabbits, a fox—all covered in that same white powder, their bodies arranged in a circle. We never drove that way again, and we never spoke of it. But sometimes, late at night, I hear the crunch of dry leaves just outside my window, and I know it’s still there, waiting for us to pass by again.