The Spit of the Unseen

At forty-four, Elara Voss had long since filed the incident under ‘childhood nightmares.’ It was a summer evening in the dusty town of Porphyry Creek, where the heat clung to the skin like a second layer. She was five, tucked into a narrow cot beneath a single window that caught the last defiant rays of the sun. The room was bathed in amber, and the shadows stretched long and thin. She remembered the sudden drop in temperature, the way the air thickened as if the room itself held its breath. Then they were there: two figures, not quite solid, draped in robes the color of dried blood, their hoods revealing only an abyss deeper than the night. They floated just above the floor, and she felt an urge to scream, but her voice was a stone in her throat. One of them leaned in, and a cold, viscous liquid struck her cheek, sliding down her chin. She was pinned, immobile, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. In a flash of defiance, a primal act of childish rebellion, she gathered her own saliva and spat back with all the force her tiny body could muster. The droplets hung in the air for a moment, then the figures were gone, leaving only the hum of the ceiling fan and the distant bark of a dog. Her parents, when she stumbled to their room, patted her head and said, ‘Just a dream, sweetheart.’ And so she buried it, a splinter of another world lodged deep in her mind.

For twenty-seven years, Elara lived a life of quiet normalcy: a sensible marriage, two children, a job at the local library, and a comfortable house with a garden that never seemed to wilt. The memory would surface in unguarded moments—a glimpse in a mirror, a chill in the air—but she rationalized it away. Then, over lunch with her pastor, Marcus, the conversation turned to the unseen realms, the ‘world of darkness,’ as he phrased it. She told him the story with a laugh, expecting a reassuring dismissal. Instead, Marcus set down his fork, his face pale. ‘Elara,’ he said, ‘you didn’t have a nightmare. What you described is something I’ve read about in texts I don’t usually bring to the pulpit. Those figures are not ghosts. They are messengers of the Hollow, and their spit is a marking.’ He pulled a leather-bound book from his satchel, flipping to a page with an intricate woodcut: two robed figures spitting on a child. The caption read: ‘The Marking precedes the Summoning.’

Elara’s life unraveled from that moment. Marcus explained that in certain forgotten lore, the spit of these beings—called the Unseen—was a sacrament of corruption. It infects the soul with a dormant seed that, when the time is right, blooms into a vessel. The victim often dreams of a place called the Hollow, a gray realm between words, where the Unseen reside. Elara began to have those dreams: endless corridors of damp stone, whispers that felt like fingers tracing her spine. She woke one night to find her hand tracing shapes on the wall—symbols she’d never seen. Her husband, Tom, grew alarmed as she started talking to the empty air. She heard the spit dripping again, a phantom sensation on her cheek. Desperate, she sought out a demonologist, a wiry man with a nervous laugh, who told her that to sever the mark, she must return to the site of the encounter and perform a ritual of unmaking. But the site was her childhood home, long sold and now a vacant lot. She went there on the same date, the same time of year, and in the fading light, she saw the two figures again, their hoods swaying as if in a breeze that didn’t exist. This time, her body was not frozen; she ran, and they followed not with haste but with an unhurried glide, and she could hear a sound like the spitting of a thousand lips, a wet chorus closing in.

She fled to the only sanctuary she knew: the church. But the walls that once felt solid now seemed thin as gauze. The figures stood in the doorway, and for the first time, she saw their faces—not blackness, but a swirling void that pulled at her vision, and in that void, she saw herself as an old woman, eyes milky, whispering secrets to no one. ‘You cannot unmark what has been marked,’ Marcus had told her, his voice trembling. ‘But you can transfigure it. The seed can be cut out, but only if you bind it to a new host.’ He had shown her a forbidden page that mentioned a ‘spit-back’—a counterspell where the victim spits a mixture of salt and ash at the Unseen, reclaiming the mark. She had dismissed it as superstition. Now, in the flickering candlelight of the empty nave, she mixed the salt and ash with her saliva, the taste of copper filling her mouth, and she spat toward the figures with the force of a lifetime of fear. The glob struck one of them, and it recoiled, hissing like a struck serpent. The other reached out a hand made of smoke, and she felt the cold grip on her throat. She kept spitting, again and again, until her mouth was dry and her throat burned. The figures began to dissolve, but not before one of them whispered, ‘We are patient. We will find you again, in the next one.’

Elara collapsed, and when she woke, she was in a hospital bed, her husband holding her hand, a nurse checking her vitals. The doctors called it a psychotic break, a stress-induced episode. But Elara knew better. She had seen the mark on her cheek—a faint, grayish smudge that wouldn’t wash off. She began to read everything she could find on the Hollow, and she discovered that the spit carries a fragment of the Unseen’s essence, and that if she were to bear a child, that essence would pass on, marking her progeny for the next step in the Summoning. She was not pregnant, but her daughter was. Terrified, she isolated herself, refusing to touch her daughter, but the mark on her cheek pulsed each time the girl entered the room. One night, in a fever dream, she saw her daughter standing at the foot of her bed, a familiar spit on the girl’s cheek, and her daughter’s voice was not a child’s but a chorus of whispers. She woke screaming. Tom, at wit’s end, demanded she see a psychiatrist. She complied, but the therapy sessions only made things worse; she could see the Unseen in the reflective glass of the office window, waiting.

Elara realized that the only way to truly break the cycle was to perform the unmaking, but her demonologist had said the ritual required a vessel of pure will. In a moment of clarity, she returned to the vacant lot on the same evening, but this time she did not bring salt or ash. She brought a small vial of her own blood, drawn that morning, and she used it to draw a circle around herself. As the sun set and the figures materialized, she began to speak a language she had never heard, words that felt like they were being fed to her by something ancient. The figures halted, and the one who had first spat on her reached out, but instead of fear, Elara felt a surge of power. She grabbed the figure’s wrist—or what passed for a wrist—and pulled it into the circle. The other tried to retreat, but the circle held, and she spoke the final word, a word that tasted like burnt iron in her mouth. The figure dissolved into a fine dust that settled on the ground, and the other vanished with a howl. The mark on her cheek faded, and she fell, exhausted.

She woke in her own bed, with no memory of how she got there. The doctors said she’d been unconscious for two days, but for Elara, it felt like a moment. The mark was gone, and for the first time in years, the dreams stopped. She embraced her daughter, wept, and thought it was over. But one year later, on the same date, her daughter, now five, ran to her with tears in her eyes. ‘Mommy, there were two men in black hoods at my window. They spit on me.’ Elara’s blood ran cold. She looked at her daughter’s cheek and saw the same faint smear. The Unseen had found a new host, and she knew, with a dread certainty, that they would be back. And this time, she had no more blood to give.