Prologue (Coming Home)
There’s a heaviness to returning home.
Not the comforting weight of familiarity, but the kind that settles into your bones, tight, cold, and unwanted.
I feel it the moment my tires crunch over the gravel past the rusted Welcome to Black Hollow sign. Its white paint has long since peeled away, the letters half-swallowed by creeping ivy and rot. It leans slightly now, like it’s too tired to stand upright. As if even the town itself is too weary to pretend anymore.
The air is thick, saturated with the scent of damp pine and decaying leaves. Fog coils around the base of the trees like something alive. Watching. Waiting. The sky above, once a soft, endless blue in my childhood memory, is now heavy and bruised, blanketed with dark, churning clouds. A storm is coming. Or maybe it’s been here all along.
My headlights barely pierce the mist. The darkness doesn’t move for me. Doesn’t welcome me.
It warns me.
Still, I drive on.
Black Hollow unfolds ahead like a ghost of itself, familiar and yet wrong, like a dream remembered just slightly out of order. The streets are quieter than they should be. Too quiet. The buildings, once full of life and routine, look drained, like they’ve been holding their breath for years.
I told myself I’d never come back.
I swore it.
I ran.
I built a whole new life out of denial and distance.
But Aunt Margaret’s voice on the phone broke through all of that.
“It’s yours now. The house. The land. It’s time you came home, child.”
I didn’t answer her right away. But something deep inside me shifted. Something old. Something I’d buried so thoroughly, I almost believed it was gone.
It wasn’t.
It stirs now like a restless animal waking in its cage as I take the final turn onto the road I haven’t driven in over a decade. The trees crowd closer here, the branches clawing at the edges of the sky, gnarled and skeletal. The streetlights flicker overhead, casting long, fractured shadows that reach across the road like claws.
Almost home.
Most of the houses are dark. Abandoned. Or simply empty in that eerie way places become when the people inside them don’t talk anymore. The ones that still glow from within look like they’re holding onto their warmth by a thread.
As I pass the old general store, I see Mr. Callahan out front, exactly where he used to stand when I was a kid, except older now. More brittle. A cigarette dangles from his lips, glowing faintly in the dark. He watches my car with the slow turn of his head, eyes narrowing behind thick glasses.
Recognition. Or suspicion. Maybe both.
They remember.
Of course they do.
No one forgets.
Not here.
Not in Black Hollow.
Not the girl whose brother was torn apart in the woods.
Not the girl who swore it wasn’t just a bear.
Not the girl who whispered the word wolf when everyone else begged her to stop talking.
They called it grief.
They called it trauma.
They called it a tragic accident.
But I remember the sound.
I remember the howl.
And I remember that whatever killed my brother had eyes that weren’t just wild, they were aware.
Now I’m back.
The house is mine.
The past is still here.
And something in this town is waiting for me.
Or maybe it never left.
