Chapter 1
I. The Manuscript
The attic smelled of dust and forgotten things—precisely the kind of place where inspiration went to die.
Ethan Cross hadn’t written a word in seven months. His agent had stopped calling. His savings were bleeding dry. The blank page had become a taunt, a white void that swallowed every half-formed idea. Desperation had driven him to the attic, where he now knelt, sweating in the late summer heat, sifting through boxes of his grandfather’s belongings.
That’s when he found it.
Tucked beneath a moldering stack of ledgers was a manuscript, its pages brittle with age, bound in cracked leather. The title, stamped in faded gold, read:
”
The Hollowing
”
No author name. No publication date. Just the story itself—thirty-seven pages of dense, archaic prose.
Ethan read it in one sitting.
It was brilliant.
A gothic horror tale about a man who steals another’s work, only to find himself hunted by the very characters he’d plagiarized. The prose was ornate, the imagery visceral. Most importantly—it was
obscure
. A forgotten relic. No one would ever know.
His fingers trembled as he typed the first stolen sentence.
II. The Research
The story didn’t exist.
Ethan scoured every database, every archive, every out-of-print horror index. No record of
The Hollowing
. No trace of its author. It was as though the manuscript had willed itself into existence, just for him.
A part of him whispered that this was wrong.
The rest of him hit
Send
on the submission email.
III. The First Change
The editor at
Black Gate Quarterly
accepted it within hours.
“A masterpiece,” she called it. “Like nothing we’ve ever seen.”
Ethan should have been elated.
Instead, he woke that night to the sound of
knocking
.
Not at the door.
Inside the walls
.
Three slow raps—the same rhythm described in
The Hollowing
, the signal the protagonist hears before the hauntings begin.
Ethan told himself it was the house settling.
Then the whispers started.
IV. The Haunting
He saw them first in reflections—pale faces flickering in mirrors, in the black screen of his turned-off TV. The characters from the story.
His
characters now.
The gaunt man with too-long fingers.
The woman whose mouth opened like a puppet’s, hinges creaking.
The child who only spoke in riddles stolen from the manuscript.
At first, they only watched.
Then they began to
interact
.
Ethan would wake to find sentences scrawled across his walls in something that wasn’t ink. The story was changing—growing new passages he didn’t remember writing.
Passages about
him
.
V. The Realization
The manuscript was writing itself now.
Ethan tried to destroy it—burned the pages in his sink. The flames turned blue, the paper unscathed. When he tried to flee the house, he found the doors led back to his study, no matter how many times he turned the knob.
The walls pulsed like living flesh.
The air smelled of old paper and something darker.
On his desk, the manuscript lay open to a new page.
Ethan read the words aloud, his voice not his own:
”The thief tried to run, but the story was hungry. It needed an ending. And so, with trembling hands, he wrote his final draft—“
VI. The Final Draft
The last thing Ethan saw was his own hand moving across the page, scripting his screams as the walls peeled away into nothingness.
The house stands empty now.
But if you listen closely, you can still hear the sound of typing from the attic.
And if you’re very, very unlucky—
You might find the manuscript.
It’s always looking for new authors.
