The Hollow House

*This one grew from a weird doodle I did of a house with too much yard and a neighbor who never smiled. The horror is quiet, the kind that lives in a crawlspace and breathes when you forget to feed it. Thanks for reading something that's less about blood and more about what happens when you refuse to be alone.*

The thumping woke Brittney at 2 a.m. It was a low, steady sound, like somebody dragging a heavy sack across a wooden floor and dropping it, then dragging it again.

She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. What was that?

It came from Rory's side. His house sat ten feet from hers, separated by a privacy fence that leaned inward like it was listening. The sound thumped three more times and then stopped, which was almost worse, because the silence after had a weight to it.

She got up and padded to the window. The August air came through the screen, warm and damp, and there was a smell riding on it. Thin and sweet, like flowers left in a vase too long, with something underneath that she couldn't name. Not garbage. Not the neighbor's compost. Something older, like wet earth in a basement.

"Rory," she muttered to nobody. "What are you doing over there?"

His kitchen light was on. She could see the edge of it through the fence gap, a yellow strip on the grass. Then it clicked off, and the whole yard went dark at once, like somebody had known exactly when she looked.

She stood there a full minute in her pajama shorts, feeling silly. Then the thumping started again, slower now, and she closed the window and got back in bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin like she was in her twenties instead of thirty-four.

She did not sleep well after that. Big surprise.

* * *

Rory ran the feed store on Main Street, the one with the faded sign that said KELLER'S FEED even though his last name was Boyd. Everybody in Marrow still called it Keller's. Rory had bought it from his uncle three years ago and never paid a sign painter, which told you something about him, or so Brittney's landlord claimed.

She went in on Friday to buy birdseed, which was true, but also because she wanted to look at him in daylight and see if the man she'd heard dragging sacks at 2 a.m. looked like a man dragging sacks.

He did, sort of. He was tall and quiet, thirty-six years old, with a way of standing still that made you notice how still he was. He was behind the counter weighing out a sack of cracked corn for a kid who looked maybe twenty-two, and when the kid left, Brittney set her seed tin on the counter.

"Hey! Neighbor," she said. "You're real hard to catch, you know that?"

"Am I," he said. Not a question.

"I live right there. Ten feet away. Brittney. We've been neighbors since March." She smiled. He did not smile back, but he did look at her, briefly, and then at the birdseed.

"I know who you are."

"Well, good! That's a start." She watched his hands as he keyed the price into the register. There were fresh scratches across the backs of them, four red lines on the left hand and a deeper one on the right wrist, half scabbed over. "You okay? Those look like they hurt."

He pulled his sleeves down. It was fast, almost automatic, the way a person does something before they've decided to. "Barn cats," he said.

"You don't have barn cats."

"Store cats, then."

"You don't have store cats either, Rory. I've been in here like five times." She laughed, trying to make it light. He didn't laugh. He counted her change out exact, three quarters and a dime, and set it on the counter instead of handing it to her.

"Anything else?"

"Did you hear anything last night? Around two? I kept thinking I heard thumping, like furniture moving."

For a second, just a second, his face did something. Not much. A tightening around the eyes, like someone bracing for a punch. Then it was gone and he was just Rory again, flat and unreadable.

"Old house," he said. "Pipes knock. You hear stuff."

"Pipes don't thump in rhythm."

"Then it was the wind." He picked up a clipboard that had nothing written on it and looked at it like it did. "I'm kinda busy, Brittney."

"Yeah. Okay. Sure." She took her seed and her change and walked out into the sun feeling like she'd just been politely thrown out of a building. The bell over the door jingled behind her, cheerful and stupid.

She glanced back through the window before she crossed the street. He was standing exactly where she'd left him, looking at the door, not the clipboard. Looking at the door until he saw her looking, and then he turned away.

* * *

Lillian called that afternoon and wanted to meet at Dot's, which was fine by Brittney because Dot's had pie and her apartment had neither air conditioning nor pie.

Lillian was already in a booth when Brittney got there, thirty-two years old, thin, wearing a yellow cardigan in August because the church crowd expected cardigans apparently. She had a folder on the table in front of her and she was sitting with both hands flat on it like it might fly away.

"Brittney! Sit, sit. I ordered you a coffee, I hope that's okay, I got you cream, I didn't know how you take it."

"Black is fine, cream is better. Thanks." Brittney slid in. The waitress dropped the coffee and Lillian pushed the folder across the table.

"So. The fair. I need flyers, posters, maybe a little program booklet. The Harvest Fair, first Saturday of October, you know the drill. Cute pumpkins, corn maze, that sorta thing. Can you do cute?"

"I can do extremely cute. Cute is basically my whole business model." Brittney flipped the folder open. On top was a Harvest Fair budget, fine. Under that was a stack of photographs.

They were not pumpkin photographs.

The first one was a man getting out of a gray truck. Forty-ish, good-looking in a way that was probably useful to him, dressed like a catalog. The second was the same man at what looked to be a job site, talking to somebody whose face was turned away. The third was a police report, four pages, and Brittney skimmed it fast because the words addiction and hospital and no charges were all in there.

"Lillian," she said slowly. "What is this?"

"That's Vince." Lillian's voice had gone quiet and very steady, the way voices go when somebody has practiced the sentence. "Vince Rathbone. He's a contractor here in town. He did the foundation work on the church annex, so you'll see him around the fair, probably. He likes to be seen."

"Okay. And he's... in your fair folder because?"

"Because I need you to do a second job for me." Lillian pulled the photos back and squared the edges against the table, once, twice, three times. "I used to date him. Four years ago. I was twenty-eight. It lasted seven months and it was the worst mistake of my life, and I got out, and I thought I was the lucky one. But my sister didn't get out. My sister Catharine is thirty now and she's been in and out of treatment for three years, and I can prove he's the one who put her there."

Brittney looked at the coffee, then at the folder, then at Lillian's hands, which had not stopped squaring the folder edges.

"Lillian, honey, this looks like it's headed somewhere I don't want to go."

"I'm not asking you to do anything yet. I'm asking you to make flyers." Lillian smiled, and it was a real smile, which somehow made it worse. "But I wanted you to know what I know. Because there's going to be a moment, maybe soon, where I need somebody who knows how to make things look official. Letterheads. A website that looks like a news site. Things like that."

"Things like that are illegal, Lillian."

"Things like that are paperwork." Lillian leaned in. Her cardigan smelled like church, candle wax and old hymnals, covering something sharper underneath. "The police report went nowhere. His lawyer buried it. His money buried it. So if the law won't touch him, then the town will, and the town needs to see what I see. That's all I'm asking. Eyes. Nobody gets hurt."

"That's a really specific way to say nobody gets hurt."

"Brittney." Lillian reached across the table and put her hand flat on Brittney's, and her fingers were cold. "You're new here. You don't know what he does to this town yet. But you will. Everybody finds out eventually. I just found out sooner."

Brittney took her hand back under the table and wrapped it around her coffee cup. She thought about saying no right there, clean and final. She was thirty-four years old, she was behind on two client invoices, and the fair job paid real money, and Lillian had said the word flyers first, hadn't she? Flyers were legal. Flyers were pumpkins.

"I'll do the fair stuff," Brittney said. "The other stuff, I need to think about it."

"Think fast," Lillian said, and smiled again, and picked up her pie fork like the conversation was over. "Oh. And the fair opens with a bonfire this year. First time ever. You'll come, won't you? Everybody comes."

"Everybody comes," Brittney repeated, and it wasn't a question, and Lillian didn't treat it like one.

Walking home after, past the dark windows of the feed store and the church with its new annex, Brittney realized she was thinking about the bonfire and the thumping at the same time, and that both of them had started to feel like the same kind of noise. Something heavy being dragged. Something that was going to drop.

She got home at dusk, and the smell was already there, faint at the fence line, sweet and wrong. She stood in her own driveway and looked at Rory's kitchen window.

The light was on. His shadow crossed it twice, fast, like he was hurrying.

"Rory," she said out loud, to nobody, again. "What in the world are you doing over there?"

The light went off.

* * *

The next morning Brittney made coffee and carried two cups out to the fence line, because apparently she was the kind of person who did that now. Rory was already out there, stacking the split wood that lived along his side of the privacy fence, and he looked up when she set the second cup on the flat top of a fence post like a little offering.

"That yours or mine?" he asked.

"Yours. You looked like you'd been up since whenever that thumping was."

He took the cup after a second, kind of like he wasn't sure he was allowed to. "You heard that, huh."

"Everybody on the block heard that, Rory. It was two in the morning. I thought you were moving furniture. Or burying a body, no offense."

"None taken," he said, and drank the coffee, and didn't laugh, and Brittney thought, well, okay then. He went back to stacking wood. She leaned on the fence and watched him, and the smell was there again, faint and sweet and wrong, like wet earth gone past damp into something else. It was stronger this morning.

"You doing okay over there?" she tried. "For real question. You've got scratches on your hands and your kitchen light's been on at two a.m. and now your wood pile is, what, forty percent bigger than it was Tuesday?"

"Neatness helps me think," he said, which wasn't an answer to anything.

"Must be a lot to think about."

He almost smiled. It was the first almost-smile she'd gotten since March, and she counted it as a win. She reached over and put her hand on his forearm, just a friendly touch, nothing, and he flinched so hard the coffee slopped over the rim of the cup and hissed on the warm ground.

"Sorry," he said immediately. "Sorry. I just. I startle."

"Okay. Loud and clear, no touching." She held both hands up like he was a horse she'd spooked. "I'm gonna stand over here being untouchable."

"I didn't say untouchable," Rory said, quiet, looking at his cup instead of her. "I said I startle. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Yeah. There is." He set the cup down on the fence post next to hers and picked up another length of wood, and for a second it seemed like he was going to say something else, but what came out was only, "Thanks for the coffee."

"You're welcome. Beer later? I owe you one for the birdseed, and I don't know about you but I've had a weird week and it's only Saturday."

He thought about it longer than a person thinks about beer. "Six," he said. "Fence line's fine."

"Fence line's fine," she agreed, and went inside, and did not think about the difference between I startle and untouchable for the rest of the day, which was a lie, she thought about it constantly.

* * *

Lillian called the next morning while Brittney was still in her robe.

"Brittney. Hi. Do you have ten minutes?"

"For you? Sure, but if this is about the flyers, I haven't started the flyers."

"Forget the flyers. Can I come by? It's kind of an in-person thing."

It was not kind of an in-person thing. It was a whole in-person thing. Lillian showed up twenty minutes later in a different cardigan, this one green, and a canvas tote bag, and she sat at Brittney's kitchen table and unpacked the tote like she'd rehearsed the unpacking. A mason jar of what looked like ash. A spool of red thread. A folded piece of paper, old, soft at the creases, with handwriting on it that slanted downhill.

"Okay," Brittney said. "I'm gonna need you to walk me through this, because it looks like you're about to do a craft project and also a crime."

"Neither. Both." Lillian laid the old paper flat and smoothed it with two fingers. "My grandmother's side of the family kept things like this. Bindings. There's a way to trap a thing inside a man, Brittney. A burning and a binding. You burn what he's touched, you speak the words over the fire, and the part of him that isn't, you know, human, gets stuck. Bound to the ashes. It can't come out and hurt anybody ever again."

Brittney looked at the mason jar, then at Lillian, then at the ceiling like there might be help up there. "Lillian. Honey. Listen to what you're saying. The part of him that isn't human?"

"You'll see it. Everybody sees it eventually, they just don't know what they're looking at. The way a man can be charming to your face and something else behind his eyes. That's not a mood. That's a thing. It rides him."

"Or," Brittney said carefully, "he's just a bad guy. Which is bad. But it's a regular amount of bad, Lillian. It doesn't need a ritual. It needs a lawyer and maybe prison."

"The ritual is the part that works," Lillian said, and her voice had that practiced steadiness again. "Here's what I need. The binding has to happen where the thing feels safe, where it's fat and lazy. He's going to be at the fair. He's always at the fair, he loves being seen. I need somebody to get him out to the bonfire at the right time and keep him there, talking, while I do the rest. That's all. You're friendly. He'll like you. You're new, you don't come with history."