What the Hollow Keeps

by Prince Kumar

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

The GPS lost signal somewhere past mile marker 41, just after the road turned to gravel and the pines closed in from both sides like something shutting its mouth. Marcus pulled over and stared at the spinning wheel on his phone screen. He was supposed to be at the cabin by noon. His wife had texted twice already. He had no bars.

It was their anniversary trip—five years, which his mother-in-law had told him was wood, which he’d thought was a strange thing to give someone—and he’d planned it carefully. Cabin rental, kayak rental, a bottle of wine that cost more than he was comfortable admitting. He’d driven up alone while Diane finished her shift, planning to have the place open and warm by the time she arrived. He was two hours from the nearest town, one tank of gas from help, standing in a ditch trying to convince his phone to find a satellite.

He got out to stretch. The air tasted like wet copper and rotting wood. The trees here were old—very old—trunks wider than his arms could reach, bark peeling back in strips to reveal something pink and moist underneath, like the trees themselves were skinless things. He told himself it was just cedar. He told himself a lot of things in the next few minutes.

The sound came first: a rhythmic, wet thumping from somewhere off the road, deeper into the tree line. He stood still and listened. An animal, probably. A deer. His brother-in-law had told him deer were everywhere up here, that you could practically trip over them. The sound came again—thump, thump, pause, thump—irregular now, like something that had learned rhythm by accident and hadn’t quite got it right.

He shouldn’t have left the road. He knew it even as he stepped between the trees. But the sound had a pull to it that his legs understood better than his brain did, and by the time he realized he’d walked a good quarter mile into the woods, he was already there.

The clearing was perhaps sixty feet across, and someone had been using it for a long time.

At the center was a low stone structure, older than anything Marcus had seen outside a museum—rough-fitted granite blocks, chest-high, arranged in an oval maybe fifteen feet long. Inside the oval, the ground was black. Not dark soil. Black. The kind of black that doesn’t reflect light, that seems to absorb it, that makes your eyes water when you look at it too long. Around the structure, driven into the earth at intervals, were poles. Marcus counted seven. From each pole hung things—he would not call them trophies because that implied intention and craft, and he could not bring himself to credit whatever had made these with either quality. They were arrangements. Layered. Bits of fur, brown with age, threaded through with what he first took for white rope and then understood was not rope.

He put his hand over his mouth.

The bones were cleaned. Whatever had done the cleaning had been thorough, patient, precise. The skulls—he counted three deer, two he could not identify, one that was not—were placed with a care that suggested they meant something. The long bones had been split and the marrow extracted and then the halves set back together, held in place with the same pale threading, as if whoever had done this wanted things to appear whole even after they had been fully consumed.

Marcus backed up. His heel caught a root, and he sat down hard on the forest floor, and when he put his hand down to push himself up, he felt something give beneath his palm, something that compressed and then slowly pushed back, like pressing a thumb into a very ripe fruit. He looked at his hand. He looked at the ground. He stood up very quickly and did not look at the ground again.

The thumping had stopped.

He turned around. The path back through the trees—the rough corridor he’d walked through, the slight trail of crushed undergrowth—was gone. Not obscured. Gone. The trees stood unbroken and indifferent in every direction, and the light that filtered through their canopy was the same weak, directionless gray that gives no information about where the sun is or what time it might be.

He walked. He kept the stone structure behind him, moving in what he believed was a straight line. The ground squelched underfoot in a way that it hadn’t on the walk in. After ten minutes he stopped and stood and breathed through his nose and tried not to think about the smell, which had been growing steadily since he’d entered the clearing, a low insistent smell like old copper and the inside of a butcher’s drain.

Something moved to his left. He turned to look and saw nothing, and then he saw—at a distance, partially obscured by a wide trunk—a shape that was approximately the right dimensions for a person if the person had no fixed opinions about where their joints should be. It was not looking at him. It was doing something with its hands, or what occupied the space where hands would be, and the wet thumping sound resumed, closer now, and Marcus walked faster.

He ran. He ran with the high, graceless panic of a man who does not run, who has not run since he was young enough not to be embarrassed by it, and the branches caught at his jacket and his face, and he did not slow down. His lungs made sounds he did not recognize as coming from himself. The shape did not follow—or if it did, it did not follow in any way he could hear. But the smell followed. The copper-drain smell. It was in his jacket, he realized. In his hair. He had breathed enough of it that it lived behind his sinuses now, and he wondered, sprinting between the dark trunks, if you could ever stop smelling something that had gotten that far inside you.

He came out of the trees sideways, catching himself on a birch trunk, spinning, landing on one knee in the gravel. He knelt there for a moment breathing. The road stretched in both directions, the same gray gravel, the same dark tree line on both sides. His car was maybe a hundred yards to the left. It looked very small and very far away and also like the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.

He found the road twenty minutes later, coming out of the trees at a dead run, gravel spraying under his shoes. His phone had one bar. He called his wife instead of 911 because when you are very frightened you call the person you love, and he told her he was fine, everything was fine, he was getting back in the car right now.

He looked down at his hand as he said it. At the palm. At the dark stain that had soaked through from where he’d pressed it into the ground, which was not mud, which smelled the way the rest of the clearing smelled, which had not dried despite the twenty-minute walk.

He told her everything was fine. His voice was steady. He was proud of that, the steadiness of it, and he filed the knowledge of what he was capable of somewhere small and quiet inside himself.

He got in the car. He drove. He did not stop until he reached a gas station forty miles south, where he went to the bathroom and scrubbed his hand with paper towels and industrial soap until the skin was raw and red. He looked at himself in the mirror for a long time.

His reflection looked back.

Eventually it blinked.

He was at the cabin by four. His wife had made dinner. He ate it. He said it was good. He said it was very good. He said all the things that a person says when everything is fine.

In the night he woke to the sound of thumping from somewhere outside the cabin walls, and he lay still in the dark and listened to it become gradually more rhythmic, more certain of itself, as if whatever made it was learning. Getting better. Practicing.

His wife slept on, undisturbed.

By morning the sound had stopped.

He never went back into those woods. But sometimes, in the city, when he walks past an alley at a certain angle—when the light is bad. and the geometry of the space is slightly wrong—he sees the clearing again. The stone oval. The poles. The arrangements.

And he wonders what it keeps. What goes in and does not come out. What lives in the hollow center of the thing he saw and whether it has, by now, finished learning whatever it was practicing in the dark outside his window.

He wonders if it practiced on him.