The rusted Ford pickup rattled over a cattle guard, and Hollow Rock announced itself the way dying things do: with silence.
Eli Marlowe had driven this road once before, eight years back, for a funeral. He remembered the kudzu then, the way it swallowed fence posts whole. Now the kudzu had crept further, choking the county road sign until only a green smear remained where the letters used to be. He eased off the gas. The tires crunched gravel, popped against the tar, then crunched again. Somewhere ahead, a dog barked once and thought better of it.
The postcard sat on the passenger seat, propped against the old coffee thermos that had served as his traveling companion since Knoxville. Cora's handwriting slanted hard to the right, the letters sharp and small as insect tracks. The house is breathing again. Seven words. No signature. No return address. The postmark was two weeks old, but the ink had smeared in the rain that caught him outside of Chattanooga, and now those seven words bled into a single grey question.
The town unfolded like a held breath letting go.
A feed store with a sagging awning. A gas station with a single pump and a wooden Indian so weathered the feathers had become suggestions. The bank building still stood, though someone had taped a foreclosure notice to the window so long ago the tape had yellowed to the color of old teeth. Eli counted the businesses as he passed them, a habit from childhood. Counting meant there was order. Counting meant the world still followed rules.
He parked in front of the diner on the square, killed the engine, and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel. The radio clicked into silence. Through the bug-spattered windshield, he watched a sheet of yesterday's newspaper skate across the empty street, its headlines too distant to read, its path aimless as a leaf.
Cora had not answered his calls in six days.
He stepped out into the afternoon heat. The air tasted of red clay and something faintly sweet, honeysuckle, maybe, or the rot of fallen fruit somewhere unseen. A screen door banged somewhere behind the diner, and a woman in a flour-sack apron looked out, studied him, and pulled the door closed again. Her face had been careful. People here learned careful.
Eli crossed the square toward the only building on Main that still seemed to draw breath. The hardware store's windows were dusty but intact, its OPEN sign crooked in the door. He paused at the threshold. Through the glass, he could see the old wooden floors, the pegboard walls hung with nails and bolts and coils of wire. At the counter, a man with a white beard and a gimme cap sat reading a paperback, lips moving faintly over the words.
The bell above the door gave a small brass cry as Eli pushed through.
The man behind the counter did not look up.
"Afternoon," Eli said.
The pages turned. The lips kept moving.
"Cora Marlowe," Eli said. "I need to find her."
At that, the man raised his head. His eyes were small, almost lost in the weather of his face, but they found Eli with the quick assessment of someone who had spent a lifetime sizing up strangers. He closed the paperback on a finger to keep his place and regarded Eli the way a man regards a snake he has not yet decided is venomous.
"Marlowe," he repeated. His voice had the texture of dry tobacco. "Any particular Marlowe."
"I know how it sounds."
"Do you." The man set the book down. His finger stayed inside, marking. "Hollow Rock's got more Marlowes than it has streetlights. Which I expect you remember, being one yourself."
Eli said nothing. He stood very still, the way his mother had taught him to stand when a dog was deciding whether to bite. You do not run. You do not stare. You wait.
The man's mouth worked around something. Then he jerked his chin toward the back of the store. "Up Sycamore Creek Road. The old Marlowe place. If it's the sister you're hunting, she's been up there three days, give or take. Since she come down to buy lamp oil and a box of wicks."
"Three days."
"That's what I said." The man reopened his book. The interview was over. "Tell her Pete says her check's good at the store. She'll know what it means."
Eli nodded once and turned toward the door.
"And son."
He stopped.
"You going up there, you watch the second step. It's been rotting since your mama walked it."
The drive out of town took longer than it should have. The road narrowed, then narrowed again, until the Ford's mirrors nearly scraped the branches crowding in from either side. Kudzu had climbed the telephone poles here, twined itself around the crossbars until the lines drooped under the green weight of it. Eli passed a collapsed barn whose tin roof had peeled back like the lid of a tin can. He passed a creek that ran the color of tea. He passed a dog, standing in the road, watching him go with the resigned patience of an old sentinel.
Then the trees thinned, and the road climbed, and there at the crest of the hill stood the Marlowe house.
It was smaller than he remembered.
That was the first wrong thing. The house of his childhood had been vast, its porch a continent he had crossed a thousand times. Now it stood against the grey afternoon like a clenched fist, its white paint gone the color of old bone, its shutters hanging at angles that spoke of more than neglect. The chimney listed slightly to the east. The porch swing his father had hung the summer Eli turned seven was gone entirely, only the chains remaining, swaying faintly without wind.
Eli killed the engine. In the sudden silence, he could hear his own breathing, and beneath it, somewhere beneath it, the faint creak of old wood settling.
He got out.
The gravel of the drive crunched under his boots. He could smell it, the sharp mineral smell of crushed limestone, and beneath it, the green and dark smell of the hollow itself, the place where water gathered and did not leave. Somewhere, a woodpecker was working. The sound of it was like a small hammer striking a small anvil, patient and endless.
He climbed the steps, watching the second one. It held his weight, but he felt it bow, felt the wood give a little sigh beneath him. He would not bring Cora down these steps again. He would not let her fall.
The front door was open three inches. Through the gap, the dark of the hallway breathed outward, cool and faintly damp.
"Cora," he said.
Nothing.
He pushed the door open. The hinges protested with a sound like a throat clearing. The hallway stretched before him, the wallpaper curling at the edges where it met the baseboards. A coat rack stood by the parlor door, bare except for a single canvas jacket he recognized as hers, the elbows worn to threads, the color faded to something between rust and rose.
"Cora, it's me. It's Eli."
A sound from upstairs. A small sound. A thump, perhaps, or a footfall, or something that had wanted to sound like a footfall and almost managed it.
"Eli?"
Her voice, when it came, was thin. His sister had never had a thin voice.
"I'm coming up."
"Wait." A pause. Then, quieter: "All right. All right. Come up."
The stairs complained under each step. He kept one hand on the banister, felt the wood give and resettle. At the top, the hallway opened into three doors. The one on the left, their mother's old room, was closed. The one on the right, his old room, was closed. The door straight ahead, the room they had shared growing up when storms came through and their father worked the night shift, stood ajar, and through it, a wedge of lamplight fell across the hallway floor.
He pushed the door open.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the way she used to sit when they were children, reading by flashlight under the covers. Only now there was no flashlight. There was an oil lamp on the bedside table, its flame barely moving, its glass chimney sooty with use. She had a sketchbook open in her lap, but she was not drawing. She was staring at the wall across from her, and her pencil hung forgotten in her hand.
She looked older than she should have. Older than twenty-four. There were shadows under her eyes that had nothing to do with the lamplight.
"You came," she said.
"You sent a postcard."
She looked down at the sketchbook, then back at the wall. "I thought you might not."
He crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. The springs gave a small wail of protest. She did not look at him, but she shifted her weight so her knee touched his. He let it stay there.
"You didn't answer my calls."
"I know."
"You didn't answer for six days, Cora."
"I know," she said again, and this time her voice broke on it. She set the pencil down on the sketchbook and pressed her palms together, hard, the knuckles whitening. "I'm sorry. I sat by the phone a hundred times. I picked it up. I put it back. I didn't know how to say it. I didn't know what to say."
"Say what."
She turned her head, finally, and looked at him. In the lamplight, her eyes were the color of creek water, and just as clear, and just as deep. She had always seen things. That was her curse, and her gift. She saw what others could not, or would not, and she drew it down onto paper so she could show them, and they did not believe her, and so she drew it again, and still they did not believe her.
"Something's wrong with this house," she said.
He waited. With Cora, you learned to wait. The words came when they came.
"I moved back in three weeks ago. I thought I could fix the roof, sell the property, get out. I thought I was done with it." She laughed, a small broken sound. "I thought it was done with me."
"Cora."
"It's breathing, Eli. I know how that sounds. I know. But it is. At night, when the house settles, you can hear it. Not the wood. Not the pipes. Something underneath. Something that goes in and out, in and out, like a chest. Like a lung. Like something that has been asleep a long time is starting to wake up."
The lamplight wavered. He could not tell if it was a draft or his own hand.
"I started sketching it," she said. She turned the sketchbook toward him. The pages were filled with drawings. The hallway. The parlor. The front porch. The chimney. Over and over, the same house, but in each drawing, something was wrong. In one, the windows had no panes. In another, the front door opened onto a hallway that ran deeper than the house should have allowed. In a third, the chimney breathed a thin line of smoke that became, if he looked at it long enough, a hand.
She had drawn the house trying to climb out of the page.
"When I draw it," she whispered, "it draws back."
He closed the sketchbook gently and set it aside. He took her hand. Her fingers were cold.
"Then we leave," he said. "Tonight. Now. We leave, and we don't come back."
She shook her head. The motion was small, stubborn, the same head-shake she had given their mother when their mother tried to make her wear the dress she hated to the church social.
"I can't," she said. "If I leave, it follows me. I tried that once. Three years ago. I went to Knoxville. I rented a room above a diner on the north side. The first night I slept there, the walls exhaled."
"Cora."
"They exhaled, Eli. The wallpaper moved. The radiator ticked. And I lay in that bed and I knew, I knew with everything in me, that if I closed my eyes, something would be standing in the corner of the room, watching me. So I didn't close them. I lay there until dawn. And when I got up, I found I had drawn the Marlowe house in my sleep. On the wall above the bed. In charcoal. While I slept."
She looked at the sketchbook.
"I burned that room," she said. "I went back and I burned it. I thought if I burned it, I would be free. But the house followed me here. It followed me home."
He sat with her hand in his and let the silence fill the room. Somewhere in the house, a board creaked. Somewhere, a floor joist settled. Somewhere, beneath all the ordinary sounds a house makes when it is only a house, he could almost, almost hear what she had described. A rhythm. A breath. The slow, patient respiration of something vast and old, stirring in its sleep.
He did not believe her. He told himself he did not believe her.
But he did not let go of her hand.
"Tell me everything," he said. "From the beginning."
She nodded. She reached for the lamp, turned up the wick, and the room filled with a thin gold light.
Outside, the hollow went on holding its breath. The Ford sat cooling in the drive, its windows fogging slowly with the temperature of the gathering dusk. Somewhere down the road, a dog barked once and thought better of it. Somewhere in town, a man with a white beard closed a paperback and sat for a long time staring at the door through which a young man had come and gone, and then he picked up the telephone and dialed a number he had not dialed in years, and when the line answered, he said only one word before hanging up:
"Marlowe."
The gravel road north switchbacked through the upper hollers, each bend tighter than the last, the ruts deep enough to rattle teeth and loosen fillings. Eli drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the seat beside Cora, who had drawn her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them like a child bracing for a blow. She had not spoken since they left the motel. The sketchbook lay closed on the console between them, its spine cracked, a few charcoal smudges on the cover like old bruises.
The Ford climbed. The headlights picked out fence posts, the bright eyes of a deer frozen mid-stride, the pale trunks of birch trees gone ghostly in the dark. The temperature dropped ten degrees between the valley and the ridge. Cora's breath fogged the glass. She traced a shape in the fog with one fingernail, a spiral, and then wiped it away.
"Almost there," Eli said.
She nodded. She did not ask how he knew. She could feel it. The house was close. The road smelled of wet clay and pine duff and the particular iron tang of old water, the kind that sat in stone basins for decades and never moved. The same smell she remembered from childhood, when their mother would send them to fetch well water and they would come back with the bucket heavy between them, swinging, sloshing, and the taste of it so cold it made their front teeth ache.
The road crested. The headlights swept across the clearing and stopped.
The house sat at the edge of the clearing the way a tooth sits in a rotten gum, tilted, listing, the front porch sagging where a corner post had rotted through. Paint peeled from the clapboards in long strips that curled at the edges like the husks of dead insects. The windows were dark except for one on the upper floor, and that one was dark too, but the curtains moved, a slow drift inward as if drawn by a breath from inside.
Eli killed the engine. The silence that rushed in was enormous. No crickets. No frogs. No owls. Even the wind had dropped, and the trees stood motionless around the clearing as if listening.
"The porch light," Cora said.
He saw it. The single bulb hanging from the porch ceiling was on, a yellow smear of light that pulsed faintly, stuttered, pulsed again. The filament inside should have been dead. The breaker had been thrown. He had watched Sheriff Pritchard throw it himself, back when they'd come up here six months ago to clear the place after the funeral. Pritchard had walked through the house with his hat in his hand and his jaw set, checking every switch, every outlet, every fixture, and then he'd gone down to the cellar and thrown the main with the kind of deliberate, ceremonial finality of a man sealing a tomb.
"The bulb's burned out," Eli said. "It has to be."
"It's not burned out." Cora's voice was small. "Look at the moths."
He looked. A handful of moths circled the bulb in their slow, dumb orbit. Moths do not circle dead bulbs. Moths do not orbit ghosts.
He opened his door. The night air came in cold and wet, carrying the smell of rotting leaves and something else, something denser, something that lived closer to the ground. He got out. His boots crunched on the gravel of the drive. He waited for Cora, but she did not move. She sat with her arms around her knees, staring at the house, and when he came around to her side and opened her door, the smell hit him.
Wet soil. Black, heavy, river-bottom soil, the kind that smelled of iron and decay and things that had been buried a long time and were only now beginning to remember what they were.
"You smell it," she said. It was not a question.
"Yeah."
"It comes from under the front door. It always came from under the front door." She unfolded herself from the seat. Her boots hit the gravel. She swayed, caught his arm. "When we were small, Mama used to say there was a spring under the threshold. She said the house was built on a spring, and that's why the floors were always cold in winter. But there was no spring. I looked. After she died, I came up here and I pulled up the boards in the front room and there was no spring. There was nothing. Just dirt. Black dirt. And it was warm."
She looked up at the porch light. The moths circled. The filament pulsed.
"It was warm," she said again, as if repetition might make him understand. "In January. The dirt was warm."
He took her arm. They crossed the clearing together, their footsteps loud in the unholy silence. The porch steps groaned under Eli's weight, and the third step from the top gave a little, listing toward the railing. He steered Cora to the side of the step that still held and they mounted it together. The porch boards were slick with a fine mist that had settled on them, a mist that hadn't fallen on the drive or the road or anywhere else. Cora looked down at the boards and saw that the mist wasn't water. It was finer than water. It looked, in the yellow light of the porch bulb, almost like dust. But it was moving. It was drifting, slowly, from the gap under the front door.
"Breathing," she whispered.
He did not ask her what she meant. He did not want to know what she meant.
The front door was the door their mother had painted blue the summer Cora turned seven, the summer Eli turned twelve, the summer their father left and never came back. The paint had faded to a pale, sickly robin's-egg, and in places it had blistered and peeled, and the wood beneath had gone gray and soft. The knob was brass, green with verdure, cold under Eli's hand when he gripped it. He turned it. The latch clicked. The door swung inward, away from him, as if the house had been waiting for someone to turn the knob and had already opened itself in anticipation.
The smell rolled out. Warm, wet, rich, alive. The smell of a freshly turned grave in the first hour of dawn. The smell of a mouth.
Cora gagged. She turned her face into his shoulder and breathed through her mouth. He held her with one arm and reached inside the doorframe for the light switch, remembering where it was without thinking, muscle memory from a thousand childhood entrances, and when he found it and threw it, nothing happened. The ceiling fixture in the front hall was dark. The sconce on the stair landing was dark. The little lamp on the hall table where their mother used to leave a candle burning for their father who never came was dark.
But the house was not dark. A faint, sourceless light filled the front hall, a light that seemed to come from the walls themselves, from the wallpaper, from the grain of the wood, a light the color of old bone. In that light Eli could see the dust on the floor, thick and undisturbed except for a single set of tracks that led from the front door down the hall toward the kitchen, tracks that looked as if they had been made by someone walking in socks, small tracks, a woman's tracks, the tracks of someone who had come in out of the rain and not bothered to wipe her feet.
The tracks stopped at the kitchen door.
"Eli," Cora said into his shoulder. "Don't go in."
"I have to look."
"You don't. We can call Pritchard. We can call someone. We can go back to town and wait until morning."
"There's no one to call. You heard him. There's no one." He was thinking of Pritchard's face in the motel room, the way the sheriff had looked at the floor, the way his hands had gripped his hat, the way he had said Marlowe into the telephone and hung up like a man who had just signed a confession. "Whatever this is, whatever's happening, it's ours. It's been ours since Mama died. Maybe longer."
He stepped inside. The floorboards gave under his weight with a long, low sigh, the kind of sound a house makes when it has been holding its breath and finally, finally, lets it out. Behind him Cora made a small sound, half gasp, half whimper, and then her footsteps followed. She had not let go of his arm.
The hall stretched back toward the kitchen, fifteen feet of warped pine floor, the wallpaper on either side peeling in long vertical strips that revealed older wallpaper beneath, and older beneath that, and older still, layers of pattern like the rings of a tree, each one a decade, each one a generation. At the end of the hall the kitchen door stood ajar, and through the gap came the smell of the soil, stronger now, thick enough to taste, metallic and sweet.
He pushed the door open.
The kitchen was empty. The table where their mother used to bread her rabbit and her squirrel and her venison was still there, scarred and ringed, the chairs pushed in as if someone had just stood up. The stove was cold. The window over the sink was broken, a single jagged pane left in the frame, and through it the night came in wet and cold. On the floor in front of the sink, in a wide, dark stain that spread from the base of the old pump to the center of the room, the soil lay heaped as if something had pushed it up from below, and in the soil, half-buried, the corner of something pale caught the sourceless light.
He went closer. He crouched. Cora hung back at the door, her hand over her mouth.
The corner of something pale was bone. A knuckle bone. A human knuckle bone, still wearing a thin gold ring.
He reached for it. His fingers brushed the bone and the ring and the soil, and the soil was warm. In January, in a house with no heat, in a house with the power off, the soil was warm.
He stood. He looked at the kitchen. He looked at the window. He looked at the door where Cora stood with her hand over her mouth and her eyes enormous in the bone-colored light.
"We need to call someone," he said. His voice sounded strange. Far away. The voice of a man standing in the next room, speaking through a wall.
"Eli," she whispered. "Don't."
"We need to call Pritchard. We need to call the state police. We need to call someone."
"There is no someone." Her voice cracked. "There has never been anyone. There is only the house, and the things under the house, and Mama, and whatever Mama became."
He turned from her. He looked at the bone in the soil. He looked at the ring on the bone. The ring was their mother's. He recognized the setting, a small opal surrounded by seed pearls, the ring their father had bought their mother the year Cora was born, the ring their mother had never taken off, the ring that had been on her hand when they had buried her.
The ring that was not in the coffin.
The ring that had not been on her hand when she died.
He stepped back. He stepped on something. He looked down.
It was a book. A small, cloth-bound book, the cover stained with soil, the pages swollen with damp. He picked it up. The cover peeled away in his hand, and inside, in a hand he knew as well as his own, in the careful, slanted cursive of their mother, were words. Words in ink. Words in pencil. Words in what looked, in places, like soot, or like something darker than soot.
He opened to the first page.
The house was here before us. It will be here after us. We are only the latest tenants. We pay our rent in the only coin it accepts. The house knows my name. The house has always known my name.
He closed the book.
Behind him, in the hall, a board creaked. A board that neither he nor Cora had stepped on. A board that creaked under the weight of someone standing very still, someone who had been standing there a long time, someone who had been waiting.
He did not turn around. He held the book against his chest. He reached back with his other hand, found Cora's hand, found her fingers cold and trembling in the dark.
"Out," he said. "Out now."
They backed down the hall. They did not run. They could not run. The house would not let them run. The board creaked again behind them, and somewhere in the parlor, off to the right, a curtain moved, and somewhere upstairs, on the floor above them, a footstep fell, slow and deliberate, the footstep of someone descending.
They reached the front door. They stepped onto the porch. The porch light still pulsed. The moths still circled. The door swung shut behind them, gently, the way a door swings shut when someone inside has closed it with care.
They ran. They ran down the sagging steps, across the clearing, to the Ford. Eli wrenched open the driver's door, threw the book onto the back seat, started the engine. Cora climbed in after him, pulling the door shut, and as the door slammed, the porch light went out.
All the way down the mountain, all the way back to town, neither of them spoke. In the back seat, the book lay open to the first page, and in the rearview mirror, if either of them had looked, they would have seen, on the page, in their mother's hand, a single line that had not been there before:
You brought her back. Now she is hungry.
The Ford's headlights carved a tunnel through the dark as Eli drove. The wipers swept. The gravel popped under the tires. Cora sat with her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them, her face turned toward the passenger window where the trees slid past, black shapes against a black sky.
Neither of them had spoken since the door closed behind them. The radio was off. The heater breathed warm air against their feet. In the back seat, the book lay where Eli had thrown it, pages rustling faintly with every bump in the road, the handwriting on the open page pale in the reflected glow of the dashboard lights.
Cora spoke first.
"Pull over."
"We're almost to the main road."
"Eli. Pull over."
He did. He steered the Ford onto the shoulder, into a turnout half-choked with scrub, and cut the engine. The wipers stopped mid-sweep. The headlights stayed on, casting long shadows through the pines. Somewhere out beyond the trees, a creek ran over rocks, a sound like voices talking low in a language he did not know.
Cora reached over the seat and picked up the book. She set it on her lap. She smoothed the page flat with one hand, palm pressing down, the way she used to press down the pages of her sketchbook when she was working.
"Three days," she said.
He looked at her.
"The entry," she said. "The one I read in the house. It's dated three days from today."
He stared at her. "That's not possible."
"I know what I read." Her voice had an edge to it, the edge she got when she knew she was right and did not want to be. "August nineteenth. She wrote August nineteenth. Today is August sixteenth."
He remembered the page. He remembered the date at the top of the entry, the handwriting neat and slanted. He had read it upside down while they were climbing through the window. August nineteenth. He had not thought about the date. He had been thinking about the name.
"Mom didn't know the future," he said.
"No," Cora said. "She didn't."
"Then how."
"I don't know." Cora pressed her hand harder against the page. "But I know what I saw. And I know what she wrote. Three days from now, Eli. Whatever's in that house, whatever we woke up, it's going to do something three days from now. She knew. She knew and she wrote it down."
He reached across and took the book from her. He turned to the page. The entry began:
August 19.
If you're reading this, then Eli came back. I told him not to. He never listened. He got that from his father, the not-listening. Don't tell him I said that.
He read on.
If you're reading this, then Cora is with him, because she wouldn't let him come alone, and she's braver than both of us put together, and don't tell her I said that either.
If you're reading this, then it has already begun.
I don't know how to write this so that it makes sense. I've started this letter six times. I started it the night your grandmother died. I started it again the year your grandfather's bones turned up in the creek bed. I started it again the summer I found out what the Hollow really is, what it takes, what it keeps. Every time I stopped. Every time I told myself there was still time, that I could figure it out, that I could find a way around it, that I could keep you safe without you having to know.
I'm out of time.
This is what I know:
The Hollow is not a place. It is a mouth.
There is a thing that lives under that mountain. I don't have a word for it. Your grandmother called it the sleeper. I called it the sleeper. Your grandmother's mother called it something in Cherokee that I never learned to pronounce right. It's been there longer than the town. Longer than the road. Longer than the trees. It sleeps. It has slept for as long as anyone can remember. The only thing that wakes it is blood of the line.
The line is ours.
I don't know why. I don't know how the line got started. I just know that it did, and that the Hollow has been feeding on us for longer than any of us have been alive. Not killing. Feeding. There's a difference, or there used to be. The old ones who settled here, they gave to it. They gave what it asked for. Once a generation, a child. Once a generation, a life. And in return, the Hollow gave them what it gives: long winters, short summers, good harvests in the bad years, luck that holds steady in a place that should have dried up and blown away a hundred years ago.
A bargain. A trade. The way of the world, your grandmother used to say. The way things get done.
I was supposed to be the one.
Your grandmother told me when I was sixteen. She took me up to the house, the same house we went to tonight, and she sat me down in the kitchen, and she told me what I was for. She told me about the sleeper. She told me about the line. She told me that when I turned thirty, I would walk up that mountain, and I would go into that house, and I would open the door at the back of the parlor, and I would go down the stairs, and I would offer myself to what was waiting at the bottom.
She told me it was an honor.
I told her to go to hell.
She looked at me the way you look at something you expected but still hoped not to see. She said, "You can refuse. But the Hollow will take what it is owed. If you won't go willingly, it will come for you. And if it can't have you, it will take the next one in the blood. Your children. Your children's children. On and on and on until the line runs out or the sleeper wakes."
"If it wakes," she said, "there won't be a town left to save."
So I went.
Eli, I need you to hear this. I need you to understand. I went up that mountain when I was thirty. I walked into that house. I went down the stairs. And what I found at the bottom was not what your grandmother described. It was not a mouth. It was not a sleeper. It was a room, and in the room there was a table, and on the table there was a book.
The same book you are holding right now.
I don't know who wrote it. I don't know where it came from. I don't know how it was there before I was. All I know is that the book was open to a page that had my name on it. My full name. Date of birth. Date of death. And in the space between, a single sentence:
If you would live, give what you love most.
I stood there for a long time. I thought about your father. I thought about you, both of you. I thought about the life I had built, the little house in town, the garden in the back, the two of you asleep in your beds. I thought about what your grandmother had told me, about the bargain, about the way of the world.
I wrote my name in the book.
And then I went home.
Cora, if you're reading this, I need you to know that I did not know what the book would do. I did not know that the words would change after I wrote them. I did not know that the book would keep writing on its own, filling itself with entries I never made, recording things I never saw, showing me pages I never turned.
I found out the next morning.
I woke up and the book was on the kitchen table. I don't remember carrying it home. I don't remember anything after I wrote my name. But the book was there, and it was open, and on the page, in handwriting that looked like mine but wasn't, there was a new entry. The entry was dated that day. It described what I had done the day before. It described things I had not yet done. It described what I would do the next week, the next month, the next year.
It described your father's death.
It described the cancer.
I read the entry three times. I went into the bathroom. I threw up. I came back out. I read it again. And then I did the thing I should not have done. I read the next page.
On the next page there was an entry dated three days after my visit to the Hollow. The entry described a death. Not my death. Someone else's. A woman I had never heard of. Someone in town, someone ordinary, someone who had nothing to do with the line or the sleeper or any of it. The entry gave her name. The entry gave the cause. Heart attack, in her kitchen, on a Tuesday morning, while she was making coffee for her husband.
The entry was dated for a Tuesday.
It was a Monday.
On Tuesday, Mary Ellen Casteel died of a heart attack in her kitchen while she was making coffee for her husband.
I closed the book.
I put it in the back of the closet. I left it there for a week. Then I took it out. Then I read another page. Then another. Every entry I read came true. Every name. Every date. Every last breath.
I stopped reading.
I didn't destroy it. I should have. I want you to know that I knew I should have, and I didn't. I was a coward. I told myself the book was just paper, just ink, just the ravings of a thing that lived under a mountain and did not understand the world the way the world understood itself. I told myself the entries were predictions. I told myself predictions don't cause the thing they predict.
I was wrong.
The book does not predict. The book writes. And when it writes a thing, the thing happens. I don't know how. I don't know why. I only know that every death recorded in those pages was a death I could have prevented, if I had only burned the pages before the dates arrived.
I didn't burn them.
I kept the book. I read it, sometimes, on the worst nights, the nights when I couldn't sleep, the nights when your father was already gone and the two of you were already grown and the house was already empty. I read it because I couldn't stop myself. Because knowing the future is a kind of power, and power is a kind of drug, and I was already addicted before I knew I had started.
I read the page that had your name on it, Cora.
I read the page that had your name on it, Eli.
On Eli's page there was an entry dated for a week from his twenty-third birthday. The entry said he would go into the Hollow. The entry said he would open the book. The entry said he would read the page that had his sister's name on it.
On Cora's page there was an entry dated for three days after Eli's.
The entry said she would die.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry I went up that mountain. I'm sorry I wrote my name. I'm sorry I kept the book. I'm sorry I didn't burn it when I had the chance. I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. I'm sorry I am not there to tell you in person. I'm sorry I am not there to stop you.
I'm sorry.
This is what you have to do.
Do not read the next page.