The Hollow Beneath Blackwater

Eleanor Marrow receives a cream envelope she wishes she had never opened: her sister Cordelia is dead, and a solicitor named Mr. Calvert is waiting to escort her to the half-drowned village of Blackwater to claim an inheritance she never wanted. The cottage is hers now, the villagers explain, and so is everything that comes with it. Mrs. Hask, the iron-willed innkeeper, pours Eleanor a drink and warns her not to walk near the lake after dark. A pale girl appears at the edge of the woods, gaunt and watchful, insisting her name is Isadora and that the Marrows have always owed her a place inside their home. As Eleanor sorts through Cordelia's belongings, she finds journals that span decades, entries written in her sister's unmistakable hand, sometimes dated years before Eleanor was born. They speak of rituals, of a figure that rises from black water, of a chorus of women whose voices the lake hungers to consume. Dr. Callum Reave, the only man in Blackwater willing to speak plainly, confesses he buried Cordelia's body in a trunk by the water's edge and has spent every night since guarding it from what stirs below. The more Eleanor reads, the more certain she becomes: Cordelia did not die, she was taken, mid-ritual, and her voice is still drifting somewhere beneath the surface. The lake is rising. The pale girl is growing stronger. And the hollow beneath Blackwater will not release its Marrow until Eleanor chooses whether to finish the song her sister began.