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Nick crested the hill, easing off the gas as the holler spread out below him. The beat-up rust-bucket he’d been driving since the divorce balanced a moment at the peak, then gravity had him, pulling him down into the navel of the world that was King’s Hollow. Home.
As sudden as that, with the car coasting downward, the sky shivered to a flat white. An eye with the lid peeled back, seeing him in the most terrible way. Nick almost jammed on the brakes, slewing the car into the trees. His front right tire skidded on the verge and he jerked the wheel sharply to the left, narrowly avoiding a bundle of rags that he could swear for a second was a body lying on the side of the road.
What happens when the stitches come undone?
The words crashed into the empty space where his stomach should be. Sweat slicked his palms, but somehow Nick managed to tap the brake instead of slamming it. His stomach lurched back into place. He glanced in the rearview mirror. There was nothing on the side of the road. No body, no bundle of rags, nothing.
The road leveled out, gliding him into the town proper. Telephone lines knit up the sky, and behind their crisscrossing pattern it was only gray—the pale, washed-out shade of an oncoming storm.
Nick’s pulse steadied, but memory came gnawing in the wake of fear. A wound he didn’t remember opening, as if it had never been closed.
As a kid, he’d seen the sky go that flat shade of white. But he’d seen it from the wrong angle, lying on his back—struggling to get up, struggling to breathe—with the weight of all that openness pressing down on him, barely restrained by stark, tossing branches. The smell of leaves, thick, on the edge of rot, filling up his mouth and nose. And the earth had rumbled—old, hungry, and slow.
Nick leaned forward, peering through the windshield. The sky remained gray, clouds piling to shutter the eye he’d felt watching him. He pulled into a space in front of the diner, bracing his hands against the wheel to stop their shaking before he turned off the car and opened the door. The first fat drops struck the pavement as Nick hurried inside.
Val waited in one of booths set against the diner’s long window, overlooking the street. She rose to hug him, failing to hide her big sister concern. When she removed the mirrored shades she claimed were standard issue for a small town deputy, Nick saw worry gathered at the corners of her eyes. But as they sat, she slid the key to their parents’ house across the table to him without asking how long he planned stay in the house while he “got back on his feet” or uttering the dreaded how are you holding up? Nick was immensely grateful.
Nick sank back against the worn vinyl, glancing around. The oversized clock he remembered from his youth loomed above the jukebox he’d never seen anyone play. Even the same specials were chalked on the blackboard. Nick half expected to see his kid-self, Val beside him, both kicking their heels against the polished rails of the red-padded stools as they sipped thick chocolate milkshakes.
“Nothing ever changes around here, does it?” Nick said.
“Nope.” Val handed him a laminated menu, grinning.
The grin faded, and Nick realized how raw his expression must look. Too late he tried to match her smile, then gave up, letting his shoulders slump. The weight of the holler crashed on him all at once, more mundane than the panic that had struck him on the road into town. Leaving had been an illusion—moving east, marrying Melanie, all of it. Somehow, he’d ended up right back where he’d started.
It was depressing as fuck, and the kicker was, he’d always known. Deep down he’d felt the circularity of his life, a spiral leading him back to the beginning. A truth he’d never fully realized until now. It was why he’d deflected Melanie’s questions about getting a real job, buying a house, having kids, all of it.
“Think Mabel still keeps a secret stash of brandy under the counter?” Nick tilted his head.
Val raised an eyebrow, but before she could tip over into sympathy, the waitress arrived with coffee.
“Come around for dinner once you’re settled.” Val stirred her coffee. “Mike and Joey have been going on about seeing ‘Uncle Nicky’ ever since I told them you were visiting.”
Nick set his own coffee aside. The world-dropping-away feeling he’d experienced as gravity carried him down the hill returned, but different this time. He opened his mouth, searching for a reply less pathetic than he felt, but his spoon rattled in his cup, distracting him.
“Earthquake?” Even as he spoke the word, it tasted wrong. Like rotten leaves. Like earth, and the ground shuddering.
“Hmm?” Val lowered her cup.
“You didn’t feel that?”
The window glass shivered, light skipping across its surface. Motion caught the corner of Nick’s eye. A shape, just on the other side of the street. Small and pale.
“Nick?”
He hadn’t realized he’d stood until Val’s voice called him back. The only things across the street were parked cars and storefronts, people going about their day.
“Are you okay?” The vague concern in Val’s eyes grew more specific, the worry lines at the corners of her mouth turning to a full-on frown.
Nick lowered himself back into the booth.
“I’m fine.”
What happens when the stitches come undone?
Nick clenched one hand into a fist under the table. The ground shivering, the sky turning white. In the woods, with the shack. They’d run. The ground had bucked beneath his feet, and he’d landed face down in the dirt. Then he’d rolled over, bruised, scrambling up as the sky closed down and the earth rose and the entire holler became a mouth trying to grind and swallow him.
“What is it?” Val leaned forward, reaching across the table, but stopping just short of touching his hand.
The stitches.
He wanted to clamp down on the words, the thoughts, but they insisted—tapping at his teeth, opening his mouth.
“Do you remember how we went into the woods when we were kids? In the summer?” Nick’s mouth dried. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying to say. “You and me, Deb and Lindy and . . . ”
His tongue stumbled on their youngest cousin’s name. E. Something. Eric. It stuck in his throat, sour and raw—a shape he wanted to spit out and couldn’t. He tried again, approaching from a different angle.
“The five of us.”
“Four.” Val corrected absently. “I remember. Are you sure you’re okay?”
Four. Nick stared at his sister. Himself, Val, Deb, Lindy. And. The name slid away from him again, jagged when he tried to grab hold, leaving his grip slick and red. And. He opened his mouth, closed it again.
The shape flickered in the corner of his vision again. Nick turned his head so sharply pain shot up his neck, already stiff from the long drive. Cars. Storefronts. People. There was nothing else there.
Nothing. He and Val only had two cousins. Not three. Except . . .
Dread pooled in Nick’s stomach. And, absurdly, it rumbled at the same time, even though the thought of putting food in his mouth sickened him. Two cousins, not three. He tried to believe it, crushing his other hand into a fist now too and ignoring the way it trembled. It had to be true. Because of the way Val looked at him.
And it couldn’t be true. Because of the way the earth churned and opened a dark hungry mouth. Because when Nick looked back, Eric wasn’t there anymore.
No!
He wasn’t sure if he said the word out loud and he didn’t care, already out of his seat and moving toward the door. His sister called after him. Nick ignored her. The floor tilted, trying to pull him back into the center. Circling and circling, inward and downward and . . .
“Sorry,” he called over his shoulder. “Tired. Long trip. Rain check.”
He didn’t wait for Val’s answer. He had get back to the car. Before the earth rose up. Before the sky peered down. Before memory swept him away. Before the holler swallowed him whole.
• • •
“They’re Indian burial mounds,” Lindy said. “We read about them in history class.”
Nick’s cousin puffed her chest out, wearing the authority conferred by being the oldest of the five cousins like a badge of honor. Lindy was the only one so far who’d graduated to the middle school wing of the K-12 building where they all attended school.
“I heard it’s where the cannibals who live in the woods bury their bones.” Deb leaned forward, grinning.
“There are no cannibals in the holler.” Val elbowed her.
Nick let the girls bicker as he studied the mound. It was just tall enough that he couldn’t see beyond it, but he was sure there was a field on the other side. The trees held a line at their backs, the border of the woods. This was the furthest they’d come on their summer adventures so far. Except for the quarry, of course.
Nick pushed the thought away. He didn’t want to think about the quarry, so he focused on the mound instead. There was something familiar about it, like an itch he couldn’t quite reach.
His class hadn’t read about Indian mounds the way Lindy’s had, but in geology they’d learned about rivers and glaciers carving the land. This felt different. Deliberate. Like someone had built it up. Changing the land, though Nick couldn’t imagine why. He tilted his head to one side, squinting his eyes half-closed.
A buzzing certainty crept into his mind; beyond the mound there were other ridges scarring the earth. Concentric rings. A path. Crossing back and forth over the earth. Stitching it closed.
Nick caught his breath. Nothing changed. He didn’t move. Yet the grass flattened. Wind rolled like a tide over an open field where the land rose in wave after wave. Like steps. Like the path leading down to the quarry. There were no trees in the field to hold back the sky. Without the trees, the sky could see him. An eye, catching him. But if he placed his foot there, and kept walking . . .
“Nick!” Val’s voice jerked him back.
Nick realized his foot was raised. He lowered it, cheeks flushing.
“Are you coming?” There was a nastiness to Deb’s voice.
“Coming where?” Nick’s stomach sank, realizing he’d missed some key part of Deb’s latest devious plot. If they were going somewhere and it was Deb’s idea, it was bound to get them in trouble.
“Told you he wasn’t paying attention.” Lindy elbowed Val.
“To see the cannibals.” Deb rolled her eyes. “They live in that old shack in the woods, like I said.”
Without waiting to see if they’d follow, Deb turned and marched away. Middle child syndrome—that’s what Nick’s parents called it when they thought he and Val weren’t listening. It made Deb the ringleader—too loud, too brash, leaping first and looking later. Like the other day, in the quarry, when she’d almost pushed Eric into the dark and . . .
“There it is,” Deb whispered.
Nick nearly crashed into her. When had he started walking? He glanced over his shoulder. Trees stretched behind him as far as he could see, the raised mound of earth completely invisible.
“There.” Deb nudged his shoulder and he looked where she pointed. Two buildings, both on the edge of rot, stood between the trees, a shack with a shed behind it. Only a pipe chimney rising through the shack’s tin roof set it apart as a place people might live.
“It’s really cannibals?” Eric pressed against Lindy’s side, his fingers creeping toward his mouth, his eyes wide. He’d just turned five, and even though he was far too old for it, he still had a tendency to suck on his fingers and thumb when he needed comfort.
“Nick’ll go look.” Deb poked him in the small of the back.
“Me?” Nick flinched forward, voice cracking.
“Yeah.” Deb grinned. “I dare you. I double dog dare you. Walk up to the window and look inside.”
Nick glanced at his sister, but Val deliberately wasn’t looking at him, worrying at a ragged bit of skin along her thumbnail. He looked back to Eric and it occurred to him that he hadn’t heard his little cousin whine once all afternoon—not to ask for a snack, not to say he was missing his cartoons.
He’d been different since they’d climbed out of the quarry. Since . . .
Nick peered at Eric. Something squirmed at the center of his eyes. A pattern. A path. A spiral leading in and downward.
Nick reached out, poised to catch the thread and draw the path out of his cousin’s eye. Eric flinched, his bottom lip pushing out, and tears starting. Realizing what he was doing, Nick stepped back. He looked again. Eric’s eyes were only their normal gray-blue, if wide and uncertain. He wanted to tell Eric it was okay, but the words stuck in his throat. Instead, he pivoted, walking toward the shack. One quick look, and they could leave. They’d go home and he’d even let Eric play with his action figures, never mind that his fingers were always sticky.
Dead leaves crunched underfoot. Nick lifted his chin. He could feel Deb watching him, waiting for him to chicken out. He didn’t dare look back.
His feet fell into a rhythm. The woods seemed to expand and contract around him. He was in the field on the other side of the mound, under a sky that rolled like the tide. He was deep under the earth, following a path that spiraled down and down. There was something important about the way he walked, the drumming of his steps like a lullaby, quieting the earth. Stitching it closed.
Nick stopped, almost bumping into the shack. He nearly looked over his shoulder to see how far he’d come, but remembered Deb would be watching him. He took a deep breath, focusing on the shack. The windows were dirty, pounded by years of muddy rain and never cleaned. Just one look, then they could go. He cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face against the window.
The tangled shadows inside the shack resolved. A little girl sat in the middle of the floor, facing away from him. An empty spool of thread rolled past her knee. He could almost hear it crossing the bare floorboards. Deafening. Far louder than it should be. And through the cacophony—
What happens.
What happens when?
The words scrabbled at him, tiny whispery things demanding entrance.
He didn’t see the woman until she swooped across the floor, snatching the girl and rushing toward the window with unnatural speed. She smacked her palm against the glass, peeling her lips back to show bloody teeth. Nick swallowed a shout, tripping over his heels.
He struck the ground hard and the sky swung above him, the strange crisscrossed branches tossing wildly. Stitches pulling free, a white eye opening to look at him. From the shed behind the shack came a horrible sound. A rust-and-stone sound. Grinding and wet. Hungry and inhuman. Nick scrambled up, barreling toward his sister and cousins.
“Go!” he shouted.
Nick’s feet pounded the leaves, drumming against the skin of the world. The earth drummed back—a vast heartbeat sound. The roar from the shed grew louder, accompanied by thrashing chains. Nick looked back, knowing he shouldn’t.
The woman stood halfway between the shack and the shed, spidery limbs wrapped around the girl, holding her close. Despite himself, Nick slowed. The rational part of him screamed to keep running, go faster. There was something wrong with the woman’s skin. Stitches. Jagged black lines of thread covered her arms. Her cheeks. Her hands. Every part of her he could see. Dense threads spiraling. Binding. Holding a wound closed. Holding back something vast and terrible.
The pattern jittered. The woman’s skin straining, the thread tugging as another roar sounded from the shed and shook the ground. A look of pain crossed her face and she closed her eyes. Nick stopped. He hadn’t meant to stop. Entranced, he turned, lifting his foot to step back toward the woman and the little girl.
Behind him, Val screamed his name. But the sky and the earth and the holler all screamed louder. Screaming at him. Screaming along with whatever was in the shed.
Nick was ready to add his voice to the din, but the ground heaved, throwing him face down in the dirt. He rolled over, struggling for breath. His stomach growled. He wanted to fill it with something. Or something wanted to fill him. He opened his mouth to . . . to what?
With a terrible groan, one of the trees tipped over, breaking his concentration. Roots tore from the earth and Nick threw his arms up to cover his face. The ground juddered with the impact. He opened his eyes. Fresh panic slammed into him, shooting him to his feet. Eric had stopped running too.
“Eric!” Nick couldn’t move fast enough.
Eric’s wide eyes spilled tears, but he didn’t move. Behind him, the air thickened, growing darker. Eric’s fingers crept to his mouth, slipping inside so he could suck on them, but otherwise he remained still.
“Eric!” Nick screamed again, but the woods—eerily silent now—swallowed his voice.
Eric had been seen by the blue eye at the bottom of the quarry. Eric and Nick had both crouched in the dark of the rough tunnel dug into the stone. Something had breathed up at them from under the earth. Tasting them. And it knew them now.
Nick lunged.
Too late. His fingers brushed empty air. The earth opened a mouth, and Eric dropped inside. Nick hit the ground, skidding on his stomach to balance precariously over the hole. It went down farther than it should. Moist, hot air swept past him. Eric was nowhere in sight.
“Eric!”
The hole twisted Nick’s voice, threw it back. Dirt slid, trying to carry Nick with it. He scooted backward. He couldn’t see Eric, couldn’t hear him. Not even a whimper.
Shaking, Nick crawled further from the hole. He’d get a grownup, the fire department, someone, everyone. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t leaving Eric behind. He’d come back for him. He would. The words—repeated as he pelted over the forest floor, breath hitching, tears smearing his vision—were almost enough to let him block out the sound of wet chewing behind him.
• • •
Nick sat at his parents’ kitchen table. It had been three months since his mother had succumbed to cancer, around the same time as the divorce was finalized, everything dovetailing into a perfect storm of misery. It had been five years since his father had passed away from the same disease, but Nick couldn’t think of the house any other way than theirs—missing only his mother’s laughter, the smell of his father’s famous five-alarm chili. Tomorrow he’d start sorting, deciding what to keep and what to throw away before he and Val put the house on the market. It was why he was here, after all. Not fleeing the divorce, or a dead-end job and an empty apartment, or the fact that his life amounted to nothing.
Nick pulled a photo album from the stack in front of him. Coming back home for his mother’s funeral, he’d felt an acute sense of loss, but one he could name. Now, he felt uneasy. Something was missing, but not something he could put a finger on. Eric. The name was clear in his mind now, nagging at him. But even that didn’t sit right. Val didn’t remember their youngest cousin. Why? He hadn’t dared to contact Deb or Lindy, Eric’s sisters. What if they didn’t remember him either?
He flipped open the album. Even when the world went digital, his mother had insisted on printing everything, trapping the moments of their lives beneath thin plastic. A beer from the fridge he’d stocked with the basics—milk, cold cuts, condiments—sweated at his elbow. Fragments of his life flashed past. Backyard barbeques, his seventh birthday party, Val’s high school graduation, his parents’ wedding anniversary, Val, Deb, and Lindy waging an epic water balloon fight in the front yard. In every picture, in every album, his family was there, but Eric was not.
It didn’t matter how far back or forward Nick went. It was as though Eric had been erased completely. Snipped out of the world, replaced with hungry mouths, and the shuddering earth. And Nick was the only one who remembered. Because he’d seen the darkness and been seen by it in turn? Because the darkness had breathed on him and it knew him. Because he was still there, and he hadn’t left. He was with Eric, still crouched in the mouth of whatever had tasted them, no matter how much time had passed.
He tried to shrug the thoughts away, but they remained. The quarry. The shack in the woods. The woman with stitches in her skin, and her little girl. Eric. It all fit somehow. Or maybe it didn’t, and Nick was the one coming undone.
Maybe he’d only ever had two cousins, one who’d grown up to be a doctor, the other a lawyer. Maybe he only had them and a sister who was now a deputy in the sheriff’s office. Maybe Nick had invented Eric out of whole cloth, wanting someone to look up to him. Someone who needed him. Val, Deb, and Lindy’s careers all revolved around helping people. What did he have? A divorce. A shitty, beat-up car. A crappy job in a warehouse. A head full of memories no one else had—Eric, and trees that didn’t grow the right way. A woman covered in stitches, and the earth covered in scars.
“Shit.” Nick closed the album, pressing the heels of his hands against the ache behind his eyes.
Carrying his beer, Nick stepped onto the back porch. His father’s heavy-duty mag light sat on the railing as if his father would be back for it at any minute. Nick aimed its beam at the screen of trees bordering the yard.
The light flattened the trunks—stark, gray lines drawn on the night. His breath snagged; a figure stood between the trees, small and pale. A child just Eric’s size. He swung the light back, making shadows jump. Nothing. Nothing but a gap, slightly larger than the rest, between the trees. The start of the trail he and Val and his cousins had taken on their summer treks. Waiting.
• • •
“It’s too high.” Eric stood on the top step leading down into the quarry, skin starting to pink and eyes growing big with the threat of tears.
The girls had already gone ahead. Nick briefly considered leaving his cousin behind. If he lifted Eric down the steps, he’d have to haul him back up again on the way home. Nick sighed, adjusting the strap of his backpack.
“I’ll help you.”
They shouldn’t be here. At very least they’d get in trouble with their parents if some other concerned adult didn’t catch them first. He’d said as much before they set out, but once Deb latched onto an idea, she rarely let go.
A splash followed sounded from below as one of the girls skipped a stone across the water pooled at the bottom of the quarry. The water was eerily blue, like an eye watching Nick as he lifted Eric down step by step. A dim shape flickered, coiling under the opaque surface. Nick almost missed his step. Loose stones skidded under his feet.
“Hurry up!” Val shaded her eyes, looking up at him.
Nick blinked. There was nothing under the surface of the water, just the endless blue, unsettling enough.
By the time they reached the bottom, Nick’s arms ached from carrying Eric. The girls had abandoned the water, their attention fixed on something one tier up from the eye-watering blue. Ignoring his shaking muscles, Nick boosted Eric, and scrambled up beside them.
“What do you think it is?” Val asked.
“It’s a tunnel. Duh.” Deb picked up a loose stone, angling her wrist back to toss it into the dark.
“Wait.” Nick grabbed her arm.
Deb turned, mouth twisted in a frown that crept into a smirk at Nick’s tone of alarm. He let go, unsure why he’d stopped her. The unease remained as he got a better look at the tunnel, barely hip-height and burrowing back into the rock. Bright as the sun was, Nick couldn’t see more than a few inches past the entrance. A creeping sensation spread through him. He tried to shrug it off, but his whole back felt cold and Nick fought the urge to spin around and see if someone was watching them.
“Let’s eat first, then we can explore.”
Nick reached into his backpack hoping Deb would forget about the hole by the time they finished their packed lunch. Deb’s smirk only deepened. She cocked her wrist back again, deliberately meeting Nick’s eye, then let the stone fly. Nick stifled a choked sound, missing whether an echo came back or not. Not satisfied, Deb frowned.
“Hey, Eric. You should check it out.” Deb caught her little brother by the shoulders, steering him toward the hole.
“I don’t wanna.” Eric dug his heels in, leaning back against his sister.
“Leave him alone.” Nick reached for Deb, but she sidestepped him.
“He’s the only one small enough.” Deb shoved Eric harder.
Eric’s sneakers scuffed, finding no purchase. Nick could see him building toward a full-throated howl, and threw a glance at Lindy, hoping she’d intervene. Lindy only shrugged. Even though she was the eldest, Deb was their leader. That was the way it had always been.
“Go.” Deb gave Eric a final shove and he tripped forward, landing on hands and knees.
Instead of the broken wail Nick expected, there was only a huff of air, breath released in shock as Eric hit the ground. Deb stepped back, ready to run in case something really did reach out to snatch her brother. But there was nothing. Only that huff of Eric’s breath. Then a huff again, like something breathing back at him.
For a moment, Nick was frozen, then he lurched forward and caught Eric around the waist. The earth shivered. A breath rolled out of the dark, warm and wet. Nick scrambled back, pulling Eric with him. The breath clung to his skin, marking him. A terrible grinding noise rose from the tunnel mouth, something impossibly vast turning over in its dreams. Hungry dreams. Wanting, needing dreams going back to the beginning of time.
Eric let out a piercing shriek, as Nick jerked him backward. The sound finally unfroze Lindy, and she moved to her little brother’s side.
“Look what you did,” Lindy snapped at Deb, her face turning red. “He wet himself.”
Lindy gripped Eric’s arm with one hand, the other poised as if she might slap Deb. Exasperated, Lindy spun on her heel, pulling Eric in her wake. After a moment, Val and Deb trailed behind her, Deb looking only slightly chagrined.
Nick watched them spiral up the path. The same dizzy sensation that had struck him standing at the top of the quarry washed over him in reverse. The sky looked down and the pool looked up, and Nick was caught between them, trapped in the infinite gaze.
He stumbled, fighting the sensation of falling upward. Glancing back at the hole one last time, he hurried after his sister and cousins. The hole was too deliberate to be natural. Someone had put it there. And it was hungry.
• • •
“What do you know about the history of the holler?” Nick toyed with a half-empty beer bottle.
“What do you mean?” Val looked up from her own beer.
Noise from the television filtered over from the far side of the room where his nephews sat on the couch that divided Val’s open floor plan. In the kitchen, Nick could hear Val’s husband loading their dinner plates into the dishwasher.
“You know, like what was here before there was a town.” Nick shrugged, trying to squirm out from under Val’s scrutiny.
“Grandpa had some local history books that are probably still in the attic at Mom and Dad’s place. Why?”
Before Nick could even try to come up with a plausible explanation, his eldest nephew’s voice rose over the sound of the television.
“Stitch witch. Stitch witch.”
“Mom!” Joey’s voice cut through his brother’s. “Make him stop.”
Val sighed and rose.
“That’s enough you two. Time for bed.”
“But Mom . . . ”
“No buts. Bed. Now.”
Reluctantly, the boys turned off the TV, dragging their feet as they retreated down the hall to their shared room.
“What’s a stitch witch?” Nick tensed, but he couldn’t help asking the question.
“A departmental nightmare that’s already becoming local legend.” Val took a long pull from her beer as she reclaimed her seat.
“About six months ago, we got a call about a woman’s body dumped by the side of the highway. Right along the road leading into town.”
Nick flinched, thinking of the pile of rags he’d seen. Rags in the shape of a body. But of course there’d been nothing there. Val continued.
“You know the holler. Nothing ever happens here worse than a speeding ticket.” Val rolled her shoulders against tension.
Except the earth opening to swallow his cousin whole. Nick kept his mouth shut.
“We figured foul play, but the coroner said heart failure. Our best guess is she was trying to walk out of town and collapsed where we found her.”
Val held up her hand as if Nick would interrupt her, even though his lips were pressed together. He clenched his hands together under the table, resisting the urge to look out the window out to see if the small, pale figure of their cousin watched them.
“It gets weirder,” Val said. “She had no ID and no one came forward to claim her body. A search for dental records and fingerprints turned up nothing, like she was living completely off the grid. Even her clothing looked homemade.”
Val glanced back toward the hallway where the boys had retreated to their bedroom before continuing.
“There’s this kid in our department who works reception, Ben Elmer, fresh out of college. He’s a good kid, good at his job, but a bit of a conspiracy nut. He swears up and down the woman has to be Annabelle May, this girl who disappeared along with her family back in the 1950s when she was just six years old. There was some crazy rumor going around about cannibals and cult activity, the Keepers of the Starving Man or some kind of bullshit.”
Val took another sip from her beer, making a face like it had gone flat or sour. Nick stared at her. There was no flicker of recognition in Val’s eyes when she mentioned cannibals, or the woods. Like the entire afternoon, the entire summer had been erased along with Eric. Fear twisted through him. How could he be the only one who remembered?
“The woman was probably in her early sixties, so the timeline would be right.” Val picked at the edge of her beer label. “The whole thing is just so far-fetched. Except sometimes I wonder. She . . . Her body was completely covered in stitches. Not medical stitches, but like some bizarre form of self-mutilation. Some kind of ritual. Maybe there’s something to Ben’s theory after all, but Annabelle May was young enough when she disappeared, there’s nothing in the database on her. We can only guess. Now kids are threatening each other with the ‘stitch witch’.”
Nick almost knocked his beer over, catching it just before it fell.
“Hey, you okay?” Val tapped the table to get his attention, and Nick looked up, startled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The woman with stitches in her skin. The woman from the shack. The body on the side of the road.
“Sorry.” Nick shook his head, standing. “I should probably get going anyway. Thanks for dinner.”
“Any time.” Val frowned. The way she looked at him, it was as if she thought he was going to fly apart at any minute.
And maybe he was. The stitches were coming undone. He could feel them, pulling, loosening, coming free. The holler was a wound that wouldn’t close, and the darkness inside its skin was just waiting to break free.
• • •
Nick tugged the cord, flooding the attic with light. He felt guilty about leaving Val’s in such a hurry. He could have tried telling her the truth, but something in the back of his head insisted she wouldn’t understand. She didn’t remember Eric. She’d never heard the earth howl, or felt the sky looking at her with its merciless eye.
A narrow path wound between piles of boxes. Somewhere in here were his grandfather’s books, the ones Val had mentioned. It was after midnight. He should be asleep. Exhaustion thrummed in the space behind his eyes, a steady beat. At the same time, wired tension sung a counterpoint. Tired as he was, he might never sleep again.
Focus. Concentrate. He moved between the boxes. If he didn’t pay attention he might . . .
The world tilted. Defying the attic’s confines, the path under his feet spiraled inward. Down into the quarry, down to the blue eye in the hollow of stone. Down between the trees and the raised barrows of earth, hunger humming back at him from underground, his steps barely keeping it contained. He walked the wound, stitching it closed.
Above him, the sky opened. Instead of piled boxes, mounds of earth guided his steps. Wind hissed over him like crashing waves. A tide retreating deep under the earth.
“The king comes to his castle. The king comes to the hollow.”
Nick struck his shin against a box. It wasn’t until he hit the attic floor on his hands and knees, biting his tongue, that he realized he’d been speaking aloud. Where had those words come from? Nonsense coming from somewhere deep inside him, feeling true. The beer he’d carried into the attic sprayed foam as it rolled across the floor, coming to rest against a box labeled Dad’s Books in his mother’s careful hand.
It was all so absurd that a ragged chuckle escaped him, bouncing strangely off the walls. The sound cut off almost as soon as it started. His stomach growled. Nick grabbed a pile of books from the box, scrambling down the narrow attic steps. The roof could peel away at any moment, and there would be nothing between him and the sky.
Nick set himself up at the kitchen table with a fresh beer. He sipped, paging through his grandfather’s books until a section written by a man who’d worked on the crew digging the quarry caught his attention.
• • •
. . . told the mining company not to send anymore men to King’s Hollow because of an attack by the local Indian tribe. They hadn’t just attacked the miners, they’d attacked their families. Two dozen people in all. Their bodies were found stacked in the mining tunnels, piled one on top of the other, almost to the ceiling. My grand-daddy worked for the mining company, and he was one of the few who survived. He said the story about the Indians was a lie. The Indians tried to warn the miners. They said there were ways to cut the earth—patterns to keep the “the Hungry Way” from opening. My grand-daddy told me how Indians showed the miners mounds they’d built in the earth, but the miners called them godless heathens, and kept digging the way they had been before.
That story about the Indian massacre was just what the foreman reported back to his bosses at the mining company so he wouldn’t have to admit his own men went mad. My grand-daddy was sleeping in a tent right next to where one of the men cut his own son’s throat before going after the boy’s ma. The screaming woke my grand-daddy. He heard the man raving about the dark coming up from under the ground and how he had to build a wall of flesh to stop it. That’s when my grand-daddy ran.
I never had trouble believing my grand-daddy’s stories. There were stories when I worked the quarry crew, too. Men who heard voices whispering from the stone, saw things out of the corner of their eyes. There were stories about one man who took his family into the woods to start some kind of crazy cult. The stories said he swallowed the darkness to keep it from devouring the world. I don’t know about that, but I do know sixteen men were murdered. We found their bodies crammed into low, ugly tunnels scratched into the quarry walls, barely big enough to fit a child. There shouldn’t have been tunnels there. Whoever killed those men must have dug them. And whatever darkness he found when he started to dig must have scared him bad enough that he crammed the bodies in there to stop up the holes, just like those miners did in my grand-daddy’s time.
• • •
Nick jerked awake, a sour taste in his mouth. He didn’t remember falling asleep, especially not curled awkwardly on the couch with his grandfather’s history books piled around him. Through the gap in the curtains, he could see the sky was just starting to lighten. He’d been dreaming about endlessly climbing down the steps of the quarry, and remnants of the dream still clung to him.
He set coffee going. Once it was ready, Nick carried a mug onto the back porch. Chill seeped from the boards to his bare feet as he scanned the trees. Mist curled, blurring the woods and creating the illusion of a shadow moving between the tree trunks. A child-sized figure creeping low to the ground, playing hide and seek. Nick caught himself against the porch rail, just about step onto the grass. Hot coffee sloshed over his hand.
What happens when the stitches come undone?
Maybe the better question was, what would happen when he came undone? Because it was happening. Or it had already happened. Melanie, his job, his apartment, everything he’d left behind—they had always been temporary. He was always coming back here.
“The king comes to his castle. The king walks the hungry way. The king devours the dark, and the king is consumed.”
The words sounded flat, but Nick recognized his own voice. His throat ached; he tasted blood. His feet itched to walk, the pattern calling him.
Nick turned his back on the woods and stepped inside. He dumped the rest of his coffee in the sink before moving to the bedroom to pull on jeans, a heavy flannel shirt, and thick woolen socks. He filled his pockets with things he probably wouldn’t need—a flashlight, a package of matches, granola bars, a bottle of water. He left his phone behind. The last thing he took was his father’s old machete, still sharp. He could use it to clear a path, though Nick suspected the way would largely be clear, waiting for him.
• • •
The sky showed flat gray between the neat, even stitches of the trees. A sheen of sweat gathered as Nick swung the machete, less to cut brush and more to release nervous energy. Sooner than expected, he came to a downed tree, the downed tree. He was certain it was the same one. Earth clotted the exposed roots. Nick had the sudden urge to curl up in their shadow. Dig right in. The dark would be warm and moist, breathing on him.
He kept walking. Branches stirred, restless, wind hushing over them in a retreating tide. But the wind was a layer within the sky, touching only the trees. Below, everything lay still. Not even insects chirred.
Nick stopped abruptly. The shack was there, between the trees. His feet had spiraled him through the labyrinth, through the maze. The king, coming to his castle. The king coming home.
Something flickered in the corner of his vision. Nick turned to see Eric running barefoot through the trees. He vanished behind the shack, and the ground shivered. A hungry, grinding sound, like one he’d heard years ago, like all the trees bending toward him at once even though they stayed utterly still.
Part of the shack’s roof had collapsed and been patched with newer material. New enough the tin hadn’t rusted yet. The stitch witch. Annabelle May, or whoever she had been. She was dead. Val had told him. Nick had seen her body for himself, or at least the echo of it, his mind already coming undone the moment he entered the holler. Was someone else living in the shack? Nick moved closer. Close enough to see the clotted shadows behind the dirty windows.
“Dare you,” Nick murmured. “Double dog dare you.”
Gripping the machete, Nick cupped his free hand and pressed his face to the glass. He half-expected to see the little girl, the empty spool of thread rolling past her knee. But a woman stood next to a rough wooden table, her back to him. She took a knife from the table and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt, which looked homemade. Her sleeves were rolled up, showing jagged stitches crossing her skin.
The woman turned. Nick ducked, pressing against the shack wall below the window. It couldn’t be the same woman. She was dead. There were fewer stitches in her skin, more blank space between the threads. He thought of the little girl playing with the empty spool, the way her mother had scooped her up in her terrible arms. Patterns and patterns, spiraling down into the hungry dark.
Nick pressed his fist against his mouth, biting back a sound that might have been a scream, or a laugh, or a sob. The woman inside the shack must be the little girl, all grown up to take her mother’s place. Maybe the same way the older woman had once taken her own mother’s place years ago. Keepers of the Starving Man. Wasn’t that what Val had called them? A cult of just one family, holding back the dark.
Behind the shack, something in the shed roared. Nick pushed himself up, meaning to run back through the woods to his parents’ house. But his feet turned the other way. Or the woods spun around him. Disoriented, he stopped short, almost smashing into the shed. Somehow, the shack was behind him now, and he was caught between the two buildings. Nick fought to get his breathing under control, deliberately putting his back to the shed and taking a shaky step forward. The shed rose before him. A nightmare, where everything was familiar, but he couldn’t find his way home. Lost in the woods, trapped in the pattern. A choked sob lodged in his throat. He leaned against the shed. After a moment, he pressed his eye to a gap between the boards.
His vision adjusted, unraveling the dark until it became a man hanging from a mass of chains looped around a hook embedded in the ceiling. Old, though Nick couldn’t be sure of his age exactly. Something about him seemed unspeakably ancient. Or as if his flesh was an illusion, holding something much older inside. The man’s arms were pulled painfully above his head, scars covering the wasted flesh between the rusted metal. The man thrashed, throwing his head back and howling.
The earth answered, a groan vibrating up through Nick’s feet. The stitches were coming undone. Nick could feel it, the threads popping, the ground opening with a wet chewing sound.
The chained man stilled. Nick pressed closer to the shed. The man swiveled his head, one eye rolling in his skull, a low, sick moon, fixing Nick with its light. The world narrowed. Wind rolled over him, a slick wave. The path spiraled him into a blue eye at the bottom of the quarry, a mote in the gaze of something vast and incomprehensible.
On the far side of the shed, the door creaked open. Light flooded the space as the stitched woman stepped inside. The machete slipped from his hand, thudding to the leaf-strewn ground. He expected the sound to draw attention, but all noise had been sucked out of the world save within the shed itself.
The woman’s footsteps scraped as she moved toward the chained man, drawing the knife from her skirt pocket. Nick watched in horror as she placed the knife against the chained man’s flesh—a rare patch between loops of rusted meta—and peeled it away in one long strip. The man threw his head back, opening his mouth to show blunted teeth that looked as though they’d been deliberately broken. His scream was utterly inhuman. In it, Nick felt the thing in the darkness—the hunger and wanting pressed against the skin of the world.
And for a moment, he saw it, too. Not a man chained in a shed, but a vast, roiling darkness contained in human flesh. The thing thrashed, straining against earth and bone. Vast and impossible, reaching everywhere under the earth, around the earth. The dense black between the stars. A system of roots. An ocean. A maw held shut by the scantest of threads. The man who’d gone into the woods to devour the dark. The king in his castle.
The chained man was only a man again as the stitched woman tilted her head back, lowering the strip of flesh into her mouth. Nick gagged, feeling it slide down his own throat. As she chewed and swallowed, the woman pulled a needle and a spool of thread from the same pocket as the knife.
Nick felt the needle’s bright point, his skin puckering around the drag of the thread as the woman pushed it through her arm. The chained man fell still. The roaring of incessant hunger subsided. A low growl, coming up through the earth. Not sated, but contained, stitched up inside the woman.
Nick staggered back, trying one last time to flee. He tripped, hitting the ground and knocking the breath out of his body. The shed door opened. Wheezing, he rolled onto his back, staring up at the white sky between the trees, the eye stitched closed. But it was too late, it had already seen him.
The woman leaned into his field of view. She reached for him, and Nick tried roll away, but she didn’t grab at him. She held her hand out, patient. Dazed, Nick let her pull him to his feet, her stitched palm rough against his. Blood dotted her skin around the fresh thread. It smeared her mouth, too but it was her eyes that held Nick’s attention. Sadness. Weariness such as he’d never seen before. She leaned forward, her voice hoarse as if unused to speaking.
“The king is dying.”
The woman squeezed Nick’s hand, asking him to understand. And he did, the rush of tide finally breaking over him. Ever since the dark had breathed on him, he’d known. A hunger so vast it called the world into being just to have something to consume. Calling the miners and the quarry men to kill and kill and cram the bodies into the earth. Swallowing Eric out of the world. A hunger that knew Nick down to his core.
A hunger so vast only more consumption could hold it at bay. It had called the old man in the shed into the woods to walk the pattern years ago. The king in his castle. The father devouring the dark, and first the mother, then her child, eating from him and stitching it inside their skin. Patterns in the earth and patterns in flesh closing up the hungry way.
“He’s dying,” the woman said again.
Tears hung in her eyes, not for the old man, but for herself, taking her mother’s place. And maybe for Nick. Because someone had to hold back the dark.
“You need to eat,” the woman said.
Nick shook his head, trying to pull his hand away. He pictured the bloody flesh dropped into her mouth. The woman tightened her grip, her voice urgent.
“Eat the dark.”
His eyes widened. He’d seen the thing in the shed for what it was, hunger contained in human skin. And now this woman was asking him to become the same thing?
“I can’t.” Nick tried again to pull free.
“Please.” The word shocked Nick into stillness.
How long had it been since she’d spoken to another human being? She’d never known any other life, but Nick knew what he’d be giving up, what she was asking him to sacrifice, to choose. Except she was asking. Please—not a demand, an entreaty. The woman let go of his hand abruptly, and Nick staggered back, gasping for breath. Because that was it, he had to choose. The darkness had chosen him, but he had to choose it as well. Close the pattern.
He glanced over his shoulder. Eric stood pale between the trees. Nick closed his eyes and saw himself at the bottom of the quarry, caught in the blue eye of something infinite and unfathomable. He saw himself and Eric, children, huddled in the mouth of the earth and feeling it breathe. The terror he’d felt then, multiplied a thousand fold to devour the entire world. That was what would happen if the darkness went unchecked.
Nick opened his eyes. The woman with stitches in her skin continued to watch him. All those empty spaces in his life—Melanie, his shitty job—now he could finally fill them with something that mattered. He could make it right for failing to keep Eric safe all those years ago. He could make it right for Val, for his nephews, and their children years down the road.
Hunger in the pit of his belly, gnawing at him. The stitched woman took his hand again, warm palm pressed against his own. His stomach growled. It had already started. He concentrated on the space, letting it expand, room enough to hold the darkness inside.
“Yes,” he said.
His throat was too tight for any more words. Nick took a step toward the shed, the stitched woman at his side, and Eric’s pale ghost following behind.