Season 2 : The Hollowing: How a Village’s Children Became Vessels for Something Older

Chapter 9: The Child Who Could Not Dream

April 6th, 1982 – 3:03 AM

The orphanage slept.

Every window now blacked out, as though reality itself had stopped reflecting. The clocks had ceased ticking, and in every room .... even in the staff quarters .... mouths twitched silently in shared torment.

All, except one.

Samuel walked alone.

The candle he held didn’t flicker, even as the air grew colder than death’s breath. The darkness around him wasn’t just shadow .... it felt aware, retreating from his presence, as if afraid.

He couldn’t hear the screams.

He couldn’t hear the lullaby.

And so, he couldn’t dream.

And in this place, that made him the most dangerous thing alive.

Inside the Others' Dreams

Every other soul remained trapped in the nightmare that the hunger fed on.

In Sister Miriam’s dream, she was locked inside a confession booth, her mouth sewn shut, and outside, a thousand faceless children begged for penance.

In Rachel's dream, she was alone in a dinner hall where every plate was filled with her own organs .... the more she ate, the more she forgot.

But in Samuel's mind…

There was only silence.

Samuel's Secret

What no one knew .... not even the entity .... was that Samuel had never dreamed in his life.

Born with a malformed temporal lobe, his brain could never fully enter REM sleep. Instead of dreaming, he watched .... as if outside himself, able to witness things others couldn’t. His waking life bled into the paranormal.

His deafness wasn’t just physical. It was spiritual. He didn’t receive the call of the god-in-the-walls.

Which is why the entity, now speaking through Callie’s mouth, couldn’t find him.

But Samuel could see it.

In every mirror.

In every corner.

In the frost on the windowpanes.

The Room with No Name

Samuel followed the red markings down into the east wing .... the part of the orphanage closed off after the fire in 1967.

He pushed open a door with no number.

The room inside was impossibly large, like a cathedral stitched together with mismatched architecture .... black wooden beams hanging upside-down, rusted chandeliers made of bones, and stained glass windows showing scenes from the dreams of the dead.

At the center of the room was a cradle.

Old. Charred. Smoking slightly.

Inside was a bundle.

A baby, with no face.

And next to it, standing motionless, was Callie.

The Confrontation Begins

Callie turned slowly. Her face was blank now .... no longer hers.

Her mouth opened and a choir of whispering children erupted:

“YOU WHO CANNOT SLEEP. YOU WHO HAVE NO DOORS.

WHY DO YOU COME HERE, LITTLE BONE THING?”

Samuel stepped forward and placed his hand over his own heart.

He mouthed one word.

Callie read his lips.

“Because I remember.”

The room groaned. The baby in the cradle began to twitch violently.

It screamed, not with a voice, but by bending reality .... the walls cracked, the glass shattered inward, and the ceiling bled ash.

The Truth of the Cradle

In that moment, Callie’s body surged forward .... overtaken .... as the hunger tried to seize Samuel.

But it couldn’t.

Not just because he couldn’t dream .... but because he remembered what the others had forgotten:

The orphanage once had a name.

The fire was not an accident.

The children who died were never buried.

And Samuel was born the night they burned.

The hunger wasn't born from hate.

It was born from forgetting.

The unmarked cradle held the first child who was erased from history. A god not created, but neglected into existence.

Samuel touched the cradle.

The bundle burst into light and ash.

The Room Collapses

Callie screamed .... really screamed .... for the first time in the entire story. Her own voice returned. The god fled her mouth in the form of black smoke, which curled and howled toward the ceiling.

Samuel, bleeding from his ears and eyes, fell to the ground .... unconscious, but smiling.

Chapter 9 Ends With…

• The hunger has been driven out of Callie .... but not destroyed.

• The cradle is empty. The entity’s core has been burned out, but it may still live in the dreamers.

• Samuel’s immunity to dreaming is not just neurological .... it's mystical.

• His memory becomes the only living archive of what happened that night in 1967.

CHAPTER 10: THE FINAL ROOM

The hallway to the east wing had not existed the day before.

Samuel knew because he’d walked the perimeter twice .... once while counting cracks in the plaster, and once more in search of a scream that had never been traced. But now, between a ruptured water pipe and a blistered mural of stick figures burning under a cartoon sun, stood a door that bled condensation.

Painted on the door, in uneven childlike brushstrokes, were the words:

“THE FINAL ROOM LOVES YOU.”

The children had stopped speaking three days ago.

Not by choice. Their tongues had darkened like spoiled meat, too stiff to move, their throats raw from silently mouthing Latin phrases that no one had taught them. Whatever communion had once required words had evolved into something worse ... into a shared instinct.

And that instinct told them:

This was the last threshold.

Documented Note - Dr. Lorne’s 1982 Orphanage Files (Leaked)

"We have no east wing. Not on the original blueprint, nor the emergency drills. When asked about the far hallway, the children either weep or gouge at their own ears.

If you see the door .... do not acknowledge it. It is not there for you."

Callie, the oldest surviving girl, was the first to place her hand on the rusted knob. Her fingers trembled, but not from fear ... from recognition. Samuel saw it too. The knob was a child’s molar, fused to copper, and it pulsed faintly, like a heart.

“What do you see?” Samuel asked her, though speaking felt sacrilegious here.

“I see where I was born,” Callie whispered. “Not in the hospital. Not in the house. Here.”

The door opened inward, like a secret trying to hide itself even as it was exposed.

INSIDE THE FINAL ROOM

There were no walls .... only meat.

Pulsing, wet, translucent flesh formed the chamber's shape, breathing in and out with each step they took. Hanging umbilicals swung from the ceiling, pulsing gently, their ends terminated in blackened cradles, each one holding a paper mache doll of a child’s body .... featureless, sexless, but unmistakably familiar.

“I think one of them is me,” whispered Mateo, pointing to the third cradle on the right.

The others stared.

It looked just like him .... but its chest cavity was stitched shut with human hair.

A slow sound filtered in from above: a low nursery rhyme, backwards, each syllable smearing across the walls like melted wax:

“…burn, burn, the baby sleeps…

mother’s eyes, the cradle keeps…”

Audio File #37 (Recovered from journalist’s recorder)

“The walls… they’re whispering. Not just sounds. They’re saying my mother’s last words. She died before I turned two. How does this place remember?”

THE MEMORY ENGINE

In the center of the room stood a spinning mobile of children’s faces, perfectly preserved, turning slowly above a pit that exhaled steam that smelled of powdered milk and rust.

Each face bore stitched-open eyes and a neutral smile. Samuel recognized three .... all children listed in the orphanage’s forgotten files. Children who were said to have “run away.” One of them, Lacy Holtz, was holding a rattle carved from fingernails.

Mateo backed away. “This is where they store who we used to be.”

Callie knelt beside the pit. The mobile stopped spinning, and a deformed heartbeat sounded from below .... loud, sluggish, yet intelligent. It knew they were there.

THE ENTITY SPEAKS (IN DREAMS)

They didn’t hear it with ears. It arrived in their teeth .... pressure and meaning wrapped in blood-taste:

“You were not taken.

You were made.

Your flesh borrowed.

Now… returned.”

A deep memory emerged in all of them .... of lying in cribs, of a humming noise beneath the mattress, of lullabies sung in a voice too large for the room.

Samuel screamed and held his head. “It’s inside my skull. It’s using my eyes to see itself!”

Security Footage Transcript (Frame 1839)

Three children appear to be praying. One begins to convulse. The mobile above them stops turning. A shadow .... twelve feet tall .... is seen behind them, though no light source exists to cause it.

Frame glitches at 00:07:43. Playback corrupted.

REVELATION: THE CRADLE IS ALIVE

Callie stood, bleeding from her nose. “It’s not a room.”

“What is it then?” Samuel gasped.

She turned, her irises now hollow.

“It’s the inside of the first cradle ever built. The first place a child was laid to sleep. The first to ever dream. And it still wants us.”

They realized then:

The room had been dreaming them back into itself.

It had allowed them to leave, to grow ... only so it could harvest their returned selves.

Mateo collapsed. From his back grew a second spine, winding up toward his neck. It whispered, echoing their mother's voices.

THE WAY OUT

There was no exit.

The door had dissolved.

But the heartbeat slowed… watching them, tasting their resolve. Samuel looked down into the pit and whispered:

“If you want us back…

take me. Not them.”

The heartbeat surged.

Callie screamed. The walls folded inward, closer, like ribs closing over a prayer.

CHAPTER 11 : Names in the Walls: The Hallway That Rewrites Your Identity

The walls stopped breathing.

For a moment, Samuel thought they had escaped ... or at least been dismissed by the thing that called itself the Cradle. But escape here wasn’t a corridor or a door. It was forgetting.

Forgetting your name.

Your past.

Your self.

When Callie turned to him in the silence, her eyes were blank ... not frightened, not possessed. Erased.

📻 Recovered Field Recording - Archive 11:14

“We came through the fleshy room, all right. But something’s off.

Callie doesn’t answer to her name. Mateo just stands at the wall.

The wall is whispering to him. It’s... it’s saying things we haven't told anyone.”

Samuel B., Survivor (last recorded entry)

A CORRIDOR OF IDENTITIES

The chamber had changed.

Gone were the cradles and meat-walls. Now, they stood in a long hallway with perfectly smooth surfaces made of black glass ... but if one looked closely, the surface wasn’t solid. It was membrane, and it shimmered like the inside of an eyelid.

Written into the walls ... thousands of names ... carved in sharp little loops, as if scratched by a trembling hand.

Each name pulsed faintly, glowing under the skin-like surface.

Mateo spoke first. “That’s my name.”

Samuel nodded. “I see mine too.”

But the horror began when Callie turned to face her reflection and saw not one name, but seven.

All hers.

All different.

“Who’s… Callyna?” she asked aloud.

The walls vibrated.

A humming sound ... melodic but alien ... filled the air.

📝 Incident Log - Rejected by Diocese Investigation

Subject stared into wall surface for 23 minutes. When forcibly removed, began speaking a dead dialect of Aramaic.

Claimed her original name was stolen in infancy and rewritten here.

Declared herself unfit to continue 'dreaming someone else’s life.'

THE NAMES BEGIN TO SING

Suddenly, the names in the walls began to move.

They rearranged, one letter at a time, like magnetic poetry aligning into sentences:

“I AM YOU. YOU ARE NOT YOURSELF. COME BACK TO THE BEGINNING.”

With each new phrase, the children groaned in pain, clutching their heads as if each message was being carved into them. Blood dripped from Callie’s nose again ... and this time, it spelled her true name across the floorboards in jagged script.

CALLYNA MEROTH, FIRST DREAMED.

Samuel, still resisting, grabbed Mateo. “Don’t look at the wall. Don’t read it. It’s rewriting you.”

But Mateo… was already gone.

MATEO’S DISSOLUTION

One moment, he was there.

The next, his name — the glowing letters in the wall — blinked out.

So did his body.

Not in a puff of smoke. Not with a scream.

But a quiet un-becoming.

The wall absorbed his identity like an umbilical cord pulling inward. He had been… taken back.

Callie began to weep, clawing her arms. “It’s sorting us. Sending the ones it remembers back to where they were first imagined.”

Disputed Vatican Manuscript 1886

...“Names are not simply labels. They are permissions.

To name a child is to invite a spirit to live in them.

To rename is to summon another.

This is how the first Cradle gained entry into our world ... by writing its own names across flesh.”...

THE WHISPERING WALLS DEMAND AN OFFERING

A single phrase now began to repeat, etched across every surface:

“WHO IS REAL?”

“WHO WAS FIRST?”

“SAY YOUR NAME.”

Callie covered her ears, screaming. “If we say it… it takes us!”

Samuel backed away from the reflective wall, its surface now crawling with hands pressed from the other side, as if a thousand unborn versions of themselves were reaching out to reclaim what had been separated.

SAMUEL’S TEST

Samuel was fading ... memories slipping like fingers through oil.

• What was his mother’s face?

• His first pet?

• His real surname?

All of it blurred.

He looked at the wall and saw his name spelled wrong.

Samwell.

And another version beside it:

SAM. AL. LUEL.

“That's not me!” he shouted.

The wall shivered, as if laughing.

📸 Security Camera Still (Degraded):

One child visible, arms outstretched.

Wall behind them mimics posture ... then erupts with black fluid forming the words:

“PROVE YOU EXIST.”

THE CHOICE

Samuel turned to Callie. “It wants us to say our names, to confirm we belong here. That’s how it reclaims us.”

Callie nodded slowly. “Then we lie. We make new names.”

They faced the wall and shouted:

“My name is NOBODY.”

“I am UNWRITTEN.”

The walls convulsed.

Names blurred.

The singing halted.

And for the first time… they saw a door.

THE DOOR THAT SHOULD NOT BE

Unlike the others, this one was not flesh, nor wood, nor molar. It was made of dried paper ... tightly pressed childlike drawings of family homes, crayon suns, and blue stick mothers that had been stitched together into a doorframe.

The doorknob was a teddy bear’s eye.

Callie stepped forward. “This leads to the room that invented us.”

Samuel: “And what’s in there?”

She replied softly.

“The one who first whispered our names.”

CHAPTER 12: THE ARCHITECT OF DREAMED CHILDREN: Inside the Cathedral of Imaginary Pain

There was no sound when the door of paper and stitched dreams swung open.

Just air ... still and heavy ... pregnant with purpose.

Not wind, not breath. Something else: the pressure of intention, as if this place had been waiting for them for a very long time.

A SANCTUARY OF FORGOTTEN INVENTIONS

Inside, the space opened impossibly wide ... a cathedral of childhood imagination gone rotten.

The ceiling stretched upward into mist, held aloft by support beams shaped like toy soldiers twisted into crucifixion poses. Stained-glass windows flickered with animated memories, looping in ghostly color:

• A birthday party that never happened.

• A mother’s hug that was imagined, not earned.

• A nightlight that never turned on ... because there was never a room.

All of it was unreal. But to the children who had imagined it, it had been everything.

Callie whispered, “This… is where we were written.”

Recovered Recording - Black Tape Fragment 012

“It makes sense now. The Cradle didn’t just haunt us. It invented us.

We’re stories it wrote to fill its empty halls.

We never left the orphanage. Because we were never really born.”

THE ARCHITECT REVEALS HIMSELF

At the center of the cathedral stood a figure of stitched shadows ... not quite man, not quite void. His robes billowed though there was no wind. His face, a lattice of fingers, rearranged themselves with every blink, like a thousand caregivers never seen clearly in memory.

He spoke, and his voice was a hundred lullabies played backward.

“You were the best of my imaginings,” he said softly.

“A boy with sadness so heavy, even dreams would drown in it.

A girl with memories she never lived, stitched perfectly to seem true.

You were beautiful ... because you were hollow.”

Samuel stepped forward, trembling. “What… are you?”

The figure bowed slightly. “I am the Architect. The author of imaginary pain.”

📜 Fragmented Manuscript - The Architect’s Pages (Page 44)

...“Before the world had words, it had fears.

I fed on them. Dreamt children to taste them.

I made them need love ... then made it unreachable.

That is how they ripen.”...

THE TRUTH OF THEIR EXISTENCE

Callie collapsed to her knees, weeping.

The Architect stepped forward and placed a cold hand of paper on her shoulder.

“You remember loving your mother. That was my finest page. You remember Mateo laughing. I designed him as comfort. Samuel’s anger? That was the anchor to keep you returning.”

He turned to Samuel, now wild-eyed.

“You were never abandoned. You were imagined.

A vessel made of sorrow, pre-loaded with betrayal, perfectly shaped to be haunted.”

SAMUEL’S REJECTION

Samuel rose. “Then why let us come this far? Why let us see you?”

The Architect’s finger-mouths smiled.

“Because one of you is ready. One of you wants to be the next Author. To write others. To carry the hunger.”

He extended a quill made from Mateo’s spine.

“Take it. Choose to remember nothing else. Fill the Cradle again.”

Callie screamed, “Don’t!”

THE CHOICE

Samuel stared at the quill.

It vibrated in his hand, whispering promises:

“You will never be forgotten.”

“You will never be powerless.”

“You will name others ... and they will live by your rules.”

He raised it...

...then turned and drove it into the Architect’s chest.

THE COLLAPSE

The Architect let out a sigh ... not of pain, but release.

“Then… none of us are real anymore.”

The cathedral shuddered.

Stained glass cracked.

The wooden pews ... made of collapsed memories ... caught fire with a color that didn’t exist in reality.

The walls bled ink.

Not red. Not black.

But the color of erasure.

Samuel pulled Callie up. “RUN.”

THE ESCAPE THROUGH UNMAKING

There was no door this time.

But the fire burned a tear in the air itself. A hole in the narrative.

They dove through it ... hand in hand ... falling through un-writtenness, through discarded stories, through voices that had never been born.

They landed in a familiar place.

BACK IN THE WAKING WORLD… OR NOT

Callie opened her eyes in her own bed.

Her real one.

Sunlight outside. No whispers. No walls of names.

She gasped.

Samuel’s voice came through the open window: “You okay?”

She nodded.

But when she turned to the mirror, her reflection blinked… twice.

Once for her.

Once for the girl she used to be

FINAL CHAPTER: WE, THE UNWRITTEN:

You don't finish a haunted story.

You let it stop speaking."

...Final annotation, The Cradle Codex

OPENING INTO UNREALITY

Samuel blinked.

Sunlight dappled the floorboards of a home that never existed.

A clock ticked in rhythm with a mother’s imagined lullaby.

The real world .. if it could still be called that .. had taken him back. Or placed him somewhere to feel like he was back. But he knew the truth now.

He walked down the stairs and into the kitchen where Callie sat with a cup of tea that steamed, then froze, then melted without ever cooling.

“We made it,” she said.

But her voice held no victory.

Just exhaustion.

And a haunting kind of grief.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF CHOICE

The Cradle had collapsed. Or… it had written an ending for itself when Samuel refused the quill.

The Architect was dead.

The stories had been burned.

Their memories?

In limbo.

“So what now?” Callie whispered.

“We’re back. But were we ever real enough to matter?”

Samuel looked at his hands. Still scarred. Still trembling.

But alive.

“Maybe we’re not real in the way others are. But we’re real to each other. That’s enough.”

A moment of silence passed between them. Then the house shimmered.

VISITS FROM THE UNFINISHED

That night, it came.

Not a monster. Not a shadow.

But a child with no face. No voice. Just the outline of a name never written.

It sat at the foot of Callie’s bed, tracing its finger in the air, spelling something no one could read.

She didn’t scream. She watched it carefully.

“You weren’t in our story,” she said.

“Were you… waiting to be written?”

The child tilted its head.

Then vanished.

CALLIE’S THEORY

The next morning, Callie brought out a journal she hadn’t opened in years. The one she’d used to draw dream siblings and write letters to invisible friends when she was alone.

It was full of names.

Names of children who’d never lived.

Of nightmares she’d forgotten.

Of places she’d dreamt in fevers as a child.

“I think I was one of them,” she said.

“One of the early drafts.

And so were you.”

Samuel shook his head. “Then how are we here?”

Callie smiled. “Because we rejected the author. We un-wrote the ending.”

UNRAVELING TIME

Time didn’t work properly anymore.

Days looped. Mornings turned to night before breakfast ended.

Sometimes they woke in different cities.

Sometimes in different ages.

Once, Samuel looked in the mirror and saw himself as an old man.

Another time, he was a child again, watching Callie from a distance, as if they were actors in a re-written script.

They were no longer bound by linear storytelling.

They had escaped the Narrative Machine.

But others were still caught inside.

THE LAST ROOM

Weeks later .. or maybe years .. they found the door again.

Not in a haunted building. Not in a crumbling orphanage.

But in the back of a library, tucked behind books no one checked out anymore.

A single label above it:

“📖 Unfinished Manuscripts”

They opened it.

And stepped into a room made of blank pages .. walls, floor, sky .. all waiting to be written.

Dozens of children stood there.

Some with blurred faces.

Others who looked just like them.

THE AWAKENING

Each child was holding a piece of themselves:

• A music box with no melody.

• A locket with a blank portrait.

• A page with a title but no story.

They looked up as Callie and Samuel entered.

“You came back,” one of them whispered.

“Are you… our parents?”

Callie knelt, tears in her eyes.

“No. But we remember what it was like to wait. And to hurt.

And to be used.”

Samuel stepped forward and held out his hand.

“We don’t want to write you. We want to help you forget.”

THE RELEASE

They gathered the children.

One by one, they lit a small fire in the center of the room .. not a destructive one, but a cleansing fire, one that burned the strings of narrative instead of the souls bound to them.

The children stepped into the fire and vanished, one by one, smiling .. finally freed from the need to be remembered.

Callie and Samuel were the last.

“Do we go too?” she asked.

“No,” Samuel said. “We stay.

Someone has to guard the gate.

And make sure no one starts writing again.”

AFTERMATH

Now, when people dream too deeply…

When a child invents an imaginary friend that seems too vivid…

When someone wakes up crying from a memory they never lived…

They come to Callie and Samuel.

They whisper a story, and if it’s too dark, too sharp, too heavy with hunger… they cut it loose.

They are the Keepers of the Unwritten now.

The ones who protect reality from being infected again.

FINAL SCENE

A blank notebook sits on a desk.

It flutters open as if by wind.

A voice whispers:

“Once upon a..”

And a hand slams it shut.

Fade to black.

END OF THE HAUNTED STORY: THE HOLLOWING

(But somewhere, something else just woke up)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This story came from the fear not of death… but of not existing at all.

Of being a name someone forgot to say. A child someone only imagined once and then abandoned in thought.

Thank you for following The Hollowing ... a haunted tale of unreliable memory, parasitic authorship, and the cost of being forgotten.

If this story moved you ... if you felt the ache of Samuel, the sorrow of Callie, or the haunting pull of imagined children ... I invite you to follow, comment, and subscribe.

Because the next story is already whispering. And it remembers your name.

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