The Hollow Ones

Ava hadn’t been back to the lake house in over twenty years. Her parents had died in a car accident just two months ago, and the cabin—her childhood summer home—was now hers. She told herself it would be good to visit. To process. To be alone.

The place hadn’t changed. Still tucked between pines, its porch sagging like a tired smile, the lake stretching wide and frozen just beyond the trees. She stood at the edge of the dock that first evening, wrapped in her dad’s old flannel, staring out at the thick sheet of ice covering the water. In a way that only winter can be, it was quiet, and every sound felt like it was swallowed up. Memories rose and fell. Her mom’s laugh echoing off the trees. Her dad teaching her to fish. The time she fell through the thin ice and was too young to describe what she had seen below the surface when they pulled her out sobbing and with chattering teeth. Faces. Eyes. But she'd been told it was panic by them. merely a dream. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

She spotted the footprints the next morning. Bare, in the snow just under the living room window. Human-ish, but off. Long toes were present. The arches oddly deep. They led from the lake, stopped beneath the glass... and didn’t go back.

She told herself it was nothing. A trick of the snow. Melting. Animals.

That night, the sounds began.

A slow scraping outside. not the wind Not animals. It sounded like fingernails—long ones—dragging across wood. She curled tighter under her blanket, refusing to look out the window. She didn’t sleep.

She noticed handprints on the glass the following morning. Long hands. Wrong somehow.

She attempted to contact Matt, her cousin, but the line hung up. She checked her phone—there was no signal. Her car wouldn't start when she tried to leave. Her stomach turned when she opened the hood because the wires inside had been chewed through like spaghetti. Something sharp. Something precise.

By the third day, she was lighting every candle she could find at night. She stopped opening curtains. She started talking to herself, just to fill the quiet. It wasn’t just fear anymore—it was memory.

She was six years old when she was swallowed by the water. How she hadn’t been scared until she saw the eyes looking up at her from below. Pale, lidless eyes. She’d told her parents they whispered to her. That they wanted her.

She thought she’d imagined it.

However, it's possible that the lake had a longer memory than anyone else. On the fifth night, she saw it.

Just beyond the window. Tall. Pale. The spine is too long, it is as thin as a stick, and the joints bend like broken twigs. It didn’t have a mouth at first—just a smooth face and hollow eyes.

Then it smiled.

The skin split where a mouth should be. Wide. Deep. full of teeth the size of pins She screamed. It didn’t move.

It only tapped the window.

Once. Twice. Three times.

She packed in the morning. She would walk and no longer cared about the car. Twelve miles to the nearest road. She barely made it a mile before the forest changed.

The trees had marks—deep gouges swirling up the bark, like something clawed its way around and around and around. There was a lot of silence. No wind. No birds. Like the world was waiting.

Then she heard footsteps.

All around her. Fast. Too many.

She turned around. The sun had set already. Something was waiting for her when she reached the cabin. It was at the entrance. I am not knocking. Just waiting.

She tried to hide inside. Closet, breath held. Heart pounding so hard she swore it echoed.

She then heard it speak, but not in her ears but in her mind. “We remember you.”

She remembered, too. The lake. The cold. The others beneath the ice.

They had waited.

And now they wanted her back.

The cabin was empty when rescuers discovered it several weeks later. No signs of struggle. The snow was undisturbed.

However, there were footprints close to the dock. Bare. Human-ish.

Leading toward the ice.

And none coming back.