The Last Light of Hollow Creek.

Clara shivered, clinching her fist over the steering wheel of her reliable Subaru. The trees around the tiny rural town of Hollow Creek were veiled in mist. Her headlights struggled to penetrate the mist, and her rough breathing rasped in her throat as she gazed down the road. Too long years had elapsed since she'd returned, but something within her was drawing her in. It was not any whistling young folks; it was a loose-fingered group of loose ends. It was her impression that there was loose business in the black town's past, and she felt it as a tug within.

There was a living Hollow Creek. There were children, families playing out on the street, the quiet hum of small-town living. All of it ended with that summer. The villagers began vanishing, silently at first, here and there, one or two at a time. They just kept vanishing after that. The victims were not random vagrants—there was a connection between them. Neighbor and acquaintance vanished, and no one was left to tell the tale. The town fell silent, the once-thriving streets deserted. The only interruption of the silence came in the evil rumor that descended upon them, whispered by the survivors: Hollow Creek was haunted. The last of Clara's family to flee from them, leaving it in their wake. They rushed to pack jam in bags in darkness, her mother a ghostly color.

Clara didn't know why they left in such a rush, but her mother's enormous, unspoken-fearful eyes caused her to hope that something far, far worse than she could even start to imagine occurred in Hollow Creek. Years have gone by and Clara steps into the old homestead; her mother's death hadn't necessitated questions, but answers. Before Clara learned about her mother's diary hidden in the attic, she had something that she did not want to know. The town had been constructed by a series of families who, for some reason unknown, had settled in Hollow Creek—a cover-up no one would talk about.

Hollow Creek was not a town. It had been constructed on a place of power, a place of power the original families initially learned to be sacred. They had cut a bargain with something supernatural, something that they had summoned up in fear, in mortality, in recalled memory. Clara's response was horror-fearful amazement as she drove her Subaru into the vacant town square. The houses stood over her like ginormous vacuum cleaners, paint years since peeled in thin, broken sheets, their windows hollow eye sockets glaring back. Wind still whistled low whining, humming off leaves. Air was heavy, heavy with the near-sound of weight, as if the world itself leaned hard on history—filthy history. She fetched her flashlight out of the front seat and moved out of the car, crunching gravel under the car. Behind her, the town square was black, the founder's statue looming in the fading night. Clara's heart pounded but she did not flinch, did not even acknowledge the shiver that chased down her spine.

She walked in front of the town hall, the dance and stutter of the flash of the flashlight, the beam stumbling and reeling into stumbling reeling shadows that danced and staggered out into darkness. Clara didn't budge a hair, a shiver sheet of inching sweat down the nape of her neck. The air hung and clung wet, with rot, with something else—something dead. The town waited.

Her own home was straight before her. opposite the square, its shadow not to be cast by moonlight. She cast a glance in that direction and was swept by a floodtide of fear which welled over and eddied and mingled in her. She waited so long, and here she was now, and she felt the fear a hundredfold greater than it could ever be imagined.

Her front door was crooked on its hinges, ajar. Clara pushed it open and entered. The air reeked of dust and mildew, heavy with nothing. Photographs that once graced her walls now hung in the vacuum, shattered and broken frames covering the floor.

There, in the magazine, the box Clara had discovered in her mother's room, years. On the bed, a small white unlabeled box, but nothing regarding the years. There was an option. The same yellow papered flowers, the same creaking bed with quilted mattress, the same wear-thin. On the bed, a small white unlabeled box.

Clara rattled the box and opened the cover.

It was filled with pages of journals of her mother's grandmother, the yellow ones—her mother's journals.

She read them and discovered the dark ritual that the founders of the town had tried to seek power, a dark ritual with some kind of entity that had been harvesting souls in exchange for wealth. The ritual had been a failure, and the curse had cursed the town to a dark eternity. The families abandoned it, but the curse remained and hung on by the very last of its remnants, who hung on for dear life. Clara's blood burned her as she read the final words: "The town will never be free until the last soul to leave returns. The darkness waits for the last light." The words sent shivers down her spine.

She had heard a whispering—a whispering that existed here and there but nowhere. Clara's anxiety was stretched to the breaking point, hairs stiff on the nape of her neck. She spun around the room, and there was no one. The whispering swelled, its voice a murmuration of voices, all hazy and disparate, like an army of ghosts wailing between the walls of the house.

And she saw it.

From the darkness of the room, he stepped suddenly, a man. Gaunt, gigantic, eyes black void. His lips curled into a foul, puckered leer, its thickness expanding, expanding, spreading wide as a maw.

"You shouldn't have come back," the shape panted, its voice far and inhuman, and closer—closer than that."

Clara retreated, gagging. She attempted to speak, but her throat was dry, her words mired in her chest.

The creature approached, its shape stretching out and increasing on the ground. "You have awakened the hunger of the town. And now it shall not rest until it has consumed you."

Clara was terrified and clutched the black stone that she had pulled out of the trunk, the stone her mother wrote about in the diary. She tossed the stone at the monster, and as the rock struck the monster, the room was filled with a whirlpool of blackness.

The creature let out a roar—a cry inhuman and one that caused the walls of the house to tremble. The walls trembled, and Clara was being drawn down into the darkness, her body convulsing against her will. But as it had almost engulfed her, the stone itself trembled, driving the glinting javelin that repelled the creature.

With one last death-cry shriek, the monster evaporated to steam, the strangling blackness closing over its point of origin with it. Clara collapsed to the ground, panting.

The curse wasn't broken, though. It had only been delayed.

Clara stepped into the darkness, hearing the whispering behind her. Hollow Creek echoed again. And it would always crave another victim who'd ventured too far.

This is a voice of pseudo-town backwoods, where buried history seethes and bubbles black magic, flavored with undertones of American fear of isolation and history that refuses to remain buried. The mix of mind horror and ghost story will appeal to those readers who enjoy the paranormal quietness of the backwoods American landscape, where history is filthy and open wide, full of secrets.