The letter that changed Elias Thorne’s life arrived on a Tuesday, tucked between a credit card offer and a flyer for a local pizzeria. It was typed on thick, cream-coloured stationery that felt anachronistically heavy in his hands. The postmark was from a town he’d never heard of: Blackwood Hollow, West Virginia. The sender was a law firm, informing him that his great-uncle, Alistair Thorne, had passed away and named Elias as the sole heir to his estate.
Elias, an archivist for a sterile, climate-controlled university library, had only a vague, sepia-toned memory of Alistair. He was his grandfather’s estranged brother, a man who had, according to family lore, “gone back to the old ways” and retreated into the Appalachian hills decades ago. He was a ghost in the family tree, a cautionary tale about turning your back on progress. The estate, the letter detailed, consisted of a house, its contents, and the land upon which it stood.
Two weeks later, after a flurry of paperwork and a long, soul-crushing drive that slowly peeled away the layers of civilization, Elias found himself turning off the main highway onto a road that seemed determined to be reclaimed by nature. The asphalt was cracked and webbed with moss. Towering, ancient-looking trees—oak, maple, and the eponymous blackwoods—formed a dense canopy that plunged the road into a perpetual twilight, even at midday. The air grew thick and heavy, saturated with the smell of damp earth, decaying leaves, and something else, something faintly metallic and sweet, like old blood.
He passed a faded wooden sign, its letters barely legible: WELCOME TO BLACKWOOD HOLLOW. POP. 112. The number seemed less a statistic and more a threat. The town itself was a cluster of buildings huddled in a valley, as if seeking comfort from the oppressive, silent judgment of the surrounding mountains. The houses were old, made of dark timber and river stone, with steep-gabled roofs and deep-set windows that looked like vacant eyes. There were no children playing, no dogs barking, only a profound and unnatural quiet. As he drove his sensible sedan down the main street, he felt the weight of unseen gazes. A woman sweeping her porch stopped, her broom held frozen in mid-air. An old man sitting on a bench outside a general store slowly turned his head, his eyes following the car with an unnerving lack of curiosity. They weren’t hostile, not exactly. They were… watchful. Waiting.
The address led him to the edge of the town, where the forest began to press in again. The house was larger than he’d expected, a two-story Victorian that had once been handsome but was now surrendering to a slow, green decay. Ivy clawed at the walls, its tendrils probing the gaps in the warped siding. The paint was a ghost of its former white, peeling away to reveal the dark, weathered wood beneath. It stood alone, a sentinel guarding the border between the hollow and the deep woods.
Elias parked the car and stepped out, the silence immediately swallowing the sound of the engine’s cooling ticks. It was here that he first felt it. A low, subsonic vibration that seemed to emanate from the ground itself. It wasn’t a sound he heard with his ears, but a feeling in the bones of his feet and the fillings in his teeth. A deep, rhythmic thrumming, like a colossal, sleeping heart. He shook his head, attributing it to the long drive and the change in altitude.
The key, a heavy, ornate piece of rusted iron, was exactly where the lawyer said it would be, under a loose stone on the porch. It turned in the lock with a groan of protest, and the heavy oak door swung inward, releasing a sigh of stale, musty air.
The interior was a time capsule. The furniture was heavy and dark, draped in white cloths like a roomful of phantoms. Dust motes danced in the thin shafts of light that penetrated the grimy windows. The air was thick with the scent of old paper, woodsmoke, and that same sweet, metallic tang from outside, only stronger here. It was the smell of a place that had been sealed for a very long time.
As an archivist, Elias felt a professional thrill mixed with his unease. This was a perfectly preserved specimen. He wandered through the downstairs rooms. A parlor with a cold, cavernous fireplace. A dining room with a long table set for one. A kitchen with a cast-iron stove and shelves of canned goods, their labels faded into watercolour blurs.
But it was the study that truly captured him. Bookshelves lined every wall, floor to ceiling, crammed with volumes of all shapes and sizes. These weren’t the paperbacks of a casual reader. They were leather-bound tomes on botany, geology, folklore, and local history, interspersed with more esoteric titles: De Vermis Mysteriis, The Cultes des Goules, and countless hand-bound journals with cracked leather covers. His great-uncle, it seemed, was more than just a recluse; he was a scholar of the strange.
On a massive oak desk in the center of the room, a single, thick journal lay open. Unlike the others, its cover was new, its pages crisp. It was Alistair’s personal log. Elias’s fingers trembled slightly as he ran them over the last entry, written in a spidery, frantic hand.
October 12th.
The Hum is stronger tonight. The Resonance is nearing its peak. They feel it in the town. I see them watching the house. They know my time is short, and they are hungry for the succession. They think the bloodline is a guarantee, a key that fits their lock. Fools. They don’t understand what I’ve been doing all these years. Not guarding the Covenant. Not nurturing their precious Root. I’ve been poisoning it. Starving it. The Thorne bloodline isn’t a key; it’s a cage, and I have spent my life reinforcing the bars. But my strength fails. My body betrays me. The soil calls for a new gardener, and they will seek my replacement. I have made arrangements. I pray he is strong enough to see the truth and not the prize. I pray he has the will to burn the garden down, rather than tend it.
Elias read the entry twice, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. The Hum. The Root. The Covenant. It sounded like the ramblings of a man lost to dementia. Yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling of that vibration he’d felt outside, that deep thrumming in the earth. He looked out the study window. The sun was beginning to set, painting the sky in lurid shades of orange and purple. Down at the end of the long, overgrown driveway, a figure stood motionless. It was the old man from the general store. He was just standing there, silhouetted against the dying light, watching the house.
A sudden, sharp scratching sound came from within the walls of the study. Elias froze, every muscle tensed. It was a dry, rasping sound, like fingernails dragging on old wood. It scurried from one side of the room to the other, then stopped. Silence descended once more, heavier and more menacing than before. He told himself it was a rat, a squirrel, a house settling. But the sound had been too deliberate, too… intentional.
That night, Elias slept poorly in a dusty upstairs bedroom. He dreamed of dark, twisting tunnels deep underground. He dreamed of a vast, pulsating network of black roots, all connected to a central heart that beat with the same slow, deep rhythm he’d felt in the soil. In his dream, the townspeople of Blackwood Hollow were tending to these roots, their faces blank, their movements ritualistic. They would periodically make a cut in a thick, throbbing root, and a dark, sap-like substance would well up. They would collect this sap in wooden bowls and drink it, their eyes glowing with a faint, sickly green light.
He woke up with a gasp, his heart hammering against his ribs. The room was pitch black. The house was silent. But the Hum was there. It was louder now, a tangible presence in the room. It vibrated through the floorboards, through the mattress, into his very bones. It felt like being inside a giant, living creature.
He got out of bed, his feet cold on the bare wood floor. He felt an inexplicable pull, a curiosity that overrode his fear. He moved to the window and looked out at the moonlit yard. The sight that greeted him stole the breath from his lungs. The lawn, which had been a mess of weeds and overgrown grass, was now dotted with dozens of small, pale fungi. They hadn’t been there when he arrived. They were clustered in strange, almost geometric patterns, and in the ethereal moonlight, they seemed to glow with a faint, internal luminescence. And they were all angled slightly, as if leaning towards the house. Towards him.
A floorboard creaked downstairs.
Elias held his breath, straining to hear over the thrumming in his ears and the pounding of his own blood. It wasn’t the random groan of an old house. It was a footstep. Slow, deliberate, heavy. Someone was in the house. He backed away from the window, his mind racing. The front door was locked, bolted from the inside. He had checked it himself.
Another footstep, closer now, at the base of the stairs. He looked around the bedroom for a weapon, his eyes falling on a heavy brass candlestick on the nightstand. He grabbed it, its weight a small, cold comfort in his hand. He crept to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against the wood.
Silence. The footsteps had stopped. But the Hum… the Hum felt different. It was no longer a steady, rhythmic pulse. It had a new cadence, a seeking, searching quality. It felt… aware.
Then he heard it. A soft, wet, whispering sound from just outside the door.
“Gardener… The soil is fallow… The Root is thirsty…”
It wasn’t a human voice. It was a composite of sounds—the rustle of dry leaves, the trickle of water, the cracking of wood, all woven together into a horrifying mimicry of speech. Elias’s blood ran cold. This wasn’t a delusion. This wasn’t a dream. Alistair’s journal wasn’t the product of a broken mind. It was a warning.
He scrambled away from the door, his back hitting the far wall with a thud. He fumbled for his phone on the nightstand. No signal. Of course. The isolation of Blackwood Hollow wasn’t just geographical.
The doorknob began to turn. Slowly. Impossibly. He had locked it from the inside. He watched, mesmerized by terror, as the brass knob rotated with a series of metallic clicks. It stopped. A moment passed, an eternity of held breath and frantic heartbeats.
Then, with a sound of splintering wood, the center of the door began to bulge inward. A single, black, thorn-covered tendril, no thicker than his thumb, pushed its way through the wood. It writhed in the air for a moment, like a blind serpent tasting its surroundings, before retracting back into the door, leaving a small, jagged hole.
Elias didn’t scream. The sound was trapped in his throat, a knot of pure, primal fear. He was in a cage, just as Alistair had written. And something was trying to get in. He looked from the violated door to the window. It was a two-story drop, but the glowing fungi below seemed to pulse in time with the Hum, promising a landing that was anything but soft.
He was trapped. He finally understood the last line of Alistair’s journal. He wasn’t meant to inherit a house. He was meant to inherit a curse. And the residents of Blackwood Hollow, the silent, watchful congregation, were not his new neighbours. They were his keepers.
Downstairs, the whispering started again, closer this time, as if whatever was in the house was now crawling up the stairs. It was accompanied by a wet, dragging sound.
“The old gardener withered… A new gardener must be planted…”
Elias stared at the door, the brass candlestick held tight in his trembling hand. He was an archivist. A man of paper and dust, of quiet order and logical systems. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. The house groaned around him, the Hum intensified, and from beyond the door, he heard the sound of something immense and patient and ancient, coming for him. The first night in Blackwood Hollow was far from over, and he had the sickening certainty that he would not live to see the dawn.
