Echoes of the Hollow

The Discovery A county survey team was only supposed to check stability readings—an old grid didn’t match the new records. Routine work. Another ghost shaft in a town that had stopped counting them. They made it past the third rusted gate, down the slope where kudzu smothered the signs, and into the hollow where everything smelled of wet stone and old iron. The air was damp and metallic, with an undercurrent of rot that clung to their tongues. One of them spotted it first. A half-collapsed wall, a gap wide enough to crawl through. He swung his flashlight, expecting rockfall or animal bones. What the beam caught instead made him stop breathing. Three skeletons. Small. Close together. No clothes. No names. Just bones, pale and deliberate, as if arranged by regret. A faint ring of blackened earth surrounded them, scorched and sterile—like the land had tried, too late, to cauterize the wound. He didn’t speak. Just stepped back, slow. The others came when he called. They didn’t talk much either. Someone clicked the radio. Static, then a voice: Hold the site. Wait for the sheriff. Nobody asked which one. There was only Raley. The light didn’t reach far into the shaft. Darkness pressed against the edges like it wanted back what had been uncovered. One man scraped a cross into the dirt with his boot. Another muttered a prayer he hadn’t used since childhood. By mid-afternoon, yellow tape fluttered across the entrance. State forensics were on the way, but word had already traveled faster than the trucks. By sundown, the whole of Maple Hollow knew. Some said it was vandals. Others said it was a ritual. Some just went quiet. Closed their doors. Drew their curtains. But the oldest ones—the ones who remembered the summer of ‘93, when three girls vanished without a trace—they didn’t speak at all. Because the Hollow remembers what it’s told to forget. *** The News Reaches Maren The hum of the city was muffled inside the studio. Thick foam on the walls, red light over the door, the faint static of her intro track looping while she checked her note. Maren Blake sat cross-legged in front of the mic, one earbud in, one out, waiting for the waveform to start dancing. She was mid-edit—Episode 34, something about a missing hiker in Oregon—when the alert pinged her phone. Local Breaking: Human Remains Found in Abandoned Shaft Near Maple Hollow, WV. She blinked. Read it again. Maple Hollow. The name pressed something behind her ribs. An old bruise. She clicked the link. It was barebones. A regional wire. Three sets of skeletal remains. Possibly juvenile. Found during a geological survey. No names, no suspects. Shaft had been sealed since the mid-’90s. Her chair scraped the wall as she stood. It couldn’t be. Not after all this time. Not there. She opened a second tab. Pulled up the police scanner. Static, then a dispatcher rattling off unrelated traffic. Nothing useful yet. Her fingers were already moving. Social media. Regional threads. Grainy photos—yellow tape strung over a mine mouth, blurred figures crouched in shadow. People speculating. Arguing. Warning each other to stop talking. Then she saw the comments. Summer of ‘93. Three girls vanished that summer. No signs. No bodies—until now. Their names flickered across the screen like ghosts. She hadn’t said them out loud in years. She sat again, slower this time. Let the earbuds drop. The city felt far away—muffled and underwater, like the studio walls had thickened. Her coffee had gone cold. Her hands hadn’t stopped moving. This wasn’t just a headline. It was a pulse beneath her skin. Her hometown. Her ghosts. The case that pulled her into true crime before she even knew the term for it. The episode she never recorded. She reached for her recorder. Then paused. Not yet. Instead, she stared at the screen. The cursor blinked beside the town’s name, waiting for her to respond. Maren closed her laptop. She was going home.