The Hollow Names
1663 Words
The passage stretched long and oddly calm. Ridgewood’s sigh still pulsed through the air. Emily felt the pulse in her wrist, a soft thrum now, not painful but guiding. The corridor ahead glimmered faintly, not from their flashlights, but as if the walls themselves welcomed them and granted them reprieve for now.
Cass moved beside her, alert and silent. Behind them, Logan watched every shadow. Maris trailed, vigilant, eyes sliding over walls as if they could slither and shift.
“That girl,” Logan whispered, her voice tense. “She was real, wasn’t she?”
Emily nodded. “She’s what the school began with. The memory it built itself upon.”
Cass exhaled quietly. “Now that she’s free, maybe the rest of them can be too.”
The air quivered. The hallway constricted suddenly, fracturing into a glowing arched doorway. Jagged shards of glass formed its frame, but there were no mirrors, only blank shards embedded like silent watchers.
Emily stepped through.
The room beyond was circular. Names, hundreds of them, were carved into the walls, each glowing a faint gold. As Emily approached, several flickered and dimmed like weak candles in a breeze.
Maris’s voice caught. “These are the students Ridgewood erased but never consumed.”
Logan traced a name with trembling fingertips. “Why are they fading?”
“Because their stories aren’t finished,” Emily said, her voice hushed. “They remain trapped.”
At the center, a platform rose, revealing a black leather-bound tome with aging brass clasps. Its pages fluttered on their own.
Cass scanned it. “Another journal?”
Emily reached for the cover. “No. It’s not written by us. It’s about us. By Ridgewood.”
Maris nodded. “The Archive, storing every secret and every erased voice.”
Logan swallowed. “The school didn’t just feed on them. It archived them.”
Emily’s heart pounded as she touched the leather. Instantly, she was no longer in the Archive.
She found herself in a pristine hallway flooded with daylight. Laughter echoed. Students moved with perfect grace, hollow eyes, and tight smiles like puppets on strings.
She turned and saw herself. Younger, naive, alone.
A voice whispered near her ear. “You were always meant to forget.”
She gasped, breaking the illusion.
Cass steadied her. “What was that?”
Emily closed her eyes. “It was my first day here, but not real. Built.”
Maris stepped closer. “Ridgewood rewrote every student’s memory. The Archive is the override.”
A metallic clang rang out.
The names on the walls trembled. Letters stretched and twisted like a language fighting to remain alive.
A new name appeared, glowing red. Emily Reeves.
The room dimmed.
Cass grabbed her hand. “It’s targeting you.”
Emily swallowed, voice steady. “It’s trying to write my ending.”
Maris stepped forward. “Not if we write it first.”
Logan flipped the Archive’s pages. They snapped open at Emily’s name. Beneath it, in spidery ink, it read: Absorbed. Forgotten. The cycle begins again.
Emily pressed her palm onto the page.
The mark on her wrist flared white-hot. The book hissed, and the words began to rewrite.
Resists. Remembers. Breaks the cycle.
The chamber shook. Emily’s name softened back to gold.
Cass whispered, “You changed it.”
Emily steadied herself. “No more erasing. No more forgetting.”
From the walls, a figure emerged. Tall, familiar. Not Carrow. Not a student.
Emily’s breath caught. “Ms Thatcher?”
The librarian advanced. Her eyes glowed like the names on the walls. “There is one last passage. The root of the school’s hunger. It lies where even echoes cannot reach.”
Cass’s voice trembled. “Where?”
Thatcher pointed downwards. “The Hollow. Beneath everything. The true beginning.”
The wall crumbled like dust, revealing a spiral staircase leading into darkness.
Emily turned to her friends. “Ready?”
Each nodded. Fear had been replaced with resolve.
They stepped into the Hollow. Stone descended like ancient roots, as memory coursed through every step.
At the bottom, a cave hung with tangled roots. In its heart stood a stone monolith glowing with red veins.
Maris drew breath. “The Hollow.”
The monolith spoke, not with words, but with memory. Overlapping voices of laughter and tears.
Cass clasped Emily’s hand. “Tell me we’re not too late.”
Emily took her place beside the monolith. The mark on her wrist blazed. She laid her hand on the stone.
Pain.
A void opened. She saw Ridgewood’s first stone, a chapel, in sunlight. Children laughed before darkness began and echoes were born.
Then the girl appeared. A small version of Emily who survived by forgetting.
A voice boomed. “Would you give it all back to end the story?”
Emily nodded.
The void shattered. Back in the Hollow, the monolith cracked open, spilling light.
The voices subsided. Ridgewood exhaled.
Emily’s wrist glowed faintly. She hovered above the broken piece of monolith.
Maris whispered, “It is over.”
Emily looked out at the fractured chamber. “No. It is finally beginning.”
Ridgewood groaned above, like the final note of a dream ending.
They rose through the spiral.
Hallways felt lighter. Names on the walls now glowed, not cries but remembrances.
Outside, tentative sunlight filtered through stone and moss.
Cass paused. “Do you feel it?”
Emily nodded. “Yes, it breathes again, not in fear.”
Maris pressed a hand to the warm brick. “It now remembers the right way.”
They walked between echoing lockers and dusted windowpanes. Each place felt softer and healed.
Above them, the sky opened. Birds sang uncertainly, as if waking.
Emily turned to school one last time. “We should be scared.”
“But I am not,” Cass said.
“Neither am I,” Logan added.
“This place holds memory,” Emily said. “And we reclaimed it.”
They walked into the forest as the light grew stronger. Ridgewood watched, now as a witness.
They carried their stories with them. And Ridgewood finally listened.
Each step away from school felt lighter. Not because the danger was gone, but because they were no longer carrying it alone. The silence behind them was not the kind that threatened to swallow. It was the kind that marked a moment of transformation. The kind that came after storms, when the air still crackled with what had been broken and made new.
The branches above whispered. Wind stirred the leaves as if Ridgewood itself were breathing out.
Emily glanced over her shoulder, half-expecting to see the door reappear. The black stone rose from the earth again to demand something more. But there was only mist now, curling at the edge of the forest, slow and uncertain. The school stood in its hollow, no longer hiding and no longer hunted. Just there. Still strange. Still watching. But it changed.
Cass walked beside her, hands tucked in her coat pockets. “You think it will stay quiet?”
“No,” Emily said. “But I do not think it will lie anymore.”
“What we did,” Maris said softly, “does not erase what happened, it never will.”
“It was not supposed to,” Logan replied. “But maybe it helps us carry it.”
They stopped for a moment beneath an old cedar tree. The air here smelled different. Pine and earth, not stone and cold iron. Maris leaned against the trunk, staring up at the filtered sunlight. “I used to think we needed to destroy Ridgewood to be free of it.”
“And now?” Emily asked.
“I think we need to understand it. That is the only way it stops controlling us.”
A raven shrieked in the distance. It circled wide above the treetops before gliding off toward the mountains. Cass watched it go, then turned to Emily. “So what now?”
Emily smiled, weary but certain. “We wrote it down. All of it. Everything Ridgewood tried to bury.”
Logan chuckled. “You want to turn it into a book?”
“Maybe,” she shrugged. “Or a record, something real.” So the next people who walk into that school do not have to feel like they are losing their minds.
Maris nodded. “Truth is resistance.”
They kept walking, farther from the ridge and farther into morning. The sun broke through the clouds in long golden slants. It felt unreal. Too bright, too warm. Like stepping out of a dream and not being sure if the world outside was the real one.
But it was.
And the pain, the wonder, the terror they had survived was real too.
None of them spoke for a while. Their silence was not heavy anymore. It was full.
Emily looked at her friends. Their shoes were muddy. Their eyes were tired. Their shoulders squared by everything they had endured. The bond between them was something Ridgewood had not counted on. I had not known what would happen when the story was shared instead of silenced. When love is louder than fear.
A butterfly passed in front of them. Its wings were tattered but still flying.
Maybe they were like that too.
“I do not think Ridgewood will ever be safe,” Cass said suddenly, as if finishing a thought from miles back.
“No,” Emily agreed. “But maybe it could be honest.”
They reached the edge of the trail just as the first cars passed on the distant road below. The world moved on, unaware of the shift beneath its feet. But Ridgewood had changed. And because of that, so had they.
They did not look back again.
Because what mattered most was not behind them anymore.
It was the truth they carried forward. Burning brighter than the secrets ever had.
And it was enough.
- Writer
