The Watertown family was gone.
All seven of them.
The day before, my wife Adelaide had seen Mr. Watertown and his four sons gathering wild onions growing just inside the Hollow. She told me about it when I returned from New York City this morning, and before I’d put my hat down, it was back on my head.
There was nothing else for it.
The Watertowns were poor folk who’d inherited a house from an uncle. They weren’t of Cross, and so they didn’t know the finer points.
Such as staying the hell out of the Hollow.
I wasn’t irritated with the Watertowns as I was with the business which had taken me to New York City. The damned place is too loud for me, and it took me a full day and a half to find the writer I had to kill.
Who would think a fat man could have hidden so well?
Well, that’s neither here nor there.
When I reached the Watertown house on Northfield Road, I stopped a fair distance back.
I couldn’t hear anything, and that was wrong. Mr. and Mrs. Watertown had five children, four of whom were boys, and the fifth was naught but a newborn babe. At eleven in the morning, there should have been some sort of commotion about the house.
But there was only stillness.
I went round to the back door and found it open. On the table in the kitchen was a bushel full of wild onions, and there were the marks of a struggle about the room. Chairs were knocked over, crockery was broken, and there was a large amount of blood sprayed across the floor and walls.
Finally, there were heel marks in the blood on the floor, and I could follow them to a blank wall. The horsehair plaster was cracked, but nothing else seemed out of the ordinary.
I searched the house high and low, but there was nothing to find.
When I returned to the kitchen, it was clean, and the onions were gone. The crack in the horsehair was repaired.
Without a word, I left the house and closed the door behind me.
There was no need to try and lock the door. The Hollow had come and taken what it was owed.
I can’t argue with that.
I’d have done the same.
#horror #fear #paranormal
