Nathan Gage had lived in Briar’s Hollow his entire life, but only recently had he started seeing the town for what it really was.
Beneath the picturesque streets, the neatly trimmed hedges, and the annual Harvest Festival that brought tourists flocking from neighboring counties, there was something rotten. Something shifting just beneath the surface.
It started small. A missing dog. Cooper, the golden retriever belonging to Mrs. Connors, had vanished one night, and she’d papered the town with desperate flyers. Then a week later, old Mr. Fallon, the widower, was found dead in his parlor chair—his eyes wide open, mouth locked in a silent scream, but with no visible wounds. The coroner ruled it a heart attack.
The next victim wasn’t so easy to explain. Jonah Dempsey, a seventeen-year-old high schooler, was discovered deep in the woods near Black Briar Creek. The sheriff didn’t release details, but the whispers that spread through town spoke of something unnatural. Something no animal, no human, could have done.
Nathan wasn’t the type to get wrapped up in town gossip. He was a high school history teacher, a creature of habit. He graded papers, drank coffee at Pearl’s Diner, and went home to his small house on the outskirts of town. But after Jonah’s funeral, a feeling gnawed at him—an itch in the back of his skull that wouldn’t let go.
And then the noises started.
At first, he convinced himself it was nothing. Just the usual creaks of an old house settling at night. But it wasn’t. The sounds were coming from beneath his floorboards. Soft shuffling. A low, rhythmic tapping, like nails against wood. The first time he heard it, he chalked it up to mice. The second time, he pried up a floorboard near the living room corner, expecting insulation, dust, maybe some droppings.
Instead, he found a tunnel.
A narrow passage, barely wide enough for a grown man to crawl through, stretched beneath his house. The walls were damp, clawed earth, the smell thick with decay. A shiver crawled up his spine as he peered into the darkness. And then—something moved.
A shape. Low to the ground. Watching.
Nathan slammed the floorboard back into place, heart pounding.
The next morning, he called the sheriff. Sheriff Miller was a no-nonsense man, one of those "seen-it-all" types, but when Nathan told him about the tunnel, his face paled. He didn’t ask to see it. He just told Nathan to "mind his own business" and "keep his house in order."
That night, Nathan sat awake in his armchair, shotgun across his lap. He waited. And when the tapping started again—closer this time, just beneath his feet—he ripped up the floorboards and pointed his flashlight into the tunnel.
Something stared back.
Not an animal. Not a person.
Its skin was pale, stretched too tight over bones that jutted at unnatural angles. Its eyes were black, sunken pits, and its fingers—long, skeletal things—ended in splintered, claw-like nails. It grinned at him.
Nathan fired.
The blast echoed through the house, rattling picture frames on the walls, but when the dust settled, the tunnel was empty.
His breath came fast, ragged. His mind screamed for logic, for reason, but the truth sat heavy in his gut.
Briar’s Hollow had always been quiet. Always been safe.
But something had been living beneath them.
And now, it knew he had seen it.
Nathan couldn’t sleep after that night. Every creak in the house, every distant rustle of the wind outside sent his pulse into a frenzied gallop. The tunnel was still there, beneath his floorboards, an open wound in his home that no amount of nails and wood could truly close. He had tried covering it back up, hammering the floorboard into place, but it no longer felt like a barrier. It felt like a thin veil, a useless attempt to hide something ancient, something hungry.
He found himself avoiding his own living room, opting to eat his meals in the cramped space of his bedroom or standing over the kitchen sink. It was irrational, he knew that, but fear had a way of rewriting logic. He spent his evenings researching the town, poring over old records at the local library, trying to make sense of what he had seen.
Briar’s Hollow had its secrets. More than he ever realized.
Missing persons reports, stretching back decades. People disappearing from their homes, their cars left in driveways, their doors locked from the inside. The police always had theories—a runaway, an accident, a drunken misadventure gone too far—but Nathan could see the pattern forming in front of him. Every ten years, a new wave of vanishings. Every ten years, families left searching for answers they would never receive.
And the tunnels.
The more he dug, the more he found references. Reports from construction workers finding old burrows beneath foundations, strange clawed-out passageways under businesses.
But the most chilling discovery was an old journal entry, hidden away in the archives of the town’s founding documents. It was written in 1823 by a man named Edgar Hallows, one of the original settlers. The ink was faded, the pages brittle, but the words sent a cold chill down Nathan’s spine.
“We built our homes atop something old. We dug our wells, laid our stones, but we should have never disturbed the ground. The Hollow beneath us watches. It waits. And when it hungers, it takes.”
Nathan closed the book, his fingers trembling. He wasn’t the first to see it. He wouldn’t be the last.
And he wasn’t sure if he would survive long enough to warn anyone else.
Nathan turned, shotgun raised, but there was nothing there. Just an empty house. An empty, waiting house.
And the whisper that slid through the air, curling around his ear like a breath from something unseen.
“You should have left it alone.”
Nathan’s heart pounded. Then, from the tunnel beneath him, came a sound that set his blood to ice. A dragging. A wet, slithering pull against the dirt. Whatever had been watching from the darkness… was coming up.
Nathan ran. He didn’t think—he just moved. Out the door, into the cold night, his breath ragged in the dark. The house groaned behind him, floorboards buckling, a deep tremor shuddering through the ground. Whatever lived beneath had come to claim him.
He didn’t stop running until he reached Pearl’s Diner, the bright fluorescent sign flickering against the black sky. He burst inside, panting, eyes wide. Sheriff Miller sat at the counter, sipping his coffee, expression unreadable.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” the sheriff asked, setting his mug down.
Nathan could only nod.
Miller sighed. “Then you best keep running, son.”
©Genevieve Mazer, 2025
