The hollow ones

Ellie left the security room feeling as though something unseen had followed her. The hallway felt longer than usual, the fluorescent lights buzzing faintly overhead. Every step she took felt too loud, too deliberate, as if she were walking through a place she wasn't meant to be.

Sam walked beside her, his usual easy confidence shaken. He hadn't said much since the footage incident.

"You okay?" she asked, breaking the silence.

He let out a dry chuckle. "You ever see something so impossible your brain just refuses to process it?"

Ellie didn't answer. She had spent her entire career grounded in psychology, science, logic. But what she had just witnessed—what she had felt—wasn't something she could explain away with trauma or mental illness.

Jonas Blackwood had disappeared. The security footage proved it. The air had gone cold. And she had sensed… something.

"I need to check the farmhouse," she said, gripping the case file tighter in her hands. "There has to be something we missed."

Sam hesitated, then nodded. "Alright. But we go in daylight."

Ellie agreed, though a part of her wondered if whatever had happened to Jonas—whatever was following them—cared about the time of day.

---

The Farmhouse

By noon the next day, Ellie and Sam stood in front of the abandoned farmhouse, a skeletal structure barely holding itself together. The place had been sealed off with crime scene tape, though the wind had already begun to tear it away.

The farmhouse sat alone in an empty field, the nearest neighbor miles away. It had been vacant for years, a relic of something long forgotten—until Jonas Blackwood and twelve others had come here for their ritual.

Now, it was just another place where something terrible had happened.

Sam pushed open the front door, and it groaned in protest. Dust swirled in the air as Ellie stepped inside, her boots creaking against the old wooden floor.

The air was wrong here. Even in broad daylight, the place felt darker than it should. The kind of darkness that didn't come from the absence of light but from something deeper, something unseen.

She scanned the room, taking in the remnants of the ritual—the blackened candles melted to their bases, the symbols drawn on the walls, the circle where the bodies had been found.

The scent of old blood still lingered.

Ellie crouched near the center of the room, running her fingers over the floorboards. The symbols—intricate, curling lines—weren't just ink. They had been carved into the wood, etched deep as if the people performing the ritual had been desperate to make them permanent.

Sam stood near the door, arms crossed. "Anything standing out?"

Ellie studied the symbols again. Something about them felt familiar, but she couldn't quite place it.

Then, a whisper.

A voice, barely audible, brushing against her ear.

"You shouldn't be here."

She froze, her breath catching. The voice hadn't come from Sam. It hadn't come from anywhere in the room. It had been right next to her—so close she could feel it.

Slowly, she turned her head.

Nothing.

But the shadows in the corners of the farmhouse seemed… deeper now. Like they were watching.

Sam must have noticed her change in posture. "Ellie?"

She exhaled, forcing herself to stand. "I'm fine."

She wasn't.

Something had spoken to her.

And it knew she was here.

---

The Basement

Ellie didn't believe in gut feelings, but something was pulling her toward the back of the farmhouse. Toward the cellar door.

She stopped at the threshold, staring down at the darkened stairs. The air drifting up from below was wrong—not musty, like an old basement should be, but stale. Empty.

"Really?" Sam sighed. "You want to go down there?"

Ellie flipped on her flashlight and started descending. "You don't have to follow me."

"Yeah, well, I'm not letting you get murdered by a haunted basement," he muttered, trailing behind her.

The basement was colder than the rest of the house. The walls were lined with stone, and the air felt thick, almost pressurized.

Ellie scanned the room with her flashlight, stopping when she saw something in the far corner.

A chair.

It sat alone, facing the wall. Surrounding it, drawn into the dirt floor, was another symbol—a different one from upstairs.

This one wasn't carved. It had been burned into the earth.

Sam shifted uncomfortably. "I don't like this."

Ellie stepped closer, her heart pounding.

That was when she noticed something else.

Footprints.

Leading up to the chair.

But none leading away.

She swallowed hard. "Someone sat here."

Sam exhaled sharply. "Yeah. And then what? They evaporated?"

Ellie didn't answer.

Because that was exactly what had happened to Jonas Blackwood.

And if she didn't figure out why, she might be next.