Chapter 3: Aunt Steffy's Secrets

Chapter 3: Aunt Steffy's Secrets

Leo slammed the truck door shut, the sound echoing the frantic hammering of his own heart. He left the keys in the ignition, the grotesque nest of hair and teeth still sitting on the passenger seat like a visiting nightmare. The thought of driving away, once a beacon of hope, was now terrifying. What if they were already in the truck? Hiding in the shadows, waiting for him to be alone on some dark, tree-lined road?

He stumbled back to the house, his sanctuary, his inheritance, his prison. He slammed and bolted the front door, leaning his full, shaking weight against it as if to physically hold the horrors at bay. The quiet of the house pressed in on him. It was no longer the peaceful silence he’d craved but the breathless silence of a tomb.

Panic gave way to a cold, frantic clarity. He wasn't going crazy. Mrs. Steinhop’s warnings, the cashier’s pitying look, the chilling whispers of his own name—it was all real. And his aunt, the eccentric Steffy, had lived in the epicenter of it for decades. She hadn't been a quirky hobbyist; she had been a soldier stationed on the front line of a war he hadn't known existed. The house wasn't just a collection of oddities; it had to be an arsenal.

“Okay, Steffy,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “What did you know? Where did you hide it?”

His search began with a desperate energy. This was no longer about unpacking boxes; it was an excavation. He tore through his aunt's meticulously organized chaos, seeing it now with new, terrified eyes. The towers of books weren't just for reading; they were research. The strange, faded symbols painted above the doors weren't decorations; they were fortifications.

He pulled open drawers in a heavy oak desk, finding not stationery but bundles of dried herbs tied with red thread, small animal bones carved with strange runes, and jars of dark, viscous liquids labeled in a spidery script: Rowan Ash, Iron Shavings, Grave Dirt (Consecrated). It was the toolkit of a folk magician, or a woman fighting for her life.

He scanned the bookshelves, hundreds of titles on folklore, demonology, and local history. It would take a lifetime to read them all. The answer had to be more accessible, something personal. Something hidden. A secret for a successor.

His gaze fell upon a bookshelf dedicated entirely to Steffy’s most mundane-looking collection: a full set of encyclopedias from the 1980s, their spines faded to a uniform beige. It was an island of boring normalcy in a sea of occult strangeness. It didn’t fit. Driven by a hunch, he began pulling the heavy volumes from the shelf. A, B, C… nothing. His frustration mounted. This was useless. He was a graphic designer, not a codebreaker.

He reached for the letter ‘J’, and his fingers brushed against something that wasn't paper. A small, almost invisible notch in the wooden shelf behind the books. His heart leaped. He yanked the remaining volumes out, revealing a small, recessed panel. With trembling fingers, he pried it open.

Inside, nestled on a bed of faded black velvet, lay a single object: a small leather-bound journal, no bigger than his hand, held shut by a tarnished brass clasp.

With a click, the clasp sprang open. He turned to the first page. His aunt’s handwriting was a spiky, urgent scrawl, the ink faded but the words sharp with intensity.

October 3rd. They are testing the wards again. The new pinecone spiral on the visitor's truck was a clear demarcation of territory. A claim. Their games are growing bolder. I fear my own wards are weakening with my strength.

Leo felt a dizzying wave of vertigo. A visitor's truck. Not his. Steffy had written this long before he arrived. This had been happening for years. He wasn’t the first.

He flipped frantically through the pages, his eyes scanning for anything that could help him. He saw sketches of the symbols from the doorways, recipes for protective charms, and star charts marking celestial alignments. Then he found it. An entire section, the heading carefully lettered in stark black ink:

THE HOLLOW CHILDREN

He read, devouring his aunt’s words, the truth more chilling than anything he could have imagined. They were the spirits of the children who had died in the great Dam Disaster of 1934, when a flash flood had burst the newly constructed dam and drowned the lower valley, including the old church and its schoolhouse. But they were not sad, lingering ghosts. Steffy wrote that the violent, sudden nature of their deaths had fused their spirits to the land, turning them into a single, malevolent entity driven by a twisted, childlike cruelty.

They don’t remember who they were, Steffy wrote. They are an echo, a wound in the world that never healed. They resent the living, especially newcomers who disturb the quiet misery of their domain. They ‘play’ with them first. Mimicry. Offerings. Games of terror designed to break the spirit. Once a person is broken, they are claimed. They become another playmate. Or they are simply… removed.

The word removed hung in the air, cold and final. The teeth in the nest. The scratch on his truck. It was all in the journal. A playbook for his own haunting.

Tucked into the very next page was a faded photograph, the colors muted with age. A younger Aunt Steffy, probably in her late sixties, stood proudly on the front porch of this very house. Her wild grey hair was a familiar halo around a face beaming with accomplishment. Her arm was slung around a much younger woman with long, dark hair and an intense, unsmiling face. In her hands, the woman held a smoking bundle of herbs. Leo recognized her from the sign in town. The healer.

He turned the photo over. Scrawled on the back was his aunt’s handwriting: Clara and I, after reinforcing the threshold ward. She has the Sight, a true daughter of Dam’s End. The town’s memory runs in her blood. Thank God I am not alone in this.

Clara Thorne. He had a name. An accomplice. A potential ally. A surge of desperate hope, the first he’d felt in days, washed over him. He wasn't alone.

Leo looked up from the journal, his mind reeling with the revelations. He was the unwitting heir to a supernatural war. His gaze drifted around the room, which now felt less like a madhouse and more like an abandoned command center. He looked towards the large glass display case in the corner, the centerpiece of Steffy’s bizarre collection.

He froze. A cold dread, colder and sharper than anything he had felt before, sluiced through his veins.

The squirrel. The one wearing the miniature fez.

He knew exactly how it had been posed this morning. He remembered it distinctly because he’d thought it looked comical, facing its taxidermy brethren in a silent, absurd tableau.

It wasn't facing them anymore.

The stuffed creature had moved. Its tiny, rigid body was now swiveled on its wooden perch, angled directly towards the desk where he sat. Its head was cocked slightly. And its two little black glass eyes, once dull and lifeless, now seemed to hold a pinpoint of malicious light. They were fixed squarely, unblinkingly, on him.

As he stared, paralyzed, a faint sound reached him, sharp and dry.

Scritch. Scritch.

It was the sound of a tiny, clawed hand scraping against the inside of the glass. The squirrel’s head gave a minute, jerky twitch, a puppet pulled by unseen strings. The threat was no longer just outside his walls. It wasn’t something they had to sneak in. It was already here, wearing the skin of his aunt's strange legacy, and it was watching him.