Blackwood Hollow
Children of The Blood Moon
Today, I’m thrilled to share a new piece of folk horror, Blackwood Hollow - Children of The Blood Moon. This story was written in response to
at Milk & Honey’s June Writing Challenge, Prompt #3, and it dives deep into the unsettling dread of a secluded, puritanical village and the horrifying consequences of forgotten truths. Prepare yourself for a descent into madness, where reality is a fragile thing, easily unmade.
The chair is still there. Empty. It faces the hearth, rocking gently like it always did, but now it is only rocked by the breeze. I trace the rough-hewn stone of my wall, the cold familiar under my fingertips, and I see it, clear as the single shaft of light that marks the day. Just yesterday, or was it a dozen yesterdays, a hundred, Mother sat there, humming that old hymn about the harvest moon, her knitting needles a soft clack-clack against the silence.
Now, if I could ask Father, he’d furrow his brow, a polite pity in his eyes, and say, “Your mother, son? You’ve been dreaming again.” Or he’ll offer a kind, bewildered correction: “This chair? Why, that’s where your Aunt Elara always rested after her chores before she passed. A place to rest weary bones, but never… never your mother.” He’d lay a hand on my shoulder, his gaze earnest. “You remember Elara, don’t you? She cared for you, saw you into this world, after your true mother… well, she was lost to the fever, long before you were old enough to remember her face.”
But none of that can happen now, all I am left with are my memories.
And I haven’t been dreaming… The ache in my chest is as real as the splinter in my thumb, a constant, sharp reminder that she was here. She was. I saw her… I saw it take her.
To understand the impossibility of that truth, you need to understand the lies they built around us, brick by careful brick, for generations. It began weeks ago, when the first leaves turned that unnatural, blood-red hue. It began with the quiet hum beneath the silence of Blackwood Hollow, a hum that had been growing steadily since I was a child. A hum of faith. A hum of fear. A hum of the Old One, stirring beneath the very roots of this land. We all knew what happened when the hum grew restless, when the appeasement was not enough: the crops withered in the fields, the wells ran dry, and a sickness, more than just fever, would seep into the very bones of our livestock, then our children. Survival, Elder Silas always preached, depended on our unwavering devotion and our willingness to give the Old One its due.
Blackwood Hollow wasn’t merely isolated; it was a forgotten world. Tucked deep in a valley that the maps of the Outer Lands simply shaded green, a place where the sun seemed to set earlier and the stars burned brighter, untouched by the flickering lights of what they called “progress.” No wires stretched to our homes, no strange voices crackled from boxes. Our days were measured by the sun and the moon, our lives dictated by the rhythm of the soil and the unyielding tenets preached every Sunday by Elder Silas. He was a man with eyes like polished stones and a voice that could make the very air vibrate with conviction. We were the faithful, the keepers of the old ways, pure and unblemished by the clamor of the modern world. Or so we were taught.
My childhood was a tapestry woven with the scents of woodsmoke, damp earth, and Mother’s lavender sachets. She was the warmth in our small cottage, her laughter a quiet melody against Father’s stern, devoted silence. Father, a man whose hands were as calloused as old oak, loved her with a quiet reverence—the kind I knew was rarer than gold. They were the center of my world, a tight, unshakeable knot in the heart of the Hollow. And we, the three of us, bore no visible signs of the Mark.
The Mark of the Old One. It was whispered in hushed tones, a birthright or a burden, depending on who you were and the depth of your faith. A faint, purplish discoloration like a bruise that never healed, or a cluster of tiny, almost imperceptible moles forming a strange constellation on skin. This was the common understanding, murmured with a mix of reverence and fear.
But even then, something about it felt… wrong to me. Not a blessing, not a simple burden. Something deeper. More ancient. More consuming. The villagers, though, they just knew it was there. It wasn’t always obvious, but they’d look at the Widow Thorne’s mottled wrist, or the permanent “bruise” on young Thomas’s left hand, and nod, a shared recognition that the Mark of the Old One was present, and that was all they needed to know. I’d seen others with the Marks simply vanish as if they were never here, totally erased from the collective memories of the villagers.
But I knew. I missed them—the miller’s boy who taught me to carve whistles from willow branches, the old woman who’d sneak me ginger snaps when Mother said I could have no more. And because I remembered, because I knew the void they left, I clung fiercely to the belief that my own family was safe. My mother, with her clear, unblemished skin, protected from the sun by the long sleeves she was so adamant about wearing, and Father, whose hands were scarred only by honest labor, bore no such visible signs. And by extension, neither did I. This gave us a quiet distinction, a silent blessing, truly of the Hollow but not beholden in that same dreadful way. Never once did I imagine that our own perceived purity was the cruelest lie of all.
As autumn deepened, a different kind of preparation settled over the Hollow—one colder than the crisp air. The children were hushed, their games subdued. The older women gathered herbs with an almost frantic energy, hanging them to dry in every sunlit corner. There was a solemnity that built with each shortening day, a tension humming beneath the surface of their usual routines. The Feast of the Harvest Moon was ostensibly a celebration, but it carried an underlying current of dread, a collective holding of breath. I remember Mother, her movements a little quicker, her humming a little softer, as the crimson hue of the leaves outside began to mirror the rising of the Blood Moon—a rare and foreboding concurrence that few spoke of, but all felt. Even then, the unease was a distant thunder, a sound I attributed to the weight of tradition, not a storm which I did not yet realize would break over our house.
The day of the Solstice dawned with an unnatural stillness. No birds sang. The air itself felt heavy, vibrating with that subtle, ancient hum I’d grown up with, but now amplified, pressing in on my skull. The usual morning chores felt like a pantomime, everyone moving with a practiced, almost robotic grace. Father’s face, usually a canvas of weathered resolve, was strangely smooth, devoid of any discernible emotion as he prepared the lantern for the evening’s procession. Mother, too, seemed quieter than usual, her gaze distant as she packed a small basket with dried fruits and a loaf of fresh bread, the traditional offerings for the Feast. She caught my eye once, a fleeting, almost imperceptible tremor in her smile. A shiver, colder than the autumn air, traced a path down my spine.
Throughout the day, these glitches intensified. They were minor at first, easily dismissed. A tool in the shed would shimmer at the edge of my vision, its form briefly indistinct, before settling back into mundane reality. The faces of villagers, familiar since birth, sometimes seemed to slip, just for an instant, revealing a blankness beneath, or eyes that were too wide, too black, like polished obsidian. A word spoken by a neighbor would echo unnaturally, or my own footsteps on the path would sound wrong, too loud or strangely muted. It was as if the fabric of the Hollow, normally so tightly woven, was beginning to fray, pulled by an unseen, monstrous hand. I’d blink, shake my head, assure myself it wasn’t the onset of madness—perhaps just the lack of sleep, the solstice jitters, the heavy air. But a cold, knowing dread settled deeper into my stomach.
As dusk bled into the ominous twilight, the crimson glow on the horizon deepened. It was the Blood Moon, perfectly aligned with the Autumn Solstice, a conjunction Elder Silas had preached about for months, his voice resonating with an unnerving blend of reverence and warning. “A time of great giving,” he’d called it, “when the veil between our world and the true earth is thinnest.”
The entire village gathered at the base of the Great Stone, said to have been left for our people aeons ago as our connection to the Old One. The ancient monolith stood sentinel at the heart of the Hollow. Its rough surface, usually grey and unremarkable, shimmered with a faint, reddish sheen under the deepening sky. All the villagers, cloaked in their deepest celebration frocks—long, dark coats with hoods obscuring their features—formed concentric rings around the Elder, their faces impassive, their eyes fixed on the stone. Lanterns, carried by the men, cast dancing shadows that seemed to writhe and stretch like grasping fingers from within their ranks. In the lantern light, they were featureless shapes, unified in their purpose. To the Old One, we were all the same, here to fulfill its purpose.
My family stood near the front, a place of honor due to Father’s standing in the community. Mother clutched the offering basket, her knuckles white. I watched the Elder, his voice rising in a low, rhythmic chant, a guttural sound that didn’t feel like human speech, more like the grinding of ancient stones. As his voice deepened, the villagers around us joined in, a low, collective hum that vibrated through the very ground. The hum intensified, a thrumming deep in my bones, and I could feel the earth itself seemed to pulse beneath my feet.
Then, Elder Silas’s chant reached a crescendo, a final, drawn-out word that echoed through the valley. At that instant, a great rumble tore through the earth beneath us, a sound that shook the very air from my lungs. A violent gust of wind, like the breath of some colossal beast, extinguished every lantern in the circle, plunging us into absolute darkness. The world was pitch, a suffocating blackness that pressed in, and the only thing that let me know I was still alive was the intensifying rumble beneath my feet. The wind now howled around us, a multitude of crying wolves unseen, unheard by anyone but me.
In my terror, I reached out for Mother, but my hand found nothing but the cold, harsh air where she had stood moments before. “Mother!” I screamed, but there was no answer, only the roaring wind swallowing my cry.
All at once, the villagers fell to their knees. A sudden, invisible force pulled me down with them, a crushing weight on my shoulders that forced me onto the cold earth. They raised their arms to the heavens, their cloaked shapes indistinct against the faint glow now emanating from the monolith. I fought against the unseen pressure, but it was relentless. Slowly, against my will, my head was forced upward, my eyes locked on the glowing stone. A voice, ancient and vast, echoed in my mind, or perhaps it was the very air around me that spoke, “Behold,” it breathed. That’s when my terror was complete.
Atop the glowing stone—now an altar—she stood, her image fading in and out of focus… Mother. I cried out to her again, a desperate, raw sound torn from my throat, and tried to stand, but some demon force had removed all power from my limbs. All I could do was watch, as Mother reached out to me, her hand trembling, as she slowly pulled up the arm of her robe.
Her sleeve slid back, revealing not the unmarked skin I had always known, but a gnarled, deeply puckered scar on her wrist. It was an old wound, bearing the unmistakable signs of her own desperate hand, a raw, angry thing against her fading skin, twisting precisely where the faint, purplish discoloration of the Mark would have been. Her eyes, already losing their light, met mine across the impossible distance. They held a profound, heartbreaking sorrow, a desperate, silent plea, and a terrible, knowing truth that screamed louder than any voice: She had the Mark. She always had. And she had tried, futilely, to cut it away, to sever the unbreakable bond of the Old One. In that instant, the last remaining brick of my sanity crumbled.
The world shattered. The whispers I’d fought against for a lifetime swelled into a deafening chorus, not of human voices, but of a thousand screaming realities colliding within my skull. The faces of the villagers, now visible as a faint, pulsating crimson glow from their devotion to the monolith, stretched and contorted, their placid smiles replaced by cavernous, alien grins. I saw their true purpose, their true form, revealed in the terrifying, shifting light. My own memories began to dissolve at the edges, a fragile dam breaking against a tidal wave of borrowed, alien thoughts. The names of those lost—the names only I remembered—echoed in my mind, fighting against the truth I’d just witnessed, threatening to pull me under the communal tide of forgetting. I could feel the Old One, not just a hum now, but a vast, ancient intelligence, sifting through the remnants of my mind, searching for the threads of her existence, eager to consume them. It was a cosmic hunger, a devouring of truth itself. I was no longer just witnessing; I was part of the sacrifice… my mind the next offering.
And then, the images ceased to make sense, the logic of the world became fluid, the lines between what was and what was not, obliterated. I closed my eyes, but the crimson darkness behind my lids was filled with swirling patterns and the phantom scent of scorched earth and ancient rot filled my nostrils. My body convulsed, powerless, as the last thread of my sanity snapped.
When I opened my eyes again, perhaps minutes, perhaps days later, the air was still, heavy with the scent of damp earth and burnt offerings. The crimson glow was gone. The monolith stood cold and grey, as if nothing had ever happened. Around me, the villagers stood or moved about, their faces calm, their movements purposeful. No one looked at the empty space beside Father, no one, not even him, acknowledged the void where Mother had been. The Feast of the Harvest Moon had ended. The Old One had been appeased. And the Hollow, in its unwavering, terrible faith, had remade its reality.
My father found me later, slumped near the monolith, my hands clawing desperately at the dirt. He called my name, his voice kind, yet devoid of any recognition of the tragedy I had just witnessed, a stranger’s voice speaking familiar words. He led me back to our home, which now felt alien, her absence not just a void but a deliberate excision. The chair still rocked by the hearth. Empty.
They say I raged, then wept, then simply went quiet. They say I spoke in tongues never uttered, of a woman who never lived, of a scar that bore no mark. They say my mind broke from the burden of truth, and for the purity and peace of the Hollow, Elder Silas decreed I needed a place of quiet contemplation, away from distractions, until my spirit could be brought back into alignment with the communal truth.
So here I sit, surrounded by the cold, smooth stones that filter out the clamor of the world, and the hum of the Old One. This silent, windowless chamber in the oldest part of the village, once a root cellar, now my permanent dwelling. Each day, the light from the narrow slit high above the wall moves across the rough-hewn floor, marking the passage of time. Each day, the silence presses in, broken only by the scratching of my ragged fingernail on the stone, carving the memory of her name, her face, her scar, into the cold, unyielding rock. The walls are already covered, a frantic, desperate tapestry of truth. They believe I am mad, that I have forgotten. But I know. I remember. I will always remember.
As the crimson hue begins to creep across the sky tonight, I know the Blood Moon will rise again. It always does. And I will be here, remembering… while they forget.
A new twist well done
WOW L.G. you have seriously outdone yourself!
I could feel the heaviness of this world in my throat. I could honestly see this being a whole book!