Weight of Shadows (The Echoes of Hollow Vale #1)

Chapter 1

one

OLEANDER

The phone had been vibrating in the cup holder for the last three hours, a persistent, low-frequency hum that felt like a secondary heartbeat against the plastic.

I finally picked it up when the silence in the car became too heavy to breathe, thick with the smell of old upholstery and the leftovers of a fast-food meal I hadn't finished. It was Liliana. Again. She’d been calling since I crossed the city limits at dawn, and I’d ignored every single one until I was forty minutes outside of Hollow Vale.

It was midnight in London, but she sounded wide awake. Worried awake. I could almost see her pacing her flat in Hackney, her brow furrowed the way it always did when she thought I was walking into a disaster with my eyes wide open.

I hadn’t been back home for almost ten years, not since I thought a degree and a love life were enough to keep me in the states.

She didn't say hello. She didn't ask how the drive was. She just breathed into the receiver, waiting for me to be the first one to break.

I didn’t, so she gave in.

"Tell me what you see," she said, her voice crackling through the car’s Bluetooth speakers. It sounded tinny and far away, like she was calling from another lifetime instead of just another time zone.

I slowed the car as I crossed the town line, my foot hovering over the brake. The fog was a solid wall, thick and grey and seemingly sentient, swallowing my headlights before they could even hit the pavement.

It felt like driving into a cloud that didn't want me there, a physical resistance that made the air inside the cabin feel damp. I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, my knuckles white against the worn leather.

"It's just a town, Lili," I told her, though my voice lacked the conviction I wanted it to have.

I passed a gas station that looked like a ghost ship, one flickering light illuminating an empty register and a row of dusty soda bottles.

There was nobody inside. No attendant, no travelers, just the rhythmic click of the flickering bulb.

"Describe it," she pressed. "Don't give me the edited version, Ollie. I know you. You're already trying to make it sound normal, so I won't tell you to turn the car around."

I sighed, letting the car roll at a crawl past an old church with a steeple that had been snapped off, the jagged wood pointing toward a dark purple sky.

"There are houses. They look like they used to be beautiful, back when people still had a reason to paint the shutters. Now they just look... tired. Like they’re sinking into the ground in slow motion. "

"Ollie, that sounds like the opening of a horror movie," she snapped.

I heard the sharp, unmistakable clink of a glass on a table.

She was drinking. She only drank when she was truly agitated.

"It's not just a town. It's a town Dominic kept hidden from you for five years.

People don't just buy secret apartments in rotting cities for no reason. That’s a red flag with its own post code. "

A small, painful laugh escaped my throat.

She was right. She was always right. She was the one who had pointed out the way Dominic had started coming home late, the way his library had filled with strange, leather-bound books that weren't the literary fiction he used to love, the way he'd go silent and stiff the moment I walked into a room. She’d seen the shift a year before he died. I’d seen it too, but I’d chosen to call it a mid-life crisis or professional stress.

"He probably just wanted a retreat," I said, though the words felt like ash in my mouth. "A place to write without the noise of the city. You know how he was about his privacy."

"I know how he was about control," Lili countered, her voice dropping an octave.

"He owned you, Ollie. And now that he's gone, he's still trying to own where you live.

Why this place? Why not a cottage in the Cotswolds or a flat in Paris?

Why a dying town in the middle of nowhere that isn't on half the maps I’ve checked? "

I didn't have an answer for her. I didn't even have an answer for myself.

I just kept driving, following the directions the unnamed lawyer had mailed to me along with a heavy brass key and a box of papers I still hadn't dared to fully inventory. The lawyer had been brief, his voice over the phone was just as ominous as everything else about this place. Mr. Ashworth’s estate includes a residential property in Hollow Vale. The deed is in your name.

I pulled up to the address. It was a narrow brick building, three stories tall, tucked between a shuttered laundromat and a narrow alleyway that seemed to breathe shadows.

The brick was a dark, blood-red hue, weathered by decades of rain and neglect.

I killed the engine, and the sudden silence was absolute, pressing against my eardrums until they throbbed.

"I'm here," I whispered into the phone.

"Don't go inside," Lili said, her voice frantic now. "Stay in the car. Go to a hotel. Go anywhere else. There’s something wrong with this, Ollie. I can feel it from here. The way you’re talking, the way you’re breathing... you’re already disappearing."

"I'm fine, Lili. I'm just tired. It’s been a long drive." I grabbed my duffel bag from the passenger seat, the weight of it a grounding comfort. "It's just an apartment. It's four walls and a roof. It doesn't mean anything."

"You always say that," she said, her voice softening into something that sounded dangerously like pity. "You always pretend the world is smaller and safer than it actually is. It’s how you survived him, but he’s not here anymore. You don't have to minimize yourself to stay alive."

"I'll call you tomorrow," I said, stepping out of the car. The air was cold, damp, and smelled of wet earth and something metallic, almost coppery. It was sharp enough to make my lungs ache. "I mean it this time."

"You always say that too," she whispered. "I love you, Ollie. Please. Just... be careful."

We hung up, and I stood on the sidewalk for a long minute, looking up at the second-floor windows.

They were dark and vacant, reflecting nothing but the grey soup of the fog.

I felt like a trespasser in my own life.

I walked to the door, the brass key cold and heavy in my hand, a silent weight that seemed to grow heavier with every step.

I slid the key in, but it refused to turn, the mechanism grinding as if it hadn't been touched in years.

I had to lean my shoulder into the wood, jiggling the metal with a frantic, desperate energy until finally, with a sharp clack that echoed down the empty street, the bolt gave way.

I pushed the door open and stepped into the dark.

I fumbled along the wall until my fingers found a switch, flipping it to reveal a narrow hallway with peeling wallpaper and a floor of dark, polished wood.

The air inside was still, but it wasn't the smell of dust that caught me.

It was something else. Something sweet, faint, and devastatingly familiar.

Sandalwood and bergamot, with a hint of something darker, like tobacco leaf. Dominic’s scent. For two heartbeats, I expected to see him walk around the corner, adjusting his cuffs, that calm, proprietary smile on his face that always made me feel like I was a rare book he’d finally acquired.

Then the scent vanished, like it simply stopped existing, replaced by the dry, sterile smell of an empty room.

I stood in the hallway, my bag still gripped in my hand, my breath coming in shallow, jagged hitches.

It's residual, I told myself, the logic a thin shield against the rising panic. It’s old.

He lived here, or stayed here, and the fabric of the place just held onto him. It’s just chemistry.

I walked further into the place, more on edge now than I was driving over here.

The layout was strange, the walls meeting at angles that felt slightly off, a geometry that defied the standard boxiness of urban apartments.

Everything I ever associated with Dominic, the leather-bound editions of Milton, the heavy mahogany desk, felt like they belonged to a different man than the one who had owned this hollow, shadowed space.

I reached the end of the hallway, where a door stood slightly ajar.

Beyond it was the bedroom, a space I could only see in fragments of grey and shadow.

I moved toward it, intending to drop my bag and collapse into whatever bed was there, but before I could reach the threshold, the door began to move.

There was no draft in the sealed apartment, no open window to catch the night air, but it moved anyway as if a hand had been placed firmly against the wood. It swung shut with a muffled thud, the latch clicking into place with a finality that made the hair on my arms stand up.

“What the fuck,” I muttered to myself.

I stared at the closed door for a long time, my heart hammering in my chest. I wanted to turn and run.

I wanted to get back in the car and drive until the fog was a memory and the smell of sandalwood was scrubbed from my skin.

But the thought of the highway, of the long, empty road back to a life that had already been hollowed out, was worse than the silence of the room.

I was a careful person, a man who had spent years learning how to navigate the moods of a brilliant, difficult husband by becoming invisible. I knew how to wait. I knew how to exist in the margins of someone else's darkness. So, I’d stay here and find out what Dominic had really been doing here.

Setting my bag down, I walked to the kitchen, a narrow galley with rusted fixtures and a tiled floor that had yellowed with age.

On the counter sat a single object, a leather-bound notebook, its edges curling like dried leaves.

I didn't touch it. I knew what was inside. I’d seen the siblings of that notebook on Dominic’s nightstand during the months before he died, pages filled with frantic, tiny script and symbols that looked like a language caught in a fever dream.

I turned away from it, my hands trembling as I reached for the tap.

The water came out orange at first, a metallic sludge that coughed through the pipes before clearing into a shaky stream.

I splashed my face, my gaze drifting to the mirror above the sink, but the silvering had started to rot, my reflection a blurred, distorted ghost of the man I used to be.

I wasn't Oleander Voss, the literary editor with a sharp eye for subtext and a quiet life.

I was just a body in a room Dominic had built for himself, a man who had watched his husband descend into a private madness and had said nothing because the silence was easier than the truth.

I was an expert at avoidance until it was too late to fix what was broken.

The apartment seemed to settle around me, the floorboards groaning as if adjusting to my weight. It was a beautiful rot, this town. I’d seen it in the way the ivy clung to the brickwork outside. Hollow Vale didn't feel like a place people lived; it felt like a place where things were kept.

I spent the next hour unpacking, trying to keep my mind from wandering to the closed door at the end of the hall.

I folded my sweaters and placed them in the built-in wardrobe, the wood smelling of cedar and old paper.

I lined up my shoes. I placed my toothbrush in the chipped porcelain holder.

I was building a safe space out of habit, a desperate attempt to make the strange feel familiar.

But the familiar was what I was afraid of. Dominic hadn't just left me an apartment; he had left me the continuation of a story I thought had ended in a hospital bed seven months ago.

I finally walked back to the bedroom door.

I reached for the handle, expecting it to be locked, expecting the resistance of the phantom hand I’d imagined earlier.

But the knob turned easily. The door swung open to reveal a room that was surprisingly bare, a bed, a small nightstand, and a window that looked out over the woods at the edge of town.

I sat on the edge of the mattress, the springs creaking in protest. The silence was different here than it had been in the car. It felt occupied, as if the air itself were listening to the sound of my breathing, waiting for me to say something that would break the spell.

Laying back, fully clothed, I watched the shadows shift across the ceiling.

I thought of Lili, seven hours ahead, waking up to a sun I couldn't see.

I thought of the gas station with the one light and the church with the broken steeple.

I thought of the way the door had closed, a quiet, domestic gesture that felt like an ending.

“Welcome to your new home, I guess,” I muttered to myself.