Wicked is the Hollow (Tales from the Hollow #1)

Prologue

THE DREAM

When I was eight, I watched my mother disappear in fading pixels. I remember it clear as day. My frantic hands trying to plug up those tiny square holes as she begged me to hurry.

Hurry, Selah. Hurry!

But there was nothing I could do. How do you put a person back together when the pieces are gone?

Then the monster came. It descended like a windstorm—spidery tendrils of swirling darkness that swept her off her feet and dragged her away.

I grabbed onto what was left of her arm as she screamed for me to save her.

Save me, Selah. Save me!

But I wasn’t strong enough to save her. Those spidery tendrils gathered into a black mouth that sucked her up. Then she was gone. The black hole vanished and I bolted upright in bed, my pajama top sticking to my back.

“A monster ate Mommy! A monster ate Mommy! A monster ate Mommy!”

I screamed the words over and over, macabre images flashing through my mind like vignettes on a broken film reel.

My mother, disappearing in bits.

My mother, swept off her feet.

My mother, gobbled up by a terrifying, bodiless mouth.

I screamed until Dad crashed into my room, and not until his calloused hands clamped over my small shoulders did that scream finally die in my throat.

“Selah, sweetheart,” my father cried, his eyes wide, his grip firm. “It was a dream. You were just having a bad dream.”

But I couldn’t stop seeing it.

I would never be able to unsee it.

That broken film reel played on and on as I whimpered in the dark.

Dad sat beside me, the mattress springs squeaking as he wrapped me in a hug and rubbed soothing circles onto my back. “It’s okay, peanut. Mommy’s fine. It was just a dream.”

His words were a lie.

Mommy wasn’t fine.

I knew this at eight. Heck, I’d known it at five.

My mother had been anything and everything other than fine.

And that nightmare? I couldn’t let it go.

It became a fixation. I was so convinced in the truth of it, so stalwartly adamant that a monster had, in fact, eaten my mother, Dad took me to a therapist named Dr. Penny—a soft-spoken woman with skin like papier-maché.

She said things like, “That must’ve been very scary, watching your mom disappear like that. ”

I thought she believed me.

Then I overheard her talking to Dad after one of our appointments.

She called my nightmare a trauma dream—a vivid, disturbing dream related to a past traumatic event.

Or, in my case, multiple traumatic events.

She said it was my subconscious way of processing my mother’s unreliable presence, which was true enough.

My mother’s presence was unequivocally unreliable.

The thing is, she always came back eventually.

Until that nightmare.

At first, nobody was surprised. She’d left before.

So often, in fact, it had become a predictable, normal thing—my mother leaving.

Usually for days. Sometimes weeks. Once, when I was five, she stayed gone for three whole months.

So when one month turned into two, no one panicked.

When two turned into three, nobody sounded an alarm.

By the time eleven months slipped into twelve, Dad had grown silently resigned.

A year had passed without a glance or a peep.

There were no staticky phone calls filled with apology.

No tear-stained postcards promising to see me soon.

From the moment I woke up screaming like a banshee, we never saw her or heard from her again.

She vanished into thin air.

Dad decided I didn’t need a therapist anymore.

Or maybe he just couldn’t afford the copays.

What I needed—what we needed—was a fresh start.

A place where I wasn’t the drug addict’s daughter and he wasn’t that “poor man.” He found himself a landscaping job two states away in the town of Foggy Hollow, West Virginia, where, unbeknownst to him, an entire family had vanished just like my mother.

It should surprise nobody that such a disappearance would capture my imagination so thoroughly.

Dr. Penny would probably blame it on trauma.

Maybe she’d call it a trauma obsession. Maybe she would’ve been right.

Whatever the case, whether from trauma or some invisible force drawing me in, I took it upon myself to learn everything I could about the Vandenberg family cold case, having no idea that several years later, my life would intertwine with theirs in the most astonishing of ways.