Need toThe Dare
They only meant to scare the new kid.
Tyler McNeil had been in Sycamore Hill less than a month, and already the Dunham twins and Markie Langston had pegged him as the perfect mark — skinny, quiet, always scribbling in a little sketchpad like he was afraid to speak out loud. When they told him there was a dare at the construction site, he just nodded and followed.
The new development was supposed to be the future: thirty identical tan homes, replacing the dense woods on the north ridge. The machines had started digging, carving into soil that hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. And then they found it — a stone well, wide and ancient, uncovered beneath a fallen oak. No one knew who built it. It wasn’t on any records.
“We toss the scarecrow down, make a mess, freak out the workers,” Markie grinned, hefting the thing over his shoulder. It wore an old flannel shirt, stuffed with straw and raw chicken parts.
Tyler hovered at the edge of the well. The granite rim was cold even in the sun. He couldn’t see the bottom — just blackness. It didn’t feel like a hole. It felt like an eye.
Markie threw the scarecrow in. There was a splash — distant, delayed, like it had dropped a hundred feet.
Then Tyler heard something else: breathing. Deep. Slow. Hollow.
The others laughed, but Tyler didn’t move. He was still staring down.
Something was awake down there.
Stone Dreams
That night, Tyler dreamed of stone — tunnels beneath the earth, walls pressed in too tight, air thick with the scent of moss and wet rock. He dreamed of stairs that led nowhere, of something large shifting in the dark, whispering in a language made of groans and grinding.
He woke drenched in sweat, his fingers twitching like he’d been drawing in his sleep. When he checked his sketchpad, the pages were full of circles. Spirals within spirals. A crude face carved in stone, mouth open wide.
At school, he drifted through the day, barely hearing the teachers. He heard something else instead — low, rhythmic thuds in his head, like distant footsteps underground.
By the time the final bell rang, he’d made up his mind. He had to go back.
He wasn’t sure why. Curiosity, maybe. Or guilt. Something about the way the scarecrow had vanished into the dark made it feel less like a prank, and more like a sacrifice.
The site was quiet that evening. Machinery sat idle. The well was still there, boarded over with thick plywood, wrapped in warning tape.
Tyler stood at the edge and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
No response. Just wind in the weeds.
But as he turned to leave, he thought he heard it again — that low, slow breathing, rising through the stone like a tide.
A Warning from the Past
“Don’t go near that hole again,” said a voice behind him.
Tyler jumped. An old man stood at the chain-link fence, hands in the pockets of a worn jacket. He looked like part of the landscape — sun-weathered, sharp-eyed.
“I wasn’t—” Tyler began.
“Lyin’ won’t help. That thing’s not for kids. Not for anyone, really.”
The man’s name was Mr. Bales. He’d lived in Sycamore Hill his whole life, worked as a caretaker at the old cemetery before they closed it down.
“They used to call that place the Hollow,” he said, nodding toward the well. “Granite Hollow. My grandfather said the stones whisper if you listen too long. Said people used to go missing when they tried to build too close.”
Tyler swallowed. “What is it?”
Bales shook his head. “Something old. Maybe something hungry. Land don’t forget what you bury in it. Not if it was buried alive.”
Tyler looked back toward the well.
“Your friends stirred it up,” Bales said softly. “You feel it, don’t you? Like it’s watching. That’s how it starts.”
He turned to go.
“You got a choice, boy,” he said. “Walk away, or keep digging.”
Disappearances
Tyler tried to walk away. For a while.
But the dreams came back worse. He saw Markie in them now, floating in the darkness beneath the well, his eyes wide and full of stone.
Then the real Markie went missing.
So did one of the Dunham twins, Joel — the quiet one. They told police they’d gone camping in the woods. But Tyler knew. He saw the tire tracks leading back to the construction site.
The foreman was found dead the next morning. Collapsed near the well, eyes staring up at the sky, hands curled into claws. His skin was pale as chalk. They said it was a heart attack.
But his face… it looked like he’d died screaming.
Tyler started sketching again — feverishly. His notebooks filled with tunnels, with hollow eyes, with twisted faces carved from stone.
When his parents tried to make him stop, he screamed.
Something had changed inside him.
He couldn’t explain it, only feel it — the pull of the Hollow, calling him back.
Descent
The boards were gone.
Tyler returned one last time, just after dusk. No tape. No signs. Just the mouth of the well yawning wide, like it had been waiting.
The air was still. The ground around it was undisturbed, but the silence buzzed like a live wire.
He lowered a flashlight tied to his belt, knotted a climbing rope to the nearby bulldozer, and began his descent.
It took longer than he thought. The walls were smooth granite, impossibly well-shaped. The air grew damp, colder with every foot.
Sixty feet down, he found the tunnel.
It branched off sideways — a rough-hewn passage carved into the bedrock, lined with strange symbols. Circles. Eyes. Teeth.
He stepped inside.
The whispering began almost immediately. Not in his ears — in his head. Voices overlapping. Markie’s voice. Joel’s. His own.
Come see. Need to come home. Come dream.
The Hollow Beneath
The tunnel opened into a vast chamber — a cathedral of stone.
The walls pulsed faintly with a gray-green glow. Crude statues lined the perimeter — faceless humanoid shapes with gaping mouths, all smiling, all reaching.
At the center was a circular platform. And on it — bodies.
Markie. Joel. And others. Pale, motionless, eyes open but unfocused, breathing shallow.
They weren’t dead. Not exactly.
Tyler knelt beside Markie. His fingers twitched. His lips moved without sound.
“They’re dreaming,” said a voice behind him.
Tyler turned.
It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t anything he could name. Just a presence, tall and formless, like a robe made from shadows, carved from stone. A face that wasn’t there, but felt smiling.
“They live in the stone now. Like we all will.”
The floor vibrated, a low hum becoming a rhythm. A pulse.
The dream opened up beneath Tyler, wide and dark and endless.
He didn’t resist.
He wanted to know.
Wanted to belong.
A New Foundation
A week later, construction resumed. The developers said the delays had been exaggerated. The missing boys were still being searched for, of course. But the town had moved on.
Tyler McNeil was doing better, his parents said. Quieter. More helpful. Less… artistic.
He visited the site every afternoon after school, watching as the first foundation was poured.
He held a notepad, flipping through blueprints. The crew joked that he’d be an architect someday.
“We need to dig deeper,” he told the foreman with a smile. “They like it deep.”
That night, as the machines sat silent and the stars began to wink out one by one, a low, wet breath echoed up from beneath the earth.
The Hollow was waking again.
And it was hungry.