Whitby stared at the blank screen, cursor blinking like a metronome counting down his evaporating sanity. Three days at the lake house, and he'd written exactly fourteen words. Fourteen!
At home, with four kiddos & two dogs, plus Ziggy's constant parade of tea check-ins, he'd convinced himself that silence was all he needed to finish this damn book. Now, drowning in silence, he wondered if the picket fenced chaos had been keeping something else at bay.
His favorite graphite coffee mug sat beside his laptop. Steam rising in impossible spirals that seemed to linger too long in the still air. He'd been staring at it for twenty minutes. The vapor danced in patterns that looked almost like... letters? Sigils?
‘Just write something’, he told himself, fingers hovering over the keys. ‘Anything.’
Chapter One: The Summoning
The words appeared as if typed by someone else. Whitby blinked. He was certain he hadn't consciously chosen them, but there they were. He tried to backspace, but his fingers wouldn't obey.
Marcus had always been drawn to the darkness that lived in the spaces between things. At seventeen, he'd gathered his friends in the basement of the Ashford house, candles flickering against concrete walls while they chanted words they'd copied from a book they should never have opened.
"What the hell?" Whitby whispered.
His suburban dad brain insisted this was just writer's block breaking. His subconscious finally engaged with the planned gothic horror novel.
Beyond his logic, in the shadows of his heart, something deeper awoke. It tasted of black candles and teenage hubris. Whispered remembering.
The steam from his coffee began to thicken. Ghostly tendrils spiraled around him. Then he heard it: a whisper like wind through dead leaves.
"Finish it, Thorn."
The graphite mug slipped from his numb fingers. Coffee splashed across the laptop keyboard. But instead of the bitter heat he expected, the liquid was ice-cold. His world imploded.
Seventeen. Black stragly hair hung in his eyes. Silver pentagram heavy against his chest. They'd called him Thorn. A Thorn to all that knew him. Marcus "Thorn" Whitby, the one who could make candles flicker on a wish, who heard voices in the static between radio stations.
"Are you sure about this?" Sarah whispered. Her goth makeup unable to hide her youth in the candlelight.
"It's just a game," he'd lied. The words of the summoning were live wires in his mouth. Something vast and hungry pressed against the barriers between worlds. Drawn by their amateur ritual and his untrained but potent gift.
The others were pale shadows compared to him. Jessica with her store-bought crystals. Danny with his borrowed confidence. Sarah with her desperate need to belong. But Thorn, the darkness surged through him, ready to cross the threshold into being.
"We call upon our Hollowed King," he'd intoned. The words flowed deep in his soul. He didn't understand, he obeyed. "Lord of the spaces between breath and heartbeat, between thought and action. We offer ourselves as vessels—"
"Marcus, stop!" Sarah screamed.
The candles guttered out in a wind that existed only in that sunken basement. An entity, vast and patient, pressed against the edges of reality.
They'd panicked. They broke the circle. Left the summoning incomplete.
Whitby gasped as he jerked back to the present. The coffee remained in his mug. Steam rising in that same impossible pattern. Copper in his mouth—had he bitten his tongue?
His laptop screen showed two pages of text. Two pages he didn't remember writing.
The ritual had been interrupted, but not stopped. The Hollow King waited in the space between. He lived tween completion and failure. Growing stronger with each passing year. It whispered through suburban dinner conversations and children's laughter, patient and inexorable. It would wait until the vessel was alone, isolated, and desperate enough to pick up the thread once more.
And then it would walk the earth and feed.
"No," Whitby breathed. His voice hoarse. "This isn't real. This is just…fiction. A story."
But his fingers were moving across the keys. Words appeared that made his blood freeze.
The vessel's name, Thorn. He'd buried his identity beneath mortgages and parent-teacher conferences. Beneath a husband's loving concern. Behind cozy children's bedtime stories. He'd thought love could be a ward against my darkness. He. Is. Wrong.
The mug grew warm in his hands. When had he picked it up again? The coffee within began to darken. It took on the consistency of thicker motor oil. In its surface, reflections swirled that had nothing to do with the sunlit room around him.
He saw Sarah's face. Pale and terrified. Mouth open in a scream that had lasted seventeen years. Jessica, backed against the basement wall as shadows with too many angles reached for her. Danny, his cocky grin dissolving into horror.
And —Thorn—eyes black with reflected candlelight. Arms spread wide as power coursed through him. Ancient and hungry. Pressed against the boundaries of this world. Whispered promises of knowledge and communion. From my king.
"You left us incomplete," Sarah's voice echoed from the coffee's surface, distorted by ripples that matched no earthly wind. "You left us waiting."
"You're dead," Whitby whispered. Even as he said it, he knew it wasn't entirely true. They existed now in the space between summoned and banished. Between alive and dead. The Hollow King's first victims, caught in the incomplete ritual. Runaways. No bodies recovered. Ever.
“Finish what you started, Thorn. Set us free."
The reflection in the coffee shifted, showing him the basement of the Ashford house as it had been that night—but wrong, changed. The walls breathed with life. Shadows moved independently of any light source. His friends frozen in the moment of interruption, caught like flies in amber. Their eyes pleading. In the in-between.
Behind them, vast and patient, loomed darkness eternal. The Hollow King. Pressing against the incomplete binding, neither fully summoned nor banished. Waiting.
Whitby tried to stand. To run. His legs wouldn't respond. The chair beneath him now the rickety folding chair from his parents' basement. The lake house's bright kitchen dissolved like morning mist. He was seventeen again, the ritual circle incomplete at his feet.
”Finish it," the Hollow King whispered. A voice like dying stars. "Complete what you began. Let me walk among the living, and your friends go free."
"No." The word scraped his throat raw. "I have a family. I have a life."
“You have lies. Pretty. Comfortable lies. I have been patient, vessel. I have watched you play at normalcy while your friends suffered in the spaces between. Do you hear them weeping in your children's laughter? Do you taste their terror in your husband's kisses?"
God help him, he did. Had always heard something underneath Ziggy's gentle words. Tasted bitter beneath every family dinner. The Hollow King had been there all along. Feeding on his happiness. Growing stronger on his attempts to forget.
The coffee mug in his hands was no longer ceramic but carved bone. Steam rose from it in complex patterns that hurt his eyes to follow.
"Your writing," the entity continued, its voice weaving through the steam, "is the final thread in my web. Each word pulls the ritual closer to completion. Each sentence drags me nearer to your world. You thought you were creating fiction. You are remembering truth. You are finishing what seventeen-year-old Thorn began."
The laptop screen filled with text he didn't remember typing. Words that burned with their own terrible truth:
The vessel had tried to seal away his power, to bury Thorn beneath the mundane concerns of Marcus Whitby. But power, once awakened, cannot be contained forever. It leaks through the cracks, summoning old hungers, old debts. The Hollow King had been patient, but patience was not mercy. It was strategy.
And now, alone and vulnerable, the vessel would complete the summoning or remain trapped forever in the space between worlds, neither fully alive nor mercifully dead.
"Trapped?" Whitby's voice cracked. He tried to remember his phone. Cobolt iPhone. His car. Blue Subaru outback. Any connection to the outside world. When had he last checked his messages? When had he last heard from Ziggy? Ziggy. Impossibly platinum hair, waves of hair. Deep blue eyes that creased like starshine when he smiled. That mischievous smile of his.
The lake house shimmered like a heat distortion. He saw it as it truly was for a moment. Not the charming rental, but something older. It was wrong. The spiral staircase led down into depths of a cavern of decay & stench. The sunken living room was carved from stone that predated human civilization. The windows looked out on a vast emptiness that stretched between heartbeats.
"You cannot leave, vessel. Not until the work is finished. Write the words. Complete the summoning. Let me taste the sun once more, and I will release you to your pretty illusions."
"And if I refuse?"
The coffee in the bone mug began to froth & bubble. The reflections within showed him truths that made him wish for blindness. Ziggy, aging rapidly. Calling his name in an empty house. His children, growing up fatherless. Their laughter now echos behind depression & tears. Time passed in the real world while he remained trapped in this space between completion and abandonment.
"Then you remain here. In this moment of choosing. Forever. Your friends will continue to suffer in the spaces between breath and heartbeat. Your family will mourn. And I... I will find another vessel. Perhaps one of your children. Perhaps the youngest child. Children are so much more... malleable."
The threat hit like ice water. His babies—Lily with her gap-toothed grin, Marcus Jr. with his serious eyes, the twins with their infectious giggles. The Hollow King would wait, patient as stone. Until they were old enough to be curious about daddy's books. About the journal he'd never let them read. About the box in the attic marked "High School - Do Not Open."
And they would be so much more powerful than their father had ever been.
"No," he breathed. "You can't—"
"I can wait, vessel. I am very, very good at waiting."
The bone mug cracked in his grip. Warm black liquid seeped through his fingers. The coppery aroma brought back memories of that basement. Of teenage arrogance and cosmic horror. The moment when the veil between worlds had grown thin enough to see through.
He looked at the laptop screen. The cursor blinking after the last line of text. Waiting. Patient as its master.
In the liquid's surface, his friends' faces looked up at him with desperate hope. Sarah mouthed a single word: Please.
His fingers moved to the keyboard.
The Hollow King stepped through the veil at last. Ancient and terrible. Hungry. The vessel completed his purpose. The ritual reached its conclusion, and the old debts were finally—
Whitby's hands froze. In the reflection of the laptop screen, he saw Thorn's face —seventeen, arrogant, & drunk on power. The kid didn't understand. The boy who had doomed his friends and spent twenty years running from the consequences.
Then he saw Ziggy's face. Patient and loving. Bringing him tea, muffins, and understanding. Saw his children's faces, bright with trust and affection. Saw the life he'd built on the foundation of his deepest shame. Imperfect but real.
"I'm not Thorn anymore," he whispered. "I'm Whitby. I'm a father. I'm a husband. And I'm not your vessel."
The Hollow King's rage shook the space between worlds. Whitby kept typing.
But the vessel had learned something in twenty years of love and loss, of bedtime stories and soccer practices, of a husband's gentle hands and children's fierce hugs. He had learned that power without love was hollow. Magic without compassion was just destruction dressed up in impressive words.
So instead of completing the summoning, he chose a different ending.
The bone mug shattered in his hands. The Hollow King's scream echoed through dimensions. The lake house shuddered. Reality blurred the edges, but Whitby kept writing.
I'm sorry, he typed, and meant it. I'm sorry, Sarah. I'm sorry, Jessica. I'm sorry, Danny. I was seventeen and stupid and drunk on power, and I hurt you all. But I won't compound that mistake by damning the world to save myself.
I banish you, Hollow King. I bind you with love freely given and freely received. I seal you with the names of those who trust me to come home safely: Ziggy, Lily, Marcus, Emma, Sophie. By their love, I am more than your vessel. By their trust, I am stronger than your hunger.
Go back to the empty spaces where you belong. And let my friends rest in peace.
The Hollow King's presence writhed around him. Desperate. Grasping. But each name Whitby typed—each face he held in his mind—drove it further away. The entity fed on his guilt for twenty years. It grew strong on his shame. Shame withered in the face of love freely given.
The basement dissolved around him. The bone mug became ceramic. Filled with ordinary coffee. Cold coffee. The spiral staircase led to a simple loft bedroom, and through the windows, he could see the lake reflecting afternoon sunlight.
His phone buzzed with messages. Ziggy, checking in. The kids, sending him pictures of their day. His editor, wondering about his progress.
Real. Present. Home.
Whitby closed the laptop without saving the document. Some stories were better left unfinished. Some doors were better left unopened.
He called Ziggy.
"Hey, love," his husband's voice was warm through the speaker. "How's the writing going?"
"It's..." Whitby looked at the closed laptop, at the coffee mug reflecting ordinary light, at the windows that showed him nothing but trees and water and sky. "It's done. I'm coming home."
"Everything okay? You sound—"
"Everything's perfect," Whitby said. For the first time in twenty years, he meant it. Completely. "I love you. Tell the kids Daddy's coming home."
As he packed, he could have sworn he heard whispers of gratitude on the wind—Sarah's voice, Jessica's, Danny's—finally free to rest.
Today, Whitby was going home to his beautiful, chaotic, gloriously mundane life. Today, love was enough.
The lake house stood empty behind him. Just a rental property with good Wi-Fi and a view of the lake. It billowed like a curtain in the breeze as he drove away.
Nothing supernatural about it at all.
Soooo much fun to see this fleshed out, really chilling, great ending!