28 Nov Hollow Limits

Part I

Christian Ward had driven into strange towns before, but Hollow Creek greeted him with a kind of quiet that suggested the place was thinking. The highway wound through the Appalachian foothills in a series of broad, predictable curves until the last stretch, where the road began to narrow. His GPS insisted he had another three miles before reaching the first street in town. The odometer disagreed. It wasn’t even close.

He slowed to a crawl. The trees on either side leaned in as though space had shifted during his descent into the valley. He tried not to put too much stock in that interpretation. Long days on the road had a way of twisting perception. Still, the sense lingered as he passed a battered green sign that looked like it had been nailed together in someone’s backyard workshop: HOLLOW CREEK — POP. 612.

He pulled off onto a gravel turnout and checked his maps. His employer, Plateau Mapping & Survey, had assigned him the job after receiving a string of “impossible measurements” and “inconsistent parcel data” from the tax assessor’s office. Christian had laughed at those words the first time he saw them. Spending the better part of a decade in rural mapping taught him the difference between bureaucratic exaggeration and genuine irregularities. But the brief for this project had felt oddly urgent. Remap everything. Rush delivery. Pay bonus upon completion.

The company rarely offered bonuses.

He rolled back onto the road and crept toward town. Hollow Creek appeared suddenly, without transition. No marker, no widening of streets, no gradual accumulation of houses. One moment he was in the woods. The next, buildings rose on both sides of him, pressed shoulder to shoulder like anxious neighbors whispering among themselves.

Christian parked outside the only structure with a fresh coat of paint: a narrow municipal building with a placard that read TOWN OFFICE. A woman stood on the wooden steps, hands folded behind her back. She had a posture that suggested she’d waited a while and hadn’t minded.

“You must be Mr. Ward,” she said. Her voice carried easily in the still afternoon. “I’m Mayor Ruth Candler.”

Christian extended a hand. “Good to meet you. Sorry I’m late. Road felt shorter than it should’ve been.”

Her eyes sharpened for a moment, though she didn’t comment. “We’ve kept your room at the Creekside Motel. You’ll find everything you need—desk, lamp, outlets. People don’t pass through as often as they used to. You’ll have some privacy.”

He nodded, noticing how the buildings flanking the street seemed closer than any of the aerial photos he had reviewed earlier in the week. A narrow brick post office leaned toward an old whitewashed church, their roofs nearly touching. Yet the dataset on his tablet showed twelve feet of separation between them. He knew property lines could drift between surveys, but entire structures didn’t.

“Before I settle in,” Christian said, “I’d like to walk the main stretch. Get a sense of things.”

Mayor Candler clasped her hands. “Of course. But I’d appreciate it if you made a point to visit the courthouse this evening. We’d like to speak with you about tomorrow’s census.”

“Census?” he asked.

“A formality,” she said. “We conduct our own count before the state’s. Helps us stay organized.”

The explanation was delivered with practiced ease, but something beneath her expression suggested she had rehearsed that answer many times.

Christian headed down Main Street, surveying distances and angles. He counted paces between storefronts, jotted numbers in his notebook, then cross-checked them against GIS data on his tablet. Nothing matched. Not even close.

A cold brick façade caught his attention. Boone’s Diner, according to the sign. Inside, a young woman arranged condiments with automatic precision. When she noticed him, her hands froze mid-motion.

“You’re the map guy?” she asked through the glass.

He stepped inside. The diner smelled of coffee, fried onions, and something faintly metallic. “Christian Ward,” he said. “I’m just taking a look around.”

She wiped her palms on an apron patterned with faded cherries. “Name’s Lila. If you’re staying the night, the motel coffee isn’t any good. Just a warning.”

He smiled politely, but her expression remained fixed. It wasn’t shyness or curiosity. It looked more like bracing.

“Town shrink on you yet?” she asked.

He paused. “Not sure what you mean.”

Lila leaned closer, speaking low enough that the hum of an old refrigerator nearly masked her words. “It feels small at first. Too small. You’ll see more tomorrow. Sometimes the woods shift. Buildings too. Don’t tell the mayor I said anything.”

Before he could respond, the bell above the door jingled. Sheriff Hal Jacoby stepped in, heavy boots echoing across the tile floor. His gaze lingered on Christian a second longer than courtesy required.

“Evening, Lila,” the sheriff said. “Mayor mentioned our guest arrived.”

Christian introduced himself. The sheriff nodded slowly, as if confirming a suspicion. “You picked quite a time to visit. Census is tomorrow. Folks are on edge. Best you keep close to town center after dark.”

“Is something going on?” Christian asked.

Jacoby’s jaw tightened. “Nothing that concerns you. Long day ahead. Get some rest.”

The sheriff’s tone implied a boundary, one Christian knew better than to push. He left the diner and continued his survey.

The courthouse stood at the end of Main Street on a slight rise, a broad brick structure with a bell tower whose shadow—short and disciplined—barely touched the lawn. As Christian approached, something odd drifted across his perception. The building looked stable, but the edges blurred the longer he stared, as though the walls leaned a fraction of an inch inward.

He took out his notebook, sketched the façade, and felt a ripple of unease. The lines didn’t match what he saw. They curved subtly toward the center of the page. He drew them again. Same result.

He tried to laugh it off, but the sound faltered in the quiet.

A hand landed gently on his shoulder.

Mayor Candler had returned, though he hadn’t heard her approach.

“Everything satisfactory so far?” she asked.

Christian closed the notebook. “Measurements are off. Distances don’t align with any of the state records.”

Her eyes softened with something that might have been sympathy—or resignation. “You’ll understand more tomorrow. Hollow Creek requires… context.”

She gestured toward the courthouse. “We’ll meet here at seven in the morning. Bring your maps.”

Christian thanked her and headed for the motel. The sun dipped behind the hills as he walked. Each time he glanced back at Main Street, the buildings appeared a little closer together than they had moments before.

He chalked it up to fatigue.

But the unease followed him all the way to his room.

Part II

Christian slept badly. Not because the bed was uncomfortable—the mattress was firm, the sheets clean—but because each time he cracked his eyes open, the furniture seemed closer to him than before. The little square table with the single chair, the dresser beneath the television, even the door to the bathroom. They did not move while he watched, yet when he drifted near sleep and snapped awake again, the distances felt different.

By morning, the table might as well have grown from the floor beside his bed.

He measured that first. From mattress edge to table leg, from table leg to door. He wrote the numbers down and told himself to check them again that night. If the numbers stayed the same, then it was his mind. If they changed—

He folded the thought away and started his day.

The town looked different in full daylight. Sun hit the brick and clapboard fronts at a low angle, picking out every crack and weather stain. Hollow Creek was not a picturesque destination, but it carried the charm of places that had never expected to be photographed. Cars sat along the curb in irregular spacing, some older than Christian, all bearing the town name on their license plate frames as if they had never driven anywhere else.

He reached the courthouse ten minutes early. Mayor Ruth Candler stood near the front steps in a gray skirt suit that was probably older than her last three terms but impeccably pressed. Sheriff Jacoby leaned against his patrol car, arms folded, studying Christian with the air of a man making mental calculations.

“I hope you had a decent night’s rest,” the mayor said. “We don’t have much in the way of nightlife, unless you count the crickets.”

“It was fine,” Christian said. “I’d like to start by reviewing your existing maps and parcel data. The discrepancies are significant.”

“We assumed as much,” she replied. “Come inside. Sheriff, join us.”

The foyer smelled faintly of dust and old paper. A bulletin board listed events that had already passed—pie socials, church dinners, a trout derby at a river Christian had not yet seen. Mayor Candler led him to a small conference room stacked with boxes. The topmost cartons were labeled in blocky handwriting: ASSESSOR — 1982–1990, BOUNDARY SURVEYS, CENSUS—LOCAL.

“Everything you could want,” she said. “The official state records never kept pace with us. We prefer our own.”

Christian set up at the oval table, spreading printed maps beside his tablet. Roads, parcel lines, and coordinates traced in familiar color codes. He reached for the nearest box and began sorting. The sheriff took a chair in the corner, saying nothing.

Old survey plats from the seventies and eighties showed a town larger by degrees. Christian noted the difference, drawing little circles in the margins. A creek that once curved widely to the north now hugged the town name on modern maps. Farmland once registered as separate lots seemed to be missing entirely.

“These parcels here,” he said, indicating a row of rectangular blocks on a thirty-year-old plat. “Do they still exist?”

Mayor Candler glanced at the page. “They did. Until the last adjustment.”

“Adjustment?”

She sat across from him. Her hands folded on the table, fingers pale where she pressed them together. “You’re here to help us make sense of it, Mr. Ward. But some of what you see, we’ve accepted for so long that we don’t question it. The edges move. They always have.”

Christian frowned. “You’re saying the town limits change on their own.”

“I’m saying we live with a reality that doesn’t care much what we call it.” She tilted her head, assessing him. “You’re a measuring man. You’ll want reasons. The people who came before us settled for rules.”

“What kind of rules?” he asked.

Before she could answer, the sheriff spoke from the corner. “Best you talk to Amos first.”

Candler hesitated, then nodded once. “He’s right. Old Man Fletcher knows more about our history than the rest of us put together. He’ll talk to you if I send you.”

She scribbled an address and a name on a scrap of paper and slid it toward Christian. “Stop at Boone’s to eat first. Lila will take good care of you.”

Christian pocketed the note, copied the most important plats with his phone, and promised to bring his own updated base map the next day. As he stepped out into the hallway, he felt a faint change in the floor under his shoes, like a building settling after a long winter. When he glanced back into the conference room, the table seemed closer to the far wall than it had a moment ago.

He nearly convinced himself he was imagining it.

At Boone’s Diner, the lunch crowd consisted of a half-dozen older men who all stopped talking when he walked in. Their gazes followed him to the counter, then drifted back to their plates with the weary acceptance of people who had seen strangers come and go without ever expecting them to stay.

Lila slid a menu toward him. “Special today is meatloaf with mashed potatoes. Coffee’s fresh.”

“That’ll do,” he said. “Can I ask you something while I wait?”

She glanced toward the men in the booth, then back at him. “Depends who’s listening.”

“That address the mayor gave me. Amos Fletcher. What’s his deal?”

Lila poured coffee into his cup and kept her voice low. “He’s been around longer than anyone. Knows more than he should, if you ask me. Some folks say he’s losing it. Most of what he says turned out truer than people wanted.”

“About what?”

“About the edges.” She met his eyes. There was a hollow tension there, a tired fear that had burned down to embers. “He keeps notebooks like you. Little maps. You might like each other.”

“Mayor said I should talk to him,” Christian said. “She also mentioned… rules.”

Lila’s mouth tightened. She tapped the coffee pot against the burner a little harder than necessary. “Every place has rules. Ours are older than the highway. Older than the courthouse. You’ll learn them. Or you won’t.”

He opened his mouth to press further, but one of the men in the booth coughed in a way that sounded intentional. Another cleared his throat. Lila stepped back, the conversation closed.

The meatloaf came, and Christian ate quickly. He kept an eye on the front window. Main Street looked narrower than it had that morning. Two trucks parked outside now nearly touched bumper to bumper, though he could have sworn a gap had existed between them when he walked in. By the time he finished, they might as well have been welded together.

He left money on the counter and stepped into the daylight.

The address led him to the far edge of town, where the houses began to thin. A small wooden sign marked the end of maintained road: TOWN LIMITS. The odd thing was how close it stood to the last cottage. Thirty feet, maybe. On his map, there should have been a broad strip of field here, a buffer of green shading indicating undeveloped land. Instead, the grass stopped abruptly at a dense wall of trees, their trunks packed close as if unwilling to give up another inch.

Amos Fletcher’s place was a low, sagging house with a porch that tilted just enough to make a visitor walk carefully. A tin mailbox leaned on a post out front, its red flag missing. The door opened before Christian could knock.

An old man in a faded flannel shirt and suspenders peered out. His eyes were pale and cloudy, but they fixed on Christian with startling clarity.

“You’re the one with the maps,” Amos said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir. Christian Ward.” He lifted his satchel slightly. “Mayor Candler thought we should talk.”

Amos stepped aside. “Then come in. No point wasting daylight while we still have it.”

The interior smelled of paper and smoke, like a library inside a cabin. Every available surface seemed covered in stacked notebooks, rolled charts, and old survey diagrams pinned to the walls with rusty nails. Christian took in the sight with a mix of fascination and unease. Some of the drawings were rough sketches. Others were detailed enough to belong in a planning office.

“Been keeping track a long time,” Amos said, lowering himself into a chair. “You people from outside change your tools every ten years. The land doesn’t care about that either.”

Christian sat across from him, pulling his own notebook free. “I’ve seen discrepancies in your records and mine. Acreage missing. Distances that shrink over time. I need to understand what’s happening.”

Amos stared at him for several seconds, long enough that Christian began to wonder whether he had overstepped.

“You ever patch a worn coat?” the old man asked finally. “Every time you sew, you pull the fabric a little tighter. Stitch by stitch, it all gathers toward the same place. Same principle.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Christian said.

Amos lifted a sheaf of papers and found a particular page. He handed it over with a hand that trembled only slightly. The drawing showed Hollow Creek from above, but not as any official map would have rendered it. Instead of clean blocks and right angles, the town bunched inward, its streets curving toward a dark circle at the center where the courthouse should be.

“Used to be more here,” Amos said. “More fields. More woods. More room. Every so often, we lose a little. Bent inward by something that likes us small.”

Christian studied the sketch. The outer edges were smudged, lines erased and redrawn closer to the middle. In the margins, Amos had written dates—decades apart—each one circled.

“These are… cycles,” Christian said. “Intervals when the town contracts.”

“That’s the gentle word for it,” Amos replied. “The pacts kept it slow. Gave people time to live and die under the same roofs. But the land remembers what it wants. If we don’t make our offering, it takes more. Faster.”

Christian looked up from the page. “Offering?”

Amos smiled, and there was nothing kind in it. Only tired certainty. “The mayor sent you here right before census, didn’t she? Then I expect she told you tomorrow is important.”

“She said it was a formality,” Christian replied.

“Formality keeps panic away.” Amos leaned back with a soft creak of wood. “Every generation, Hollow Creek gives one of its own to the center. Keeps the lines from closing up all at once. Keeps the world from folding shut around us.”

Christian swallowed, aware of how absurd the words sounded, how easily he could file them under folklore and senility. Yet his measurements, his maps, even his uneasy walk through town whispered the same thing from different angles.

“You don’t have to believe me,” Amos said, reading his hesitation. “Belief doesn’t change the stitch. But you should understand the rule. Tomorrow, the town counts who belongs. And the land chooses who pays.”

“Why tell me this?” Christian asked.

Amos’s gaze drifted to the window, where the tree line seemed closer than it had when Christian arrived. “Because you’re new. And it’s been a long time since anyone new came here of their own accord.”

Part III

Christian left Amos Fletcher’s house with the old man’s words still circling in his thoughts. The trees along the property looked closer than they had when he walked in, though he told himself that was only the angle. Shadows—short, ordinary shadows—shifted as the breeze shook the branches overhead. Nothing unnatural happened in front of him. Nothing moved in any way he could point to. Yet as he walked, he found himself double-checking the ground, the trees, the houses, everything as though it might slide when he wasn’t looking.

The “town limits” sign creaked behind him. He didn’t turn around.

Back on Main Street, he stepped carefully, measuring with each stride. He counted paces between the hardware store and the barbershop. Thirty-two. He wrote the number down, checked a satellite map, and frowned. It should have been more.

When he turned the corner toward the river crossing at the south end of town, he felt a faint drop in the air temperature. A wooden footbridge spanned what used to be a wide stretch of river, based on the official hydrology map. But the water beneath was barely wider than a drainage ditch. He knelt and touched the stone embankment. The river had once carved a path six or seven feet deep. Now, puddles reflected the sky in broken fragments.

He snapped photos, measured the incline, and tried to reconstruct what could cause this level of rapid change. Drought could shrink a river, but not the banks. Not the bedrock.

A door opened behind him. An elderly woman stepped out of a cottage and crossed her arms, watching him without stepping off her porch.

“You’re the map man,” she said.

He stood. “Christian Ward. Just surveying.”

“You’ll want to finish up before sundown. Things slide faster then.”

He hesitated. “Slide?”

She didn’t answer. She shut her door gently, as though afraid the sound might disturb something sleeping nearby.

Christian turned back toward the motel. The roads felt steeper, even though they hadn’t been an hour earlier. His stride shortened. Houses leaned slightly inward. He tried to blame the angle, the road, the hills—anything—but the distances were compressing around him in ways he could not quantify through ordinary logic.

Near the courthouse, he paused. The building was still a fixed point at the center of town, but its presence carried weight. The closer he walked, the more muted the surrounding sounds became. The wind in the trees faded. Distant voices thinned out. Even the rumble of an engine on some side road slipped away.

His heartbeat—not racing, just present—sounded louder in his ears than the street did.

He stepped onto the courthouse lawn and crouched to take another measurement. The tape measure read four and a half feet from the base of a stone pillar to the walkway. He checked the county record from two years prior. It listed the distance as seven feet.

He tried a second location. Same result. The courthouse seemed to be pulling everything inward, not through visible movement but through shifting relationships between points in space.

Like stitching on fabric, Amos had said.

Christian wiped moisture from the back of his neck and forced himself to keep going. He didn’t want the sheriff asking why he was hesitating around the building. He didn’t want the mayor to think he was doubting his own professionalism.

Still, he walked away sooner than he meant to, checking the map again as if that would steady anything.

A narrow alley led behind the diner. As he passed it, he heard glassware clatter inside—just normal diner noise, nothing ominous—yet when he looked down the alley, the back door of the diner seemed closer to the adjacent hardware store than the last time he’d looked. He narrowed his eyes. Only an hour ago, he could have walked between the buildings easily. Now he wasn’t sure his shoulders would fit.

He slung his satchel higher on his shoulder, checked his phone, and noticed the time glitch: 3:17 p.m., back to 3:03, up again to 3:19. He restarted it, but the minutes flickered without pattern.

He turned toward his car.

A little girl stood near the curb, holding a jump rope. She watched him with the wary curiosity of a child evaluating a stranger.

“You’re the one they picked,” she said.

Christian stopped. “For what?”

The girl glanced toward the courthouse. “For the count.”

“Who told you that?”

She shrugged. “Everybody knows. It’s just how it works.”

He approached slowly, careful not to appear threatening. “What do you mean, the count? Census?”

She twirled the rope around her hand, tangling it. “They put down names. They look at who belongs. The land knows who belongs too, but it needs names.”

Her phrasing struck him, unsettling in its simplicity.

He nodded and thanked her. She skipped away, rope trailing behind her like a loose thread.

Christian climbed into his car and shut the door. He didn’t start the engine. He sat there, notebook open, staring at the numbers he had collected over the past twenty-four hours. Everything he recorded pointed in the same direction: the town’s physical footprint was shrinking. Not metaphorically, not symbolically, but in a literal, measurable way that defied every natural model he knew.

He drove to the northern edge of town, where a long straight road connected Hollow Creek to a highway three miles away. According to both the county and his employer’s maps.

He drove until his odometer marked exactly one mile. The GPS read two miles elapsed. The mountains on the horizon shifted positions with each tenth of a mile, as though he were circling them rather than approaching them.

He kept going.

The road dipped and curved gently left, but the curve stretched longer than it had the first time he came in. He checked the maps again. The curve did not exist. It should have been a straight shot.

He rounded the bend and saw a familiar green sign ahead: HOLLOW CREEK — POP. 612

He pressed the brake. The gravel turnout where he had stopped yesterday sat just beyond the sign. The same broken guardrail. The same impossible drop in his stomach.

He pulled over and sat in silence, hands resting on the steering wheel.

The loop was real.

At least, real enough.

A soft tapping on his window startled him. Sheriff Hal Jacoby stood outside, leaning one hand on the roof of the car. Christian rolled the window halfway.

“You shouldn’t be out this way,” Jacoby said. “Road’s in rough condition.”

“I was trying to leave,” Christian said. “It brought me back.”

Jacoby nodded, the motion slow and unsurprised. “Roads aren’t reliable before census.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t have to.” Jacoby stepped back. “Town meeting at seven. Mayor expects you there. Best to stick close until then.”

Christian drove back toward the center of Hollow Creek. The roads felt narrower on the return trip, as if the land itself had shifted during the minute or two he had spoken with the sheriff. When he passed the diner again, only a sliver of sky remained between the neighboring buildings.

He parked near the motel and walked the last stretch on foot. The evening light dimmed behind the hills, and the houses seemed to lean slightly toward him, creating a corridor where none had existed when he arrived the day before.

At the door to his room, he turned and glanced back down the street. The horizon dipped slightly, bending at an angle.

He closed the door and tried not to think about it. But the numbers he had recorded lay open in his notebook. None of them changed while he watched, yet he couldn’t shake the sense that they wanted to.

He shut the notebook, slid it under the lamp, and sat on the edge of the bed, telling himself the room would look the same in the morning.

He wasn’t convinced it would.

Part IV

Christian didn’t attend the town meeting. He arrived five minutes early, waited outside the courthouse doors, and listened through a crack in the frame while the townspeople spoke in low, overlapping voices that carried an unmistakable rhythm of routine. He recognized something in those voices—an expectation, almost a ritual order—and he couldn’t bring himself to step inside.

When the mayor emerged afterward, she found him still standing under the eaves, notebook tucked beneath his arm.

“Mr. Ward,” she said, brushing past a handful of residents as they exited. “You should’ve joined us.”

“I wasn’t sure what kind of meeting it was,” he replied.

Her expression didn’t shift. “Preparations for census day. You’re part of this town now, whether you realize it or not.”

He didn’t argue. The idea unsettled him in ways he couldn’t concentrate through. Instead he said, “I need clarity. My measurements aren’t just off—they’re changing. Distances contract. Roads curve where they shouldn’t. Buildings are closer together by the hour.”

Several townspeople paused on the sidewalk and turned their heads slightly, just enough to make it clear they were listening. Sheriff Jacoby stood ten feet away with his hands on his belt, watching the exchange with a resigned attention.

Mayor Candler gestured toward a bench near the courthouse lawn. “Walk with me.”

Reluctantly, Christian followed. The bench felt too close to the tree beside it, as if it had been pushed inward during the meeting. The mayor sat down with the ease of someone who had spent years talking people through uncomfortable truths.

“You’ve seen more in one day than most outsiders ever do,” she said. “You’ve taken measurements, studied parcels, walked the streets. And now you finally understand why we requested a rush contract.”

Christian waited, aware that anything he said might reveal how rattled he was.

“Hollow Creek survives because we maintain a balance,” she continued. “The land pulls inward. Always has. The earliest records mention a valley that couldn’t keep its shape. Our founders realized the land required an anchor.”

“An anchor,” Christian repeated. “You mean a geological feature?”

“No,” she said. “A person.”

He felt his pulse climb in his neck—but not in the way of a cliché sprint of adrenaline, just a steady awareness of blood and tension as he processed the implication. “You’re telling me the town survives because you—what? Sacrifice someone?”

“We choose someone,” the mayor said. “Not murder. Not violence. A willing acceptance, though sometimes acceptance arrives only at the final moment. Each generation gives one body to the center, beneath the courthouse. One resident who binds the town in place. Without that presence, the land folds inward like cloth drawn tight. Everything disappears.”

Christian stared at her. “You can’t expect me to believe that.”

She didn’t react defensively. “Believe what you’ve measured. The land has been adjusting itself faster than usual. Because the last anchor is weakening.”

“Then choose someone else,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “A volunteer. Anyone.”

“Volunteers vanished decades ago,” she said. “People learned what it meant. They stopped offering. So the land made its choice. It drew someone to town each generation. Someone new. Someone who didn’t grow up here and wouldn’t have ties that bound them too tightly.”

Her eyes settled on him. The meaning was unmistakable. The message had been there since he arrived.

Christian stood from the bench, unable to remain still. “This is insane.”

Sheriff Jacoby took a step forward, calm and deliberate, giving him space yet ensuring he wouldn’t bolt down the street. “Nobody wants this,” the sheriff said. “Nobody enjoys it. We lose someone every generation. We lost my uncle when I was a boy. The mayor lost her sister. Amos lost nearly everyone he knew. None of us benefit from this. It only prevents something worse.”

Christian shook his head. “You’re talking about a superstition. A myth.”

“Then explain the collapsing perimeter,” Candler said. “Explain the altered distances. The river that shrinks even when it rains. The woods that fold in on themselves. You’re a man who respects measurements. You’ve seen the truth in the numbers.”

The numbers. The shrinking. The looped road. The motel room that closed in around him with each hour he spent inside it. The courthouse that felt heavier at its center than any building should.

Even worse, the undeniable pattern: the closer he drew to town center, the more the distortions intensified. Everything converged on the courthouse as predictably as gravity.

Candler stood. “The center waits. It always waits. But it must receive one resident during the census, or the next cycle accelerates. The last time we failed, we lost nearly a quarter of the outskirts before the week was over.”

Christian backed away. “No. I’m not staying here. I’m not part of this town. I’m a contractor. I’m leaving tonight.”

“You already tried,” Jacoby reminded him. “The road showed you its answer.”

Christian turned and began walking quickly down the sidewalk. He didn’t know where he was going—just away from them, away from the courthouse, away from the suffocating inevitability they spoke of.

He didn’t look behind him when the mayor called his name. He just kept moving.

The houses leaned closer as he walked, not by visible motion but by the disorienting shift of geometry that had plagued him all day. The street narrowed to a corridor. His steps shortened to compensate. Each crosswalk seemed closer to the last. His own shadow skimmed the porch railings as though he were cutting through a space too tight to breathe in.

He pushed open the door of Boone’s Diner with more force than he intended.

Only three people sat inside. Lila Boone cleaned the counter with slow, circular motions. When she saw him, her shoulders tightened.

“You talked to Amos,” she said quietly. “And the mayor.”

“Yes.”

“You understand what tomorrow is.”

He searched her expression, hoping for contradiction, a crack in the shared belief that the whole town seemed to hold like scripture. But her eyes carried the same fear he had seen flickering behind her earlier remarks.

“You should have left yesterday,” she whispered.

“The road brought me back.”

She nodded slowly. “It does that.”

Christian stepped backward until he hit the wall beside the window. The town outside looked bent around the courthouse, as if the buildings were tilting minutely toward its foundation. He could no longer write these distortions off as fatigue.

“Is there any way out?” he asked.

“If there was,” Lila said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

He steadied himself with a hand on the back of a chair. The sheriff’s earlier words returned—not threatening, but final. Best you stay close until census.

Lila lowered her voice. “The center wants someone. Not the town. Not the mayor. Not the sheriff. The thing underneath calls for it. That’s why nothing beyond the valley holds steady. That’s why roads loop. Why land tightens.”

Christian felt the weight of every measurement in his notebook. Each one pointed toward the courthouse as if pulled by an unseen force.

Lila looked at him with a mix of pity and apprehension. “It chose you the moment you drove in.”

Part V

Christian didn’t sleep. He sat upright in the motel chair with his notebook open on his lap, watching the room for any sign of creeping distortion. Each time he blinked, the corners felt slightly closer. When he looked away and looked back, the lamp seemed to lean in. He measured the gap between the dresser and the wall three separate times. The number didn’t change on the tape, but the room felt as if it were shrinking around the edges of his perception, following a logic that didn’t need to obey measurements.

By dawn he’d folded his maps and placed them carefully into his satchel, though he knew the data they contained would never make sense to anyone outside this valley. The sun came up pale over the hills, casting a dull glow over Hollow Creek that revealed nothing to comfort him.

The town was already awake. People moved quietly along the sidewalks in small, sober clusters. No one spoke beyond a murmur. No one laughed. A sense of procedure guided every step they took toward the courthouse, like participants in a tradition older than memory.

When Christian stepped outside the motel, Mayor Ruth Candler was waiting near the curb with her hands clasped, the way someone might wait for a doctor to call her name in a sterile hallway.

“Mr. Ward,” she said. “It’s time.”

Christian kept a firm grip on his satchel as he approached her. “You’re not dragging me anywhere. I can walk on my own.”

“We don’t use force,” she replied. “None of us want this. We only do what our parents did, and what theirs did before them.”

Sheriff Jacoby stood a short distance behind her. His face carried no hostility, only the weary patience of a man who had lived through this cycle more than once. He nodded at Christian and gestured toward the courthouse.

The building seemed larger than it had the night before—wider, heavier, its lines bending toward the center as if pulled inward. The lawn around it sloped in subtle ways he hadn’t noticed earlier, creating the impression that the building sat at the bottom of a shallow funnel.

As he climbed the steps, he felt a faint sense of pressure behind him, not physical contact but the certainty of being watched by every resident gathered on the street.

Inside, the air held a quiet that made his ears ring. The courthouse hall looked normal at first glance—old wooden benches, framed photographs, dusty flags—but the floorboards the mayor walked across seemed to angle slightly downward toward the center of the building.

They descended a narrow stairwell to the basement. The sheriff’s steady footsteps echoed against the concrete walls. With each step the air temperature dropped by degrees, not sharply, but in a gradual way that suggested a deeper space waiting below.

The basement was larger than the footprint of the courthouse above. Christian noticed this immediately. It stretched too far in both directions, the far walls dissolving into shadow that swallowed the overhead light.

At the very center of the room, the concrete dipped into a shallow circular depression. The edges of that depression were warped, as though softened by heat or drawn inward by centuries of pressure. The center itself appeared darker than the rest of the floor—not paint, not shadow, but a depth that shouldn’t have been possible in something only a few inches deep.

Amos Fletcher sat in a wooden chair near the wall, bundled in a coat several sizes too large. His eyes lifted when Christian entered.

“The center’s waking,” Amos said, voice thin but steady. “It’s been restless since the last cycle. Knew it was time again when the farms started pullin’ in quicker than they should.”

Christian stepped back from the depression. “You expect me to climb into that? To let myself be swallowed by whatever’s under this building?”

“No one climbs,” Amos said. “You stand at the edge. The center decides the rest.”

Mayor Candler approached him. “We take no pleasure in this. You were drawn to us in the quiet ways the land uses. It chose you before we ever knew your name.”

Christian turned on her. “I could’ve passed this town without stopping. I could’ve ignored the assignment.”

“You didn’t,” she said softly. “Ask yourself why.”

The worst part was he had asked himself. The contract had been a simple assignment—routine, straightforward, exactly the kind of work he’d hoped for during a year of drifting from one job to the next. Yet he’d taken it with a strange eagerness, as though something had nudged him toward it.

He backed toward the stairs, but Sheriff Jacoby stepped into his path—slowly, gently, almost apologetically.

“You can’t outrun it,” the sheriff said. “You saw the roads. You saw the limits sliding in. You’re part of the count now.”

Christian gripped the railing. The metal felt colder than it should. “You could stop this.”

“We’d lose the town if we tried,” Jacoby said. “Nothing left but a hollow in the ground, and everything beyond it folded shut.”

He looked from the sheriff to the mayor, then to Amos, who waited with his hands resting loosely in his lap, staring at the depression as if it were a familiar threshold.

He walked forward only because the room left him no alternative. The floor sloped gently, pulling him closer to the center even when he tried to steady himself.

At the threshold of the depression, he felt a faint tug beneath his shoes. Nothing violent. Nothing dramatic. Just a subtle persuasion, as if gravity had shifted a few degrees.

The darkness at the bottom deepened. It wasn’t a hole. It wasn’t an opening. It was a fold in the world, a place where the rules no longer aligned with anything he had measured.

He thought of all the distances he’d recorded—the riverbed that had shrunk into puddles, the woods that folded like pages, the streets that closed inward—and understood, in the most practical sense, that these distortions had always been leading toward this one locus.

The mayor stepped beside him, her voice barely above a murmur. “Your presence holds the shape. The land settles around the one who goes first.”

Christian’s breath tightened in his chest—not in a frantic or dramatic way, but as a natural reaction to standing at the edge of something he could neither fight nor reason with.

The floor shifted.

Only an inch. Maybe less. But that inch was enough to tilt him forward.

He braced, but his balance slipped. The darkness expanded beneath him, its pull no stronger than a firm hand guiding him downward.

The last thing he saw was the circle closing gently around him, like fabric tightening at a thread pulled through the center.

The basement brightened by a fraction as the weight lifted.
Above, the courthouse creaked in relief.
Outside, the streets of Hollow Creek loosened, gaining breathing room inch by inch.

A new cycle began, and the land held its shape for another generation.