He never ate a single bite of the midnight meals you delivered for two years, the estate attorney told sixty-eight-year-old Arthur Pendelton inside the empty probate office.
The town meeting had scattered Greg’s allies and shamed him in public, but it hadn’t stopped the clock. Sheriff Rust had placed an official “hold” on any demolition orders, but the land trust papers would take a few more days. Greg, however, was not one to wait.
I knew he wouldn’t give up. Not with $1.8 million on the line.
That night, as a thick, unnatural fog rolled in from the river, blanketing Hollow Creek in an eerie silence, Clara called me.
“Dad,” her voice was urgent, “I just saw Greg’s truck heading towards the diner. And he’s got… heavy machinery hitched to the back. A small excavator.”
My blood ran cold. He was going to break in. He was going to try to demolish the cellar himself.
“Get in the car, Clara,” I said, grabbing my keys. “We have to stop him.”
We sped through the fog-choked streets. The diner appeared like a phantom, its dark silhouette barely visible against the misty backdrop. The air grew colder, the fog denser around the old building.
Then we heard it. The grating shriek of metal, the splintering of wood.
Greg, driven by a desperate, maniacal greed, had smashed through the cellar door. He was already inside, using a crowbar to pry at the reinforced iron deadbolt I had bolted shut earlier that day.
As we ran towards the entrance, a low, guttural roar erupted from beneath the diner. The ground beneath our feet shuddered violently, shaking the very foundations of the building.
A dark, spectral frost, visible even through the thick fog, began to spread up the diner’s outer walls. It crackled and writhed, turning the wood brittle, freezing it solid in an instant.
Inside, Greg let out a terrified scream.
Clara and I burst through the front door. The diner’s interior was an arctic wasteland. The air was thick with the unnatural cold, swirling with an oily black mist that emanated from the now-shattered cellar door.
Greg lay crumpled on the kitchen floor, his crowbar beside him. His eyes were wide and unfocused, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He pointed a trembling finger towards the cellar entrance.
The opening to the subterranean chamber pulsed with a sickly, green-tinged light. The air around it crackled with static electricity, and through the swirling black mist, I could glimpse the stone well, no longer sealed.
It was open. And from its depths, something dark and formless roiled, pushing upwards.
Greg, for the first time, saw it for what it truly was. He wasn’t blaming gas lines anymore. He was collapsing in sheer terror before the glowing, unstable fissure.
The entity was rising.
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