Lena found the journal at the bottom of her grandmother's trunk. Its leather cover was cracked, the pages yellowed and reeking of mothballs. The first entry was dated October 31, 1987—the day I learned the Hollows read back.
She laughed. Grandma Ruth had always been eccentric, whispering about "the ones who live in the margins." But when Lena flipped to the last page, her blood froze.
There, in fresh ink, was today's date.
"Lena," it read, "close the book. They'll see you."
She should've burned it. Instead, she wrote.
Who are you?
The reply came instantly, the letters bubbling like blisters. "Your shadow. Your scribe. The Hollows let me warn you. Stop reading."
Lena's hands shook. Why?
The journal convulsed. Words erupted, red and wet:
"BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT REAL."
That night, Lena dreamed of typewriters. Thousands of them, clattering in a void, punching letters into skin. She woke to a click-clack rhythm in her walls. Her reflection in the mirror mouthed: "Run."
She tore the house apart. Behind the wallpaper, she found them—sentences. Her sentences.
"Lena fears the dark."
"Lena never loved her husband."
"Lena will die on page 27."
She burned the journal. The ashes spelled TOO LATE.
The Hollows came as whispers. They rewrote her cat's meow into a scream. They turned her coffee into blood. Her husband, Mark, forgot her name, then his own. By dawn, he was just a pile of adjectives: "tall, kind, doomed."
Lena fled to Grandma Ruth's attic. The typewriter there was still warm.
"Let me go," she typed.
The keys moved on their own. "You're not the protagonist. You're the caution."
On page 27 (of course), Lena cornered the Hollows. Not monsters. Not ghosts. Readers. Their eyes were paragraphs, their fingers made of footnotes. They clutched her story in hands she'd drawn herself.
"Why me?" she screamed.
One tilted its head. "Why any of us?"
Lena lunged, tearing the page—
You're getting bored, aren't you?
I can tell. You're skimming. Waiting for the twist.
Here it is: Close this story. Now.
**They're in your screen. The Hollows. The ones who edit.
You think you're the reader?
Look closer.
Who's holding your page?