Hollis Springs

Hollis SpringsThe Rusty Spur is closed, so five of them take a truck down a washboard spur in Carroll County on Halloween, looking for a lake nobody uses anymore. Hollis Springs used to be a Corps of Engineers campground. Pavilion, fire rings, a swimming beach, a sign shot full of holes. Before that it was bottomland the government bought for nineteen dollars an acre, and a house that went under when the dam closed. The chimney still shows, a square of fieldstone in water the color of cold tea.A man is already at the tree line when they pull in. Chore coat, feed cap, hands at his sides. He does not wave. He shakes his head once left, once right, the way you do at a child walking toward a well. They laugh him off. That is the mistake.By full dark the cooler has been dragged, the stakes pulled and reset, the cans turned to face the lake. Four figures stand in the oaks. Not quite ape. Not men. Too tall in the shoulder, too quiet in the leaves, arms past the knees, hide that shines like a catfish belly. One of them reaches for an old paperback story about watchers from before the counties were drawn. The woods do not confirm it. They do not have to. They were here before the creek had a name.The old man comes back. They think he is the threat. He is the watch. His people have stood that watch since a surveyor pitched a tent on the knob in 1958 and would not turn his radio down. You do not name what lives in the lake. You do not sleep on the water. Most folks feel it in the gut and go home with a funny story about a creepy hillbilly. These five do not.Hollis Springs is an Ozark horror novella about a place that does not chase, because it does not have to. Fear here is not a costume. It is a gate left open, a fire still burning, and a man at the edge of the dark who has already told you no.