Chapter Four – Shadows in the Record

The library of Black Hollow sat at the far end of Main Street, tucked between a shuttered tailor shop and a hardware store with a sagging sign. Evelyn hadn’t expected much—a rural town library rarely offered more than outdated encyclopedias and romance paperbacks—but to her surprise, the building was solid brick, its tall windows clouded with age.

Inside, it smelled of dust and old paper, the air dry and cool. A single elderly librarian sat behind the desk, her hair a thin halo of white, glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She looked up briefly, nodded, and returned to her knitting.

Evelyn headed for the archives. The small back room was lined with metal filing cabinets and battered wooden shelves sagging under the weight of forgotten boxes. She tugged on a cabinet drawer. It squealed but slid open, revealing decades of town records, handwritten in neat cursive or typed on yellowed paper.

Hours passed in silence as she sifted through brittle newsprint and fading ink. At first, she found only mundane entries—births, marriages, crop yields. Then, tucked between notes on a harvest festival and a school reopening, she saw it.

“Local hunter found dead in forest. Authorities cite wolf attack.”

The clipping was dated 1923. The description was vague, but the language sounded too familiar—bones broken, body mangled, wounds inconsistent with scavengers.

She kept reading. 1892. 1859. 1817. Every few decades, another “wolf attack.” Always brutal. Always unexplained.

Her breath caught when she noticed the intervals. Thirty to forty years between each death, like clockwork.

Coincidence, she told herself. Wolves were more common then. People exaggerated. But deep down, unease twisted in her gut.

She photocopied the articles, her hands trembling slightly as she fed them into the machine. The whir of gears sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness.

As she left the library, arms full of papers, Evelyn almost collided with a woman stepping carefully onto the sidewalk.

The woman was elderly, wrapped in a shawl of faded wool, her posture bent with age but her eyes sharp and bright. She steadied herself with a cane carved from gnarled oak.

“You’re the doctor,” the woman said, her voice low but clear.

“Yes,” Evelyn replied. “Dr. Evelyn Hart.”

The woman’s gaze flicked to the papers in Evelyn’s arms. “Looking for answers where no one dares dig.”

Evelyn frowned. “And you are?”

“Agnes Holloway.” She gave a small smile. “My family’s been in this town longer than the church. We’ve seen what others call wolves.”

Evelyn hesitated. “Wolves didn’t kill those men. But you don’t think so either, do you?”

Agnes leaned closer, her breath smelling faintly of mint and smoke. “They call it the Hollow Beast. Always have. It comes when the moon is fat and white, when the woods are thick with fog. It takes one, sometimes two. Then it sleeps again for a generation.”

Evelyn stiffened. “That sounds like folklore.”

Agnes’s smile widened, almost pitying. “Science is young here, Doctor. The forest is old. There are things your books don’t name.”

“I deal in evidence,” Evelyn said firmly. “Bodies, bones, wounds. Not stories.”

“And yet your evidence,” Agnes said softly, “looks just like the stories.”

The words struck harder than Evelyn wanted to admit. She tightened her grip on the papers. “If you know anything useful, tell me plainly. Not riddles.”

Agnes tapped her cane once against the pavement. “Plain enough, then. Three nights from now, the moon will be full. If you’ve any sense, you’ll be gone before it rises.”

Evelyn watched the woman shuffle down the street, shawl trailing like a shadow. Her pulse thudded in her ears. Three nights. Full moon.

Coincidence, she thought fiercely. The deaths were timed by chance, not by the moon. And yet, when she looked up, the pale afternoon sun had done nothing to banish the memory of Agnes Holloway’s eyes—clear, unblinking, and utterly convinced.

Back in her lodge, Evelyn spread the articles across the desk, trying to arrange them into something rational. She noted the dates, the victims, the details. She drew lines between decades, scribbled notes in the margins.

Possible explanations:

Rogue bears, cycling through territories.

Human violence—ritualistic? Staged to resemble animals?

Statistical anomaly?

But each theory unraveled under scrutiny. Bears didn’t kill like this. Humans lacked the strength to crush bone this way. And statistical anomalies didn’t leave claw marks eight feet high in trees.

She rubbed her temples, fatigue gnawing at her. Her neat columns of logic bled into the messy scrawl of doubt.

Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the loose shutters of the lodge. Evelyn forced herself to look at the calendar she’d tacked to the wall. She flipped forward to the end of the week.

The full moon was indeed three nights away.

Her chest tightened.

The next morning, Evelyn carried the records to the sheriff’s office. Calhoun listened in silence as she laid out the articles, her notes, the patterns. He leaned back in his chair, eyes shadowed.

“I know these stories,” he said finally. “My father knew them. His father before him. You think we never noticed the timing?”

“Then why keep calling them wolves?” she demanded.

“Because wolves can be hunted,” Calhoun replied. His voice cracked slightly, the mask slipping. “You tell people it’s a curse, a beast, a monster—how do they fight that? They don’t. They panic. And panic kills faster than any animal.”

Evelyn’s throat tightened. “So you just… pretend?”

“I protect my town the way I can,” he said. “That’s all any of us do.”

She wanted to argue, to lay out the facts again, but she heard the defeat in his voice. He wasn’t blind. He was afraid.

For the first time, Evelyn realized she was, too.

That evening, she walked the edge of the woods, the articles folded in her coat pocket. The air was colder, the sky bruised with twilight. The trees loomed like watchful giants.

She paused, listening. Nothing but the whisper of branches. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling of being observed, as if unseen eyes moved between the trunks.

Her hand brushed the recorder in her pocket. She resisted the urge to turn it on, to speak her thoughts aloud. What would she even say? Subject: Evelyn Hart. Condition: beginning to doubt her own sanity.

She forced herself back toward the lodge, her boots crunching against frost. Behind her, the forest exhaled a low groan of shifting wood. Or perhaps something else.

Sleep didn’t come easily. When it did, it was filled with visions: the claw marks gouged into trees, bones snapping like brittle twigs, eyes gleaming in moonlight.

She woke before dawn, her skin clammy, the sheets tangled. Through the thin curtains, she saw the moon, low and swollen, sinking toward the horizon. Even waning, it looked too bright, too near.

Three nights, she thought. Three nights until full.

She pressed her palms to her eyes, willing her mind back to the safety of science, of logic. But the words of Agnes Holloway whispered in the dark: The Hollow Beast comes when the moon is fat and white.

And for the first time, Evelyn wondered what would break first—her reason, or her nerve.