The wind carried something strange through Harper Heights that night. A sharp scent. Damp earth. And blood.


Nia Carter, a no-nonsense investigative podcaster known for digging into stories the news refused to touch, was back in her childhood neighborhood for what she swore would be her last visit. But when twelve-year-old Jeremiah was found in the middle of Harper’s Field—barefoot, eyes wide with terror, whispering about the Hollow—her instincts kicked in.


“The Hollow ain’t real,” her uncle Darnell said, lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. “Just old folks’ stories to scare kids into staying home.”


But Jeremiah wasn’t the first. Over the last five years, eight children had vanished, all from the same three-block radius. The city said they were runaways. Nia knew better.


The locals whispered about a thing in the woods beyond the field. A thing that took voices. A thing that only came for the gifted ones—Black kids with futures too bright for the system to contain.


She recorded the boy’s mumblings:


“He has no face. Just teeth and hunger. He walks like smoke. He wears Mama’s voice.”


With the help of her childhood friends—Kenyatta, a reformed gang member turned counselor; Bree, a schoolteacher whose students kept drawing strange symbols in their notebooks; and Malik, a conspiracy theorist who lived out of his van—Nia begins uncovering the roots of an urban legend that was never just a myth.


They discover that The Hollow is real.


But it’s not just a monster.


It’s a curse—passed down through generations, born from a pact made during slavery, fed by trauma, and hidden by those in power.


And it’s hungry again.