The Hunger That Waits

Ashes.

They floated, weightless and slow, dancing through the pale morning light. What was once a home was now a charcoal outline, smoldering and skeletal. The oak beam that used to frame the living room buckled with a groan and collapsed into embers.

Taylor Robinson stood at the edge of the ruin, boots planted in the damp earth, a duffel bag at his feet. Smoke clung to his coat, woven into the threads like a curse. He didn’t move. Not yet. Not until he was sure it was done.

A crow cawed somewhere overhead. He didn’t look up.

The fire had started at 2:17 a.m. He knew because he’d been staring at the clock, unable to sleep. Something about the house always kept him awake — maybe the silence, maybe the memories, maybe both. It had been his father’s house, and his grandfather’s before that. A hundred years of Robinson men had grown up inside those walls.

They had not all grown old inside them.

Taylor's father, Stan, died in the west room two years ago. Heart attack, they said. But Taylor knew better. The same room where his uncle Kevin had slit his wrists in ’93. Same room where his mother had said she saw shadows moving, even in daylight. Same room where Taylor, at twelve, had seen a door open by itself and never forgotten the sound of the whisper that followed.

They called the land cursed. Neighbors, relatives, even a priest once. Taylor had laughed it off. Until last month, when he found the notebook.

It was wrapped in leather, hidden in the crawlspace under the stairs. Inside- page after page of ink-drenched confessions. His father’s handwriting, but twisted. Paranoid. Frantic. Descriptions of voices in the walls, of things in the woods, of something he called “the hunger that waits.” And in the margins- symbols. Dozens of them. Some Taylor had seen in books, others he didn’t recognize.

He spent a week trying to make sense of it. Another week trying to burn it.

It didn’t catch. Not once. Not in the fireplace, not in the stove, not even soaked in gasoline. That’s when he knew the house wasn’t just haunted — it was alive.

So last night, he lit the walls instead.

Not a ritual. Not a ceremony. Just fire, pure and old. He soaked every floorboard, every drape, every cursed nook of that place in fuel, and struck a match. The flames roared like a thing set free.

He watched it all burn from the porch, eyes dry, breath steady. Watched the west room collapse first.

Now the sun was up, the flames down, and Taylor still stood at the edge.

A soft crunch behind him.

He turned.

A girl — no older than ten, barefoot, hair tangled, wearing a nightgown that looked like it belonged to another century.

“Is it gone?” she asked.

Her voice was too calm

Taylor's throat tightened. “Who are you?”

She stepped closer, feet bare on the blackened grass. “I was in the house.”

“Impossible.”

“I was in the wall,” she said.

He took a step back, hand brushing the handle of the hatchet in his bag.

The girl tilted her head. “You burned it to stop it. But it won’t stop.”

Taylor didn’t answer. Didn’t trust what he was seeing.

“It was here before your family came,” she said, voice light as windchimes. “It’s in the soil. You burned a house. Not the roots.”

He swallowed. “What do you want?”

The girl pointed past him, to the scorched ruins. “It’s still there.”

He turned back to the wreckage. Smoke curled upward, curling like fingers.

When he looked back, the girl was gone.

He didn’t sleep that night.

He drove out to the nearest town — three hours east — rented a room, took a shower, and stared at the ceiling for hours. The notebook was still in his bag, and he could feel it. Like it was pulsing. Like it knew.

At 3:12 a.m., he heard a knock on the door. Then another. Rhythmic. Slow.

He opened the door to nothing but an empty hallway.

When he closed it, the notebook had moved — now on the nightstand, open to a blank page.

Except it wasn’t blank anymore.

“You think fire ends what never lived?”

He slammed it shut. Stuffed it into the motel trash. He left before sunrise.

Two days later, the fire department called. Said the fire didn’t spread naturally. Said there were signs of accelerant — but also signs of something else. Deep scorch marks in the soil, in a pattern they couldn’t explain. Melted stone.

One of them said it looked like a sigil.

Taylor didn’t go back.

He rented a cabin a hundred miles away, changed his number, didn’t tell anyone where he was. He tried to move on. Wrote in a journal. Took long walks in the woods. Avoided mirrors. Avoided sleep.

But it followed.

Not in body, not in flame — but in signs. A bird with no eyes on his porch one morning. The sound of a door creaking open when there was no door. And always, that phrase, in a child’s voice-

“It’s still there.”

He started seeing her again, the girl in the nightgown, standing at the edge of the forest, or behind a tree, or reflected in puddles. Always watching. Never speaking.

Until the night the sky turned red.

He woke to heat.

His cabin, untouched by fire, glowed as if something massive burned just beyond the treeline. And he could hear it — a sound like wood cracking, like bones breaking.

He ran.

He ran until his legs gave out. Collapsed in a ditch. Looked back.

No fire.

No girl.

Just stars. And the smell of smoke in the wind.

He made it to the city. Took a new name. Got a job washing dishes. Lived in a basement apartment with no windows. Started telling himself it was trauma. Just trauma. That’s all.

Then came the dream.

He was back in the house. Except it wasn’t ruined — it was whole. Clean. Lit by candlelight. His father sat in the chair by the fireplace, smiling, holding the notebook.

“You left something behind, Taylor.”

He couldn’t speak.

“Some things don’t burn.”

He woke up choking on ash.

He moved again the next day. Changed names again. Burned his ID. Started sleeping in shelters. Kept moving.

But he couldn’t outrun the roots.

Because the thing wasn’t in the house. The house had just been a vessel. A mouth.

The thing was in him now.

And when he looked in the mirror that last time, and saw her eyes staring back instead of his own, he finally understood.

The fire hadn’t freed him.

It had opened the door.

Now he sits in a diner off Route 9, coat zipped up to his chin, notebook clutched tight in both hands. Not the same notebook. A new one. Same symbols. Same script. But this time, it’s his handwriting.

He’s writing something. Something important. He’s writing how to open the next door.

Outside, smoke curls into the morning sky.

The waitress stops at his booth, coffee pot in hand. “More coffee, hon?” she asks, smiling.

He looks up.

Her eyes are black. Not just dark — black. Like ink. Like burned paper. Like the space between stars. She keeps smiling.

It begins again. Ashes.