The Hollow Hills

It is late where you are. I know it is. That is how you found this. A companion to the broadcast for the ones who were still awake, out on the edge of the hollow hills.

The maps call it the Ozarks, and the maps are lying to you. Not on purpose. They draw the rivers and the little towns and the green for the forest and they make it look like country you would take the family. But these are some of the oldest mountains on earth, older than bone, and they are hollow all the way through, eaten into caves and rivers that have never seen the sun. The old people who settled that country named those hills after the devil himself, over and over, and they did not scare easy. Ask yourself why. Then come out to the edge of the trees with me, and we will look at what is standing there looking back.

The thing that howls

It starts with the silence. The bugs and the frogs and the whippoorwill all stop at once, because the little things go quiet when something big is moving. And then it comes down off the ridge: a cry that is a wolf’s howl and a woman’s scream and a brass horn all braided into one throat. They call it the Ozark Howler. Bear-big, low to the ground, shaggy and so black it is a hole in the night, with a pair of horns on a great cat’s skull and two eyes that throw back red in a flashlight beam. It has walked those ridges a long, long time. And the hill people will tell you the one rule that matters: when you hear it call, you go inside, and you do not call back. Because if you answer, it answers, closer, every time. You are not playing a game with it. You are teaching it the way to you.

The lights that watch

All through that country there are lights. Out on a certain road, generations of people have driven into the dark to watch a ball of light come up the road toward them, bobbing, splitting, changing color, backing away when you reach for it. That is the tame one. The ones I want you to think about are the ones that come down. Into the yard. To the barn. To the bedroom glass, low and pulsing slow like a breath, in total silence, while the dog hides under the bed and shakes. Everyone who has had one at the window uses the same word for it. Curious. Like it crossed the whole sky to look in at them the way you would look into a tank. And the drivers, alone on the hill roads at night, who watch a light pace the car, and then arrive somewhere down the road with three hours gone and no memory of where they went. The clock always knows, even when the mind has been made to forget.

The light on the Tebo

And then we brought it all the way home, to our own county. There is a creek in Benton County called Tebo, worn down from the name of a French trapper, Thibaut, who gave it his name two hundred years ago and then vanished out of the record. People settled the Little Tebo bottoms back in 1832, and the bluffs above that creek held graves far older than that, the resting places of the first people of this country. Then, in our own lifetime, the Army Corps of Engineers closed the dam and the water came up the valleys and drowned all of it. They moved the Tebo Baptist church and six hundred marked graves to higher ground before the flood. They did not, could not, move them all. The unmarked ones, the forgotten ones, the oldest ones on the bluffs, are still down there under the Tebo arm of the lake, and when the water drops in a dry year the headstones and foundations come back up into the daylight. That part is true; you can go look. The part they only tell after dark is the light: a low, gold, lantern glow that crosses the water at night, riding the drowned creek channel, carried by something that walks the flooded bottoms looking for the graves we moved. And if you are ever out on that water late, and a voice calls to you from somewhere out in the dark where there is no boat and no bank and no living soul, you keep your eyes in the boat, you start your motor, and you do not answer. Because there is nobody out there to answer. Whatever calls you across that water only wants one thing, and that is for you to call back, and turn toward it, and come.

The ones who wear the woods

And there is something older than the Howler and the lights. The hill people only tell it last, when the fire is almost out and they have decided you need warning more than sleep. The skin-changers. The ones who wear the woods. A thing that stands at the tree line wearing a deer, but the deer is wrong, too tall, too still, head turned the wrong way on its neck. A thing that watches a family for a long time and learns the sounds of the place, the screen door, the dog’s name, and the voices. And then, some night, it stands just past the porch light and calls to you in a voice you would know anywhere: your mother, your child, someone you have buried. It does not use a monster’s voice, because you would run from that. It uses the one voice you would run toward. That is why, in that country, you always leave one light burning. Not against the dark. Against the thing that is in it.

One rule carries the whole night, and it is older than the roads: when something out in the dark calls your name, you do not answer. You go inside, you turn on the lights, you hold your people close, and you wait for the sun.

We are not done with this country. We have only walked the ridges, up top, where you can still see the stars. Next week the hollow hills go down, into the black water at the bottom of it all: the towns they drowned on purpose under the lakes, the steeples and roads still standing in the cold dark, and the gray thing that has rolled in the deep current of one of those rivers for a hundred years. Rest up. You will want your strength for the deep water.

Leave the light on tonight. For me. The signal fades, but the mystery never does. Chris