Read the story. Make a list of the fifteen vocabulary words highlighted. Define each of the vocabulary words, indicate each word’s part-of-speech, and use each word in your own original sentence about a time your imaginary friend woke you up.
The Hollow Sound
Jake Mercer had grown up hearing the warnings about Blackwood Forest—how the trees swallowed sound, how the fog clung like a sinister hand. But with his phone dead and his mom’s texts growing increasingly frantic (“WHERE ARE YOU?”), the shortcut home seemed worth the risk.
The moment he stepped beneath the canopy, the air thickened with an eerie silence. No crickets. No wind. Just the dread pooling in Jake’s stomach as his flashlight flickered over gnarled roots that seemed to twist toward him.
Then came the whisper.
“Jake…”
It slithered through the leaves, making his skin tremble. Not his name—his voice. As if the forest had peeled it from his throat and thrown it back at him.
A ghastly wail shattered the silence. Jake petrified, his breath ragged. The sound came from the ravine ahead—the one the town had fenced off after the ’84 disappearances. The fence was broken now, its wires curled like skeletal fingers.
“Hello?” His voice sounded small, swallowed by the abyss of darkness beyond.
Something lurked in the shadows. He saw it then—a figure standing too still between the oaks. Tall. Thin. Wearing a tattered hunting jacket Jake recognized.
“Mr. Calloway?”
The thing turned its head. Moonlight caught its face—stretched taut like old leather, lips sewn shut with fishing line.
“Not Calloway,” it gurgled, fingers plucking at the threads. “Just wearing him.”
The line snapped.
Jake ran, branches clawing at his arms. Behind him, the thing moved without sound, always just at the edge of his vision.
“Why me?” he gasped, skidding to a stop at the ravine’s edge. Below, half-buried in the dirt, sat the rusted shell of a ’84 Chevy. The missing hikers’ car.
A wet chuckle echoed from the trees. “You crossed the line, Jakey.”
“What line?”
The thing stepped into the clearing. Calloway’s face peeled away in strips, revealing something slick and grotesque beneath—a writhing mass of blackened flesh and needle teeth.
“The one your granddaddy painted in ’82,” it hissed. “Red ochre and bone ash. Kept us quiet for thirty years.” Its voice shifted, becoming Jake’s own. “Till you kids started partying here. All that noise… all that blood in the dirt…”
Jake’s stomach lurched. He remembered the bonfire last April—Tina Harris screaming when he’d drunkenly shoved her, the way she’d limped into the trees, sobbing. She’d transferred schools the next week.
“Found your trash,” the thing whispered, holding up a rotted homework sheet with his name.
The ominous truth crashed over him. This wasn’t just a monster. It was a reckoning.
Jake scrambled into the Chevy, his hands slipping on the macabre scratches covering the interior—like something had been dragged out, not in. Under the passenger seat, he found Tina’s pink sneaker, caked in mud.
The thing’s shadow loomed over him. “We don’t like liars, Jake. But we love guilty boys.”
With a shriek, it lunged.
Jake swung a rusted tire iron. The impact sent the creature reeling, its form flickering like a phantom between Calloway’s face and something far older. For a split second, Jake saw its true shape—a tangle of blackened roots and human teeth.
Then the ground gave way.
The search party found Tina Harris’s sneaker first. Then Jake’s phone, shattered against a tree.
Officer Ruiz shone his flashlight into the ravine. The Chevy’s doors hung open, the interior clawed to ribbons.
“Third one this month,” Ruiz muttered, turning away.
Deep in the trees, something wearing Jake’s face smiled, its lips stitched shut with fishing line.
“Fourth,” it whispered to the gathering shadows. “If you count the girl.”
The next evening, Officer Ruiz stood at the edge of Blackwood Forest, staring at the broken fence. His flashlight beam trembled as it swept over fresh footprints leading into the trees.
From the darkness, a familiar voice called out—
“Ruiz…you’re late.”
The officer’s blood ran cold. It was Jake’s voice. But Jake Mercer was declared missing just this morning.
Ruiz reached for his radio, but the static that answered wasn’t dispatch. It was laughter—wet and gurgling, like something drowning in its own throat.
Behind him, the trees sighed. The fog rolled in.
And Blackwood Forest remorseful another guilty man whole.