The Mouth That Sings You Back

Whispers in the Hollow

Episode 3: The Mouth That Sings You Back

It began with silence.

Not the kind that comforts or settles, but the kind that waits, like a mouth behind a locked door, listening.

Luke hadn’t spoken since the cellar. Since the salt-body collapsed into ash and memory. Since he drank the voice of Marissa from a chalice filled with ritual breath and grandmother-rot. His own reflection now lacked eyes, and he avoided mirrors as if they could hollow him further.

He wasn’t sure what he had become.

And Marissa… she was beginning to hum.

She didn’t notice it at first. A quiet tune stitched through morning routines. It curled around the boiling kettle. It lingered in the hush between blinking and remembering. Then one day, she opened her mouth to speak and the song came out instead, clear, ancient, without origin.

It was Luke’s name.

But not as she remembered it. As if spoken backward and buried.

The Return of Names

Crest Hollow had changed. Slightly. Brutally. Doors shifted shape. Street signs blinked. Children giggled at things no one could see. Trees wept sap into symbols.

Marissa kept finding letters in her mailbox.

Unstamped. Unsigned.

Each bore a name.

Not hers. Not anyone’s she knew.

But when she said them aloud, something stirred.

One day, she spoke a name that smelled of cedar and ink: Thomelin. Her hands spasmed. A shadow passed beneath the window. Her reflection mouthed “Thank you.”

Her grief had become summoning.

Luke and the Chapel That Breathes

Luke began building chapels again.

This time in soil. In breath. In silence.

Each night, he returned to the cellar, not physically, but in sleep. The door no longer led down. It led inward.

He saw himself standing in a chapel made of ribs and scripture. Candles floated like memories. Moth-winged saints hummed lullabies from beneath his skin.

The floor was warm.

Alive.

It pulsed to the rhythm of names no one remembered.

The mouth returned to him then, not as horror, but as choir.

It opened wide.

It sang his childhood.

And Luke wept, for he had finally remembered the lullaby his mother used to hum before she forgot she was a mother.

He sang with the mouth.

Not aloud.

But in marrow.

The Gathering

They weren’t alone anymore.

Others had begun to hear the song.

A man at the grocery store muttered to himself and left trails of salt behind him.

A girl drew staircases in the dust. When asked why, she said simply: “Because God wants inside again.”

Marissa wandered the church graveyard and felt names lifting like fog from the stones.

One tomb hissed.

She listened.

It whispered a name she hadn’t remembered in years: her sister’s. The one who vanished when she was eight. The one they never found.

It sang her back.

And Marissa sobbed joy into the soil.

The Ritual Breathes

That night, Luke and Marissa returned to the place between memory and worship.

They built an altar from linen and feathers and teeth.

They spoke the names they had gathered.

One by one, the Hollow responded. Each name carved the air. Each syllable folded reality.

Luke offered his heartbeat.

Marissa offered her song.

The chapel opened its mouth.

And from within it, a voice neither old nor new, neither dead nor alive, said:

“We do not take. We remind. We do not sing to fill you. We sing to hollow what is false. Become hymn. Become echo. Become remembered.”

They understood.

Together, they wept.

And somewhere deep beneath Crest Hollow, the roots began to hum.

Next Episode: “The Bones That Write You” Where memory becomes ink, and the chapel asks for what it’s owed.