Luna returns to Elara's house at dawn after someone else has been reading the journal. The entry Elara wrote on the night of Luna's birth describes a ceremony on Crowder's Ridge. Luna drives to the ridge and finds a circle of standing stones with a stone altar carved with a spiral. In the center of the spiral is a hollow filled with dried blood. She touches the spiral and hears Elara's voice speak a name. Luna returns to Elara's house and finds the journal open to a new page written in Elara's hand: 'They are coming for you.' The air grows cold. The candle snuffs out. Luna hears footsteps on the porch.
Still standing in Elara's living room, Luna reads the second page of the journal and finds a description of a ritual her mother performed the night she was born — a ritual meant to bind the hollow's memory to her. She drives to the old church on Crowder's Ridge, where the groundskeeper tells her that the hollow 'takes back what it gives.' In the church basement she finds a row of locked drawers, each labeled with a birth date. Her own date is there, but the drawer is empty. Unearthed and unhinged, Luna returns to Elara's house as dusk falls and realizes someone else has been reading the journal while she was gone.
Luna arrives in Hollow County, West Virginia, in late October, summoned by a cryptic letter from a woman named Elara who has since vanished. The fog is thick, the air smells of wet leaves and kerosene, and the only sound is the distant cry of a bird she cannot name. At the edge of a hollow, she finds a split-rail fence lined with crow feathers, each one tied with a single red thread. Inside the house, a journal awaits her, its first entry dated the day she was born. The dread settles in like the mist, quiet and patient.
