Everyone in Briar Glen knew the rhyme.

Two go in, and one comes out,

One walks free, the other—shouts.

Down the Hollow, secrets trade,

A soul is kept, a debt is paid.

It was recited in playgrounds, murmured in the wind near the forest edge, scratched onto the desks at Briar Glen Middle School. Parents pretended it was just an old rhyme—something leftover from the town’s mining days, when people disappeared all the time and someone needed a story to tell the kids.

But every decade or so, the Hollow Tree took someone. And the town simply… looked away.

This time, it was my brother.

⸻

His name was Elijah, and he was everything I wasn’t—bold, popular, loud. The kind of kid who didn’t believe in ghost stories, except when he was the one telling them. He laughed at the Hollow Tree, even dared his friends to go there with him.

But no one ever took the dare.

Except me.

It was the day before Elijah’s seventeenth birthday. He’d been brooding all week—moody and quiet, like something was weighing on him. At dinner, he barely touched his food. When I followed him out back to the woods, he didn’t tell me to leave. That was my first clue something was wrong.

“We’re going to the Hollow,” he said, without looking at me.

“You don’t believe in that,” I replied, but my voice caught.

He didn’t answer. Just started walking.

I followed.

⸻

The Hollow Tree stands in the oldest part of Briar Glen Forest—gnarled and black, as if it had been scorched by fire and never healed. Its trunk is wide enough for two people to stand inside. It smells like earth, rust, and something old and sour—something dead.

We stood before it, the wind stirring the branches above us like skeletal fingers.

“We both go in,” Elijah said, not quite looking at me. “We stay for one minute. Then we leave.”

He stepped inside without waiting.

I hesitated.

Something in my chest whispered: Don’t go. Run. But he was my brother.

I followed.

⸻

The darkness inside the Hollow was total. I could feel the tree around us—its heart still beating somehow, slow and ancient. My breath caught. I reached for Elijah’s hand, but it wasn’t there.

“Elijah?” I whispered.

Silence.

Then—a whisper, low and slithering:

One will leave. One will feed.

I turned. The walls of the tree pulsed. Something moved in the bark. I could feel it watching.

“Elijah!” I called again, louder.

No answer.

Then—I felt something grip my arm. Not a hand. Claws.

The world tilted. I screamed.

And then—I was outside.

Alone.

⸻

The town didn’t ask questions.

Elijah was gone. They said he ran away. Just like the others. His face joined the others on the fading wall of missing posters.

But something was wrong.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw his eyes in mine. Not just family resemblance—his eyes. And sometimes, when I was alone, I felt two heartbeats in my chest. I dreamed of roots and blood. Of something whispering from beneath the forest floor.

A week after he vanished, I returned to the Hollow Tree.

“Take it back,” I whispered.

The tree didn’t answer.

But the rhyme did.

Two went in, and one came out,

One walks free, the other—shouts…

And sometimes, if I stand near the tree at night, I swear I can hear him. Screaming.

Still trapped. Still waiting.

And I don’t know if I left him behind…

Or if he left me.