S2E6 | The Darker Season | Tales From The Hollow

Episode 6 of Season 2 of Tales from The Hollow

Frank Harmon spent ten years reading a creek like a gauge. He should have been reading it like a message.

At Ironwood, a night with no sleep in it turns into a morning with an answer in it, nine to eleven days, the same interval, year after year, buried in his own overwritten ledgers. Herald puts a name to what it means: the containment was never a wall, it was a ring, and someone reversed it a long time ago. It isn't leaking. It's pumping.

Michael comes out to the fence still not knowing which he'd rather hear, and gets an answer to a question he's been afraid to ask out loud, whether the thing coming for Willow's Bend started coming because of him, or just found him in the way. Herald doesn't soften it. Michael doesn't flinch, not where anyone can see.

Across town, Roy Chandler buries an old man on a bright Saturday afternoon and learns, at the edge of an open grave with ninety mourners around him, that the iron in his pocket has never once done what he thought it did. Not everything he's carried for ten years was ever meant for the hollow's creatures. Some of it was meant for something else. He calls Frank before he's finished being honest with himself about what he saw.

And back at the south fence, on an ordinary dry Wednesday night, Frank watches the creek do something water isn't supposed to do, and when he runs the arithmetic against a death forty miles north, the two clocks he's been keeping turn out to be one clock, with two hands, closing on the same ground.

This is not a standalone story. The Darker Season is a continuous serialized narrative following one unfolding threat across 12 episodes. Start with Episode 1 and follow along as the darkness builds toward something that has been coming since 1977.

1980s supernatural horror | Gothic horror | Serialized thriller

Runtime: approx. 1 hour 33 mins

Content: Supernatural horror, themes of inherited guilt, the cost of silence between fathers and sons, and the patience of something ancient and hungry. No graphic content.

📚 DISCOVER THE WILLOW'S BEND NOVELS: The horror at Ironwood Retreat is just one chapter of a much larger story. The darkness in Willow's Bend has been feeding for over a century. Learn how it all began:

The Haunting of Willow's Bend Farm (1977–1978) & What Dwells Beneath (1885)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FN6T77TR

Both novels reveal the Dark Entity behind everything you just heard — and the families it consumed long before Ironwood Retreat existed.

Season 1 Collection - All 10 Tales:

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2YN5CVT

EBook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H31WBJLJ

🎧 MORE TALES FROM THE HOLLOW:

• YouTube: Stephen Crane Audiobooks — https://www.youtube.com/@StephenPCraneAudiobooks
• Complete series + exclusive content

📱 CONNECT:

• Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks
• Leave a review to support the show
• Share with your horror-loving friends and don't spoil what comes next

Until next time, stay out of The Hollow.

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/stephen-crane-audiobooks/donations