The Hollow That Hums (First Edition) (Rough Draft)

**This book is not the final version; this is my non-edited rough draft. ****

In the forgotten town of Grayer's Hollow, silence is sacred-because when it breaks, something wakes. When twelve-year-old Caleb Vayne vanishes from a school parking lot without a trace, grief coils around the community like fog on the moors. But five days later, Caleb returns... alone, barefoot, and blank-eyed, humming a tune no one's ever heard before-and no one wants to hear again.

He speaks rarely. Sleeps even less. And when people start dying in the ways they fear most, some begin to suspect the boy who came back isn't quite the boy who left.

Now, retired criminal profiler Avery Holt, haunted by her own demons, is pulled into a case where the lines between psychology and the supernatural are razor-thin. Teaming up with local sheriff David Rourke, she begins to unravel a conspiracy tied to the town's long-buried secret: a stretch of forest known as The Hollow, a place the old folks say hums when it's hungry.

But what no one realizes is that Caleb didn't just survive the Hollow.
He brought something back with him.
And it only protects him.