Ethan Raines left the mountain years ago and built a life far from the place that had always felt wrong.
Then his uncle Silas dies, and Ethan comes home.
What waits for him is more than an empty house and old memories. There are tracks too large to belong to any ordinary animal. A chain dragging through the darkness. A bark where nothing should be standing. And a warning Silas left behind that Ethan is only beginning to understand.
The deeper Ethan digs into what happened to his uncle, the clearer one thing becomes.
Voice, speed & continuous listeningUses the voices already available on your device. Narration starts only when you press Play or enable continuous listening.View story content warnings
These warnings apply to the story as a whole.
Death and grief
Violence and gun violence
Blood and disturbing imagery
Animal-like supernatural threats
Peril and frightening situations
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Some places hold their history close. Others refuse to let it stay buried.
HELLHOUND is a story about coming home to a place you were warned to leave, and discovering that some warnings were never meant to expire.
Keep the lights on.
— Corvin E. Blacke
Ethan Raines was halfway through changing the belt on his lawn mower when his phone rang.
He almost let it go to voicemail. His hands were black with grease, one knee pressed into the warm concrete of the garage floor, and the belt had already slipped off the pulley twice. Whoever was calling could wait five minutes.
Then he saw the area code.
Ethan stopped with one hand still beneath the mower. He hadn’t seen those three numbers on his phone in years, but recognition came before he had time to think about why they bothered him.
Behind him, through the open door leading into the house, his wife was talking to someone in the kitchen. The television played upstairs, muffled by walls and distance. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice at nothing in particular. They were ordinary Thursday afternoon sounds, the kind that usually passed beneath his notice because they belonged exactly where they were.
The phone kept ringing, its sharp electronic buzz suddenly more noticeable against the familiar sounds drifting through the garage. Ethan pulled his hand from beneath the mower and wiped the grease along the thigh of his jeans before reaching for it. For another second, he stared at the unfamiliar number and the area code he knew too well.
“Hello?”
Silence answered first. Not enough to make him think the call had dropped, just long enough for Ethan to pull the phone slightly away from his ear and glance at the screen. Then an older man spoke, his voice roughened by age but steady.
“Ethan Raines?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Amos Bell. Sheriff Bell.”
Ethan straightened slowly, the wrench and half-finished mower forgotten behind him. Heat had been collecting in the garage all afternoon, trapped beneath the roof and rising from the concrete, but suddenly he was aware of every degree of it. Something about hearing Amos Bell’s name after all these years made the familiar space feel smaller.
“I don’t know if you remember me.”
“I remember.”
Bell had been a deputy the last time Ethan saw him. Younger then, though probably not as young as Ethan remembered. Everybody from back home seemed frozen at the age they’d been when he left, preserved somewhere in his mind along with the roads, houses, and mountains he had spent twenty years putting behind him.
Another pause came through the phone. Ethan looked toward the open doorway to the house, where the ordinary sounds of his life continued without him.
“What happened?”
Bell exhaled.
“It’s your uncle.”
Something tightened beneath Ethan’s ribs. He shifted his weight against the workbench, already knowing the name before he asked.
“Silas?”
“Yeah.”
Ethan waited, but Bell didn’t continue. The silence lasted just long enough to tell him there would be no harmless explanation waiting on the other side of it.
“What about him?”
“We found him yesterday morning.”
The choice of words caught Ethan harder than the sentence itself. Found him. Not he died yesterday. Not there was an accident. Just found him.
Ethan lowered himself onto the edge of his workbench.
“Where?”
“Old Weaver Road.”
The name landed harder than it should have. Ethan stared across the garage, but what he saw was a narrow gravel road winding between trees that crowded close on both sides. There were no houses after the first mile, no streetlights, and no reason for anybody to be out there unless they were going somewhere they shouldn’t.
“What was he doing on Weaver?”
“We don’t know.”
“What happened to him?”
Bell hesitated long enough that Ethan knew the answer wasn’t going to be simple.
“Looks like an animal attack.”
Ethan frowned, trying to fit the words together in a way that made sense.
“What kind of animal?”
“That’s the problem.”
The sounds from the house seemed to recede. Even the neighborhood beyond the garage faded from his attention until Bell’s voice and the phone pressed against his ear felt like the only things left in the room.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the medical examiner says animal attack, but nobody can tell me what kind.”
Ethan stood and walked toward the open garage door. Late-afternoon sun stretched across the driveway, bright and ordinary, turning the concrete almost white in places. Across the street, Mrs. Talley was pulling weeds from the flower bed beside her mailbox, dropping them one by one into a plastic bucket at her feet.
Everything looked exactly as it should.
“Bear?”
“No.”
“Coyotes?”
“No.”
“Dog?”
Another pause followed, subtle but long enough for Ethan to notice.
“We don’t think so.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and stared past Mrs. Talley toward the quiet curve of the street. Silas Gentry had lived in those mountains his entire life. He knew every animal that moved through them and most of the places they moved through. He’d once chased a black bear away from his trash cans by banging a metal garbage lid against the side of his shed and shouting like a lunatic.
At least, that was how Ethan remembered it. Twenty years had softened some things, sharpened others, and left him wondering how much of the man he remembered belonged to Silas and how much belonged to the boy Ethan had been.
One thing remained certain. Silas hadn’t been afraid of much.
“Was he alone?”
“As far as we know.”
“Where was his truck?”
“About half a mile up the road.”
“Broken down?”
“No.”
Ethan’s hand stopped against the back of his neck.
“The truck was working?”
“Far as we can tell.”
“Keys?”
“In his pocket.”
Ethan turned toward the mower, though he no longer saw the loose belt or the tools scattered beside it. Half a mile was not far until a man willingly left a working truck and covered the distance on foot along Old Weaver Road after dark.
Silas had known better. He had been the one who taught Ethan better.
“Ethan?”
“I’m here.”
“There’s something else.”
Of course there was. Ethan had the uncomfortable feeling that every answer Bell gave him was opening another door instead of closing one.
Bell cleared his throat.
“Your uncle named you executor.”
Ethan closed his eyes.
“Me?”
“That’s what the paperwork says.”
“I haven’t talked to him in…”
He stopped because he knew exactly how long it had been. Twenty years was the easy answer, but it wasn’t entirely true. There had been birthday cards for a while, then a few Christmas calls. Eventually there had been less of both until life stretched between them and silence became easier than explaining why neither man had closed the distance.
“The funeral’s Saturday,” Bell said. “But you probably need to come sooner.”
Ethan opened his eyes.
“Why?”
“There’s some things here you’ll need to go through.”
“What things?”
“I’d rather show you.”
Ethan almost laughed, but there was nothing funny in Bell’s voice. The sheriff sounded like a man measuring every word before allowing it out.
“Sheriff, you called me to tell me my uncle was killed by an animal nobody can identify, on a road he had no reason to be walking, and now you’re telling me there are things you don’t want to talk about on the phone.”
“That about sums it up.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Yes.”
The answer came too quickly.
Ethan stared down the street. Mrs. Talley had gone inside while he wasn’t looking, leaving the plastic bucket near the flower bed. The dog that had barked earlier had gone quiet too. Nothing had actually changed, yet the neighborhood seemed unnaturally still beneath the afternoon sun.
“When should I come?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I can be there by afternoon.”
“Make it before dark.”
A chill moved through Ethan despite the heat pressing against his skin.
“Why?”
Bell didn’t answer immediately. The silence stretched between them until Ethan could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the garage and the distant television inside the house.
Then Bell said, “Roads aren’t what you remember.”
Ethan almost asked what that meant, but something in Bell’s tone stopped him. He had known Amos Bell a long time ago, and even after twenty years he recognized the sound of a man choosing not to say everything he knew.
“I’ll leave early.”
“Call me when you get close.”
“Cell service still bad?”
“Worse.”
“Some things never change.”
Bell didn’t laugh.
“Drive careful, Ethan.”
The call ended.
Ethan remained near the end of the driveway with the phone in his hand, staring at the dark screen as though Bell might call back and give him the part he had deliberately left out. Behind him, the mower waited in pieces on the garage floor. Somewhere inside the house, a cabinet door closed.
His wife appeared in the doorway.
“Who was that?”
Ethan turned.
Whatever she saw in his face stopped her before she crossed into the garage.
“What happened?”
“Silas died.”
Her expression softened immediately.
“Oh, Ethan.”
He looked away, his attention settling on the driveway because it was easier than meeting her eyes. She knew the name, but not the man. Ethan had told her stories over the years, usually the harmless ones. Silas teaching him to fish. Silas letting him drive the truck through the pasture when he was twelve. Silas slipping him twenty dollars when his mother said no.
He hadn’t told her everything.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Are you going?”
“Tomorrow.”
She nodded without hesitation.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
The answer came too fast, sharp enough that her eyebrows lifted.
“I mean…” Ethan rubbed his forehead. “There’s no reason for you to make that drive. I’ll handle the funeral and the estate stuff. Probably only be a few days.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
She studied him with the patient familiarity of someone who knew when he was leaving pieces out. Ethan recognized the look. She was deciding whether to push, whether whatever he wasn’t saying mattered enough to make him say it.
She didn’t.
“All right.”
After she went back inside, Ethan returned to the mower. The belt still hung loose beneath the engine, exactly where he had left it, and the wrench lay near the workbench. Five minutes earlier, getting that belt back onto the pulley had mattered enough to have his full attention. Now the whole thing looked strangely insignificant.
He picked up the wrench, felt its familiar weight in his hand, then set it down again.
Old Weaver Road.
He hadn’t thought about that place in years, and the lie barely survived the thought. He remembered Old Weaver Road every time he heard a dog bark too deep. He remembered it whenever he drove through mountains after dark and watched the road disappear behind him in the rearview mirror. Time had blurred the edges of the memory, but it had never managed to erase the feeling attached to it.
Ethan closed the garage door.
That night, after his wife went to sleep, he sat alone in the living room with the television turned low. Its shifting light moved across the walls in pale flashes while he searched Old Weaver Road on his phone.
Nothing useful came up. A county map. An old property listing. A hiking forum from eight years ago where someone mentioned the road being washed out. Ordinary things attached to a place that had never felt ordinary to Ethan.
He zoomed in on the satellite image. Trees covered most of the road, their canopy swallowing long sections of it until the pale line of gravel disappeared beneath the green and surfaced again farther along the mountain.
Ethan stared at the screen longer than he meant to. The television murmured somewhere beyond his attention, and the house settled around him with the occasional creak of cooling wood.
Then the memory came.
He was seventeen again, standing on Silas’s porch while darkness gathered beyond the yard. The mountains had gone almost black against the last traces of evening sky, and the tree line had become a solid wall where individual trunks and branches could no longer be distinguished.
Something barked beyond it.
The sound came only once, low and deep, with a weight to it that seemed to travel through the darkness rather than across it. There was nothing frantic about it, nothing familiar. It had been too deep for any dog Ethan knew, and the quiet that followed somehow made it worse.
Ethan had laughed because he was seventeen, and because laughter had been easier than admitting the sound frightened him.
Silas hadn’t laughed.
His uncle had reached for the shotgun beside the door without taking his eyes from the trees. Ethan remembered that more clearly than he wanted to. There had been no confusion in Silas’s face, no squint into the darkness as he tried to decide what he had heard. Whatever had made that sound, Silas had recognized enough of it to be afraid.
Then he looked at Ethan and said the words Ethan had spent twenty years trying not to remember.
“That ain’t anybody’s dog.”
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