GigaNotoSaurus, April 2026
Amelia Hunter runs her family’s magical farm alone, tending cockatrices, phoenixes, strix birds, enchanted beehives, and an animated scarecrow named Poppet. She prefers the pre-dawn dark and the company of ghosts to that of living people — and there are many ghosts on Hunter Lane, gray figures who comb her hair, bring her acorns and stones, and have gradually become tender toward her rather than accusatory. Amelia’s siblings, the charismatic Gideon and Melody, are dead, and she has run the farm in isolation ever since, half-hoping the business will simply dry up and release her.
That quiet is shattered when her second cousin Primrose arrives unannounced, bringing a stylish, red-haired friend named Wendell. Prim is a well-traveled water witch, warm and glittering in ways that remind Amelia painfully of her dead siblings. Wendell works in advertising and carries himself with easy charm. Both seem curious about the farm in ways that feel pointed — asking about illusions, business prospects, and the possibility of expanding or partnering. Amelia is wary and hostile, convinced they want to take the farm from her, and the ghosts share her suspicion, tripping Wendell and hiding Prim’s teacups. More unsettling still, someone is writing messages on Amelia’s walls — first in lipstick, then nail polish, then mud: Feed me more. I’m hungry. They always fed me. You are a bad thing.
A violent storm forces Prim and Wendell to spend the night. In the small hours, Amelia discovers Wendell’s mutilated body in the living room — hands severed, eyes replaced with lavender, chest opened. The method is horribly familiar: it is exactly how Gideon and Melody killed people. Prim, arriving to find the body, attacks Amelia in grief and rage. The confrontation finally breaks Amelia open. She confesses what she has always known: her brother and sister were serial killers, sacrificing travelers and workers to feed the farm’s power, and nobody — not the police, not the victims she tried to warn — ever listened to her. She stopped them the only way she could: poison in their morning honey.
Prim reveals her own truth in turn. She and Wendell had come not to steal the farm but to investigate disappearances connected to it. Wendell could see through illusions; he had sensed the ghosts. Now someone — or something — else is in the house. That something turns out to be a soil-dwelling entity that made a deal with the Hunter family generations ago: human sacrifices in exchange for the land’s magical abundance. With Gideon and Melody dead and the killings stopped, it is hungry again. It has possessed Poppet and animated Wendell’s corpse to demand payment, confronting both women in the storm-lashed dark.
Amelia frees herself by calling a ghost into Poppet’s body long enough to break its grip, then releases the cockatrice — a creature she has always trusted precisely because it hides nothing about what it is. The cockatrice destroys both vessels. Prim then summons a tidal wave in a soul-burning act of water magic that drives the entity out of the earth entirely. The exertion leaves her collapsed and near death. Amelia revives her with raw honeycomb and improvised healing — painting her cousin’s veins in amber, humming half-remembered songs — while Wendell’s ghost keeps vigil.
When Prim comes back to consciousness, Amelia tells her she wants to sell the farm and leave, taking her cockatrice with her. The ghosts, freed by Prim’s spell, have already dissolved into the fog — all but Wendell, who stays behind, holding Prim’s hand as the rain eases.
The story is a slow-burn Gothic horror built around the costs of bearing witness: Amelia has always been the one who sees what others refuse to, and has paid for it in isolation and guilt. Wollenweber uses the honey — nourishing, healing, and poisonous — as the story’s central ambivalent symbol, and the final image of Amelia offering it to save rather than kill marks a quiet but decisive turn toward the living.
Natalie Wollenweber is a writer and lover of gothic and fantastical fiction. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San José State University. In her writing, she likes to explore macabre folklore, witches, and haunted places. Her work has appeared in Red Wheelbarrow, Corvid Queen, and Dracula Beyond Stoker.