The Headless Rider on Hollow Backroads
The night unfurled like a dark script along the backroads, a ribbon of black ink that refused to be smoothed. I drove slow, the tires sighing over gravel, listening to a chorus of cicadas that seemed almost apologetic for the late hour. The town had warned about the rider who haunted these bends, a figure without a head, seen only by the reckless and the restless. It sounded like a tall tale, something to tell over coffee after a long shift, but the road knows how to keep its own secrets. Every mile tucked tighter the fog, and every mile whispered the same refrain: keep going, or become part of the story you tell later.
Then the silhouette appeared, a rider astride a horse that moved with a patient, measured cadence. No face beneath the scarf of night, just a hollow space where a head should be, as if the wind had peeled away the very thing that gives a man his name. The horse kept pace with the car as if reading the same line in the night that I was reading. My hands grew cold, not from the cold, but from the sudden certainty that the road was alive, watching, waiting for me to blink. The rider did not lean forward; the rider waited, as though time itself paused to allow the moment to arrive.
The moment did arrive in a way that can only be described as a reckoning. A branch slapped the windshield with a frog-splash of rain, and in that brief stutter of glass, the rider’s silhouette lowered its gaze, or perhaps the gaze lowered toward me. I felt the road tilt, a whisper of metal and oath, and then the world snapped back to its ordinary, stubborn gravity. The rider remained—still, silent, a statue that rode the night—while the hollow where a head should be seemed to breathe with a cool, quiet wind that smelled faintly of rust and old iron.
Whispers from the Hollow
The legend grows where the road ends in a shallow gravel throat, where trees lean close like old witnesses. Some say the rider lost his head in a bargain gone wrong; others insist the head remains, bound to the person who dared speak his name after midnight. Either way, the Hollow Backroads remember every bargain, every decision that bends a life out of its proper shape. If you listen carefully, the night will tell you what you chose to forget.
“The road does not forget the hands you gave it, nor the promises you broke along the edge of darkness.”
As I reached the last bend, the rider dissolved into fog, leaving only the echo of hooves and the faint rasp of a scarf brushing against cold leather. The car rolled onward, yet the feeling lingered—not fear, exactly, but a quiet humility before a force older than headlights and tires. The Hollow Backroads kept their rider, and perhaps kept a piece of me too, tucked away where only shadows dare to follow.
- The moonlight thins and breath grows heavier as you approach the bend.
- Hoofbeats echo from nowhere and everywhere at once.
- A whispering wind carries a taste of iron and rain.
- A sense of being watched, even when the road is empty.