The Collector

For a hundred and fifty years the Mercers have paid. On the night the old founder's clock stops, the Collector comes, a tall figure that walks up from the trees and takes one of the bloodline. The family has learned how to endure it. They bar the doors, they do not look at it, they suffer who it chooses. The elders say resisting only makes it worse, and they are probably right.

Cal Mercer watched it take his older brother when he was a boy. Now he farms the family land in an isolated valley, with a wife and two small children of his own, and the sign has appeared again. The clock has stopped. It is coming.

Cal will not do the old way. He will not bar a door and let the thing in the dark choose between his children. He decides to end it, which first means understanding what it actually is and where it came from, and the history his family has buried is darker and sadder than the monster they fear. This is a folk horror story with a heart, full of dread and love in equal measure, about the terrible courage it takes to be the last one who pays. What is the thing in the woods, and what did it cost to make it?