The Thirteenth Knock

In 1999, a school bus carrying thirteen children left the Hollow Bend Halloween carnival and disappeared on Old Mercy Bridge. No wreckage was found. No bodies were recovered. By morning, the only things left behind were thirteen candy buckets arranged in a perfect circle - each holding one piece of candy and one small human tooth. June Harrow was supposed to be on that bus. Her best friend, Maddie Voss, took her seat instead. Now, twenty-five years later, Old Mercy Bridge is being torn down, and the town of Hollow Bend is beginning to hear knocking inside the walls. Three knocks. Always three. Then the missing children begin to return, unchanged by time, still dressed in their Halloween costumes, still carrying the smell of river mud and burnt sugar. But they are not the children their families lost. Something came back wearing them. As June is pulled back into the town she fled, she discovers that Hollow Bend has been keeping a terrible secret for more than a century. Every family has a debt. Every debt must be paid. And the bridge has been waiting patiently for the one child who escaped. Atmospheric, emotional, and deeply unsettling, The Thirteenth Knock is a Halloween folk-horror novel about grief, memory, childhood guilt, and the terrifying things people invite in when they would give anything to see the dead again.