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The Hole
I’ve always had a deep relationship with the supernatural, mainly because it doesn’t exist.
I can’t say for certain that every horror story I’ve ever heard is bogus… but even if they are, human beings still seem to derive a strange type of pleasure from indulging in fear. I’d almost describe horror as a different polarization of the feeling religious tales can give. One type of story makes you feel all warm and safe even in dangerous situations, while the other type of story leaves you jumpy and terrified, even when you’re behind locked doors and safe. Also, as far as I can tell from my experiences, both types of stories are false… and my experiences are extensive.
I was one of those who took a grim delight in seeing just how deeply one could travel into the realms of fear. I climbed through the dark depths of every cave I came across. I would find a spot in the woods at night, and imagine scary stories by the pale moonlight. I would survive until morning in every place that rumors whispered of as haunted.
Despite my best efforts, nothing ever happened.
I began to feel a burning resentment at the human tendency to dramatize horror. Every time I overheard someone bringing up a scary movie or campfire tale, I’d almost get violent in my vehement anger at such things. I’d done it all. I’d walked through the high, lonely places at midnight, and I’d fought through underbrush in long-abandoned forests… and there had never been anything there. I’d never seen a ghost, never ‘felt a presence,’ never seen anything describable with words like ‘gibbering’ or ‘eldritch,’ and never gone instantly insane merely from looking at some forbidden thing. In short, I felt ripped off.
The burning resentment slowly began to overtake my life. I suppose it felt exactly like losing faith in one’s religion when miracles fail to happen, and when promises made are never delivered upon. My religion was fear, my miracles were encounters with ancient entities, my promises were ghostly mysteries with some delicious twist… and they were all as absent from real life as any religion’s tenets. My hollow anger at this denial of fulfillment drove me to intense solitude, and I found myself spending my free time doing odd things like wandering around in cemeteries. I was in one of these cemeteries when I saw the funeral.
I watched from afar as the service was held, and as the small coffin was lowered into the ground. I waited until people began leaving, and then, certain that I would be unwelcome here, I hid in a tree, so that I could listen to the words floating on the chill autumn air. As one young couple passed, I overheard them talking about who had been buried, and it sparked my interest. Apparently, the coffin had been empty. The funeral had been for a young boy, the third of five missing children. The fifth had gone missing just today. The worst part was that they were all from the same neighborhood. As the couple walked away, I felt my heart race in anticipation. This was it: the start of my own real supernatural experience. I was going to find that fifth missing child, and encounter some horrific demon entity in the process... or, a cannibalistic crazy old woman… or I might even be destroyed in some esoteric ritual, the kind that traps you in a fate worse than death if you so much as breath wrong.
I was practically bounding with joy as I headed for the accursed neighborhood.
It was early evening as my feet brought me to the pavement of that long street, where decaying leaves swept along quietly in shadowy corners. As I walked down it in the slowly fading twilight, I noted the five houses with black ribbons on their mailboxes. I reasoned that those must be the families that lost children… so it was true! Children really were disappearing from this street! I immediately receded to the grass-floored shade between the houses, lurking in the shadows as I usually did. I was such a student of fear that I actually felt safer in the dark. After all, if monsters can’t be seen in the dark, then I can’t be seen either.
After investigating the back yards of many of the houses and wandering through a narrow forest between sections of the suburb, I began to hear a faint sound. I turned my ear to the cool evening air, and sensed what sounded like a child whimpering. Could it have been that the missing child was still here, somewhere? I followed the barely discernible sound out of the short range of trees, and into a gloomy ramshackle house’s yard.
The house seemed disturbingly close and dominating, as if its dark windows were somehow watching me. One lone oak covered by ivy crouched in a fenced corner of the yard. The sound grew louder from that direction. Perhaps the tree was evil, and had eaten the child, who was now trapped inside it? I drew closer. I touched the tree, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary about it. I went to step around it, when I heard the child’s crying louder than ever… and I promptly slid forward off of a crumbling ledge of moss, dirt, and grass.
I almost immediately found myself upside down and assaulted by brutal impacts on every side. When it finally came to a stop, I caught my ragged breath, and tried to assess what had happened. I immediately realized, to my dismay, that nothing supernatural had occurred – I had merely fallen into some sort of sinkhole, barely wider than myself, and been injured as I fell face-first into it. Mossy rock and dirt pressed into me from every side, having mercifully stopped my fall. From the scant seconds I had slid, I guessed that I was maybe five or ten feet down. My feet dangled upwards, and I tapped them against the sides of the chute to confirm that I was nowhere near the surface.
My heart began to pound as I realized that, for once, I had finally found real danger. Perhaps this hole had been carved by some insect creature that was eating the children. Or maybe the ghosts of the children were down here somewhere, crying, luring the unsuspecting to their deaths… the prospects fueled my imagination. I would investigate further, but, first, I needed to somehow extricate myself from my precarious position. The hole went down further below me – I could smell stale, musty air flowing from below – but I could see nothing. The close rocks pushed into my sides, making it hard to breathe.
I attempted to slowly push myself backwards, up the hole. I used my feet to grab the sides somewhere above me, and tried to push myself up. My muscles strained as I slowly rose, but my movements dislodged a loose rock. Almost immediately, I found myself battered again as I slid even further down the hole. This time, knowing what was happening, I tried to catch myself. My hands continually cracked hard against mossy rock, dirt flew painfully at my face, and my ribs took a terrible beating. I fell almost three times as long as before, sliding through layers of loam and crumbling rock. Just when terror almost overwhelmed my reason, my feet caught on some sort of unseen ledge…
I found myself dangling in pure darkness, my legs the only thing keeping me from falling further. My hands searched for the close sides of the chute, but they were gone. I felt the hole’s edge pressing into my waist – which meant I was hanging free from the ceiling of some sort of open space. My heart pounded in my chest, the pumping blood emphasizing the pain in the bruises I’d received. My face, in particular, began to feel heated from the blood rushing to my head as I hung upside down. For a few moments, I forgot all about my quest for the supernatural, and I simply breathed quietly in the darkness, my senses failing to find anything in the void that stretched out below me. My flailing arms found no contact with anything solid, except the rock from which I hung. I had saved myself literally a split second before falling into the lethal unknown. I realized that I was in serious trouble… and that was when I heard it.
From somewhere around me in the open darkness, I heard a child crying. Sheer and overwhelming terror rushed through me, as well as a long-awaited ecstasy. I had finally done it – I’d found a ghost! Somewhere in the darkness, a chilling apparition must be lurking. I could imagine it even now – a ghostly white face with no eyes… or a horrifically gory corpse, animated by residual spiritual energy. I tried to think of ways to get a look, but it was pitch black, and I could find no loose rock to strike for sparks. Even as I thought these things, I began feeling light-headed, and the pressure in my face grew heavier.
> I suddenly heard the small voice form words… it was a boy’s voice, and it was close. He called out when he realized that he was no longer alone.
I started at the sound, the fear and the pleasure at the fear combining into a sharp elixir of enjoyment. I couldn’t get a good look at the boy while I was down here, so I would have to get him out of here somehow. If he was a ghost creature that attacked me in the process, well then… even better! I reached out an arm in the direction of the voice, and finally made contact with something. A tiny hand gripped mine, and I held him fast. My fall must have broken something down here, because I don’t quite understand how the boy got to the ledge he must be on, from this hole… despite myself, I kept smiling and thinking of all sorts of horrible creatures he could be. Did his skin feel oddly cold? I couldn’t be sure.
Pulling him roughly, I managed to find his other arm with my free hand, and I swung him out into the darkness below me. His crying grew louder and more terrified. Straining tremendously, I pulled us both up with my legs. I felt the closeness of the hole surround me, and I used my elbows against the lip of rock to support myself. If only I could somehow turn right side up… but there was no space. I lifted my legs now that my elbows supported us, and the rock bit into my arms sharply.
Slowly, exhaustingly, painfully, we moved back up the sinkhole shaft. The boy stopped crying after a few moments, and grew strangely quieter the closer we got to the surface. My strength felt like it was going to give out when I was fifteen feet up… only halfway. I gripped his tiny arms as I forced my way backwards and upwards with my elbows and legs, and, strangely, he seemed to get heavier the higher we went. I was elated! This was obviously some sort of fiend masquerading as a boy, who would surely grow heavier and heavier, eventually pulling me back down if I did not let go. I would die in some horrible abyss, my soul consumed by this creature. I was sure of it!
I was only a few feet from the surface when the boy seemed to become unbelievably heavy. I simply could not move any further. He was now completely silent and motionless. Breathing raggedly, I began to question whether I could actually do this. I wanted so much to pull this thing out into the world, to see what it was, but I simply did not have the strength. I began to feel… angry. I was going to be screwed out of a supernatural encounter yet again! With the anger came renewed strength, and I pushed myself up another three feet, until I could go no further. I was spent.
A few tense moments passed as I realized that I would have to drop the boy.
I hesitated, and, in that moment, I felt hands grasping my legs. Shouts rang out from above, muffled by the dirt constricting us. The ground did not want to let us go, and the boy seemed impossibly heavy. It felt like my arms were going to be ripped off… but I did not let go. I wanted desperately to unearth this nightmarish entity. There was a moment of equal, terrible weights – and then we came free, falling onto the ground. I breathed a sigh of elated relief as my muscles finally relaxed. I looked up at the old man who lived in the gloomy house nearby, seeing nothing but his shadow in the dark. How had he seen us to help us? Did he somehow hear my struggles beneath the earth?
Light shone from a streetlamp on the other side of the gloomy house, creating an aisle of blessed sight. I picked the boy up, and carried him into it so that I could see him. The old man let out a shout of anger and fear. I dropped the boy before I got a good look at him, and he stumbled to the ground, still illuminated. I couldn’t see anything odd or wrong with him. My confusion began to mix with anger and unhappiness. It was no ghost or creature – it was just the fifth missing boy. I felt my body swell with rage. I had thought this would be it. I was convinced I had finally found what I had been promised by all the scary stories I’d ever overheard.
Without warning, the old man attacked us with a shovel, screaming. The boy just looked at me, terrified. Before the old man could hit him with the shovel, I blocked his swing with my arm. Terrible pain exploded in my consciousness, and I felt the arm nearly snap. There was nothing wrong with the boy – what the hell was the old man doing? The realization hit me before his next swing did – the sinkhole was in this old man’s backyard. He had to have known about it… about us… he might have even dug the sinkhole on purpose, to silently kill children that wandered in to his yard… and now he could never let us leave.
The shovel hit me again, this time on my back. I fell to my knees, the boy’s sharp screams filling my thoughts. Three words, more ideas than syllables, kept repeating in my thoughts: still not supernatural. It was just a crazy old man… still not supernatural… the shovel hit me a third time, battering my shoulder. The unbelievable existential disappointment I felt at this terrible end to my own personal story began as a void and empty feeling in my chest, like the space I had felt below... but quickly turned into a fiery rage. Hate filled me. I hated the world for being devoid of real fear, I hated fear for failing to deliver on its promises, and most of all, I hated this damn old man and his damn shovel and his damn sinkhole for being the biggest cosmic joke yet played on me. My head cleared as pure, white, and exploding rage energized my every nerve.
I stood up suddenly, roaring, and caught the old man’s shovel in my uninjured hand. I could see his face as I pulled him toward me into the narrow aisle of light, and he was terrified at the sudden turnaround. His terror only fueled me; my anger needed satisfaction. Without hesitation, I crushed his head with my secondary jaws, and threw his body back into the darkness as the boy’s screaming reached a fever pitch. I turned to kill him, too, for his part in my cosmic joke, but I suddenly had a better idea. My anger faded and a grim smile grew across my face as I loped into the woods.
Over the next few nights, I continued to lurk around the houses. My sharp ears, which had led me to the boy in the first place, let me listen in on the fearful rumors spreading among the suburb. The fifth child had been found, next to a horribly mutilated old man, and the boy’s story was almost too wild to be true. They whispered the boy’s tale, that some creature had pulled him out of the hole and then killed the old man that tried to save him. Hushed voices frantically wondered at what such a creature’s motivations might be, to save a boy, but murder a man. The strangeness of it simply made the whole incident that much more terrifying. Wives held their husbands close at night, and friends laughed nervously with each other in fear, telling each other that it was just a scary story.
And through it all, in the darkness outside their windows, I smiled. Finally, after all of my searching in the dark places of humanity… I had found something to fill the void in my soul, that hole in me left by the false promises of the realms of fear. No longer would I be merely a listener, following the promises of horror blindly and fruitlessly. I could fashion my own paths through the twisted lands of terror now, dark paths stronger and more fulfilling than any before, because my stories would actually be true.
I soon left that neighborhood behind, a great setting for my next work already in mind…
Creepy Tales Page 3
