Unstable Ground

At the edge of town sits a hole so deep it will take you straight to Hell. Or so the children say, anyway. On Friday afternoons, as the kids of Colson River Middle School are finally released out into the dusty streets, it’s not uncommon to spot a few detaching from the crowd, laughing and shoving each other as they make their way toward the town limits. Older boys, mostly, and the few girls who like to prove they’re just as tough. They holler through the empty streets past boarded storefronts and overgrown front yards, past the men waiting in line for the day’s last jobs they hope will come. Out beyond the mill, a tombstone rising still and gray into the sky, before the brown dust turns to forest, and the forest into mystery. It is there the hole sits, yawning hungry toward the sky.

There’s a simple rope fence around the hole to keep trespassers at bay. But the children don’t care, as children often don’t. They duck the rope and approach the hole, each one edging closer than the next. They pitch rocks into the endless darkness, listen to them echo off the walls until the sound disappears. Those few who make it all the way to the edge and lean to stare down into the depths swear they’ve seen shadows moving in the darkness. Some claim to hear whispers, and the sound of sobs, like a mother missing her child. They run screaming into the darkened streets, terror alight on their faces like shining beacons in the empty mid-evening. 

Monday mornings they recount their bravery. The crowds gather in the schoolyard in wonder and listen—it was not a whisper they heard, but a shout from the depths of Hell, telling them to cast themselves in or face the Devil’s wrath. Not a shadow but a great claw, dragging at the rock wall, seeking escape. But they had not run. They stood bravely, yelled back at the Devil to go home to Hell where he belongs. And the Devil always listened.

When some younger child inevitably asks how the hole came to be, the answer is never the same. No one’s quite sure how long it’s been there, or precisely when it appeared: decades, centuries. But why the hole appeared? On that the town agrees. 

There was a home there once, they say. Beautiful, Victorian, dating back to the first settlers. A man lived there with his wife and child. He was the mayor, some say; a great businessman, others. Then one day, without warning, his wife packed up and left, taking their young son with her. He never saw them again. They say he must have done some great ill deed for a woman to leave him so, respected as he was. Perhaps he’d committed adultery, some suggest. Gambled away all their money, others. Maybe he’d sold his soul. 

The man wasn’t seen to leave his house for six days; the town began to wonder if he’d died. Then on the seventh day, a hole opened in the Earth and swallowed them whole, man and house together. And when the townsfolk arrived to see to his well being, they found only the hole. Though some who were there that day swore they could hear the man screaming from beneath, and the deep, damning laughter of the Devil. They say they’re still there, both man and house, waiting at the bottom of the pit, calling out for others to join them in the dark.

And at this, the older children pick up their sticks to chase the younger around the playground, gnashing their teeth and wailing to the sky. These stories are more than entertainment; more than those the children watch on their televisions or read in the pages of their books. They represent hope—that life is not something that only happens in other places, reserved for other children, those with more. That it could happen here, too.

By the time he’d reached sixth grade, the Boy had heard every version of this story. But despite being old enough to join the Friday evening haunts, he’d never been much interested in the Hell Hole. His father had told him plenty of tales of what happens beneath the Earth, and none of them had sunken houses, lost mayors, the Devil. Only rocks, and loud noises, and angry foremen. The sounds of coughing long into the night. 

Not that anyone minded his absence. The Boy had never been well liked among his peers. He’d had a few friends over the years, but each grew bored of him before long. His unwillingness to play games. His distance from life. It was even worse now that his father was gone. While the other children ran and played, the Boy had taken to sitting silently beneath the shade tree that grew impossibly from the cracked asphalt of the school yard. He did not invite himself, and they were glad for it. 

Which is why, on that particular Monday as the children recounted their usual tale, they were shocked to find that the Boy had joined the crowd. One by one, they noticed him, and a hush fell over them.

“Has anyone ever fallen in?” the Boy asked. From the silent crowd, one of the older boys spoke up.

“My mama says her uncle jumped in once,” he said. “Turned up three days later wandering down the middle of the street by Hargar’s Sweet Shop. Where it used to be.”

“How’d he get back out?” the Boy asked.

“Don’t know. Says he don’t remember nothing about it. Like there was some kind of curse on his brain.”

“And now?” the Boy asked. “Where is he now?”

“Man, I don’t know. Why you care so much about my family? Not like you’d ever go near the hole, pussy.”

“But it can happen?” the Boy asked. “That someone falls in and then comes back?”

It was true—the Boy did not care about the hole, nor the kid’s family. He cared only for his own mother, who had spent the past three weeks drifting between the couch and the front door, leaving the house only to drive to the corner store for her daily bottle. He cared also for his father, who despite what the police had said and all the speeches at the funeral, the Boy was sure would return home any day now. While his mother had done what she could to convince him otherwise, just that morning, the Boy had found a wholly remarkable thing, hanging from the chain link fencepost at the back corner of the yard. His father’s helmet, the headlamp blinking on and off in the morning light, the small bit of tape still proudly carrying his name on the inside. In that moment it all made sense. His father wasn’t gone, as the grown ups had said, and certainly not on purpose. He hadn’t left to be in a better place. He was simply lost—down in the darkness without his light to guide him. And as the man of the house, it was now up to the Boy to bring him back.

And that’s exactly what he would do.