Hole

[Short Story] A man grapples with an anomalous occurrence in his backyard.

Looking back, most of my life’s problems involved holes. Shithole apartments. Asshole bosses. But this thing in my backyard. This was something else.

“At first, I thought some animal dug it,” I told the guy from the city, your typical paunch-and-mustache municipal worker. “Then it got deeper every day. I watched this video about sinkholes. Maybe it’s something like that.”

“Probably not a sinkhole.” He peered over his clipboard as if examining a fascinating piece of roadkill. “Sinkholes ain’t usually square.”

The inspection couldn’t have lasted ten minutes. He stuck his head beneath the lanai Maggie had installed last year. Grunted at the dirt tracked around the garden shed. Stomped the loose soil near my dying bonsai. In the end, he offered no answers. Although he said he knew someone who dealt with these things.

“Normally, I’d write you up for a code violation.” He handed me a business card from his glove box. “Under the circumstances, I’ll give you a break. If it ain’t gone when I come round next month, the city’s gonna fill it and send you the bill.”

I took the card. “And your guy does it cheaper?”

“Him?” The city inspector shrugged and laughed. “I doubt it.”

I scratched my head as he drove away. Then I glanced at the card.

It was for a psychiatrist.

I overslept the next day. My alarm didn’t go off. Maybe I didn’t hear it. I’d been craving sleep like heroin.

“Did you get that hole sorted?” Maggie asked as I slumped into a chair with a bowl of cereal. “Grace gets antsy playing inside all day.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Can you talk to the boys next door about the music? They’re disturbing Grace’s naps.”

My wife was a beautiful, witty, and intelligent woman whose voice now made me vomit. A working mom entering her fifth year of maternity leave, her greatest skill as a homemaker was delegation. A surfeit of concerns and a dearth of solutions.

“Sure thing, sweetie,” I said, and kissed her forehead.

“Look what I drew, Daddy.” A girl and a woman flew through the clouds, their gender clear by their single strand of fish-hook shaped hair. Another piece in what I called her feminist period. I’d stopped appearing in her artwork months ago.

Maybe I should have been worried about that.

When I ducked out the side door, a faint buzz droned in the backyard. I should have just gone to work. But no, I checked the hole.

A foot deeper now, my alarm clock jutted halfway into the bottom. The digital display angrily flashed to inform me it was currently something: 45. I eased myself down, careful not to dirty my white button-up.

After I hit snooze and climbed out, I made an appointment with that psychiatrist.

Okay, I should have considered this possibility sooner. The guy from the city clocked me, and it’s probably where you thought this was heading from the start. Unhappy husband. Nagging wife. Daughter growing distant. Of course I dug the hole.

But let me ask you this: how deep does the mysterious hole in a man’s backyard need to get before he should consider that he might suffer psychosis? Whatever the answer, my hole passed that threshold when I wasn’t paying attention. I was busy. Distracted. Maybe it was my tendency to stick my head in the ground, but in this case that might have been productive.

I’d never visited a psychiatrist, but my understanding was they’re usually not a same-day service. When I called this guy, Dr. Tellurian, he fit me right in. Seemed strangely eager to talk after I explained the problem. Come whenever is convenient, Sir. After business hours? Not a problem, Sir.

Dr. Tellurian’s office was by the courthouse. One of those outfits that took appointments to psychoanalyze criminals. I vaguely remembered him from TV during the trial of that lady who’d drowned her children in a well.

His décor seemed stuck in the Victorian Era. Some cranial calipers, a marble bust of Carl Jung smoking a pipe, and a sepia globe with a dubiously shaped Africa and Asia.

In the end, the session wasn’t the revelation I’d hoped. He didn’t so much offer advice as grill me with pointed questions while scribbling in his notebook. How have you been sleeping? Abominably. Scribble scribble. What do you do for a living? I’m a geologist. Scribble scribble scribble. And how deep is this hole? Six feet. Scribble scribble scribble scribble scribble.

In the end, he never told me whether I dug the hole. Guess I was supposed to figure that out myself. He said I needed to work on something called shadow integration. Confront the unsavory corners of my psyche. I paid him in cash, and didn’t schedule a follow-up.

Truth is, my sleep problems long predated my hole problem, my expertise in geology didn’t extend past oceanic oil wells (I’d barely ever used a shovel!), and I had a feeling that tomorrow, my hole would be deeper than your standard grave.

When I got home, the boys next door blasted music again. Their Bluetooth speaker played to an audience of two empty patio chairs.

Head like a hole, Trent Reznor sang. Black as your soul.

“Oh, hilarious!” I smashed the speaker against their patio table, cementing my burgeoning reputation as the neighborhood nutcase. Then I tossed it into the hole. How’s that for shadow integration?

After another restless night, I forced myself into work. In college, someone told me that geologists made great money. Had I investigated the claim, I’d have discovered that they meant oil companies paid great money. And so, I traded my shithole apartment problem for my asshole boss problem. At the time, it seemed like an improvement.

I spent the day in meetings grappling with the company’s two emerging crises: the exhausted well in Alaska and the oil spill in Louisiana. One hole without enough oil and one with too much.

“The judge threw out the environmental suit on standing,” the asshole boss in question said. “We should be clear so long as the EPA stays quiet. Or unless the pelicans sue.”

They didn’t notice that I refrained from their hearty chuckle. They didn’t notice that I hadn’t spoken the entire day.

I was preoccupied with some documentary I’d watched the night before. A Neil DeGrasse Tyson thing about black holes. He talked about how scientists believed tiny primordial black holes might have collided with the earth during prehistoric times and tunneled underground. Maybe one of them killed the dinosaurs, they said.

Maybe some were still there.

On my way back to the car, two homeless guys browbeat me for cash. They’d bundled themselves in winter gear, alternating between too tight and too roomy. An unseasonal April cold snap had fallen over the city. A few days ago, I’d skimmed past an article about how the homeless shelters were scrambling to stop people from freezing amidst the abrupt temperature shift.

“Did you mean to give me these?” A homeless guy asked as I quickened my pace.

I checked my wallet in the car. Two leftover c-notes from my psychiatrist visit were missing. Probably worth it not to watch them shivering. Another reminder the earth was dying, and that I wasn’t paid nearly enough for my part in killing it.

Maggie had a Trader Joe’s frozen dinner and her usual litany of requests waiting for me at home. “Can you get Grace’s dress from the dry cleaner? She needs it for her Easter recital. I tried going this afternoon, but she refused to leave until she found her drawing.”

Easter twisted in my gut. The holiday always ambushed me. I was never particularly religious. Neither was Maggie. But after Grace turned two, we somehow appeared in church. I couldn’t tell you why I subjected myself to it. Nodding along while some pastor gently reminded me that I’d spend eternity in hell, Just for harboring doubts about a guy three days dead leaving his own grave.

“Have you seen it?” Maggie asked.

“The dress?”

“Grace’s drawing. She showed you yesterday. Now, she wants to add dinosaurs. We tore up the entire house looking for it.”

Do you ever have a vivid memory of picking something up, but can’t for your life remember where you put it down? Do you ever wonder where that stuff goes? Well, I don’t. Not anymore.

I couldn’t even see the bottom now. I pulled a collapsible ladder from the garden shed and climbed down.

The hole got wider as I descended. Really wide. Like a full-sized bunker. I combed the floor with my cellphone screen’s dim light. Should have brought a lantern.

A chill ran up my arm as something rustled behind me. I spun around. Beady, jaundiced eyes barreled at my face. A crocodilian snap clapped the air just shy of my cheek.

I scrambled backward. My back hit the dirt.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

I fumbled toward the ladder in some frightful combination of a crawl and a roll. It came at me again, now from above. A hideous croaking bugle blasted my ears while its squelching locomotion grew closer.

Moonlight revealed black wings stretched wider than my torso. It was a pelican. A fucking pelican. I only recognized the bird by its general shape, because its feathers oozed oil. Its stomach-beak thing overflowed with black bile.

I shot up the ladder as the pelican slammed into it. Pulled myself out just before it fell. Poor bird was too caked in oil to fly. Thank god.

The next day, I bought a shotgun.

I needed to psych myself up to go back down there. The bird couldn’t have survived long. Probably. But its mere existence blew the lid off the possibilities around this hole.

Before, I could chalk everything up to a man with a garden shed losing his mind. Not the pelican, though. We lived hundreds of miles from the ocean. Thousands from the oil spill. If that thing could wind up here, anything could.

So, you can imagine the bricks I shat when I heard voices coming from down there.

I called to them. No response. My ladder was already at the bottom, but I doubted it would have reached. I broke out my old climbing gear and belayed down.

A tunnel jutted from the bottom. I followed the voices to two guys in mismatched coats huddled around a camping lantern.

“Who in the hell are you?” I shouted.

“Oh, it’s you. We met the other day.” It was the homeless guys I’d accidentally made two hundred dollars richer. One of them, the panhandler who’d tried to return my money offered his hand. “I’m Mark. That over there’s my buddy, Harry.”

Harry’s concept of a greeting was to stare without blinking.

“I meant what are you doing down here? You’re in my backyard.”

“We are?” Mark examined his surroundings, blinking more than I’d prefer. “Nice place you got. Hey, I bet this belongs to you.”

He handed me a crumpled paper. Grace’s drawing.

“Thanks. I was looking for that.”

He flashed a big smile. “Happy to help, boss.”

“Can you tell me how you got here?”

“Don’t remember. What about you, Harry?”

Harry shrugged.

“Something weird is happening with this hole. I’m sorry you got dragged into it. My ladder’s down here somewhere and some ropes and carabiners that can pull you out.”

“Pull us out?” Mark’s cheery disposition soured. “You got the warmest spot in the city. After we came all this way, you’re throwing us back on the street?”

“You can’t expect to live down here.”

Only when Harry stood did I comprehend how adhesive this situation had grown. He was a giant of a man with a giant of a beard. A real speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick vibe. Except he carried no stick. And didn’t speak. Game too big for my Walmart birdshot.

That left the police as my only alternative. How would that look? Man visits a psychiatrist about a nervous breakdown, buys a gun, and now two homeless men are buried alive in his backyard.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess you can stay until it warms up. Just tell me if you find anything else down here.”

Mark flashed a smile full of crooked teeth. “Sure thing, boss.”

I unfurled Grace’s drawing on my way back inside. A pyrrhic victory. Dirt seeped into the paper and blotted out the clouds she’d drawn. Returning it would only upset her.

“Did you get it?” Maggie asked over dinner.

“I forgot I took the drawing to the office,” I lied. “Tell Grace it’s sitting on my desk.”

“Not the drawing. She’s moved on. Her dress.”

“The dress…” I said. “Shit.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Hey, I’m going through it with this hole.”

“I’m sick of this god-damned hole. Whenever I need something from you, I ask a dozen times. When I do it myself, you complain I did it wrong, or I insulted your manhood, or I don’t give you opportunities to be involved in Grace’s life. Getting anything done is like steering a god-damned cruise ship. It was bad enough when you’d rot on the couch. But this hole business is so much worse than doing nothing. I can’t live this way. Call a landscaper right now and get it filled.”

“I can’t.” I sighed. “There are people down there.”

Maggie said nothing. She just stood and left her plate. The next morning, she’d packed her and Grace’s things and left for her mother’s.

Looked like she was in for a long stay, given all she took. Divorce levels of packing. The house looked strange. All her places empty, all mine a mess.

When someone knocked on the door, I held the faintest sliver of hope that Maggie came to talk things out. It was the guy from the city.

“We got a complaint from your neighbors. Listen, I know I said I’d give you until next month, but I wasn’t expecting the thing to get deeper. Get it sorted by the first or we’re bringing a dump truck.”

“Okay…”

I must have looked really fucking pathetic, because he patted me on the shoulder. “You visit that guy I told you about?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Maybe you should think about going back.”

Okay. It was time to finish this. I withdrew a thousand dollars from the ATM to pay out Mark and Harry. They could stay at a motel until Summer. Then I’d this hole filled and move on. I should have done this sooner. Why hadn’t I done this sooner?

The tunnels had expanded long enough to wander. I found Mark shoveling dirt at the back of some corridor.

“Stop!” I shouted. “You’re making this thing deeper?”

“Nah, boss.” Mark wiped his brow. “Just digging a little shortcut to the South tunnel.”

“I need to fill this hole before the city comes back. I brought you some money so you can get yourselves sorted.”

“We can’t leave yet, boss. There’s treasure down here. Look what Harry found.” Mark flashed Maggie’s wedding ring.

“That’s not treasure. It’s our stuff.”

Mark winked. “Don’t worry, boss. We’ll cut you in. Just sit back and let us excavate.”

At this rate, I’d have better luck convincing the terrifying, silent guy. “Where’s Harry, anyway?”

“Over yonder.” Mark pointed down the tunnel. “The door on your left.”

“Wait. Door?”

Sure enough, a familiar oak door jutted from the dirt. A sign hung from the handle, written in cursive. Session in Progress.

I barged inside. There was Dr. Tellurian. And his entire office. In my hole.

“I apologize, Harold,” the doctor said. “We must continue another time.”

Harry cast me a silent nod as he departed.

“Please tell me you know what the hell is happening,” I said.

“Eversion of the subconscious into physical space,” Dr. Tellurian replied. “Quite fascinating. We’ve long theorized it was possible but never observed it.”

“Do you know how you got here? Those other two guys can’t remember.”

“You should first confront the possibility that I’m a hallucination. Personally, I’ve already disabused myself of that hypothesis. I think, therefore I am and whatnot. More likely, while treating you, your mental singularity entangled me.”

“Well, I’d appreciate it if you left.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. I’ve run experiments to confirm my position beyond the event horizon. Wherever I go…” He poured himself a tumbler and gestured at his desk. “…there I am. No, this will require years of psychotherapy to untangle. On the positive side, it should yield some fascinating literature.”

“Years?! No. The city’s filling this thing on the first. We need to get everyone out before then.”

Dr. Tellurian shrugged, only mildly perturbed by the prospect of being buried alive. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Things did not go well after that. The house decomposed like my abandoned bonsai garden. I’d never realized how much work Maggie did tidying. Dishes piled in the sink. Towels in the bathroom. And dirt tracked everywhere. On the floor. In the bed. Inside drawers.

Out of morbid curiosity, I drove down by the courthouse and checked on Dr. Tellurian’s office. It sat completely empty, save for an expired subpoena taped to his door.

The phone rang when I returned home.

“I’m incredibly upset with you.” My mother-in-law.

“Hi, Mary. What’s wrong?”

“I only just now heard from Gladys that the Sunday school held an Easter recital. I would have appreciated an invitation.”

Had Easter already happened? “Maggie probably just forgot to tell you. We’ve been going through it lately, as you know.”

“You tell her to make sure Grace knows Grandma didn’t forget her.”

“Wait. She’s not with you?” A pit welled in my stomach. Probably in my backyard, too.

“They haven’t visited in weeks, dear.”

No. No. No. No. No. I slammed the phone on the cradle and drove to church. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to go. Maybe I was just delaying the inevitable. The conversation with the pastor revealed nothing I hadn’t already guessed.

Easter was last Sunday, of course.

Maggie and Grace hadn’t attended, of course.

The chapel’s crucifix had gone missing, of course.

As I sped through stoplights home, I tried to construct a mental calendar out of this fugue and remember how long someone could survive without food or water.

I barreled straight from the car into my backyard. My makeshift belay snapped when I dove into the hole. I caught myself on the side of a tunnel that now overlooked a fatal drop into an impossibly deep shaft.

“Mark! Harry! Have you seen my daughter? Have you seen a woman and a girl down here?”

Only echoes of laughter responded. Then a gurgling rush as I moved closer.

Their campsite was filling with oil. It sprayed out of the walls and ceiling like fire sprinklers.

“We did it, boss!” Mark pumped his shovel in the air, tears and tar streaming down his cheeks. “We’re going to be rich.”

Harry howled behind him, neck deep in the spill. His voice sounded jolly and cavernous. Santa Claus gone Bedlam.

I turned the corner toward Dr. Tellurian, hoping to find some sanity. No such luck. His liquor bottles sat empty, and Carl Jung’s bust lay supine like a king in checkmate. The good doctor himself huddled over his desk, furiously annotating a hand-drawn map of stapled papers that spilled onto the floor.

“Doc, I’m looking for my wife and daughter.”

“They’d be somewhere in the Anima.” Dr. Tellurian drew his finger across the map. “Given your insecure masculinity, it’s likely sublimated somewhere beneath your Shadow. Haven’t charted that far yet. Say, would you be amenable to taking some DMT?”

I tore the map away and left. Navigating by the light of my cell phone, I descended deeper.

And deeper.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

And deeper.

As I neared the center, a region that Dr. Tellurian’s map labelled “Inferior Function,” a heartbeat shook through the tunnels.

The path widened into a grove of desiccated bonsai. Their dead fingers snapped against my hips. A sharpened branch dug into my side.

The pulse morphed into a bass line. Then the vocals joined.

Head like a hole. Black as your soul. I’d rather die than give you control.

The neighbor boys sat in their patio chairs around the Bluetooth speaker, catatonic. Or dead. I didn’t stop to check.

My pathway ended in a cavern of half-buried fossils. The skulls of ancient behemoths melted into black ooze like Dali’s clocks. I dropped to my knees and tunneled between a Plesiosaurus’s ribs with my bare hands.

Bow down before the one you serve. You’re going to get what you deserve.

I dug until my palms bled. Until my fingernails fell off. I couldn’t let Maggie and Grace rot away like my career, my bonsais, all the dead Tamagotchis stuffed somewhere in my parent’s attic.

The music fell silent as the dirt ahead crumbled away into another chamber, the bottom of that deep shaft. The hole’s entrance shone like a pale sun, illuminating the church crucifix. Jesus’s sullen gaze fell on two prone forms.

“No…” I collapsed into sobs.

Maggie and Grace lay in their Easter dresses. Their flesh almost glowed in the dim light, expressions utterly serene. The maggots and worms left them alone. No dirt touched them. Wherever they’d gone, their bodies no longer belonged to the earth.

Harsh beeping broke the tomb’s silence. I grasped around for my alarm clock. But the sound came from above. A truck backing into my yard.

“No! Oh Jesus, no!”

A landslide poured down, eclipsing us into totality. I scrambled toward the crucifix, but the falling earth struck me down. It didn’t matter. Jesus couldn’t help. Jesus was buried here with me.