William Meikle: The Hole

Suddenly all went quiet.

Fred, with Charlie beside him, lay across the top of the septic tank, half of which was embedded in a steep muddy bank.

A voice called down to them.

“You still alive down there?”

John Hopman was some feet above, looking down, then past them. Fred followed his gaze and almost forgot to breathe.

The septic tank was perched on the edge of a drop that fell away out of his view, but the sound of water dropping into the new chasm told him it was of some depth. The pond no longer existed. In its place was a huge muddy hole that even now was falling in at the edges, soft clay soil seeping farther into the gaping hole.

Fred shifted his weight, and the septic tank lurched to one side alarmingly before settling again.

“Get some rope,” he said to Hopman. “And you’d better do it quick.”

Hopman complied this time, and moved away out of sight. Fred made sure that they were in no immediate danger of toppling backward into the hole, and checked on Charlie. The older man was out cold, his face white with only a high patch of color on each cheek. The wound at his brow looked superficial, although it was still bleeding, and he was breathing, fast and shallow, but breathing.

“Stay with me, Charlie,” Fred whispered. “You’re the only friend I’ve got in this town.”

Hopman came back seconds later.

“Grab hold,” he shouted, and threw down, not a rope, but a long length of exterior electric cabling. Fred had to shift his footing to get it wrapped under Charlie’s armpits, and his heart thudded faster as the septic tank slid back a foot before coming to a stop. He tied the cable in a knot he prayed was strong enough to hold.

“Okay, take him up,” he shouted. He hoisted Charlie’s weight as long as he could while Hopman took the strain. As Hopman started to haul Charlie up, Fred stepped off the tank and tried to climb the bank to keep pace. There was a crash behind him. He turned in time to see the septic tank fall away out of sight. The thud as it hit bottom seemed to take a long time to come.

Then Fred was in a scramble for his life as the soil sloughed away beneath his hands and feet. He slid back three feet before he caught purchase, his legs swinging over empty air.

He looked down.

The hole fell away into a dark pit far below. Something moved down there, something large and pale, but it was gone before he could make out what it was. He grabbed at a thick root, half expecting it to give way beneath his weight. But to his surprise and relief it held, long enough for him to clamber away from the lip of the hole and roll aside; traversing the rest of the muddy bank in a zigzag crawl that brought him within range of Hopman’s reaching hand.

He took it gratefully, and let the man pull him up onto the lawn where he lay beside Charlie’s unconscious body, gasping in air, wondering what had just happened, and wiping away a fresh nosebleed.

Janet Dickson had just realized that all of her patients that morning were from the east side of town. She decided that the sheriff needed to know, and was reaching for the phone when Fred Grant arrived in the waiting room, half carrying Charlie Watson. The older man had blood seeping from a scalp wound and looked to be unsteady on his feet. She put the phone down and moved quickly to help. She couldn’t miss noticing the rank smell that hung around the men, but ignored it as she helped Fred get Charlie to the treatment room.

“I’m fine,” the wounded man said and tried to push them away. “Ain’t nothing a little Jack won’t cure.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Janet said. She finally persuaded the older man to sit on one of the gurneys, and set about trying to clean the wound.

“It’s a nasty cut. What happened to you?” she asked.

It was Fred who replied.

“John Hopman’s septic tank fell on him,” he said, deadpan.

Janet almost laughed but stopped when she saw he was serious. And she was now also intrigued, so she let Fred stay while she stitched Charlie up, the story unfolding as she did so. “It’s a big hole?” she asked as both the story and the stitching came to a conclusion.

Fred nodded.

“And getting bigger by the looks of things. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hopman house isn’t at risk before the day is out.”

“Any idea what’s caused it?”

“Nope,” Fred replied. “But I’ll tell you something—ain’t no way I’ll be the one cleaning that shit up.”

The youth was more talkative than she’d ever seen him. He wasn’t one of her patients, but she knew of him, of course. Everybody knew the town bad boy .

“Twenty years old and fit for nothing but the county jail,” was how Sheriff Bill Wozniak described him. Janet didn’t quite see it that way. She liked the youth. He had a good head on his shoulders. He and Charlie had painted the outside of her house just after she moved in, and it was obvious that both men took some pride in doing the job properly. Fred hadn’t come across as brash or mouthy like others of his generation.

Of course just last year he’d smashed up a car he’d stolen mere hours before. But he’d admitted it straightaway the next morning, and had even appeared contrite, blaming it on the booze and promising to behave in the future. Whether he could deliver on that promise remained to be seen. But here and now in the surgery he looked like what he was—an excited youth running on adrenaline and fumes.

There was one other thing. Both men had nosebleeds that took a long time to stop flowing. Charlie had more blood coming from his nose than from the scalp wound.

“Headache?” Janet asked.

Fred smiled wanly. “No, thanks. I’ve already got one. And it’s a real stinker. It got worse right after we arrived at Hopman’s place and it ain’t eased much since.”

That statement set alarm bells ringing in Janet’s mind. After she showed the two men out with prescriptions for painkillers, and a warning to stay off the booze and take it easy, she went to the wall map and traced her finger over the houses of the patients who seemed worst afflicted. She’d been right in her earlier assumption. All of the cases came from the east side of town, the worst being those closest to Hopman’s Hollow.

Her patients’ ailments, and the new hole, were linked.

But for the life of me I can’t see how .

She was still pondering the question later that afternoon when Bill Wozniak arrived. By then the nosebleeds and headaches had all been seen to, and she’d checked with County that the two patients she’d sent over were fine. For the first time since her arrival that morning there were no patients in the waiting room and no appointments scheduled. She felt safe in making herself a coffee, and had just sat back at her desk when the sheriff arrived. The big man looked worried.

“You look like you need a coffee,” she said.

He shook his head, and she knew there was trouble. Anything that kept the big man from his fix could be nothing less. He looked older than his forty-four years, and seemed somehow slumped, as if suddenly beset by the strain of his office, a strain he had always seemed to carry lightly until now.

“It ain’t good, Janet,” he said. “It ain’t good at all. I need you to come with me to the Hopman place. We’ve got a forensic team coming down from County, but it’ll be a while yet before they’re here, and it’ll be getting dark. Maybe you’ll see something in daylight before then that’ll give me a heads up on what is going on.”

“What is going on?” she asked.

“I ain’t exactly sure myself, yet. I have my suspicions. But I’d rather let you make up your own mind. Will you come?”