William Meikle - The Hole

“Of course, just give me five minutes to close up.”

It was obvious before they even reached the Hopman place that something was indeed going on. There was more traffic on the road than she had ever seen. Normally you could drive along this stretch and maybe see a lorry going the other way, or a battered pickup heading for one of the farms. Now it seemed that half the town was heading out east. Whatever it was, it had brought out as many people as the church summer fete.

Bill had been remarkably quiet on the short trip from the town center, but now he cursed, long and loud.

“Ain’t had a day like this since ’98 when the school bus crashed,” he said. He waved a hand to encompass the traffic. “Damned ambulance chasers. I’d have the lot of them in the cells if I had the room.”

“ Ambulance chasers? I thought it was only Charlie who got hurt?”

“Hurt? There’s more than hurt out here, Janet,” Bill said softly. “We got some dead folks.”

He went pale, and there was something in his eyes that made Janet wish she’d stayed back in the surgery.

It’s a bad one.

She didn’t push it, for by then they were almost on top of a crowd of gawkers. They were packed so thick on the roadside that Bill had to put on his lights and siren and edge his way through, window down, shouting curses and exhortations at the top of his voice. Even then they scarcely moved—not until Bill started to accidentally nudge them aside with the front bumpers.

It was only when they got through the crowd that Janet finally saw what all the fuss was about. The Hopman house, or rather half of it, sat perched on the edge of a hole that stretched off quarter of a mile to the south. What was left of the building was open to the elements, the rest obviously having fallen away when the ground collapsed beneath it. There was a fine array of antique furniture on show to the world. Janet knew that as much again and more must have joined the walls in their fall into the hole. If nothing else, the Hopmans had already lost a small fortune.

At the nearest point to their position the collapse reached all the way up to the edge of the road, where a quartet of tired-looking deputies tried to keep the crowd back. The scar was also over a hundred yards wide, and as deep as Fred Grant had said, if not deeper, a yawning chasm filled with blackness.

“It’s still growing,” Bill said quietly, as he got out of the car.

Janet got out and joined him.

As if to prove Bill’s point, a foot-wide piece of the right-hand roadway fell off into the hole and tumbled away out of sight. She waited for a splash, but none came, or if it did, it was too far off to hear. People started to crowd closer, hoping for a better look.

“Get these folks right back,” Bill shouted. “And get this road closed. I want roadblocks a hundred yards either side of the collapsed area. There’s to be no traffic either way until I say so.”

The deputies moved to comply. Bill turned to Janet.

“This isn’t why you’re here. Come with me.”

He led her west along the road, back towards town, then along the side of the hole for fifty yards. Her heart sank when she saw the bodies, three of them, lying on the edge on a bed of pine needles. From a distance it looked to be two adults and a child. They were unclothed, with the greasy pallor of flesh that had been too long in the water.

Floaters .

She steeled herself for the inevitable stench to come. As she approached, she noticed something else.

They scarcely look human.

“What is this, Bill? An accident?”

“You tell me, Doc,” the sheriff said wearily. “I only work here.”

He looked green around the gills, as if about to puke. She saw why as she got closer. All three bodies were bloated and distended, puffed up by gasses. The degree of decomposition seemed severe.

And it’ll only get worse out here .

“We need to get these into controlled conditions, fast,” Janet said. “Otherwise there won’t be much left for the boys from County to examine.”

“That might be for the best,” Bill said dryly, but didn’t elaborate.

He stayed well back as Janet bent to look at the bodies. The decomposition was indeed bad, and getting rapidly worse, as if the air itself was acting like acid on the pale flesh. The incongruities piled up as soon as she started her examination. The first thing that struck her was that all three bodies seemed to be completely hairless. Then she saw the tails… three feet long, gray and scaly, the sort of thing normally seen on rats. The more she looked the more she saw that these bodies were indeed not human. They were mammalian, of sorts, but looked to have evolved for a different existence. For eyes they only had black pits, their hands were flat and broad, palms like spades, fingers stubby, and their back legs were thick and short, built for pushing rather than walking.

She looked up at Bill, who was pointedly looking anywhere but at the bodies.

“What the hell is this?” she said. “Some kind of joke?”

Bill looked solemn.

“ Hell might be the operative word,” he said, and pointed at the head of one of the bodies. Twin protuberances, fleshy and swollen poked from above the brow. “Sure looks like horns to me.”

It took Janet a few seconds to understand.

“Devils? You think that’s what these are?”

Bill shrugged. “If the shoe fits…”

She almost laughed, and then thought better of it. Bill was a churchman through and through, as was much of the town. She’d learned a long time ago to keep any skepticism to herself. She did, however, study the horns more closely. There was no sign of any bone. Instead the bumps seemed to be coated with short fine hairs, and she guessed they might be some kind of sensory organs. She bent to study the mouth area when the face of the thing fell in with a moist sucking sound, and she almost gagged as a foul stench rose up from the body, forcing her to cover her mouth. The chest cavity started to slump in on itself, and the smell got much worse.

It quickly became clear she wasn’t going to get much, if anything, of the remains back to controlled conditions. They were corroding fast, noxious fluids bubbling and seeping into the ground as Janet watched. There wasn’t even any hope of bones to study—the whole structure of the bodies was breaking down and in seconds there was nothing left but some greasy flesh on the pine needles.

She just had time to scrape a sample of what remained into one of her latex gloves before, with a soft hiss, the last of it turned to little more than a puff of steam.

“You can cancel the forensics team,” she said.

She stood back from where the bodies had lain and started to study the surrounding ground. Bill pulled her away, grabbing her arm hard enough that she knew there would be a bruise there later.

“What the hell did you do that for?”

Then she heard it, a hum, like the sound of distant machinery. She tasted blood on her lip from a nosebleed, and a headache pounded behind her left eye.

“It’s happening again,” the sheriff said, and pointed at the hole. The sides were slipping, falling away into the blackness, and the crumbling edge crept towards their feet.

“Come on,” Bill said. “Back to the car.”

They almost didn’t make it. The side of the hole collapsed faster than their walking pace. Janet stumbled, right on the edge, as a fresh chunk of earth fell away underfoot, and was only saved by Bill bodily lifting her up and away to safety. Seconds later they were both running, just ahead of collapsing soil and rock. A tree crashed to ground right behind them, then another.