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William Meikle: The Hole

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William Meikle The Hole

The Hole: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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It starts with an odd hum that brings headaches and nosebleeds to the inhabitants of a remote, sleepy country town. Then a sinkhole begins to form… and out from that hole comes the townspeople's worst nightmares. Facing their fears and the growing madness, a group of survivors descend into the collapsed area in an attempt to save what is left of their town. Sacrifices will be required, but will they be enough? The hole is growing… spreading… and the horror within it is growing stronger…

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They got halfway to the road when the screaming started, and when they reached the tarmac, they had to push through a panicked throng, all trying to flee in the opposite direction.

“Get behind me,” Bill said, and using his bulk, pushed back against the crowd, utilizing his huge arms to shove anyone aside who was foolish enough to get close.

“Coming through,” he shouted, and enough folk moved aside that they were finally able to get to the squad car. Over to their left the hole had encroached on the road itself. A hefty slab of hardtop fell away less than twelve feet away as they got into the vehicle.

“Time to go,” Bill said grimly, shoved the car into reverse and screeched away as the whole road fell in just beyond the bonnet in a crash of noise and a billow of dust. Janet smelt burning rubber as the tires squealed, then held their grip. The car shot backwards, away from an approaching collapse.

“Get out the goddamned way,” Bill shouted, then had to brake hard as they caught up with the fleeing crowd. For a long moment Janet thought they had not gone far enough; the road continued to collapse as the hole widened farther. She held her breath as a fresh plume of dusty earth flew up just in front of them.

Bill killed the engine. There was no road to be seen beyond the bonnet, just a black hole full of swirling dust.

After a few seconds Janet remembered to breathe. The collapse seemed to be over… for now.

Everything went quiet.

5

Fred and Charlie sat at the bar in The Roadside, on their second beer, working on making it a third before too long, when news came in that The Hollow had grown again. The news was brought by Tom Perkins, as red as a berry and excited fit to bust.

“The Hopman place has gone; most of the house, stables, horses and paddock, the whole lot, all ’et up. And the highway’s out; ain’t nothing coming in from that direction for a long time. You gotta come see.”

The bar fell quiet as many of the clientele left to check it out, but Fred and Charlie stayed in their seats.

“Ain’t you boys going to see what all the fuss is about?” Tony, the barkeep, asked.

“It’s a big hole, I’ve seen more than enough of it already,” Fred said, finishing off his beer. Charlie merely grunted, and chugged his own glass down. His scalp wound was red raw, black stitches showing under butterfly clip bandages that already looked grimy. The wound hadn’t slowed down his beer drinking any though, and Fred was happy to go along with a third for each of them. When he reached for his wallet, Charlie waved him away.

“The beers are on me tonight, son. I owe you, for getting me out of that hole.”

Fred wasn’t about to argue. There didn’t look like any way they’d get paid by John Hopman anytime soon, and he was going to need most of whatever cash he had in his pocket for food for the next week. But although they were only on the third beer, Fred could already hear the JD calling. He suspected eating would just have to wait. But before then, he needed to slow down a tad; it was too early in the day to start tying one on.

Who am I kidding?

“What do you think is causing it?” he asked Charlie, hoping to get a conversation going that might take his mind off the booze, for a few seconds at least.

Charlie accepted his fresh beer and chugged down a third of it before replying.

“If I was betting on it, my money would be on the old mine workings. It was only a matter of time before a collapse happened. Looks like that time has come.”

Fred knew of the mines; every kid in town knew. Back in junior high, one of the top dares of a summer was to go inside the main entrance at the foot of Hangman’s Bluff and stay there after sundown. Fred remembered his own experience only too well. A cold evening in a damp place; the only scares being ones he gave to himself and a slap from the old man on his late return home. Not much reward for surviving a successful dare. But he hadn’t gone much farther than a couple of yards inside. He might have been stupid enough to accept the dare—but he wasn’t that stupid.

All he remembered of it now was the dark and the damp. Even back then in the early years of the new century, the place had looked to be long neglected.

“I never knew that the mine had ever amounted to much,” he said. “Didn’t old man Hopman give up on it back in the sixties?”

Charlie took a while to answer, and when he did, he had a look around first to make sure no one else was listening.

“That was the story he had put around. But some of us know better.”

Fred lit up a smoke and sipped at his beer. He knew Charlie of old. A story was coming, and one that might be a while in the telling.

* * *

“You’ve got to remember,” Charlie started. “Things was different back in them days. There weren’t none of these Health and Safety restrictions… at least none that old man Hopman needed to pay much attention to in any case. I weren’t much older than you are now, fresh back from ‘Nam with a busted knee and not enough dollars to keep me in booze and smokes. When word came down that the old man was hiring miners, cash in hand, no questions asked, I jumped at the chance.

“Mayhap I should’ve been more careful, but the money was too good to turn down. Hopman even provided us with free meals and as much coffee as we could drink after our shift was done. But the working conditions in the shaft itself were a bad dream come true. He had six of us down there, three at a time in twelve-hour shifts, hacking away in the near dark with scarcely a pit prop or lintel to stop the rock from falling in on us.

“I don’t mind telling you, there were a couple of times when things got right hairy. We nearly lost Tom Lipton when a stone fell on him. Banged his leg up good, and he was off work for a spell. But a couple of weeks later he was back at it with the rest of us. As I said already, the money was just too good to turn down.

“We never did find out what we were looking for. We shifted the rock and it was taken away in carts for the old man to inspect before it got dumped in the old quarry off the Getting’s farm road. All we knew was that we had to keep digging. Old Hopman was on a quest for whatever it was he thought was down there. Silver was my thought, for there’s stories from the old days of a vein running through the rock in these parts. But some of the men said it must be Spanish gold and others spoke of some long-forgotten stash of Indian treasure. There were even mutterings of it being a taboo place. Several local kids managed to scare themselves silly one night while partying a bit too hard. But this was at the ass end of the hippie era. There was more than just booze involved, if you catch my drift, and that waccy-baccy can make you see anything you want to see.

“In truth, nobody but old Hopman really knew, or cared what we were digging for. We hacked at rock, coughed up dust, and took his money. We worked hard, and partied harder on the one day off we got in every ten. This was the early seventies, back when a party was a real party. This bar here was jumping most nights, and a man with a roll of green in his pocket was the most popular man in town. Happy days.”

Charlie tailed off, staring into space, lost in memory. Fred thought the story was finished. But there was more to come.

“The good times lasted for six months,” Charlie continued after a while. “Then one night the other shift disappeared. Nobody knows what happened, or when it happened. We turned up for our shift as usual in the morning to be faced, not with three tired men on the way out to meet us, but with a fresh cave-in. There was no blood, no sign at all the men had even been there except for a pickaxe and a shovel that had been bent out of shape, as if it had hit something, hard.

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