William Meikle: The Hole

“We did what we could; we dug for three days straight, deep and far, only stopping for water and rest when we were too exhausted to keep going. We cleared the whole cave-in, and even dug a bit farther. But we never found nobody; no bodies, not a trace that they had ever been there.”

Charlie stopped again and chugged what was left of his beer, motioning to Tony for another.

“Old man Hopman made a token effort to keep the work going, but ain’t no way any of us was going back down there for a while, money or no money. And the old man himself seemed to have lost any enthusiasm he had for the project. I took up the handyman business, and tried to forget about the three men and what might have happened to them. I also took up the booze, even more than I had been doing. Some of them years are mighty cloudy looking back at them now. If you ain’t careful, lad, you could be in for some of the same yourself.”

Fred was in no mood for a lecture on abstinence.

Not after the morning I had.

“We’re not talking about me,” Fred interrupted. “Remember? There’s more about the mines, isn’t there?”

Charlie nodded.

“Just a bit. But give me time. I’m getting to it.”

The older man lit a cigarette, taking his time about it, drawing out Fred’s anticipation before finally continuing.

“I thought I was finished with the mine. But it weren’t quite finished with me.

“It was nineteen eighty or thereabouts, eight years later, before I was back down there. Old man Hopman had got filthy rich at some point a few years before. I reckoned he’d finally found what he was looking for down there in the mine, but I’d scarcely given him any thought at all apart from in my nightmares—until the old man contracted me to get rid of some chemical waste from his factory over in Loughbourne. Why he wanted it hidden, I never found out, but I’d learned years before that asking questions only gets you answers you didn’t really want to know.

“‘Fetch it from the factory, and stow it down below,’ he said. ‘What the county ain’t able to see, it ain’t able to bitch about.’

“I knew exactly what he meant by down below. I wasn’t happy about it, but eight years is a long time, and the memory had faded. Or so I thought. That same night I loaded up my truck with twenty oil drums of something I didn’t want to think about, and took it to Hopman’s mine.

“Now I ain’t ashamed to tell you, I didn’t want to go back down there into the dark. As I stood at the entrance to the shaft, the years seemed to fly away, as if they’d never happened, and suddenly I couldn’t get the thought of the three missing men out of my mind. I wanted to just dump the waste at the entrance and head down here for a beer. But the business, such as it was, weren’t doing too well, and I needed the old man’s cash badly. So I loaded the drums on a cart, hitched it to the forklift, and headed down into the dark.

“That was when I found out just how busy old man Hopman had been in the intervening years. There’s a proper warren down there, or at least there was back then, a nest of caverns, all crumbling, some with fresh cave-in material building up, others looking ready to drop at any minute… and this was thirty-odd years ago. God knows what it’ll be like now. And that ain’t the worst of it.

“I took them drums down as deep as I dared. And it were there that I found old man Hopman’s secrets.

“He had some kind of operation going on down at the deepest level. There were generators, water barrels and refrigeration units… all kinds of shit. I reckoned he was building a bunker; remember that the Cold War was still going on, and some folks were just plain scared shitless. I had a look-see while I was there. There was a big iron door, obviously there to protect something , but it was locked tight. And I had started to get the heebie-jeebies by then anyway. I kept hearing somebody whispering to me, but when I looked around, there was never nobody there. After ten minutes of that crap, all I wanted to do was get back up top and have a drink… a lot of drinks.

“I did what the old man had told me to do. I followed the tracks to the deepest part, and found where I was supposed to leave the waste drums.”

He paused again, took a deep drag of smoke and let it out very slowly. Fred saw something in the old man’s eyes he hadn’t seen before: pain. That, and a hint of fear.

“And here we get to the point of the story,” Charlie finally said.

“Old man Hopman hadn’t just been tunneling… he’d been dumping his industrial waste down there too; scores of barrels of the crap, some open and leaking, stacked willy-nilly in rough-hewed, crumbling caves. And the smell… I’ll never forget it. It stung in the nose and throat like a rancid shit, and it took a whole bunch of beers later that night to get the taste of it out of my mouth.

“I’m telling you, son, it don’t bear thinking about what might be down there by now, but I know one thing… we don’t want it getting back up here.”

Fred was quiet for a while, thinking about the thing he’d barely caught a glimpse of back in the hole; a white, slithering thing he’d only seen at the edge of his vision but suspected might be haunting his dreams that very night. Charlie, after his bout of being talkative, went back to a more normal period of silent drinking, which was fine by Fred. He was getting settled in for a long evening, and in truth was looking forward to the eventual oblivion the booze would bring.

Scraps of information came back from Hopman’s Hollow over the next few hours, the gist of which was mostly more of the same. Big hole, getting bigger. There were other stories too; there would always be other stories where the Hopmans were concerned. Folks told of bodies that were there then were gone, of weird voices calling up out of the hole, and of strange diagrams seen on the walls and floor of the Hopman house just before it fell into the chasm. Fred and Charlie listened, then went back to drinking, both of them hoping to start to forget their own tribulations earlier that day.

But it was not to be.

The bar began to fill up, the crowd again full of excited chat about the hole which was the biggest thing to happen to the town in many a year. Once people heard that they’d been first on the scene, Fred and Charlie became the focus of some attention. Charlie got exasperated at first with the incessant questioning, but the pair of them quickly cottoned on to the fact that, as minor celebrities, they could squeeze a fair bit of free beer out of their story if they padded it out long enough.

Fred even started to enjoy himself, embellishing his story with new detail on each subsequent telling so that after an hour or so he had made himself out to be quite the hero. The one thing he didn’t mention was the memory of the pale thing that had moved in the pit. He kept that locked away, and after a few more beers even started to forget about it completely.

Janet sat back from the microscope, then leaned forward for another look, just to make sure she had indeed seen what she thought she had. She had a sample on the slide, taken from the decayed matter she had gathered at the side of the hole.

It hadn’t changed; it remained the same even on this, her third look. Where she’d expected to see cellular structure, maybe even blood cells, remnants of skin, some indication of organization, she saw instead merely a blob of undifferentiated protoplasm with nothing to indicate it had recently been part of a living body. There was no sign of mitochondria, nor of Golgi apparatus; no sign of much of anything. She was at a complete loss to explain it.