Davis and the Hole in the Ground
Davis couldn't quite put her finger on what it was that drew her so persistently to the dark hole south of the road leading away from her house. She stood there at its, peering down into whatever it is that's in a hole besides darkness, all the while wondering if perhaps she wasn't a bit insane to even consider thinking about planning what she had planned and was prepared to do.
Perhaps it was the sheer mystery of the thing. It was certainly a mystery what was concealed in the viscous darkness that lived there beneath the edge of the earth. Perhaps it was the scale. She had definitely seen larger holes, Davis thought to herself as she looked down, but never one deeper than this. Of course, it could be, she noted, that she didn't have much experience with holes on a broad scale, the scope of her familiarity with them being primarily limited to this one and whatever holes her father had dug, in which to plant seeds, in the garden behind the house, which hardly counted as holes at all, by her counting. Then again, she reminded herself, she didn't have much experience with holes.
Perhaps it was that, for much of her life, her family -- her mother and father -- had pretended that the hole was in fact not there. It was never spoken of, and Davis had always found it slightly off-putting that such a unique and impressive feature of the landscape near their home was never even mentioned in casual conversation, especially considering there was not much else to distinguish their house or their town from any others. But instead it went unnamed and was surrounded by such a tacit air of foreboding, more the fault of her parents than the hole itself, that Davis at many points throughout her young life had found herself teetering on the brink of sneaking out of the house some midday and experiencing for herself whatever there was to be experienced at or in a mysterious hole in the ground south of the road leading away from her house.
But today was different. Today, she stood ready and willing to find out exactly what lay at the bottom of this hole, if even it had a bottom. She bent down to pick a fist-sized stone from the ground, and held it diffidently over the gaping blackness before her. She examined the stone at arm's length and wondered quietly to the summer air whether it would be prudent to so callously discard such a potentially useful stone, and whether the hole would mind being littered with foreign objects. She reminded herself, however, that a stone in a hole could not rightfully be considered a foreign object, no matter how objectionable the stone, as the hole was cut from the earth, and the earth was made, as far as she knew, primarily of stone. Or perhaps it was primarily of water; she seemed to recall hearing, at some point in time, that most of the earth was ocean. That would mean, of course, that even if she did drop this stone into this hole before her, it would be basically the equivalent of casting a stone into the ocean, something which people did with almost distressing regularity. She wondered briefly if the ocean minded being littered with stones all day, but quickly put the thought out of her mind. There was no use distracting herself now, she thought, not when she was so close to finally fulfilling her aching desire for knowledge, especially considering that there must be myriad stones underwater anyway. She released the stone, letting it tumble cleanly into the center of the hole, and peered in after it long after it had been swallowed by the darkness.
Five seconds passed without report. Ten. Davis stood, her head cocked to one side in the heat, the sun bearing down upon the back of her neck, her ears straining to catch some noise other than the faint, incessant drone of unseen insects in the dry grass. Finally, she heard what she thought might be the strike of a dropped stone at the bottom of a hole. She couldn't be sure, having never heard such a sound before, but she was almost certain that it might sound very similar to what she had just heard.
But then she heard it again, five seconds later. She stared down into the hole, her mind mulling over any possible eventuality which would explain the striking of one dropped stone against the bottom of a hole twice. She found, after a moment's consideration, that she couldn't think of anything worthwhile. Perhaps it was that the stone had come to rest on a ledge, and subsequently lost its balance and fell the rest of the way to the bottom of the hole. Perhaps it was that the first sound she heard, or even the second, had not truly been her stone striking the bottom of the hole. That seemed unlikely, she thought, as the two sounds were very similar. She put her hands on her hips, fingering the coil of hemp rope drawn about her waist for easy transport. Now, she decided as if there were any question before, she would have to see for herself the nature of the bottom of the hole, and what had happened to the perfectly good stone she had dropped. She got to her knees beside the hole and, leaning over the edge on a slightly quavering hand, she slipped her fingertips slowly into the shadow.
It was not a large hole, she noticed as she let her hand dip farther and farther into the unknown. The nerves beneath the skin of her fingers rang uncomfortably with the creeping sensation born of being unable to see where one is sticking one's hand, and she averted her eyes from the spectacle, one squinted mostly closed as she stretched her fingers, half hoping to touch something and half fearing that she would. Her hand encountered nothing, and she lowered her shoulders, vaguely encouraged, to probe deeper inside. It was cool and less damp than she had suspected, surrounded by insulating earth, and Davis couldn't help but imagine the rock and dirt and sand encircling her hand and arm on all sides looking like a scientist's diagram of the layers of the earth, orange and brown and boldly yellow and beige, though she supposed it all looked the same, in the darkness.
She leaned still farther, immersing herself to the shoulder, and still she felt nothing. In a rush of bravery, she moved her hand in as arc, her eyes, above ground, squinting in concentration, ready to snap open or closed as soon as she found a root or a rock or the walls of the hole. She found none of these things. Wider yet she swung her hand, her chest brushing the flattened grass, her arm concealed in its entirety by the langorous shadow, and still she encountered nothing but cool, dark space. So intent was she, and so absorbed, that she didn't notice even when the fingers of her supporting hand crept over the edge of the land. She didn't notice that her shoulder and dangling hair were being slowly coaxed into the maw of the earth. She barely noticed herself losing her balance, until the heel of her hand slid abruptly into the darkness, and she found herself being swallowed unceremoniously up, leaving nothing to the memory of the outside world beside a flash of legs and a small scream, but this too was muffled by the stony, jagged, unctuous strata.
When Davis awoke, she was almost unable to tell whether or not she was still passed out. Darkness pressed in on her eyes from all around, alleviated only by the stark white disk of sky she saw when gravity and her wavering sense of balance told her she was looking straight up. It was cold, in the hole, and quiet, and slightly more damp than she had expected. She struggled to sit up, and found herself covered in dank dust and woozy from her toes to her head, which still sang with pain. She touched her forehead, surmising that it must have been what broke her fall, and found it matted with sticky hair and coated in a fluid too thick to be water, not that water dried in crusty flakes upon one's skin anyway, she reminded herself. She got unsteadily to her feet, bracing against the jutting rocks reaching in at her from the sides of the cave.
For it was a cave -- she listened, and off to the left of her, the stifled, close sensation in her ears of looming objects was less oppressive. She reached out her hand again, and her fingertips found nothing. She took a careful step in that direction, sliding her foot by inches across the rough stones beneath her, clinging to the unseen wall beside her for security, and found that the ground was reasonably level , and sound with the assuredness of the earth. She took another look up at the mouth of the hole, and stretched her arms up, groping along the walls for a handhold that did not threaten to give way and send her tumbling headlong back to the bottom of the hole. She could find nothing. Davis sighed in resignation, and moved another inch into what she hoped in the darkness was a tunnel from the bottom of the hole to somewhere.
By and by, as slowly and cautiously along the wall she went, she looked up at the disk of sky, for she could still see it, angling slowly away from her as she traveled at a crawling pace through the artificial, underground night. She groped ahead with her hands a foot or two, letting her feet and body and head follow only when she was certain there was no sudden wall or boulder barring her path. She paused again, listening, and she decided that she could distinctly hear the attenuate trickling of water running across her path. She moved ahead, feeling with her fingers and ears the ceiling beginning to press down upon her in uneven degrees, and stooped to clear her head of the rocks above. It was soon that she could no longer stand upright in the tunnel, nor see the sky peeking down at her from the mouth of the hole, behind and many feet above. She could, at least, still hear the murmur of the water filtering through the array of rocks, and as she lowered herself to crawl, her hands felt smooth, damp stones, and water began to soak through her skirt in front to sooth her bruised knees.
As she crawled, the tunnel grew wetter, and the splashing of the underground stream grew louder. It was still pitch dark, and David took to closing her eyes, unwilling to let the darkness grope at them any longer. The stones beneath her became slippery with water, and she was forced to travel more slowly. It was more than once that the roof of the tunnel bent low to bite the crown of her head painfully, and she felt more and more like a snake as she was made to slither awkwardly along the bed of stone and water. Her hands began to slip upon the stones, and they turned beneath her, sending her at an alarming rate down the tunnel, headfirst and unable to stop her descent. She tumbled over a ledge and fell a short way to a nest of stone, her head and shoulder and arm cracking nauseatingly as her bones met the harder material.
Davis reeled as best she could while in a crumpled heap, but did not pass out, though perhaps she should have. She tried to push herself up to her hands and knees -- the ceiling was now far above -- and instead met the pain of a broken arm, and the sickly, flesh-muted crackle of the twin bones in her forearm twisting and bending in ways they should not. She collapsed again, moaning in pain and cradling her ruined wrist against her breast. She could feel, through the pain which would be blinding if the darkness of the cavern were not already complete, more blood soaking into her blouse and trickling down the side of her neck. She got to her feet with difficulty. The ground was wet, and the walls and ceiling were both all too far away to hear, and her ears were filled with the constant splashing of the small waterfall she had fallen over. She took a step forward, still clutching her arm against her body, and another, thinking only to relieve herself by any means possible of the earth which had entrapped her. The ground was fair and as level as could be expected, for which she was faintly thankful, and she was able to move along the expanse of the hallway as readily as any girl who had just broken her arm and who was dizzy with pain, confusion, and nervousness, and who could feel the empty prickling of abject fear creeping into her stomach and lungs.
The journey was interminable, more or less straight ahead along what the water sloshing in her shoes told her was the path of the stream. As the sound of the cascade faded behind her, her ears became slowly and insidiously aware of something else, something Davis was not entirely certain she wished to hear. It was behind her, low to the ground, and the echoing cavern made it as if the sound were all around her. Or perhaps it was, she thought to herself, her footfalls in the shallow riverbed quickening, her stiff muscles growing taut and tense in anxious anticipation of something she could not quite place. She found herself trotting along the corridor, listening above her footsteps for whatever it was that was behind and beside her, close now, intimite in its soft almost-scraping, almost-sliding, almost-breathing or murmuring or echoing or whatever the thing was that she was almost certain had made her an unwilling companion in the cave. She broke into a run, still hearing whatever it was she was hearing to both sides of her, a mere foot away in the darkness. The sound seemed to pace her easily, but her race was over more abruptly than she had hoped anyway. A stone, a fist-sized stone, turned under her foot, sending her sprawling anew into the water. She stifled a cry of pain, clutching her broken arm to her stomach as she clenched herself into a ball, too sickly frightened and tight and vibrating with sensation to strike out at the shadow that was now inches away from her in more spots than she cared to count or contemplate.
Davis could not hear it now, but she could feel it, cool and damp and earthen. The water in which she lay was cold and the only thing she had to cling to besides the stone, and the silent noise closing in upon her, and her broken arm, and the summer sky somewhere above her, too far to matter. She drew herself up tightly, cold, bleeding and broken, spent and bruised and discarded and uncomfortably not alone, her eyes squeezed tightly shut against the darkness pressing in upon them, the thick, white fear in her head and face and mouth too distracting now for her to ever rightly have wondered what was at the bottom of the hole.
disturbing, yet I want to read more... is there more?
Haunting The Rathe for 3 Years Straight: Baroness Delissandra Splitshadow - Half-Elven Assassin - For Hire Grandmaster Poisoner (250), Master Potter (183), Grandmaster Lush (200)
"Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another." - Oscar Wilde
Re: Davis and the Hole in the Ground
Reminds me of Lovecraft.
I don't know if you want to hear a comment like that or not, but at any rate...
I liked it.
And I second the "Is there more?"
Chromic2 Registered User
Posts: 12
(10/2/03 4:51 pm)
Re: Davis and the Hole in the Ground
Please more thanks
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