Holes

A short story

Photo by Keith Curry on Pexels

This year I’m writing one short story a month according to a specific horror trope.

My January story on Ghosts was Hot and Cold.

February's trope is: ABANDONED PLACES

Enjoy!

Holes

The moon is white hot amid the dark sea of black. Its silvery light outshines the stars. It cascades down over the desert valley.

Low hills snake around the dark desert floor. The highest trees go up to the knees on an adult. Bereft of leaves and devoid of foliage. They are full of needles that stab and deep roots that greedily drink up the rare rainwater when, and if, it falls.

A coyote yips and howls. An owl sings a mournful song. Even a mountain lion stalks low through the underbrush of sage.

But they won’t go near the town.

Even the animals stay clear of that place.

The lights are still on in that town. A lonely highway runs off the side of a sign that reads: WELCOME TO JACKSON. There are no cars on the road.

There is no rust on the sign. The paint used on the white letters and the blue background look fresh.

Around Jackson, there are no other towns. No gas stations. No stores. Just dirt and sand and sagebrush.

And darkness.

Only the odd trailer on cinder blocks here and there on the outskirts. Plastic swimming pools full of lukewarm water, tricycles, basketballs, and dog houses litter the spaces of desert claimed as yards. One such home has a Barbie doll buried in the dirt up to its waist next to a pogo stick leaning against a low-lying and sickly tree.

All the lights are on in the trailer. The TV is on. A voice of a male newscaster: “Clear skies tonight, Janet. And all day tomorrow expect the same crisp and clear weather…”

Crickets chirp near the trailer.

Nobody closes the open doors to the home. No dogs bark or howl at the moon.

Near silence.

Footprints in the dirt in front of the home. One set from a man’s heavy work boots. Another from a much smaller pair of sneakers. They lead from the home and out into the yard by the Barbie and the pogo stick.

They end abruptly. They do not lead back into the home.

The chain used to keep the dog in the yard lies flat in the dirt. It is coiled around the footprints, adding those of the dog to the people’s. They too do not lead back to the doghouse from the children’s toys.

A slight depression in the ground rings the footprints and the chain. The dust in a faded red.

A dirt road leads from the trailer down into the town. Cacti and Indian ricegrass dot the side of the road and even grow into it here and there.

A Toyota Hilux lies in the gutter, on its side, leaning against a cattle fence. The left tire is holding down the barbed wire, the sharp prongs have punctured the rubber and the air is leaking out.

The emergency lights flash blood red over the otherwise dark road. The passenger door stands open vertically. There is no one in the car. There are no cattle in the fields. Only vague suggestions of dark water coalesced into pools.

A single strip of wet meat hangs from the barbed wired fence.

A smooth impression leads from the truck, away from ten scratch marks on the side of the vehicle, and down into the town. A smoothed and flattened out section of dirt. There are handprints and shoe prints in the impression. They appear sporadically, with no rhyme to them. Blood is mixed with the dirt. A wallet lies open in the path. It is open to a driver’s license of a woman with short black hair and uneven bangs over her droopy eyes behind purple rimmed glasses. The name on the ID is Joanna Perez. Age 23.

Today is her birthday.

The entire length of the impression of prints and blood and dust is a football field. Halfway along it, a single shoe is left. A left pink shoe. The human foot is still inside of it. The meat covered bone sticking out. Further along, right when the dirt road becomes a paved one, a two-inch puddle of blood has pooled into a depression in the concrete. Purple rimmed glasses lie in the middle of the pool. The blood is slowly draining down into an unseen hole at the bottom of the depression.

A streetlight hangs overhead. Flashing its yellow light. It lies almost horizontal across the hood of a mud covered blue sedan. The windows are shattered. The doors, all four of them, lie detached several feet away from the car. There is more blood in the car. It covers the headrests and the seats of the two front seats and the back two. A child’s car seat lies facedown on the street. Broken in two pieces down the middle.

More puddles of blood appear on the street. Each one lies in a depression the size of a bathtub.

Each one is draining into unseen holes.

Electricity sparks to life further down the street. Telephone lines lie severed on the road and whip around like snakes. They spark and flash. One has set fire to a nearby home. A single-story house, completely consumed in flames. No sirens can be heard rushing to the scene.

The fire is licking at the next-door apartment complex. The complex is leaning to the side. An air-conditioner falls from the slanted balcony of room 209 and crashes onto the sidewalk.

Its crash echoes throughout the silent street.

The apartment groans and shifts. It is now on fire. The parking lot in front of the complex is gone. In its place is a hole. Soon the building will fall into it if the fire doesn’t destroy it first.

The street is fractured. A Jeep lies headfirst in a hole in the middle of the road. The car’s backside nearly points straight up. The horn is blaring. The driver’s seat has been crushed into the steering wheel and the body pinned between the two is pushing the horn with its chin. What used to be its chin. The face has been smashed to where identification cannot be made. Teeth lie on the dashboard. A sliver of the skull is stuck in the roof. The rest of the face that can be seen between seat and wheel is a mush, a wet and glistening pulp of red. The chair has nearly flattened the body into the front end of the Jeep.

Aside from the face, there is little blood in the car. What is there is draining down into the hole the Jeep is stuck in. The headlights are on and illuminate a part of the tunnel under the street. The lights do not reach far. Beyond their glow, the tunnel is dark. It is not a sewer line. It runs underneath that.

The tunnel is wide enough for a semi-truck to drive through it. Nothing can be seen. There is a scratching deeper down into the dark.

Something drips down from the ceiling. From multiple points. What flows down is sticky. An underground power line flares to life. It has been severed in two and it lights up what is pouring down from above. It is blood. It falls to the ground and sinks further down through the soil itself. Swallowed by the hungry black earth. The sparking stops as the power dies.

Further down the tunnel, a hole opens up to the left. It leads down. A draft blows up like a wail. It carries a heat with it. There is more scratching down there. Rustling. The skittering of many feet running wild in the dark. Yipping and howling and moaning. The tunnel veers off to the right, away from the deeper hole, and leads back up to the surface.

The lights from many fires bathe the lip of the hole. Dancing on the shattered pavement. Rising out of the hole, the Jackson’s downtown opens up. A sedan is on fire. The rubber of the tires is melting into the street. A blackened skeleton still grips the steering wheel with an eternal look of shock.

Hundreds of bloody puddles fill the streets. More blood than any pavement left. Cars are upturned. One truck has been bifurcated down the middle lengthwise. Some have crashed into store fronts. An ice cream shop is on fire from the ambulance that has crashed into it. Smoke and embers rain down on the town square.

A police car flashes its red and blue lights across the scene. Ten bullet casings lie on the pavement, four are in a blood puddle. A shotgun lies near a crushed dumpster, almost as if it were stepped on a smashed like a beer can. Two shells, still smoking, lie on the ground. The gun has been shattered into one hundred and five distinct pieces.

Shadows dance further down the street, illuminated by the now spreading fires.

They writhe against the brick wall of a brewery.

Yipping.

Howling.

Moaning.

A human silhouette is lifted between the larger shadows, their actual size impossible to tell. The person’s shadow flails and struggles, but is held in place. A shriek pierces the silent air. The human shadow is torn into three pieces by the writing things. The shrieking has stopped.

The shadows of the writhing things, now dozens of wispy tendrils, wriggle and scatter and skitter up the walls.

Going around the corner where the shadows projected from, there is nothing but a burning elm tree, one of the few larger trees in town.

Was.

Beneath the roots of the blazing bark, a new indentation in the ground. Made moments ago. The blood ripples and swirls.

And drains down into the hole beneath it.