The Hole

Jem Waites stared down into the dark hole trying hard to distinguish any shapes or colors. The hole was ringed with a small wall of stones much like the wall Jem had put up a year ago around the old well at the south end of the farm. Jem guessed that the diameter of the hole was about four feet wide, and it had to be more than twenty feet deep because when he shone the flashlight down it was unable to penetrate the blackness. Jem remembered when the county crew got permission from Jem’s father to create the hole. It was intended to be some kind of waste collection pit for a new drainage system that the state was installing, but the funding ran out, and so did the crewmen. Jem’s father, Obed, tried for the longest time to get the county to seal the hole but there was always one reason or another that they couldn’t come down and do it. For weeks Obed threatened to have Jem fill in the hole, but father and son became so busy with the farm that they just never got around to it.
A month later Obed took ill and died. A week before he expired Obed had Jem build the small wall of stones around the hole, no one really knew why, least of all Jem.

Old farmer Howard Phillips often said that he would look out of his window at night and see Obed crouched down in front of that hole. The old farmer said he could see a fire burning nearby, and he swore he could hear a rhythmic chanting. Then again farmer Phillips also claimed that faceless creatures would carry him from his bed at night and bring him to other worlds. The old man was crazy, but Obed did seem to have an obsession with that hole. It was a persistent topic on the Waites’ farm during the last few weeks of Obed’s life, according to day workers. On more than one occasion Obed yelled and screamed at Jem, while hacking up blood, and demanded that the boy drop stones down the hole until it was closed forever. Obed always calmed down and apologized to his son right afterwards. Farm hands had said that they didn’t think he apologized because he had hurt his son’s feelings, but because he really didn’t want the hole closed.
It is rumored in town that poor Obed was found dead in the main doorway of the house, the doorway facing the north pasture, as if in an attempt to make one final journey to that hole.
Jem knew that it was all hearsay, country talk. Although he had been working in the corn to the east when the hands found his fathers body so he couldn’t say for sure. He was well aware of the penchant for the older folks in town to make up wild stories in an attempt to garner attention to themselves and their backwoods wisdom. Still, there he was staring down a deep dark hole.
Last time Jem was in town Goodie Watkins told him that his father held truck with rust skinned devils from down that trench, and he got whatever he deserved.
Jem didn’t see any devils, but his mind did stagger at the inscrutability of that pit. The sheer enigma of that blackness caused his mind to reel. That mystery compounded infinitely with the fact that the hole was bored right through the center of something Jem knew so well. As a child he had played among the high grass of the north field. He had his first kiss here, and had lost his virginity in the woods that ringed the property not far from where the hole is now. It baffled him how something so unfathomable could exist within something so familiar. Like a hole in his reality. Perhaps these were the thoughts that drove his father mad and killed him. Jem doubted it; his father was a pragmatic man, not given to flights of fancy. But still, it was all very odd, Jem had to admit as he gazed down into that hole. This business was very odd.
Old Howard Phillips stared down into the Waites’ pasture that adjoined his own property; the north field the Waites called it. He could just make out, past the dense wood that separated the properties, young Jeremiah Waites crouched before that obscene hole the same way his father had done before he died. The boy, like his father, was just kind of, sitting in front of the hole. The word supplication popped into the old farmer’s head but he wasn’t sure what it meant, even though he had heard it in church time and time again. That boy’s gonna go nuts like his old man did.
Farmer Phillips wondered if what Goodie Watkins had said was true. He wondered if she really saw Obediah signing the devil's black book and then lying with the prince of lies himself. He didn’t wonder long though, Goodie Watkins hadn’t been to the Waites’ farm since Obediah’s grandfather, Ambrose, married that queer girl from Dunnich. That was most likely where the madness in the family came from; you don’t mix Dunnich blood into your family tree and walk away unscathed. The old man shook his head at the lad kneeling before the hole. It would only be a matter of time before something terrible happened.
For the next four days customers of the Waites farm complained that they hadn’t been receiving their regular deliveries. A week later farmer Phillips anonymously called the sheriff, though everybody knew it was him, and reported that the dogs nearby the Waites farm had been barking for two whole days. An officer was dispatched, and within an hour, the body of Jem Waites was carried away in a body bag. Farmer Phillips would not open his door to answer the officer’s questions, and the window facing the Waites’ north field was boarded up. The old farmer died within the next month.
There was talk that Jem had started a second hole in the root cellar inside the house. Goodie Watkins claimed that when the sheriff had found Jem his arms were hacked open and his blood was draining into the hole. Unfortunately these rumors were never substantiated. Within a month a strange collector from the city purchased the Waites property. Locals say he tried to excise the hole so he could bring it back to the city for study but it collapsed under its own weight. Soon after the property was razed and sold back to the county, where it languished for a number of years before being turned into a cemetery.

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