The Hole by William Meikle Page B

The ground at his right was still falling away into the darkness as a new hole grew. And it wasn’t the only one. Fresh screams rose from all around the trailer park, and even from where he stood, Fred saw that at least a dozen of the mobile homes had been swallowed, lost somewhere in the deep. Off to his left another leaned at a precarious angle and, before he could move, tumbled away out of sight.
    “Get over here,” Tricia shouted. She sounded almost hysterical. “Right fucking now.”
    He started to move towards the trio…just as the ground collapsed in front of him. He managed to keep his balance and leapt to safety.
    The others weren’t so fortunate.
    The wall of the new hole slid in one huge slab of earth with them on top of it, straight down into the blackness.
    The last thing Fred saw as he looked down was the blonde mop of hair, disappearing into the gloom as Tricia, and her friends, fell screaming into the dark.

 
     
     
    8
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Janet and Bill were parked just off road to the west of Hopman’s Hollow. They sat on the bonnet, sharing the last of the sheriff’s coffee from the large travelling mug he kept in the car. It had gone lukewarm, but Janet didn’t mind that, as long as the brew was strong, and Bill liked his coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in.
    A clear sky hung overhead, and a crescent moon was just coming up over the trees. It might almost have been peaceful, if it wasn’t for the almost constant sound of earth falling away into the growing hole. They were over a hundred yards from the edge, parked at one of the roadblocks Bill had asked to be set up, and Janet still didn’t feel quite safe.
    But I’m not leaving Bill out here alone.
    They’d both been quiet for several minutes, but this was no awkward silence.
    “We should do this more often,” she said.
    Bill laughed.
    “What, stand guard over a hole that threatens to swallow the town?”
    She punched his arm, playfully.
    “You know what I mean. It’s nice to get some peace and quiet.”
    Bill nodded and looked up at the stars spread overhead.
    “Do you ever wonder? What it’s all about? What it’s all for?”
    “Having deep thoughts, Bill? It’s not like you.”
    He took a while to answer.
    “It was seeing those devils that did it. I always had some sort of faith, a weak one, but it’s there. But seeing those—things—has made me think. How about you?”
    She had a speech pre-prepared; one honed in long, slightly drunken, conversations at medical college, back when she’d tried to engage in debate with her more religious classmates. She brought it out again, for the first time in years, but she remembered it almost by heart.
    “Faith? I put my faith in science. Life for me is an opportunity to create meaning by my deeds, my actions and how I manage my way through the short part of infinity I’m given to operate in. And once my life is finished, my atoms will go back to forming other interesting configurations with those of other people, animals, plants and anything else that happens to be around, as we all roll along in one big, ever-changing, universe.”
    “No God?” Bill asked softly.
    She shook her head. “None needed. Not for me.”
    “Then I pity you,” Bill said, and Janet felt a flash of anger that she pushed down. Back at college she would have vented at his point, letting loose a diatribe against big sky fairies and superstitious claptrap. But that wasn’t anything Bill needed to hear.
    Not now, not tonight.
    “Look up there,” Janet said. “Some of that starlight blazed billions of years ago, from billions of stars in billions of galaxies. I’m not so conceited as to think that all of that was created just for the benefit of folks that live on a tiny speck of blue and white tucked away in a small corner in the middle of nowhere. We folks have only been here for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of the universe, and given the way we’re going, I don’t think we’ll be