The Hole

A horror short story in english, written by The Grim Reaper.

There was always something «off» about our house. We lived in one of those townhouses from the turn of the century, which was really showing its age. The bricks were faded, the mortar was disintegrating and no matter how high the heat was on, it was always cold. Come to think of it, with the coming telling of experiences, there might be a reason for the frigid temperatures in the house.

I lived in the house with my family – mom, dad and two younger brothers. I was around 10 when this happened, while my brothers Jack was 4 and Terry was 7.

You would think that in a house as old as ours there’d be plenty of vermin – spiders, roaches…even rats. All the other houses on our street struggled with an infestation, but not our house. It was like the creatures knew something we humans didn’t, so they knew to stay away. We should have gotten the message when all the pets we had, cats, guinea pigs…even goldfish, always turned up the same way – dead. For example the kitten our mother got for us, wound up jumping to its death from the open window of the second story bedroom, the one facing the backyard. Our goldfish boiled to death. Well, that’s the only reason for the state Copper was in when we found him floating in his bowl. After Copper, our parents wouldn’t get us anymore pets, the backyard was looking more like a cemetery than a home.

We were a pretty normal working class family. My dad had all the trademarks of working hard all his life, big calloused hands and a face that made him look 20 years older than what he really was. The past year he had a work related accident rendering him disabled and confining him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. You could tell he was bitter about it, but he never took it out on his family. My mom worked two jobs to make ends meet, cleaning houses for those better off than us, leaving me and my two brothers with a lot of alone time in the house. Our dad was of course at home, but due to his wheelchair he didn’t move around much, and stayed for the most part in my parents bedroom watching TV.

One night my mother was working late, I discovered something peculiar in the corner of my eye. Something small flew up from the basement, through the kitchen and into the living room. My brothers were watching TV, and I asked if they had seen something come in here, they hadn’t.

«Strange», I thought to myself – I could have sworn I saw something. Which was weird, as we didn’t get as much as a normal house fly in our house. I started walking around the living room, just to double check that everything was OK. I guess my rummaging around the room, scared it out of its hiding place, as a small, humanoid creature suddenly flew up against the lamp in the ceiling. We all looked up at it, we couldn’t believe what we saw, it looked like a small man, all greenish in color, with wings flapping a mile a minute.

I swear it was looking right back at us. It hissed and flew back down into our basement. As we were just kids, we did not dare follow it into the depths of darkness.

As the creature disappeared into the dark, we could hear the front door unlocking. It was mom, apparently exhausted from a long and hard day. We all ran to her, hysterically trying to tell her what we’ve just saw. She sighed. Obviously annoyed that she couldn’t get five minutes to herself, she told us to stop imagining things.

Days, even weeks went by, without anything happening, and soon I had all but forgotten about the incident. Until the day my dads wheelchair malfunctioned, and I was told to go down to the basement and get his tools so he could fix it.

Our basement didn’t feel like any other basement. Maybe it’s because I was only 10 years old, and every place like that looked very huge and creepy for a little kid. But as I reluctantly made my way down the damp and rickety staircase, which definitely had seen better days, the cold got worse – the temperature plummeted as I neared the bottom, so much so that I could see my breath.

I pulled the chain so the naked bulb could dimly light up the room. It was fairly spacious, raw, naked concrete walls, only littered with some random boxes of stuff like ornaments from Christmas and Halloween and one huge old school boiler that with a distressed whine tried its best to heat the house, but the task seemed futile. I spotted my dad’s toolbox and was ready to grab it and run upstairs as something caught my attention. I didn’t notice it at first, but it was like a tractor beam pulling me closer and closer.

When I got as close as possible, I dropped the toolbox to the floor with a bang. I could only feel one thing, immense fear – standing still, completely in shock. In the corner farthest away from the staircase, was a hole in the floor. There was no way either of us could have made this hole, and what made it even more unnerving was that it seemed to have been made from under the floor and up, based on the amount of debris around it. Like you can see which way a window has been broken, depending on which side the shards of glass is.

I came to myself after a while, hearing my dad yelling at me. I ran upstairs with the toolbox, and told him all about it while he fixed the chair. I made sure my brothers didn’t hear this, as I didn’t want to unnecessary freak them out too. My dad had a similar reaction to mom and told me to stop imagining things, that the hole probably had a completely natural cause.

Either way, I felt I should do something about it. I had spotted a few bags of concrete while I was down there. So I waited, waited until the dead of night and hidden by the darkness I snuck down to the crypt-like room. Only the creaking of the basement stairs could be heard while I closed in on my target. I pulled the chain again, only to have the bulb explode and shower me with debris of glass.

I brushed myself off, pulled out the tiny flashlight I had brought with me just in case. I collected the bags of concrete and proceeded to open them up at the edge of the hole. As I started pouring the first bag, one could hear growling – it….it seemed like it was coming from deep inside the hole. Now I told myself to stop imagining things and continued pouring the whole bag in. As I continued this process with the second bag, a loud and blood curdling scream made the blood in my veins run ice cold, and it surely woke up the whole house.

After what was probably like 10 seconds, but felt like an eternity, a red glow could be seen from within the hole and the whole floor started to shake violently. A pair of greenish hands, or more like a combination of hands and claws, appeared on the edge. The creature that was slowly emerging from the hole was massive and looked like something from your worst nightmare. It was almost 10 feet tall, a broad torso and muscular. It’s eyes glowed an intense red. The monster exuded a putrid, rotten smell, was covered in slime and had razor sharp claws on all six fingers and six toes, three on each side.

Without hesitation, it lunged at me, hit me hard – which left me lying on the cold concrete floor, with a beginning bruise on my face and a pretty deep cut running across my cheek. The monster, believing I was dead, made its way up the stairs to the rest of my, now panicking, family. They were now hiding in my parents bedroom, but all the monster needed to do was to follow the screams. I woke up to the sound of the bedroom door being ripped to shreds, and I ran up the stairs only to see my dad distracting the monster while my mom and my younger brothers were able to escape. The last thing I heard from him was “run!!” as my mother pulled us out of the house, threw us in the car with nothing but our pajamas on our backs, and her in a nightgown and pink, fuzzy slippers. The tires squealed in agony as we floored it down the road. She didn’t slow down until the car almost ran out of gas, several miles away from home

We barely made it to a cheap motel. Clearly nervous and in shock we checked in, and mom went straight for the phone to call 911. With a shaking voice, she told them everything. She had to plead and beg for them to investigate, as they apparently didn’t take her seriously.

A few hours after she hung up the phone, a police cruiser pulled into the motels parking lot, and the officers made their way to our room. They knocked and my mom let them in. “This isn’t easy to say”, one of the officers told us. They then went on to tell us that they found dad slumped over on the bed, ripped to shreds. The coroner had concluded that the cause of death was mauled by a wild animal or rabid dog, but I knew better. Our house was in a residential area, there was no wild animals around.

“What about the hole?”, I asked with my mother shooting me a look that clearly urged me to shut up. “What hole?”, the officer replied. “In the basement”. The officers reported this to the investigators at the scene which went down to the basement, past the random boxes and the old school boiler, the farthest corner from the stairs……and…..

Nothing. Nothing but the worn out, raw and naked concrete floor.

As this was reported back to the officers in our room, we could hear them call for a HazMat team to collect the body, as there was discovered something “moving” in dads wounds. Then the radio went silent.

As we left the house that night, we left everything behind,  driving off into the night to escape the evil that lurked in our basement, the evil that spawned the hellish creature that killed our dad. A creature that could be at large, out there, somewhere. As this gruesome thought festered in our minds, I could feel something fester in the cut on my face, something “moving”…