The Holes of the Earth

The Holes of the Earth “Shem whispers my name: Down discordant memories & drains from every gaping hole of this Mother cry subversive young who've seen no light beckoned here by murmur, I long to look down into somewhere... A rim lain prostrate at my feet, and my fealty gotten in turn. What empty eternity is this? Begot of a time before night, light in entropy. Do my hands spare my audacity? I lean close in to a blackness. I am not alone. Blindly I feel in fur and scale, not my kind I dare to swear! Such swept centuries must a thing have got, awaiting only that which needs such a brilliance of awakening. And in such darkness my eyes alight on the furthest of sights, and from such hole will lie no more any such beast, as I lie sleeping, as I lie waking dream walking this world forevermore I shall find no solace in man made things. Deep in mother eternal lies a blank skin, scarred in no way, marred and from an empty tapestry might a fickle fiend afire, nothing left to admire in a sleep never slept, dream a dream to be kept then sleep no more, in a waking nightmare must you wander, in each hole a slaughter. Cross my path only when you must, for in my sacred trust, I must, I must relinquish no more fair care for what I saw there! No matter my senses forlorn, no matter secrets forsworn I will never taste solace again. The ineffable pit taints a land once unmarred, and the conscious effort to cover: a hole of man. Beneath the grates and plates of metal, I know waits that which does not rest. In sweet betrothal will I carry the curse, to know Mother dearest is to never speak first.”

        The only thing I was left by my father was a blind rabbit and an attached poem.  His things are a mess, twenty boxes in his home full of paper, and a sorting method unknown to any living human being.  Four sets of dining room furniture, platter ware in the kitchen to match each set.  At least forty painting in his storage closet, each one being worth something around a thousand dollars.  All of these things in his home, and his will left me only the rabbit and ‘any attachments’.  Being his only relative left living, and with nothing else on his will short of that one statement and a few signatures, all of this is left to me as well.
        The rabbit is hopping into a corner where it knows its bedding to be, the bow of fabric that had tied the poem to it still wrapped around it.  The little creature’s dull grey fur made the pink bow all the more noticeable.  Not that it would know.  Peering from behind dull lids, a white dot watches me from across the room.  I never thought my father liked animals, let alone one that couldn’t take care of itself.  But I suppose, I didn’t know him.
        His home is musty, dust sunk so deep into things I can’t even wipe it away.  A picture of mother hangs on the wall, quaint for a two year marriage.  I wonder if she even knew he kept a picture of her at all.  In a box of documents of his many travels, I find a picture of him standing beside four other men.  They are all wearing military uniforms, but look much older than the pictures I had seen of father in his military days.  The back says ‘Morocco, 1973’.  Didn’t know him then either.  I thumb the paper the poem is written on.  Parchment in texture, but it feels older.  No, not parchment.  Smooth on one side, rough on the other.  Hide?  Only some of the oldest writings we have at my library have hide for pages, and those reside in special collections and special collections only.  The mottled and unclean edges make me wonder if he made this page, or found it. 
        I didn’t know my father was a poet, just that he travelled a lot.  I can’t compare him to much besides writers from medieval times, but it seems like he may have been decent at the least.  Even then, it doesn’t read like the words of such a man’s man like my father.  He travelled the world hunting, digging, making scientific finds of the old world and fighting men in bars with one hand behind his back.  I’ve read some of his articles in the magazines, some of his publications on his findings in this desert or that mountain range.  He might have waxed poetic once or twice, but only in a line- maybe a paragraph at most.
        Mother told me I received my creative talent from her.  Each letter I received from father to congratulate my newest play was more an insult than anything else.  Mother used to hide them from me, but I would find them in her desk drawer.  Always handwritten, with concise lines in perfect lines on unlined white paper.  Telling me he was proud of my work with words, my stories that seemed to go over so well in the papers.  Telling me that he never had the penchant for writing I did.  Telling me he never considered it worth his time, too unimportant in the grand scheme.  But was he proud of me, why he always told me so in at least one sentence.  The rest was about his adventures.  Things I never went so far as to read.
        I open a new box, it’s full of leather-bound volumes.  They appear to be journals.  I stand up and walk across the living room to his bedroom.  He has only one dresser and one night stand.  I open both completely, every drawer baring its bottom.  To his office, his desk.  Each drawer- empty.  Not so much as a pen.  Every surface of his house, only dust.  Perhaps these boxes are not organized for a reason.  It seems he simply emptied everything into the boxes and ran off.
        I open the journal on the top of the pile.  The first entry reads,
        “It is May the second of nineteen-eighty-two.
        I went back to the hole today.  Muriel came with, a pink ribbon around her fat body so I can pick her out in the darkness of that place.  She’s good with her directions, can always find her way home.  I know that I can trust her to return home with her S.O.S. upon her back, finding me aid should I need it.  I often envy her blindness.
        Last time I was here, I felt something beneath the ground.  A tremor of some sort.  I spoke to the man at the diner a few miles away on my way back, he said he had felt nothing.  I have experience with localized tremors, but out here it’s a most curious thing.  There hasn’t been an earthquake in this area for over five decades!  So today I took with me an invention of my own device, most simple really.  A few pipes, some water and a small buoy in each with a bar attaching them to one another.  By simply setting it on the ground and watching the bar on top, one can see if there is movement in the ground by its movements.  With no one and nothing but Muriel and I within a mile, I was surprised to find it moving.  The hare and I sat quietly as my light watched the bar tremble, then shake violently. 
        I’m most curious what the hole goes down into, but it is barely wide enough for a grown man to fit, and though I hate to admit, I am aging.  Should I go into it, I would require assistance.  Perhaps I could ask a Hernando.  Better two old men than one.”
        This was the correct year at least, but still a month before father went missing.  I feel these cold pages and know that no one has been here before me.  I am the only one to have read this, the only one to have retrieved the poem from Muriel, the hare.  I fiddle with the thermostat on the wall, but it appears to be done.  The house is cold, and I know that when the sun goes down, I will have nothing to read by.  Father has been missing three months now, of course his utilities are up.
        I go to town, Muriel comes with.  I find the town’s market, and go within.  They have flashlights it appears, decent ones too.  But just aside them are boxes of candles.  Cheaper, and somehow much more fitting.  Perhaps they just play to my heart, but I can’t help but think of unfolding the mystery of my father’s disappearance from his journals by candle light.  I grab a box of matches and approach the woman behind the counter.
        As I pay, the cashier looks me long in the eye.  She asks my name.  Her eyes narrow as I begin, and she nods in acceptance when I finish.  She says I look like him.  She says she thought so.  I realize that I will never live in a small town.
        In my car outside Muriel sits twitching her nose at the door.  As I open it to get in, she hops out from the car and scurries into the night.  I consider chasing her, but beyond what few dim streetlights there are, I can only see her grey form fade away.  She’s heading home.
        His house is just at the edge of town, and being as small as the town is, takes only minutes to reach it.  I look about the yard, wondering if I should whistle, if I should open the door and beckon Muriel in.  I open the door to find her waiting on the doormat.  I step in and she hops back to the box of journals by the recliner I had been sitting in.  It had only taken ten minutes at most to get the candles, but already the home felt colder.  I locate in a closet a large quilted blanket and settle to the floor beside the boxes.  I light a candle on either side of the journal I was reading, and worry as Muriel approaches them.  She wrinkles her nose at them, but seems content enough to avoid knocking them over.  Perhaps she is cold too, I think, and wrap a hand under her belly to pull her under the blanket with me.
        “May the third.
        Hernando came with me, but did not return.  My thoughts are still a jumble.  My car would not start, I ran as far as the diner to get help, but when I arrived, I knew my appearance.  The old man who came around to ask about tremors and earthquakes when there were none.  Now, sweaty, winded, exhausted and calling for help from the hole that had eaten his friend!
        I considered at length upon reaching the diner what I should do.  To call help to that hole… that would call attention to it.  People would question why I hadn’t shared it with anyone, why I was hoarding it.  People would want my findings, they would laugh at my stories and tell me Hernando was probably in Mexico again, that I was senile, that I was simply too old.
        It has been five years since I last published anything.  This is finally my find again, and not just in the States but in my own state!  This was not the first time a friend of mine had perished during our work.  But I have a feeling it will be the last.
        Hernando had agreed whole-heartedly to join me, said he had been thirsting for the thrill once more.  Our last time together was on the cliffs of a mighty range of forested mountains, a dig set into the side of a sheer face of rock.  We had descended into a cave system unknown to man, and returned three days later after a rock slide had kept us in.  If someone was to aid me in this, I knew no one better.  But we are old.  I saw it when Hernando showed up at my home with his gear on his back, enthusiastic to begin.  He would have looked like a photo of his younger self, if only his back was not craned.  His legs thin, his arms trembling at the ends.
       I took him anyways.  I did not take large lights with me, indeed we were there with just ourselves and our gear.  And Muriel of course.  Hernando set up the ropes and needed hammering the pitons into place among the rocks of this place.  He said it reminded him of the ruins we explored in the Yucatan, if explorers were to find our old buildings centuries after we were gone.
        I nodded, but he could see nothing in the dark.  I lit up a torch and dropped it down the hole.  It fell quite a ways, but at a great distance it stopped.  Hernando offered to let me go first, but I insisted he went.  He was the more experienced spelunker, I didn’t want to take chances.  And so he went. 
        I followed, and we found tiers to something.  Perhaps this building, perhaps one it was built upon.  Levels of a sort, as though below the Earth were layers of old life.  We could not see far into each level, but they appeared to be quite empty, the further we went, the more natural they became.  At first they were seemingly man made, then more and more appeared to be of the stone of the earth, carved, then less and less until they appeared entirely natural.  Tunnels.  Holes throughout the Earth.”
        The entry ended there.  The next entry began “May the fifth, nineteen-eighty-two.”  There is no fourth; there is no continuation of their adventure below the ground.  I look through the box for the journal that preceded this one.  It appears that even if my father had simply dumped everything else into boxes, at least his journals seemed to be in chronological order.  The previous one was right on top.
        “April the eleventh, nineteen-eighty-two.
        I found a hole today, it is in an old building outside of town a few miles.  The building is grand.  It looks from the outside to be something of an abandoned warehouse- but so far away from anything else.  Driving to it from the highway I found a smooth surface to drive on.  When I got out of the truck, I brushed away some of the sand and indeed there was a paved lot out there.
        I pushed open the old doors after removing the chain and padlock, they screamed as they slid like a hanger’s doors.  I half expected to find an old plane in there, but the doors were no hint to the contents of the building at all.  No, it appeared to be an old shopping mall.  Rows of storefronts, never outfitted with product or glass.  The whole place seemed almost subterranean, everything made of stone or tile that imitated.
        I wandered each empty room, but found more and more that my interest was being lost.  Each one looked identical, each one empty.  I was most surprised to find no stragglers of society in there, not a single indication of a camp.  It was two stories, and in the center of its cross shaped interior was a domed skylight, shattered in most every spot, and dirt ridden over the few panes remaining. 
        When I reached the point, I looked ahead to the other end, then to the left, and then to the right. Down the right wing of the place I could see something new.  I lacked a flashlight today but in the future I will remember to bring one.  The end of the wing was torn up as if by an earthquake, juts of stone tore this way and that- and in the center of it all was an opening wide enough for me to crawl inside.  I admit, I considered it.  I had been free climbing before, but in the dark like that, I thought better.
        I think I will take Muriel there tomorrow.”
        I consider combing backwards through his journals to find where Muriel came into the picture, but I have no idea when or where they met.  A blind hare, a seemingly useless animal.  But here she is, finds her way home no matter the distance, it might seem.  Besides, I am honestly much more interested in seeing what my father did after Hernando went missing, regardless of how it happened.  Perhaps I will find the ‘Shem’ from his poem in the pages I have yet to read.
        I flip the pages in the first journal back to the beginning of the next entry.
        “May the fifth, nineteen-eighty-two.
        The doctor told me I should be taking it easy.  My heart cannot keep up with the work I appear to be doing.  If only he knew.  I have not been to that place since that day, but I think of it.  I think of it ever so often.  It almost appears that it’s thinking of me.
        I went into town to see the doctor and nearly fainted at seeing a storm drain.  At the market, I stopped in the middle of an aisle to stare at the drain on the floor.  The tiny grate covering its open abyss.  I looked up to find Julia staring at me with her children.  I smiled but it was fake, and she knew it.  The town already thought me an old man with his stories, now I must be the town fool.
        I cannot help now but notice how many holes there are.  Manhole covers with their tiny center holes.  A grate there, a pipe here.  How many caves have I fallen into?  How many times have I gone fearlessly into small spaces where I had to wriggle through or be stuck?  How many ancient passages have I wandered and felt nothing but exhilaration.
        Now I shiver at the sight of rabbit holes.  Thank God Muriel does not dig.  I think I would be unable to look at her ever again.  I’ve been dreaming of it.  Vast emptiness beneath the ground.  Beneath my bed, beneath my house.  Hernando, reaching his hand from the darkness and my trembling breath as it pulls away.”
        “May the seventh.
        I slept all day yesterday.  I woke in a cold sweat only to fall back into sleep.  I dreamed of holes in my house.  Holes in my room.  Holes in my flesh.  A seething mass of life teeming below the surface.  The only place to go was to the hole, and I went.
        I swam in the dirt below the ground for days.”
        “May eighth.
        I bought a shovel.”
        The entries stop.  I think for a moment about the last entry.  The sheriff had broken the door down, searched the place thoroughly after my father went missing.
        “He bought a shovel…” I say aloud.  Muriel perks up, hops toward the basement door.