Big Dark Hole

by Jeffrey Ford

  “You mean you’ve never heard of Deb Tresnum?”

  I thought for a moment but had to eventually admit I hadn’t and shook my head.

  “There’s only one thing a little freaky about her,” he said. “She can’t blink. She’s got some medical condition that prevents her from blinking. Once an hour, she’s gotta put drops in her eyes.”

  “Sounds bleak,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a little unnerving, but, like I said, she’s smooth.”

  I made it to the KGB with a few minutes to spare and sat on the steps outside smoking a cigarette before heading up the long flight of stairs that led to the bar. While I was sitting there, relaxing, I tried to dredge up some memories of Toby from college. I really didn’t remember much about him. What I recalled was his presence on the periphery of parties we’d have, or I could clearly see him reading a story in the workshop. Otherwise, all was unclear. While I had a moment, I took out my phone and texted Barney, whom I’d just stayed with down along the Delaware River. The reason I thought of him was because he’d been in that same fiction workshop in college. I thought maybe he could jog my memory. I left him a quick message on his phone as to where I was and who I’d met.

  The reading went off great. I read with a younger writer. He went first, there was a short break, and then I went. There was a good crowd and they seemed to like our stories. I saw a lot of my friends from New York City there. Afterward a bunch of us went out to dinner at a Greek place. I did a lot of drinking—much more than I usually do. Luckily, I kept my wits about me so as to have enough for cab fare on the way back to the hotel. That party broke up around 11. I caught a cab, but when he dropped me off at the Lilliputian Hotel, the driver charged me much more than I thought was right. I thought that fare should have been ten at best, with a tip, but this worked out to a solid fifteen dollars. For a second I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to pay it. The guy didn’t take a card. Then I remembered I had a five dollar bill folded four times and stuck into the corner of a secret compartment of my wallet. I was relieved as hell to find it, and being loaded, didn’t think twice about using it.

  Back in my room, I sat on the bed and stared out the window at the city lights. Something was bothering me. I wasn’t so drunk as to feel sick, and my high was starting slowly to wear off. I took my wallet out and opened it and stared into the empty spot where the five had been. It was then that I realized that the meticulously folded five spot had been the protective charm given to me by Averal Braun, the hex doctor. I felt a distinct sinking feeling in my gut and was short of breath. My phone dinged, and I dug it out of my pocket. There was a message from Barney. It read—“Tried to call, no answer. What are you talking about? Toby died during 9/11.” Right then, there was a pounding at my room door. I trembled, my mouth went dry, and I could feel my heart chugging.

  “Ford, are you in there?” I heard Toby’s voice, but now it was a little harsher, a little darker.

  The pounding continued, the calling of my name. He got angrier and angrier each time. But I sat where I was, in the dark, my fists clenched, my eyes squeezed shut, and my mind telling me none of this could possibly be happening. That was one morning I did see the dawn.

  Harvest

  Summer faded, and I willingly turned the air-conditioning off in the second week of October. No more sweating, no more slapping the annoying flies out on the porch. A beautiful wind had come up one night, and I was charmed by the sound of it rattling the dead leaves in the trees. Sitting on the porch alone, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, Lynn having gone off to bed, I sipped my wine and listened to the ocean-breaker sound the brown foliage in the giant white oak made across the field.

  I closed my eyes and rocked and began to doze, when from out in the night there came this horrible raspy moan. I stopped rocking. The cry came again, sounding as if whatever made it was lurking behind the garage. Fin stood up and went to the porch steps as if intending to investigate. I called him to me, and he came and sat next to the rocker. The sound came a third time, and it was loud and hellish like the devil was choking on a sinner’s blood. That’s exactly the image it conjured in my mind.

  I was afraid to get up, afraid to make any movement that might draw it to me. I sat in silence for a minute or so and the night was still again. I thought perhaps the creature had moved off, but then I became concerned because if it moved from behind the garage, my question was, “Where did it move to?” I slowly stood from the rocker and listened intently. Another growl erupted suddenly, and I tossed the blanket back on the chair and ran for the porch door. I was inside in a second. Fin followed me. I slammed it shut. “What the fuck?” I said to the dog.

  The very next morning, the cop cars came streaming down the road past the house. It was unusual in that you hardly saw any cars at all on that road, let alone five state troopers. Later, when I went out for cigarettes, I saw that one of the black cars was parked midway down the road at the turnoff for the back way toward town. An officer with a bald head and sunglasses was standing at the corner, holding a shotgun. I stopped and asked him what was going on. As he approached my car, I saw down the two mile stretch of road ahead that there was a trooper car there too with two officers out of the vehicle, one on either side of the road.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  The cop said, “They had a detail of prisoners out on the side of Rt. 70 cleaning up this morning and one of them made a break. We’re pretty sure he’s held up in one of these cornfields around here. You live up the road?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Keep your doors locked and give us a call if you notice anything.”

  “Will do,” I said. “Thanks for the rundown.”

  “We’ll catch him,” said the cop.

  Famous last words, ’cause they didn’t catch him. By the next afternoon, the story of the runaway convict was all over the local news and had made it to CNN online. There were cop cars all over the roads between the fields—sheriff’s department, U.S. Marshals, local town cops, state troopers. When I went out for butts, I saw they had tracking dogs they were leading into the cornfields. There was a helicopter circling about. What I learned on the radio was that the convict had been in the army special forces and had training to survive outside on his own, and that’s why the authorities were having such a hard time getting him. He knew how to throw the dogs off or hide in culverts, stay ahead of his pursuers. They believed he was still right in our general area. For all I knew, he could have been holed up in the old shed in our yard.

  There was a week and a half before the corn would come down, and if they didn’t have him by then, they’d have to get him as there’d be no place left to hide. I sat in the back in the cool weather, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, writing at my little table in the orchard. Every once and a while, I’d look up and out across the cornfield beyond our property to see if there was anything large moving through the rows. The corn had all gone utterly brown and almost clacked together in the wind it was so dry. Since it was feed corn and corn for industry, the farmers waited till absolutely all of the sugar had been drained from the plant into the ears.

  I wasn’t fearful about the convict—that is until one day when my son and his girlfriend came over to visit. We sat on the porch and drank coffee, and Brianna, Jack’s girlfriend, who’d grown up in town, told me that she knew the guy who had escaped into the cornfields. She was in the high school class just a year later than his.

  “He was always a crazy fucker,” she said.

  “You mean that guy was from around here?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. Jem Nelson.”

  “A bad character?” I asked.

  “Not so much bad as just weird. A loner. He finally went away and joined the army. He was over in Afghanistan, sneaking around and cutting throats. What do they call it, a ranger or Special Forces? He came back and never really fit in. Then they arrested him a little while ago
for killing some guy back on Morgan Road. He was loaded or high on something and he drove the guy off the road with his truck.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Are you talking about a black pickup truck?”

  “Yeah, that guy,” said Brianna and laughed. “Did you ever get in front of him on the road?”

  “Jesus, yeah.”

  Later on, when Jack and Brianna went back to their apartment in town, I went around and locked all the doors and windows. Lynn was away on a business trip and was due to be gone all week. I was petrified that Jem Nelson would surface in the backyard and try to force his way into the house at night. He already seemed to have something against me, or something had something against me. Trying to sort out the threads of magic and hex and plain old madness was impossible. I kept a big butcher knife, sort of like a kitchen machete, handy whenever I had to go out at night to take a bag of garbage to the can. I stayed off the porch, and when it was time for Fin to go out for a piss at the end of the night, I put him on the chain so he couldn’t go too far.

  Eventually the harvest started, and the farmers began dismantling the rows of corn. Over a period of a few days the vast fields were mowed and all of the bounty of the summer months was stored away. The cops were on hand for the entire thing, dogs at the ready to give chase when Jem Nelson lost his cover and ran for it. The U.S. Marshals went door to door and checked everyone’s outbuildings and sheds. To my surprise and theirs, they never found the guy. In my garage as well as the one next door and one around the corner owned by the Mennonites, they did find evidence that he’d probably stayed in those structures during the colder nights of the manhunt. The officers showed me there was a dead animal in the back of my garage. They pulled it out and laid it on the ground. It was a red fox.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would he leave that in my garage?”

  “You can’t eat the animal. Well, you can, but you’ve got to marinate it for a long time and it is really gamey and tough eating. And you’ve got to boil it extensively. But you can eat the tongue after cooking it over a direct flame for a few minutes,” said the officer. “And that’s what he did here,” he said, pointing at the dead animal. Its coat was beautiful and its tail fluffy. Nelson had used some of my old manuscript pages he’d dug out of a box to start the fire he used to cook it.

  “It’s a little sustenance, and a little sustenance goes a long way when you’re on the lam,” said the Marshal.

  “Seems a horrible waste,” I said. “So where is he now?”

  “Most of the fields are down, and he’s not been spotted from the helicopter. We’ve checked pretty much every building he could possibly be holed up in. I guess he slipped the net and has moved on. We’ll get him eventually.”

  But they never did.

  The fact that he had been in the garage freaked me more than a little. A few days after the police had given up the stakeout, I was out there straightening things up in the spot where the escapee had hidden. On the concrete floor, between two boxes, I found the root figure the history student had dug up over the summer. I had no idea how it had gotten there. I tried to wonder what path it had taken to find its way to my garage, but every avenue I daydreamed boggled my mind beyond comprehension. The night before Lynn got back, I burned the little effigy. It snap, crackled, popped, and I made sure it turned to ash. On a night of a full moon and Venus glowing brightly on the horizon, I buried the ashes out amid the roots of the white oak.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to all the editors who helped to make these stories better in their initial incarnations: Ellen Datlow, Navah Wolfe, Dominik Parisien, Bradford Morrow, Charlie Finlay, Eric Guignard, Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link.

  Publication History

  “The Thousand Eyes,” The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, 2016

  “Hibbler’s Minions,” Nightmare Carnival, 2014

  “Monster Eight,” Conjunctions 74, 2020

  “Inn of the Dreaming Dog,” “Monkey in the Woods,” and “The Match” appear here for the first time.

  “From the Balcony of the Idawolf Arms,” Final Cuts, 2020

  “Sisyphus in Elysium,” The Mythic Dream, 2019

  “The Jeweled Wren,” Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost

  Stories, 2019

  “Not Without Mercy,” Conjunctions 67, 2016

  “The Bookcase Expedition,” Robots VS. Fairies, 2018

  “The Winter Wraith,” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science

  Fiction, 2015

  “Big Dark Hole,” Conjunctions 71, 2018

  “Thanksgiving,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2018

  “The Five Pointed Spell,” Horror Library #6, 2017

  About the Author

  Jeffrey Ford was born on Long Island in New York State in 1955 and grew up in the town of West Islip. He studied fiction writing with John Gardner at S.U.N.Y Binghamton. He’s been a college English teacher of writing and literature for thirty years. He is the author of nine novels, including The Girl in the Glass and five short story collections, including A Natural History of Hell. He has received multiple World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards as well as the Nebula and Edgar awards, among others. He lives with his wife, Lynn, in a century-old farmhouse in a land of slow clouds and endless fields.

  Also Available from Small Beer Press

  Trade paper 9781618731180 | ebook 9781618731197

  World Fantasy Award & Shirley Jackson Award winner

  Ohioana Book & Locus Award finalist

  ★ “Seamlessly blends subtle psychological horror with a mix of literary history, folklore, and SF in this collection of 13 short stories, all focused on the struggles, sorrows, and terrors of daily life.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Delivers plenty of black humor and bone-dry social satire.”— Jason Heller, NPR

  Trade paper 9781618731821 | ebook 9781618731838

  “These 13 captivating short stories entwine fantasy, horror, and science fiction to explore monsters, Filipino folklore, immigration, and queerness.” — Buzzfeed

  “Overflows with life and magic.” — Washington Post

  ★ “Such a joy to read.” — Booklist (starred review)

  Trade paper 9781618731722 | ebook 9781618731739

  Philip K. Dick Award finalist · NPR Best Books of the Year

  “Cotman wields a compelling literary voice packing both a wallop and a deft touch.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  ★ “Grapples with the responsibility of holding power, and whether that power can, or should, be shared. Cotman’s bold and timely speculative fiction marks him as a writer to watch.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Trade paper 9781618730602 | ebook 9781618730619

  Shirley Jackson Award winner

  World Fantasy Award and Bram Stoker Award finalist

  Adapted into the Hulu TV series Monsterland

  “Pain is one of the most private experiences people face, and yet a universal experience. North American Lake Monsters uses this palette to create most of its narrative hues and textures, to sharpen and heighten the characteristics of its profoundly human, deeply flawed characters.” — Toronto Globe and Mail