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sadoeuphemist · 4 years

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Human-Sized Hole

“This is a communal hole!” he said. “Come on in! It was made for everyone!”

I stood at the entrance of the hole, squinting into the darkness at the faint silhouette that raised a hand and beckoned me to follow. It was a guy’s voice, relatively young by the sound of it, but I could make out nothing more of him than that. There might have been more people even further down, echoes that sounded distantly like laughter, but at this distance it was impossible to be sure. The hole itself simply went on and on without end, a rectangle of the deepest and most unadulterated black.

“Hey, where does this even go?” I called out to him, and I heard him laugh and I thought I could see the silhouette shrug, the edges of its outline shimmering in a bobbing motion as it grew smaller and smaller and disappeared into the darkness entirely.

I hesitated, thinking about that one Junji Ito comic, and then I followed him in.

Of course, this was nothing like that. The Enigma of Amigara Fault, that was the title. With the holes in the cliffside shaped like people cut-outs, and everyone compelled to find their matching hole and climb in, wriggling their way ever deeper into the all-embracing earth.

No, this was a hole carved into a mountain, human-sized just like in the manga, but that was the extent of it. It was just a normal rectangular hole, probably some industrial use, like maybe a side shaft or something leading into a mine. I’d passed it hundreds of times without ever thinking anything of it. It was just that this was the first time I’d ever seen anyone going into it, and that had been enough for me to pull over for a minute and check it out.

Inside, it was spacious, very roomy, more of a long corridor really, the ceiling a good several feet above my head. The floor was smooth beneath my feet, almost polished, no stray rocks or loose dirt. I remembered what the guy had said, and the words ‘wheelchair accessible’ popped into my head. It got dark quickly the deeper I went in, dark enough that soon I couldn’t even see my own hand in front of my face, but there was nothing to bump into, no uneven ground, no twists in the path. All you needed to do was keep walking straight ahead, and if you veered off to one side or the other you’d eventually brush against the wall and be able to reorient yourself, or you could just walk with one hand touching a wall at all times, which is what I did eventually. There were no obstacles here. I could turn back any time I wanted.

“Hello?” I called down into the hole, my voice echoing, and from far ahead I could hear maybe the indistinct murmurs of people. It wasn’t quiet, I realized. There was a sort of background hum, like at an airport or something, no one talking to each other at the moment but everyone on their way to someplace else. That was comforting to me. I liked that.

In the darkness I thought I could feel a slight incline to the floor, the sense that we were descending, and I could stretch my hand up and not touch the ceiling and I wondered why I’d ever thought of the hole as ‘human-sized’ to begin with. It was a doorway, that was all it was. Was a doorway a ‘human-sized’ hole? Weren’t they supposed to be bigger than that, to allow for accommodation, for example bringing furniture in and out? But of course, thinking again of wheelchair users, there were also humans who were unusually tall, seven feet, eight feet, nine feet tall, or however tall the tallest person in the world had been, and of course a human-sized hole would have to accommodate them too. How far would they have been able to travel down this passage having to stoop the whole time, having to force themselves to fit? So of course it had to be much larger than me, to take them into account.

I had a thought. Experimentally, I stopped moving, stood firmly in place with my left hand extended for my fingertips to brush against the wall, and I waited. Yes, there it was, the subtle friction between my fingertips and the wall. The floor was inclined and marble-smooth. Even without walking, I was moving gradually downwards.

So even mobility was not necessary. I was thinking in extremes now, of people so morbidly obese that they were confined to their beds or sofas, incapable of carrying themselves under the stress of their own weight. The walls were certainly spaced wide enough. They would not have to exert themselves. Even people incapable of getting around under their own power, all they would need to do was make it past the threshold, and then gravity would do the rest. I bent down and touched my fingertips to the floor. Was it that smooth? I had not felt in any danger of slipping while I walked. Or was the floor like a conveyor belt, carrying me forward imperceptibly? I felt a light vertigo, a seasickness. The sensation of drifting free in space. I was on solid ground. Or was I?

In the darkness, I might have been one of many, a ceaseless crowd of people politely flowing around me, each on their way to work or school or wherever. I wanted to call out, and at the same time felt certain that it would be impolite. We were all just trying to get through this passage, get through our day, and no one particularly wanted to interact with a stranger. In my mind I had populated this hole with all the extremes of humanity, in height and breadth and dimension, accepted how big this hole needed to be for us all to fit. This was a human-sized hole, truly, larger than me, empty as far as I could extend my hands, but I had the sudden premonition that we would all end up here eventually. All the people in the world gradually finding their place in this perfectly accommodating human-sized hole. Deeper down the passage no doubt were all the people who had come down this way before, hallways and corridors full of them, growing more and more populated until people were shuffling heel to toe, brushing gently against each other and yet ferried gently deeper still, all the way down until the end.

I felt the first sensation like panic. I felt that if I turned around, I would see only a mass of silhouettes blocking off the entrance to the hole, a long line formed behind me, and then there would be no way back; I would be obligated to once more turn towards the darkness and continue down the path.

But there was no one there. The hole, though distant, was a rectangle of light calling to me.

I ran. I did not slip or fall. I just ran, hearing my footsteps slap against the stone, hearing my own breath heaving in my chest, until I was outside again, my back pressed against the side of the mountain as I looked up at the sky and the sun. The hole, when I backed away to look at it, was still deep and dark and rectangular and perfectly patient, nothing ominous or compelling about it at all. It was just a doorway in the side of a mountain. A way in.

I got back in my car and started driving.

I checked my dashboard clock. I had somehow been in the hole for almost three-quarters of an hour, and now I was definitely going to miss my first class. I could make up for that though; it was the trig exam in the afternoon that I definitely couldn’t miss. But as I pressed down on the gas I couldn’t help the building panic, the maybe-irrational fear that now my whole schedule had been thrown out of whack. I was disoriented. After the dark of the hole the sun seemed too bright, the world too full of distracting objects. I’d planned to get in a last minute cram session before the exam, and to print out my history paper in the library after finishing off the last few pages, but now it felt like I had knocked over all the dominoes prematurely and I could no longer rearrange them in a sequence that made sense, and on an impulse I made my exit one turnoff too early, just veered right and let the chips fall where they may.

I no longer knew where I was going. I’d never been this way before, but I knew that all the roads and all the highways would all connect together eventually, that everywhere led to everywhere else. I drove for quite a while. There weren’t very many cars on the road at this time of day, and for stretches of time it would be as if I was gliding effortlessly along a wide black stretch of asphalt, the sky open and spacious above me, just a human-sized hole stretching far as the eye could see.

#fiction #repost #junji ito

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