Piehole

Everybody around Gainesboro, Tennessee, knew about Piehole.

Nobody talked about Piehole.

Those two facts might seem hard to reconcile, but people in small towns can agree not to discuss something with an efficiency that would make the federal government jealous.

Piehole was a pothole in the middle of an old country road, about the size of a football. The road didn't have a proper name on most maps, and the pavement was so old that grass had begun growing through the cracks. There were abandoned fence posts on one side, woods on the other, and a curve that people took slowly even before they reached the hole.

Piehole wasn't particularly impressive to look at. It didn't glow. It didn't smoke. No terrifying noises came out of it. There wasn't even a warning sign, unless you counted an old NO DUMPING sign leaning against a tree fifty yards away.

It was just a black opening in the asphalt.

The trouble was that Piehole didn't have a bottom.

Not a deep bottom. Not a bottom so far down nobody had managed to reach it. No bottom at all, as far as anyone knew.

If you dropped a rock into Piehole, the rock disappeared. If you leaned close and listened, you wouldn't hear it hit anything. The same went for sticks, coins, marbles, and one unfortunate fishing lure that belonged to a man who'd never forgiven his nephew for borrowing it.

Nobody knew how long the hole had been there.

Ask somebody in their thirties, and they'd tell you it had been there when they were a kid. Ask somebody in their sixties, and they'd tell you the same thing. Ask somebody in their nineties, and they'd tell you not to ask foolish questions while they were trying to watch television.

There were rumors, of course.

Some said a meteor had made it. Others insisted it was an old mine shaft, although nobody could explain why a mine shaft would be the size and shape of a football. One man claimed Piehole was a government project. He also claimed the government controlled the weather through the Dollar General parking lot lights, so most people took his opinions with a grain of salt.

Nobody remembered who named it.

Somebody had called it Piehole years ago, and the name stuck. It wasn't clear whether this was a reference to the opening itself or an instruction to anyone foolish enough to ask questions about it.

Even the county road crews avoided the subject.

Once, a new employee asked why they didn't just fill the thing with gravel. The older workers stared at him until he changed the subject. By lunch, he'd apparently decided there were easier ways to earn a living than asking about Piehole.

The locals simply drove around it.

If an out-of-towner asked why everybody swerved at that particular spot, the answer was usually something like, “Bad patch of road.”

If the visitor pressed for details, somebody would mention the weather.

Weather was always a safe subject in Tennessee.

The children, however, knew everything.

Or at least they knew everything the adults refused to explain, which in a child's mind amounted to the same thing.

Every kid in the area grew up with two very important instructions:

Don't play in the road.

And don't mess with Piehole.

Naturally, this ensured that children had been messing with Piehole for generations.

In the old days, kids threw rocks into it. Then they graduated to bigger rocks, which sometimes required two children to carry. Somebody dropped a horseshoe down once. Somebody else lost a perfectly good pocketknife. The most ambitious experiment involved a roll of twine, a heavy bolt, and three boys who were supposed to be helping their grandfather clean a barn.

They fed every inch of twine into the hole without the bolt ever striking bottom.

When their grandfather discovered the missing twine, he didn't ask where it had gone. He just looked at their faces and said, “Piehole?”

All three nodded.

“Well, you can buy me another roll.”

That was the end of the conversation.

Fishing line became popular for a while. A particularly determined boy spent an entire Saturday afternoon lowering a sinker into Piehole from a reel. He went home sunburned, hungry, and several hundred yards of line poorer.

His father wasn't impressed.

“Catch anything?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“Didn't think so.”

Then technology improved, and the children of Gainesboro discovered drones.

This was a development that should have concerned everybody.

Small drones could fit through the opening easily enough. Their cameras had lights. They could transmit video to a phone. They seemed like the perfect solution to a mystery that had embarrassed generations of children armed with nothing better than string.

The first drone went down about three feet before its camera showed nothing but black.

The boy flying it complained that his phone had frozen.

Then the signal disappeared entirely.

He waited for the drone to rise back out.

It did not.

The second drone lasted slightly longer, depending on whose story you believed. A third vanished so quickly that its owner accused his friends of stealing it, which was a remarkable accusation considering they had all watched it descend into the hole.

One boy tried tying fishing line to a drone before sending it down.

For a few seconds, everyone thought he'd solved the problem.

Then the line snapped.

The drone disappeared.

The boy's father grounded him for two weeks.

Nobody ever recovered a drone, and none of their videos revealed anything useful. Every recording ended in blackness, a frozen screen, or the sort of digital noise that made the children insist there was definitely something moving down there.

Parents began warning their kids not to take expensive electronics anywhere near Piehole.

The kids responded by taking cheaper electronics.

That was how things stood the summer Robbie scared everybody half to death.

Robbie was twelve, skinny as a fence rail, and the proud owner of a red bicycle with mismatched handlebar grips. He was a perfectly ordinary boy except for his ability to come up with ideas that sounded reasonable until about thirty seconds after he tried them.

He once attempted to teach a chicken to fetch.

The chicken had not appreciated the opportunity.

His three closest friends were Jesse, Emma, and Cole. The four of them spent most summer afternoons riding bicycles, arguing about video games, and making elaborate plans that generally ended with somebody's mother telling them to get out of her kitchen.

They all knew about Piehole.

They'd visited it together dozens of times. Cole had lost a toy car down it. Jesse had once insisted he could hear wind coming up from the darkness, but Emma maintained that he was hearing his own breathing. Emma was usually the sensible one, which was a burden she carried with growing resentment.

They had agreed not to go there alone.

This was less a safety rule than a matter of fairness. If something interesting happened, nobody wanted to miss it.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Robbie announced that he had something to do and rode off by himself.

Nobody thought much of it.

Around supper time, Jesse, Emma, and Cole were sitting beneath a shade tree near Jesse's house when they heard the unmistakable rattle of Robbie's bicycle coming down the road.

At first they thought he was racing somebody.

Then they saw his face.

Robbie was pedaling so hard that his knees looked ready to fly off in opposite directions. His eyes were wide, his mouth was open, and he kept glancing over his shoulder. He wasn't riding the bicycle so much as trying to climb through the handlebars and get somewhere ahead of it.

“Robbie!” Jesse shouted.

Robbie didn't answer.

He hit a patch of gravel, fishtailed across the road, and somehow managed to stay upright. One of his feet slipped off a pedal, but he got it back on without slowing down.

“What's wrong?” Emma yelled.

Robbie looked at them just long enough to shout something none of them understood.

Then he vanished around the bend toward his house.

Cole stood up. “Was he crying?”

“I think he was praying,” Jesse said.

Emma stared at the empty road. “Maybe we should go see.”

They rode over to Robbie's house, where his red bicycle lay on its side beside the porch. The front wheel was still turning.

His mother answered the door.

“Can Robbie come out?” Jesse asked.

“Not right now.”

“Is he sick?”

“No.”

“Did he crash his bike?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did something chase him?”

Robbie's mother looked at the three children for a moment.

“I think,” she said carefully, “Robbie just needs a little time to himself.”

Then she shut the door.

That evening, the rumors began.

Cole thought Robbie had seen a bear.

Jesse thought he'd seen a ghost.

Emma pointed out that bears didn't generally live in potholes and that ghosts didn't usually need country roads, but neither boy seemed interested in her objections.

By the next morning, somebody at school claimed Robbie had seen a man climb out of Piehole wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Another kid said a voice had called Robbie by name. A third insisted that Robbie had come home with completely white hair, even though his mother had been seen buying groceries and hadn't mentioned any dramatic change in her son's appearance.

Robbie wasn't available to correct anybody.

He stayed inside Wednesday.

He stayed inside Thursday.

He wouldn't answer his phone. He wouldn't come to the door. His mother said he was fine, but she had started giving the children the same look adults gave whenever somebody mentioned Piehole.

By Friday, Jesse couldn't stand it anymore.

“We're going over there,” he told Emma and Cole.

“We've been over there,” Emma said.

“Then we're going again.”

This time Robbie opened the door himself.

He looked normal enough, except for the dark circles under his eyes. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and holding a glass of sweet tea. Behind him, the television played a cartoon at a volume so low they could barely hear it.

“Hey,” Jesse said.

“Hey.”

Nobody spoke for a few seconds.

Finally Cole asked, “You see a bear?”

“No.”

“A ghost?”

“No.”

“A man with a briefcase?”

Robbie frowned. “What?”

Emma stepped forward. “Robbie, what happened Tuesday?”

His eyes moved from one face to another.

“You'll laugh.”

“We won't,” Jesse promised.

Emma looked at him.

“We won't laugh much,” Jesse amended.

Robbie lowered himself onto the porch steps. The others sat around him, waiting.

He held the glass in both hands for a long time without taking a drink.

“I went to Piehole,” he said.

“We figured,” Emma replied.

“I was just messing around. I wasn't doing anything bad.”

Cole opened his mouth.

Emma elbowed him.

Robbie stared out toward the road. Whatever had happened, he was still frightened enough that the words came slowly.

“At first it was just like always. Stuff went down, and I couldn't hear anything hit. I figured I'd try a couple more things before I came home.”

Jesse leaned forward. “And then?”

Robbie swallowed.

“I threw my old baseball down and went to get the firecrackers I brought with me when I heard a soft thump and saw my old baseball roll past me.”