Dopecentury L --- Hole in the Wall
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: "the monotony rarely becomes tedious.") My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these "Dopecentury" entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
/We all did it once ourselves/ they said, ganged all about with long dangling teenage-boy arms, some of those arms tipped by lit cigarettes glowing redly in the murky light.
/You want to ride with us, you gotta do it/ they said, pushing and prodding, seeing the fear in the eyes of the kid.
/It's no thing, you just do it, and the thing is done/, another tactic, more endearing, but the kid understood it only contributed to the pressure in a different kind of way.
It was the quiet part of the night, far past sunset, long before the sky would lighten with the morning. Down in the neighborhood under the wreck of the old stadium, where the buildings shrugged their low shoulders and leaned against one another for support. Where the unlit streets somehow had reverted to a rough grid of rutted dirtways, despite still being well within the borders of the city. Where packs of wild dogs occasionally scurried across the disorienting pools of light that cascaded down from some high corner floodlight put in place by the more ambitious landlords in the area. But the floodlights could never make a serious dent through the murk and the wafting drifts of acrid fog.
One of the boys had found the spot months before (it was wholly untrue that they had all done it once themselves) in an expedition to the neighborhood to reconnoiter whether there might be turf worth holding. There was not, but there was this spot worth visiting. Beyond the reach of any floodlights, across a perennially flooded intersection, down a narrow alleyway, over a chainlink fence with corkscrews of rusting concertina wire hanging down from where it had been cut, between an abandoned dumpster (thoroughly rusted through along the bottom) and a pile of broken glass, there was a hole in the wall.
The wall was fearsome to begin with, made of crumbling black stone, covered in a wet slime (the moisture somehow sourced from somewhere in addition to and beyond the precipitation that regularly fell on the city), faded graffiti marking it with arcane and illegible symbols, smelling of urine and rat death.
And at about waist height, a stone had long ago been pried out of the wall, leaving a hole with a diameter that would almost precisely match the width of a moderately-sized human hand. Around the hole grew slimy black mosses as if they had ventured out from the hole, perhaps trying to escape it. The hole was black and wet and grim.
/Go on, put your hand in/ they said, nodding or gesturing a cigarette toward the hole.
/Do you have a light?/ asked the kid.
/You don't need an effin light, just do it/ they said, but one of them came up with a lighter and handed it to the kid.
The kid snapped the lighter, and held the flame close to the hole, trying to look past it into the depths of the hole. He held a finger up between his eye and the flame, trying to see around the flame into the dark, and while the flickering light revealed the disturbing movement of small crawling things making their way into and from the hole, it did not have any success and penetrating into the dark recesses. From the surface, the hole appeared to be a bottomless abyss of pitch.
The kid let the light go out.
/Doooo it/
The kid bit his lit, extending his hand with trembling fingers in front of him and slowly pushed them into the hole. The hole sucked up his fingers, then his wrist, then his forearm, all disappearing as if the blackness of the hole was biting them off as they came. The kid kept going, past the elbow.
/What do you feel bro? Anything in there?/ they asked.
The kid's face twitched, contorted, and his mouth dropped open. He screamed. All the boys jumped back, cigarettes dropping to the mud.
The kid ferociously yanked his arm from the hole, and it was naked to the bone, flesh degloved, skin and tendon hanging in strips from the arm. The kid, screaming, swung around whipping the remains of his arm through the air, flinging drops of blood that spattered against the wall, the dirt, and the faces and clothing of the boys who fell backward, tripped backward, and then began running backward, then over the fence, then scattering in the darkness.
The kid stood glaring at the stump of bone blood and ground flecks of meat, and screamed into the darkness.