Posted on May 27, 2008

The Hole: Part 74

This was not the strangest thing I’d heard uttered during my search for the hill Cumorah. Quite the opposite, in fact. But it was said with an an earnestness that made the remark impossible to brush aside as the simple, drunken ravings of a country bumpkin. I asked him to repeat what he’d said and he did, without a change in either the words or tone.

“Can you describe it?” I asked him. “Tell me in as much detail as you can remember.”

The story he told was horrific indeed and, as I listened, I was dismayed to find myself believing him.

Bear routinely spent a large portion of each year living in these forested hills, hunting and trapping, feeding himself from the spoils and selling what remained to the locals in exchange for occasional shelter and frequent drink. Two years ago had been a particularly warm and plentiful summer and Bear had been living without human contact for nearly a month.

He’d made camp at the center of a circle of low hills, a place he’d used before since it was sheltered from the wind and fed by a small stream of clear spring water. The sun had just gone down and he was drinking the last of his whiskey before turning in for the night when he heard a terrific cracking sound close by.

Knowing the danger of falling trees, Bear hauled himself up from his sleeping furs, lit a torch on his campfire, and set out to investigate. Over one low ridge, he thought he could make out a glow of sorts, a pale yellow light defusing through the mist.

“It could’ve been fire, is what I was thinking,” Bear said. “Fire like that it’d easily bring down trees and be mighty dangerous to a fool like me camping right near it.” He said this with the awareness of one who recognizes his own propensity towards unjustified risk and his eyes flashed at the excitement of the memory. “Times like that,” he said, “I wish I kept a dog. Animals can smell a fire before we can.”

I poured him another drink. “What did you see when you looked over the crest of the hill?” I asked.

That glitter of remembrance disappeared from his eyes, which now went hard and cold. “Not a fire,” he said. “It was a pit, you’d probably call it, but to me that thing was nothing but a huge mouth, opening in the dirt. It had teeth of roots and broken logs, lips of moss. It opened–I watched it do that. Wider and wider. And that glow, what was fire when I was in my tent, wasn’t fire but the stuff on it’s tongue. Spit, I guess it was. The tongue licked out of that mouth and it shone like the forges of hell.” He reached for the glass and drank its contents in a single swallow. “That’s not the worst,” he said. “No, it only gets more awful after that.”

The mouth, as it turned out, was only a portal through which something else came into this world. Bear stayed low along the ridge of the hill, shivering in the wet grass, his torch dropped and forgotten, as the maw continued to expand. The tongue, a fat appendage writhing like some injured beast, lashed at the lips, teeth, and the earth beyond, spreading its luminescent saliva in pools and spatters. After several minutes, this conflagration ceased and the mouth was still. The tongue pulled back inside and the glow began to fade. Bear, focusing whatever nerve he had left, crept closer. He had heard tales of mysterious occurrences in these woods between Palmyra and Manchester, stories of phantom lights and voices, or ten foot tall men walking among the trees. Most of these he never doubted, raised as he was in the backwoods superstition of this burned over district, but even for his decidedly credulous mind, the spectacle he now witnessed was very nearly maddening. The tongue was only gone a short while. The yellow glow dimmed just noticeably before it reappeared, climbing out of the throat, carrying its horrific passenger.

Here Bear stopped, took another drink, and crossed himself. “You of a religious sort, Mr. Smith?” he asked me. I told him I wasn’t and this seemed to relieve him. “I’d say that’s good for you–if it didn’t mean damnation,” he said. “Good here, at least, because what I’m about to tell you–what I saw come out of that mouth–would wither the heart of any good Christian.”

At first, all Bear saw was an increase in the strength of the glow. But as it got closer, he could tell that this new light, instead of the prior eerie yellow, was a hateful and malignant purple, like a bruise stretched thin over a candle flame. He pushed himself backwards, away from the opening, but his leg caught and twisted in a thick, rotting branch. Bear sat up to pull his foot free when he heard the sound, a whimpering moan that increased in volume to a thunderous warble not of any animal or man. As he stared in terror, the source of that cacophony rose from the open mouth, riding the tongue like a patriarch on his palanquin.

“A vicious and terrible beast it was,” Bear said. His complexion had faded to nearly that of a corpse. “A sheep, but none like I’d seen in the fields. This one was monstrous, bigger than even the largest bull in a fair.” The wool hung in mangy clumps, spread unevenly over great knots of muscle. The creature’s mouth was open and the purple light poured forth, along with that awful baying sound. In the still present glow of the tongue, Bear could see that the animal–if it could be called that–was wet with blood. Its eyes were closed as it screamed at the sky. When the full creature finally came into view, Bear saw its sickly white teats.

Then the tongue stopped and the beast opened its eyes. “And that’s when I began praying,” Bear said. “That’s when I begged God and Jesus to save me from this abomination. Because when those eyes sprung open, they showed the same purple flame and, worse–God so much worse–was that they weren’t the only spot. No, more holes opened, all over the thing’s head, each one with that same light. And I called to God because this thing, this bloody beast, had a wretched halo. This blood anointed lamb was a perversion of the Lamb of God. It was a sick impostor of our Lord Jesus Christ.”