The Hole, Part II: The Throat of the World

Fiction by Brock Eldon

Visual by Sandolore Sykes

This piece is part of The Lot, the first volume of SUM FLUX. Featured in Edition II, this work is one of eight contributions to this edition. Read more about this zine and its theme here: https://sumflux.substack.com/p/volume-1-the-lot.

Read Part I here:

https://sumflux.substack.com/p/the-hole-part-i

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PART II: The Throat of the World

The shaft was narrow, its walls were slick with condensation, the smell of iron, rot. The boards they’d laid at the bottom were warped and swollen, barely holding back the mud that seeped through the cracks. A fire burned low in the center, light flickering against the curved walls casting jagged shadows, moving as if of their own accord.

Julian crouched beside the fire, his pistol resting in his lap. Esme sat across from him, her back pressed against the damp wall, knees drawn to her chest. When she pulled her hood back, her face looked carved down to him, the sharpness of its contours softened, as if the edges were blurred by mist or shadow.

They sat facing one another looking at the battered radio, the knobs suddenly turned static. The boy reached out for it, twisting the dials with his thumb and forefinger. At last, a voice broke through the crackling: warped, distant. The voice rose from the battered radio jagged and warped through the static. It filled the space of the narrow well, slicked walls glistening against the light from the flames. Shadows twisted, wild, and, thought Esme—without bitterness now, and after so much time—without master:

—“WE . . . ARE SEARCHING . . . TWO HUNDRED CITIZENS REMAIN UNACCOUNTED FOR . . . ”

Julian sat with the pistol resting heavily in his lap, eyes fixed on the fire. It burned low between them, coals red and sullen, spitting occasional sparks into the damp air.

Listening, Esme sat with her knees drawn up, her back pressed to the wall, the dampness seeping through its cold surface into the close-cropped strands of her hair, prickling pleasantly against her scalp.

It frightened them both.

Esme’s eyes locked onto the radio, its voice twisting and writhing in static bursts, like something unformed: like something misshapen, dragging itself through the firelight.

—“DESCRIPTION FOLLOWS . . . HEIGHT: SIX FEET TWO INCHES. SCAR OVER RIGHT BROW. MALE, BROWN HAIR, NAME: LUCAS RHODES—CONSIDERED DANGEROUS.

The fire hissed. In the cracks above them, water dropped steadily, the sound soothing in contrast to the voice, seeming to stretch, seeming to stretch from the radio, distorting as though struggling to rise through the earth itself.

—“NEXT: FEMALE. SHORT. DARK HAIR. LAST SEEN NEAR THE OUTER QUADRANT. NAME: CLARA BRIGGS . . . CONSIDERED UNSTABLE.”

Julian’s knuckles whitened on his pistol’s grip. Esme’s hand moved out as if to reach for the radio dial again, but stopped short. Her breath came shallow and quick.

The voice cracked and warbled, the words seeming to bleed from the static.

—“ALL UNACCOUNTED CITIZENS . . . RETURN TO THE CAPITAL IMMEDIATELY. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL BE CONSIDERED—”

The sound dissolved into noise, words collapsing back into speakers as Esme’s hand shot out to twist the knobs again just as the sounds of the machine gun firing broke out, once more from above. The fire burned between them, the only movement in this stillness they inhabited.

***

The first of the vibrations came as a whisper, faint, tremulous . . .

Julian’s eyes flicked to Esme. Her lips parted. No sound came.

The tremor grew. The warped boards beneath them groaned, the firelight quivered; the jagged shadows trembled like a restless pack of wolves circling their prey, their forms bleeding into the dark walls. Julian listened, his chest tight, as if the entire weight of the lot was pressing down on him. Each breath came shallow, uneven, his ears straining to catch the faintest sound beneath the creak of the boards and the flicker of the flames. The silence between the noises felt alive, stretching taut, threatening to break and spill something unspeakable into the room.

“It’s them,” Esme said, her voice barely audible.

Julian shook his head. “It’s not them.”

But his eyes betrayed him, darting upward to the well’s low ceiling where the darkness pressed back against the firelight. He tightened his grip on the pistol.

“Do you think it’s coming?” she said, recalling the shock of the previous explosion, almost wanting the tension in her muscles again, longing for it, ready to receive the vibration: something, anything. When she turned her face toward him, her eyes were hollow and unreadable. For a long moment, he did not answer. The silence stretched, and in it was the sound of the earth trembling, the fire burning low, the faint whisper of water threading through the cracks in the walls.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Above them, the world remained silent, but Julian felt it, distant yet inescapable: the weight of all it, just gathering—ready to fall.

***

The pulley system creaked and groaned as the boy cranked, his muscles growing taut, his breath coming only in shallow bursts. The shaft was stifling, the fire’s embers glowing faintly below as he ascended. Above him, the circle of dim light grew wider, its edges smudged with ash and rust. He reached the surface, pulling himself out with a grimace. The lot greeted him with its familiar staleness, the damp and metallic air. Julian crouched low, listening with his back against the rotted old Punto, pistol drawn, scanning the empty lot for movement.

The girl followed.

Her hands gripped the rope with a white-knuckled desperation that left her palms raw scrambling up after him, her breath coming in short, jagged gasps. When she emerged, her lungs seized against the sudden rush of air, albeit polluted, sharp, and acrid, burning down her throat. Her gaze snapped to the edge of the lot and the shadow of the boy’s crouched figure urged her forward.

“Keep low,” he hissed.

They ran in the dark of night, steps muted against the cracked asphalt littered with broken glass and twisted scraps of metal under the rattling of the gunfire a few streets down. Rusting cars rose around them at every corner, the windows of most buildings shattered, their exposed interiors blackened by old fires. The girl stumbled but caught herself, her knee striking a jagged piece of debris. Esme bit back a cry and pushed on, following Julian’s weaving path.

A faint sound carried on the air—a moan or a creak, too faint to tell. Her heart pounded, her every nerve taut as they rounded the corner into an alley marked with soot-streaked walls and layers of graffiti scrawled in desperate, half-faded warnings. The stench grew thicker here, a choking weight that forced her to pull her sleeve over her nose.

The other lot yawned open before them. The ground was uneven, muddy. There were heaps of discarded belongings—shoes, shredded clothing, shattered glasses—all soaked through with dark, congealed blood.

Esme looked up. The poles rose taller than the streetlights, their steel surfaces catching faint glints from the wavering beam of her flashlight. Rust ran like veins along their lengths, streaked with something darker still, something that clung and would not dry. From each pole hung a body, wrists bound in chains so tight they seemed to grow from the flesh itself. The corpses moved faintly, swayed by the wind, their weight drawing whispers from the iron. Some bore the pale slackness of the newly dead, wounds that yet wept, while others had ripened into grotesque forms, their skin swollen and split, stained with the hues of decay. Flies clung to their emptied sockets and slackened jaws, their droning thick in the air, a hymn of ruin that rose and fell without end.

Esme watched Julian rummage through the pile, his hands moving methodically. A rusted handsaw with missing teeth caught her eye—a set of kitchen knives dulled by years of use, a jagged shard of glass glinting on the floor, a hatchet with its handle split but serviceable, and a pair of garden shears caked in dried mud, each one an instrument reimagined for the grotesque necessity that awaited.

He turned back to his work, but his movements were slower now, deliberate. Esme went silent, and Julian found himself lingering on the fate of those bodies—that hounding inevitable fate (for what it was worth). He moved forward with the battered saw through row upon row when he approached one of the fresher corpses, wrists bound high, fingers curled. When he touched the skin he felt it elastic, still with some colour. His stomach clenched with a raw, insistent hunger.

He hesitated:

—Not with Esme, no. Not with Esme, he had promised . . .

But Esme had insisted.

***

When the saw’s teeth bit into the flesh, the sound was wet and grating. Blood, sticky and dark, oozed down the pole, pooling at the base as he reached bone. The same faint metallic tang seemed to hang all around them: one of the civilian bodies suspended near the center of the lot had split at the abdomen, entrails dangling like macabre streamers.

She handed him the metal baseball bat, its weight a cold promise in her grip. He swung at the wrists with a savage precision. Bones splintering like dried branches, flesh giving way in sickening bursts to release the hands from their chains.

When the boy finished, he wrapped the severed hands in a stained cloth and stuffed them into his pack. Esme did not ask why.

“Help me,” he said, his voice shaking in his fatigue, as if he were shivering, taking the body from under its shoulders down, and up again to carry it back. The body left jagged streaks of blood across the dirt—dark and glistening in the ruptured cracks of the pavement below. The smears widened where the limbs dragged, the weight of the body carving a grotesque trail, as though marking their path with the remnants of this—yet another stolen life.

***

Esme scanned the lot once they’d returned; her eyes traced the wreckage a last time, as she prepared to face the darkness again. The tattered old city buildings rose like the broken ribs of the earth. When she looked to Julian, she saw the blood seeping through his shirt in dark blossoms. Still, he worked—without pause, threading the cables to lower the corpse—his movements deliberate, neurologically and kinesthetically mechanized through the repetition.

The tears came suddenly, hot and unwelcome to the girl's eyes.

“Julian! Julian!” she cried, her voice trembling as she pointed toward the spreading stain.

He stopped, letting the cables slack but only for a moment in his hands, and he turned to her with a faint tilt of his head, his expression unreadable. When he touched his chest, his fingers arrived at the sticky warmth through the fabric of his t-shirt; As he drew his hand away, the blood gleamed dark and viscous on his palm, staining the sling with a slow-spreading permanence. He glanced at it briefly, then returned to his work without a word.

The pulley creaked in protest, the taut cables moaning like sinew stretched past the breaking point. Esme’s arms faltered, her muscles trembling. The blood on her palms slicked the rope, mingling with sweat, the metal biting into her skin with every pull. Julian worked beside her, unyielding, the cords moving through his hands as if through the hands of a clockmaker, steady and sure. She saw the smear of red streaked across his knuckles, the faint tremor that betrayed his fatigue, though his face betrayed nothing. The body below swung like some obscene pendulum, its limbs adrift in the half-light, descending into the earth’s waiting throat where no light nor grace followed. She dared not speak. What would she say?

The sirens came faintly at first. Then came the gunfire, scattered and hollow, then closer, a language of steel and powder and ruin. Julian turned to her, his face half-lit, his hand still on the rope. She thought to ask him—how much longer? How much longer could they hold before the world came down around them? She did not ask, and he did not look back.

At the bottom of the well, the air was damp and cold, and the dark closed over her like a shroud. She could feel her pulse in her ears, her chest, her fingers. She sat with her knees drawn up, the earth pressing against her from every side, a grave not yet sealed. The lid slid into place above, shutting out even the faint glow of the world’s burning. Then there was silence, thick and eternal, save for the sound of her own breathing. When Julian’s arms found her in that suffocating dark, she let herself collapse into them, her tears falling unbidden, a flood she could no more control than the coming ruin, she realized in her collapse.

Above them, the sirens wailed and the heavens thundered, the bomb descending as sure as the sun would rise, its shadow growing, growing, until nothing remained but the echo.

***

With the light above sealed, Esme knelt on the uneven ground unrolling the bundle of cloth where she and Julian gathered and concealed their scavenged tools.

The blades gleamed dully in the shifting hues of firelight: a bow saw—its narrow, curved metal frame holding the taut, fine-toothed blade for bones; a crosscut saw with its double-edged teeth meant for biting into the larger joints; a hand saw, short and rugged, with its wooden grip worn smooth from use; and the hook and scalpel for the finer work. A filleting knife rested beside them, thin and curved, honed for precision in the hours of their waiting. There was the scalpel, gleaming and cruel, the hook with its wicked curve for pulling sinew from bone, and a pair of bolt cutters, their rust-pitted jaws capable of severing even the thickest ligaments. A claw hammer lay nearby, its darkened head bearing the patina of countless blows, and beside it, a cleaver, squat and weighty, the blade wide enough to split a skull.

She chose the bow saw first, her hands steady despite the tremor in her chest.

“Esme—” he started, his voice low and uneven, the words catching as he watched her position the blade. He took a step forward, but his legs faltered, and he sagged against the wall, his fingers curling into a fist. “No. Esme! . . . Please, Esme. Don’t . . . —”

Julian's words broke off. The clatter of the blade’s first bite into flesh made him flinch as if it struck his own bone. He was growing weaker. He knew, and he knew that Esme knew.

Sparks danced in her periphery as a timber collapsed somewhere above, throwing orange shards of light down the well.

With each cut and tear, he felt more lost to the void, his despair swallowed whole by the ceaseless, repetitive rhythm of the act and the images.

After a time, he reached for the scalpel and joined her.

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Read Part III January 5th.