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I recently bought some land and a small cabin on the outskirts of Frost Hollow. The town had been in decline for decades. A constant stream of businesses and people left Frost Hollow every year. I heard rumors about high missing persons rates as well as insane homicide and suicide rates that plagued the town constantly. This didn’t bother me in the least, however. In my mind, it just meant the land there was dirt-cheap, and that I wouldn’t have too many neighbors to worry about.

My closest neighbor, Art, was a sheep farmer, an ancient man with a cantankerous voice and a back like a broken board. He stood only about five feet tall, always wearing his trademark blue coveralls and a wide-brim hat. When I first found the hole, I tried shining a light down and then throwing heavy rocks inside. When only silence greeted me after a minute, I quickly realized that neither method would help me realize the depth of the hole.

I immediately went over to Art’s ranch house. Art had lived in Frost Hollow his whole life, and I figured if anyone would know about the pit, he would. Sheep milled about on the grassy fields around his house, meditatively chewing as they slowly ambled forward. Art and I both lived on top of the same hill, on a spot cleared of trees and brush about one-tenth of a mile across on the peak. My dog, Peaches, ran by my side, her mouth wide open in excitement and dripping with silver streams of saliva.

I saw Art sitting on his porch of his weatherworn home, smoking a pipe and staring out across the field. His eyes ratcheted to me when the rickety porch steps groaned in protest under my weight. All of the paint had long ago peeled off the walls and shutters of his ancient home.

"Joshua," he said in a thick drawl. "How are you settling in?" He took another long drag from the pipe. Smoke wreathed his face and white beard. He reminded me of a thin, diminutive Santa Claus.

"It’s very interesting," I admitted. The cabin still had books and trinkets left behind from the previous owner. It seemed like whoever it was had left in a hurry. I was happy to find leather-bound hardcover works by Robert Browning, TS Eliot and others when I first purveyed the bookshelves. "But I’m really wondering about the hole, the one with the retaining wall around it. What is it?" 

I figured it wasn’t a well, for this hole was about ten feet across and seemed to go down for at least four or five hundred feet. The top of it was ringed by a perfectly circular stone wall a few feet high, presumably to keep people or animals from falling in by accident.

"If I knew that, I would be a wise man, indeed," Art whispered sagely. "That hole has been there for as long as anyone knows, before the town was even started. It doesn’t seem to have any bottom that we can see. A few people who live around here have used to get rid of their trash for decades. We just throw whatever rubbish we have into the hole and- voila!- it’s gone forever. Though my wife never trusted it, at least before she died. Maria always asked me not to go near it." I frowned. Art rarely talked about his dead wife. I knew she had passed away a few years earlier, but he refused to share any of the details of her death.

"That could potentially poison the groundwater," I said. "I’d like to ask you to stop throwing trash in the hole until I can get it looked at. I think Maria may have been right to be leary about abusing the pit." Art leaned forward, his eyes twinkling.

"Sonny, wells around here never go below two or three hundred feet. I can guarantee you that pit is neither a well in any conventional sense, nor connected to the underground reservoirs. As far as we’ve been able to tell, the walls are solid all the way down. They turn into some sort of glassy sandstone, and they go deep, at least a few thousand feet down."

"How do you know all this?" I asked, curious. "Have you been studying it?" His expression brightened at this.

"The previous owner of your cabin, Mel, asked me and a couple others to come over. This was back around 2001, I guess, the first time I saw it. We did a few experiments, ran some lines to try to see how far down it went. We never did figure out where the bottom was, if it even has a bottom, but there were other weird effects from sending things down," Art said. 

"Like what?" I asked. He winked at me.

"Meet me there in an hour, at sunset, and I’ll show you," he said. I woke Peaches up and headed back to my cabin. She barked excitedly by my side, running circles around me playfully.

***

I went to the hole early, watching and waiting as night descended. In the cloudless sky, the stars came out one by one, faintly twinkling like broken glass. I must have gotten lost in a trance, because the next thing I knew, Art was putting a small, bird-like hand on my shoulder. His ancient fingers trembled nervously, though I didn’t know why. I saw him carrying a threadbare canvas bag around his shoulder. With a grunt, he put it down on the black earth surrounding the stone walls of the hole. I had left Peaches outside to run around and tire herself out.

"What’s all this?" I asked, feeling a creeping suspicion rise up my spine. Art gave his inscrutable Santa Claus smile, pulling his dirty pipe out of a pocket and lighting it.

"You’ll see," he said, pulling a long, heavy rope out of the bag. At the end, it was tied to a closed wicker basket. He kept reaching into the canvas bag, and his hand came up with a plastic grocery bag filled to the brim with ice. It had been tied and knotted. He looked back at me as he gingerly lowered the ice into the wicker basket.

"You wanted to know what the hole is?" he asked, handing me the rope. "Let this basket drop down as far as the rope will go, and maybe you’ll see for yourself."

***

Together, we lowered the basket down into the hole. The darkness swallowed it instantly like a hungry mouth. I wondered what kind of game Art was playing. I figured that, by the time we raised it, we would have a basket filled with melted ice and nothing more.

"It doesn’t always work, you understand," Art said, "but when it does… well, it’s one of the goddamned strangest things I’ve ever seen." We reached the end of the rope, let the basket hang for a few seconds and then started pulling it back up. The whole process took a couple minutes.

"You know there are dozens of types of ice?" Art asked as we struggled with the rope. "Some kinds of ice are burning hot and will scald your flesh from your bones. Others are as hard as steel and as cold as liquid nitrogen. Bizarre, huh? On Earth, we don’t really see them, but on other planets, under high pressure, ice can take some truly alien forms."

I watched the basket rise out of the shadows, appearing suddenly as if it had broken through the surface of a dark ocean. There seemed to be a light coming from inside of it. Carefully, we pulled it out and laid it next to the stone wall.

"Go ahead," Art said, sitting down on the wall’s ledge with a huff. It gave me vertigo just seeing him there, on the edge of an abyss that stretched thousands of feet. Art apparently had no fear of heights, however. He pulled out his pipe and lit a match. "Well, what are you waiting for? You wanted answers. Open it up and see for yourself."

I knelt down next to the wicker basket. I inhaled deeply as I raised one of the covers, flipping it over in a heartbeat. I stared down in amazement at what I saw.

The ice cubes were all still in their original shape, but now, they looked like they were burning with an inner fire. Orange light flickered from the insides of them, twisting and spiraling in tiny cyclones. I saw they had totally melted the plastic bag, and by this point were starting to leave scorch marks on the wicker. Black smoke rose from the basket. Art stepped forward, taking a gnarled old hand and flipping the basket over before the burning ice could ignite the material.

"What is it?" I asked, backing away from the ice cubes. Art shrugged, getting up with a creaking of bones and a heavy groan.

"To be honest, Joshua, I can’t give you all the answers," he said. "The story with the hole is long and very weird. We don’t know where it came from or why it does what it does. Mel and I experimented with it for years. He even tried sending live animals down there." Art’s wrinkled face seemed to go pale at the memory.

"What happened when he sent an animal down there?" I asked, intensely curious but also somewhat sickened. Art just shook his head.

"I don’t want to talk about that," he said. "Just pretend I never brought it up. Some things are better left forgotten."

***

Art left a few minutes later. He gave a friendly wave as he disappeared into the night, but I was far too focused on the burning cubes to pay him any attention.

I ran back to my house, trying to find a way to transport them. I found a shovel and ran back, gingerly picking them up with it. I wanted to keep them for observation. I had a small wood-burning stove in the cabin and threw the fiery ice cubes into the cold ashes. As I threw logs on top of them, the wood ignited as if it had been soaked in gasoline, sending sputtering blue flames up.

I was sitting down in front of the strange fire show when I heard high-pitched squeals of pain split the air. I instantly recognized the yelping cries of Peaches. I grabbed a shotgun from next to the door and ran outside. The growls and barking had formed into a deafening screech by this point. My eyes widened in horror as I realized what was happening.

A brown bear had Peaches by the neck. Its powerful jaws crushed the pitbull’s flesh in an instant, and Peaches cries faded to a whisper, the light in her pupils slowly dying.

Her eyes rolled back in her head. I raised the shotgun and sprayed a round of buckshot at the bear. Its rolling eyes turned towards me, its sharp fangs gnashing as it dropped Peaches’ twitching body. 

It started sprinting straight at me with an insane expression of bloodlust on its crazed, furry face. Everything seemed to slow down as I met the creature’s eyes and shot it in the mouth.

It stopped in its tracks, dripping thick streams of blood from its chin and neck. A single heartbeat later, it turned and sprinted back towards the dark forest in a blur, leaving the dead body of Peaches in its wake.

***

Sickened by the brutal death of my beloved Peaches, I wiped tears away as I went inside to grab a comforter. I wrapped her mutilated, bleeding form in the thick blanket and drove the dog’s corpse over to the hole.

"Goodbye, Peaches," I said in a voice choked with emotion. I had wrapped the dog up like a mummy. Her body felt heavy and stiff. I inhaled deeply, heaving as I pushed Peaches up on the retaining wall. I felt her cooling blood soaking through the comforter. After resting for a moment, I slid Peaches over the edge, watching her tumble down into the endless darkness.

Her body fell straight down without hitting any of the rocky sides. Within a few moments, Peaches had disappeared forever- or so I thought at the time.

***

I remembered waking up early the next morning, hearing a heavy rhythmic bouncing and thudding coming from the direction of the pit. I blinked my eyes blearily, seeing the first bloody streaks of dawn covering the world like a blanket. Then I remembered Peaches’ death the previous night and the strangeness with the hole. Sadness and anxiety crushed my heart at the memory. The sound of grunting and hard thuds came bouncing back again. I threw on some clothes, running outside to see what was making such a racket.

I saw a Mexican-looking fellow unloading a truck full of bald, damaged tires into the hole. He was whistling as he worked, his tanned face gleaming with sweat. He had backed the bed of the rusty pick-up to the perimeter of the retaining wall. The thudding sound was the tires smashing off the sides of the smooth, rocky walls as they tumbled endlessly down.

"Hey!" I yelled, striding forward with long steps. He glanced back at me, his expression never changing. He just continued clearing out the dozens of tires stacked up five feet high in the bed.

"Morning," he responded cheerfully. "You’re up early, eh?"

"Because of you! Who are you? What are you doing on my property?" I asked, narrowing my eyes at the intruder. He stretched out a thin, grime-streaked hand. I stared down at it as if it were a dead slug.

"My name’s Miguel, and I’ve been coming here for years, man," he said in a thick accent. "I’ve thrown thousands of tires down here. No one cares. The dumps will pay you to take them off their hands. They don’t want to deal with the red tape, right?"

"Thousands?" I asked, chagrined. Miguel just nodded proudly. I tried to imagine how much junk must be at the bottom of the hole. There must be hundreds of feet of decaying animals, rusting machinery, flat tires and whatever other garbage was unlucky enough to find itself eternally imprisoned in this endless pit. 

Miguel opened his mouth, about to say something, but his words were cut off as a cacophonous wail tore its way up and out of the hole. The eerie scream had a grating, metallic quality to it. I felt goosebumps rise all over my body as Miguel’s eyes widened. He stared down into the eternal shadows, leaning over the retaining wall. The shrieking ended as abruptly as it had started.

"What the…" he started to say, his bronze skin appearing much paler than when I had first seen him. His brown eyes stared ahead, unbelieving and frightened. The screaming started again, much closer and louder. It sent shockwaves of sound traveling up through the air. I saw the retaining wall shake like a leaf on a tree. A moment later, it crumbled and fell to pieces before my eyes. The metallic wailing faded off again, abruptly plunging us into deafening silence.

Miguel gave a loud shriek of surprise and terror as his arms windmilled crazily. He tried to catch himself as the black, lifeless soil surrounding the hole crumbled beneath his feet. I instinctively threw myself back as more and more earth slid into the hole. Miguel tried to crawl up the loose sand, his eyes wide with animal panic. He reached out a trembling hand towards me, but the sands underneath him were flowing like a waterfall. I reached my hand toward him in a futile attempt, watching his rolling eyes as he slid down and disappeared in a single instant.

His scream echoed up for what seemed like a very long time. After a minute, it grew fainter and, eventually, disappeared.

***

I stood in stunned silence, staring down at the hole. The entire retaining wall had fallen in, leaving jagged pieces of stone poking out of the earth like broken teeth. As usual, the pit had eaten everything hungrily. There was no sign of the life it had consumed so suddenly, no change in the thick curtain of shadows. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but a sharp feeling of disappointment pierced my chest, though I wasn’t sure why. I stared between the rusted brown pick-up truck and the hole, as if expecting a magic trick to take place. My thoughts slowly returned in a jumbled mess, a stream of consciousness garble that told me to find help.

I sprinted blindly across the dead earth towards the grassy fields surrounding Art’s rickety house. Art was already out under the bleary, early-morning Sun, letting the sheep stream out in excited lines from the wooden barn out back. Sweating and hyperventilating, I gave a high-pitched, terrified yell. He jumped, spinning around to look at me.

"Art! Something bad’s happened at the pit! Someone fell in!" I screamed. His face turned chalk-white, his thin, bird-like face falling into a pensive, serious frown. He slowly ambled toward me, placing a hand on my shoulder.

"Show me," he said simply.

***

Art followed behind, his old man’s gait slowed by a pronounced limp. It seemed to take forever to head back toward the pit. He saw the rusty pick-up from a distance, his small, watery eyes widening.

"Oh shit, it’s Miguel," he whispered grimly. I saw the collapsed retaining wall. The bed of the pick-up truck was still open, patiently parked a few feet away from the place where the soil had collapsed like a melting glacier.

"Yeah, I talked to him for a few minutes," I said, not bringing up the tires. A dozen bald, flat tires still sat waiting in the bed of the truck. "Shit, what am I supposed to do? Call the cops?" Art froze at this, his normally placid face falling into a grimace. His eyes met mine, as cold and blue as an Alaskan glacier.

"Do not call the police," he said, his tone steelier than I had ever heard it. "If the government finds out about this, they will steal your land and probably murder you, and maybe murder me just for good measure. Hell, look what happened to Frank Olson during MKULTRA. The US government threw him out a window and made it look like a suicide just to prevent the media from finding out that the CIA was torturing and drugging US citizens, giving them LSD and subjecting them to prolonged physical and sexual abuse. And that was just over LSD. What will they do if they find this? We have no idea what kind of power lives down there."

"So what? We’re just going to pretend like nothing happened?" I spat back, my face flushing. "What about that guy’s family? They’ll never know where he went." Art just shook his head.

"Trust me, Joshua, it’s far better to leave them in the dark. If they get involved, they might find themselves getting thrown down the pit as well." Art pointed to the pick-up truck with a shaking finger. "Just put it in neutral and roll it inside. Get rid of the evidence. No one ever needs to know what lies rotting at the bottom of that abyss."

***

Art watched me with an amused half-smile as I got into the pick-up truck. The entire cab smelled like tacos and French fries. I saw discarded fast food wrappers all over the seats and floor.

"Disgusting," I muttered, starting the engine and putting it in neutral. The engine idled like an old man with pneumonia, gurgling and sputtering in rhythmic waves. I jumped out onto the soft black soil. Deep down, I knew Art was right, though I still felt sick and guilty about covering up this man’s death. I imagined Miguel’s broken body down there among the thousands of tires, twisted among the rubble with a silent scream still frozen on his lips.

"Can you give me a hand with this?" I asked Art as I got behind the truck, preparing to start pushing. I glanced over, but he wasn’t looking at me or the pick-up truck. He stared intently past me with a look of horror. I followed his line of sight, seeing he was staring at the border of the dark evergreen forest fifty or sixty feet away. My eyes instantly met those of Miguel’s.

But he seemed different. I squinted, seeing his eyes were white, crying scarlet tears that streamed down his face. His jaw looked shattered. It hung limply open, sharp pieces of bone poking out through the skin. His clothes were ripped and stained in a rainbow of dark fluids. Oil spot rainbows glimmered next to drippings of thick, clotted blood.

Peaches stood by his side, but like Miguel, the dog had changed in death. Her eyes had lost their pupils and irises. Under the dim dawn light, they gleamed a pale, cataract white. Bloody saliva frothed from her silently gnashing jaws.

But that wasn’t the most horrifying thing. Thousands of blood-red worms ate away at their loose flesh. They fell from Miguel’s gray, lifeless skin like raindrops in a heavy storm. Each looked about the size of a maggot. As the carpet of squirming larvae ate away at their hosts, new streams of clotted blood slowly ran down their bodies with the consistency of sludge.

I felt sick waves of nostalgia seeing Peaches standing there, chunks of her neck still missing from the bear attack. I had to constantly remind myself that this was not Peaches. This was some abomination from the pit, some dark twisting of my innocent dog’s flesh.

"Oh God, Maria was right," Art whispered in a voice choked with emotion. "We should’ve never come back here." He grabbed my arm with an iron grip, his terror giving his frail hands a seemingly superhuman strength. Peaches and Miguel didn’t move. They simply stood there, wavering on their feet, their eyes as blank as those of corpses.

"Let’s just go," I whispered back. "They’re not moving. I’m not even sure there’s any consciousness there behind those blank eyes. They remind me of zombies. They might just stay there." But as soon as we took a step away from Miguel and Peaches, they came to life. I heard a long, low hissing sound that tore its way out of their throats in unison. It echoed like the hissing of many snakes.

"These things must have been what murdered my wife," Art mumbled, more to himself than to me. A look of shock fell over his wrinkled face. "Oh God, it was the pit all along. All of the misfortune and tragedies… it’s the center of all of it." I was about to respond when the corpses took off after us with a vengeance.

Peaches sprinted forward, the sound of grinding bone splinters in her shattered canine body rising in volume as she came at us. But none of the reanimated corpses seemed to feel any pain. Miguel blindly staggered forward, lunging in strange, dragging steps. The crimson maggots eating away at his body had reached his face and eyes by this point, leaving small rivulets of cold gore wherever they feasted.

"Fuck! Keep it away from me!" Art screamed, taking off as fast as his old man’s body would allow. With his pronounced limp, he didn’t stand a chance. I sprinted away, passing the old man in seconds. A moment later, I heard a heavy thud and a whoosh of air. 

I glanced back, seeing Peaches standing on the prone man’s chest. She ripped at his shoulder and arms, tearing off chunks of flesh with every bite. Art wailed like a man being burned alive. The red maggots continuously fell off Peaches’ body. To my horror, I saw them instantly start burrowing their way into Art’s body, slithering into his mouth and nose.

Miguel was only a few feet behind the struggling pair, coming straight at me. I headed towards my cabin, trying to block out the dying screams of Art.

***

I flew through the door, slamming it shut behind me. A single heartbeat later, I heard Miguel’s body thud into the other side. Frantically, I threw my weight against it and locked it. I lunged for my shotgun, which I always kept propped up next to the door.

One of the windows next to the door shattered. I saw a bloody hand reaching in. Miguel blindly climbed up on the sharp shards of glass, ripping open his stomach and chest in the process. Fresh waterfalls of clotted gore and dancing worms slowly dribbled down his mutilated flesh.

Another window shattered a moment later. A pale, white hand reached in. I saw the reanimated body of Art, his filmy, dead eyes rolling back and forth over the room of my cabin. When they saw me, they stopped, focusing on me with an insane ferocity.

Miguel slunk towards me, his skin a carpet of writhing red maggots now. They skittered all over my wooden floor, slowly crawling towards me, hungry for living tissue. I raised the gun, pointing it at his face. It was half-gone by this point, the jaw bone hanging limply from a mass of half-digested flesh.

I fired, blowing the skull-like face into a mist of blood and bone splinters. And yet, even missing most of his face, Miguel didn’t stop. Bleeding heavily as his brains leaked out of his forehead, he staggered forward, grabbing at me.

I took the stock of the shotgun and slammed it into the bullet wound in the front of his head. There was a sickening, wet crunch as he fell back, his hands blindly swiping the air in an attempt to reach me. He continued gurgling and hissing blood.

Art had nearly finished crawling into the other window by this point. Out of ideas, I took the opportunity to escape towards the back of the cabin, away from these reanimated bodies.

***

I saw my car parked on the side of the cabin, only about twenty feet away. I looked both ways out of the back door before flinging it open and sprinting towards freedom. The coast looked clear.

But, as I reached the door, a heavy thudding of paws came running around the side of the cabin. Peaches snapped at the air with an insane bloodlust, her fur skittering with a carpet of maggots. I pointed the shotgun at her, constantly reminding myself that this was not the real Peaches.

She lunged forward, grabbing my ankle as I fired. The bullet ripped her back apart, revealing part of the spine and ribs. The white bone poked out through the ragged strands of flesh for a few moments, until the crimson maggots skittered over the wound and covered it.

I felt a burning pain as her powerful jaws bit into my leg. She shook her head from side to side, nearly throwing me off my feet. The pain radiated up my left leg. More small agonies like burning drops of lava covered my arms and hands. I realized that some of the biting maggots had landed on me. In a fit of pure panic, I grabbed the shotgun and shoved the metal barrel into one of Peaches’ eyes. The orb exploded in a dribble of vitreous fluid before I fired.

Peaches’ head disintegrated under the onslaught of the buckshot. I felt her jaws release a second later. Staggering back, I stumbled towards the car. I flung open the door and slammed it shut, locking it. I looked down at my arms, seeing the worms eating their way down towards the muscle, biting through the skin with terrifying efficiency. Quickly, I began plucking them out, squishing them between my fingers. They exploded like tiny water balloons filled with blood.

I looked up, seeing that Miguel, Art and Peaches all stood in front of the car. They looked like little more than ragged pieces of decaying flesh by this point.

I started the car and accelerated rapidly towards them, hoping to crush all these eldritch creatures in one fell swoop. All three lunged to the side, twisting in jerky, zombie-like movements. Even without faces, Miguel and Peaches were still incredibly fast.

Without looking back, I drove away, leaving the pit and its many strange mysteries behind forever.