Jason Graf awoke one morning and found a hole in his living room floor. It was no wider than a dinner plate and easy enough to miss at first glance, so he nearly tripped into it on his way to the couch. He stumbled back a step, splashing scalding hot coffee on his fingers.
“God damn it!” he cried. The cup slipped out of his hand and tumbled into the hole. More coffee hit his legs and the floor, but he hardly noticed. He watched the mug fall end over end into inky darkness before vanishing completely. He never heard it strike bottom.
“Are you ok?” Julie called out from the kitchen.
Jason ignored her. He crouched and peered into the pit. It was not simply a break in the floorboards; it was a dark gap in the room that seemed to swallow the strips of morning light that slipped in through the blinds. Its sides were flawlessly cut into the laminate, leaving a clean, splinterless line above, and solid black below. Whatever padding or concrete had been underneath simply no longer existed. It was as though something had carved a perfect little piece of the room—of the world—away.
Impossible. Jason’s next thought was that it looked like something the coyote would paint on the side of a cliff to trap the roadrunner. He would touch it and find a completely smooth surface. Black paint would come off on his fingertips. He reached forward to test the edges of the hole, but as his hand got close, a deepening dread tore at the back of his mind. He bit his lip and glanced about the room for something else to use.
“Did you hear me?” Julie asked sharply, concern curdling into frustration. Then she saw Jason on his knees in the center of the mess and she rushed over, once again asking if he was hurt.
“I’m fine,” Jason said, standing and shrugging off her touch. He rubbed his throbbing fingers and shook his head, pointing at the hole at his feet. “I almost fell in, though.”
Julie eyed him quizzically, crossing her arms over her chest. “You might have drowned,” she added with a smirk, inspecting the spilled coffee at his feet. “I’ll get a towel.”
She didn’t see it.
Jason watched her hurry off towards the linens, and he bit his lip again. The coffee was as clear as day, but the hole into which he had almost fallen was invisible to her. Confused and frightened, he stuck out his toe into the gap. Sure enough, it met no resistance where the floor should have been. He wasn’t crazy. The hole was real.
Bolder now, he dipped his foot a little deeper into that void. It was cold inside—no, not precisely. This was something else; something more like a total absence of warmth; a sickening nothingness. Without knowing why, he probed a little further. The pit seemed to get colder the deeper he went. Already he was starting to shiver, and the hairs on his neck and arms were standing at attention. It was like pressing bare skin against a block of ice. Now his whole foot was sunk in up to his ankle. He felt he should go further still. Just until he could tease the bottom. A little more…
“Here.” Julie tossed him a ragged towel. Her voice snapped him out of his daze, and he pulled his foot back up. “I’ll pour you another,” she said, turning back towards the kitchen.
“You don’t see it?”
She looked at him, her concern and confusion mapping out lines on her brow. She didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Never mind.” Jason shook his head. Julie smiled half-heartedly and went to get him a new mug.
He crouched and began sopping up what was left of the mess. Most of the coffee had already washed over the edge into the darkness, so it didn’t take long. Jason tried to be extra cautious. It wasn’t big enough for him to fall in, but nevertheless, he had this horrible vertigo just being near it.
He fought back dizziness and peered over the lip again. Nothing but black. He whistled, high and sharp. The sound died as soon as it entered the hole. No echo called back.
He slid the coffee-soaked towel forward, stuffing it into the mouth of the hole. It stuck for a moment, but another slight nudge sent it down into the empty, blank space. He chuckled a little as it disappeared. He had been trying to throw that torn thing away for years, but Julie had always found a reason to keep it.
“Wow, that was quick,” Julie said, stepping back into the living room with a pair of steaming mugs in her hands. “What did you use to clean it?”
“The towel,” Jason answered, claiming the offered cup and taking a sip. It burned his tongue a little, but he knew better than to complain.
“What towel?” Julie moved past him and plopped down on the couch.
“The one you gave me…” Jason answered, hearing the sharp corners in his voice, and regretting them at once.
Julie didn’t seem to hear him. She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her pajama pants and started scrubbing through her mailbox. After a moment or two, she took a long sip of her coffee and shot a banal smile in Jason’s direction.
How could she not see it?
His shin had been buried in the hole when she had entered the room, and yet somehow her mind blinked it away. The towel, too, seemed to have been entirely forgotten. What’s more, Jason was sure he had seen her take an extra, unconscious step around it.
I’m not crazy, he thought, breathing a small sigh of relief. Even if Julie was blind to the hole’s presence, she was in no danger, so long as some part of her knew to avoid it. But what had caused the thing to appear? And what became of those things he had dropped into it? He resolved to test it, but only after she had left for the day.
“Busy day?” he asked, trying to sound calm.
“Three client meetings,” Julie answered. She grimaced at something on her screen and took a long pull from her mug.
Jason smiled inwardly.
After breakfast, Julie showered and got dressed. She gave Jason a peck on the cheek as she left, promising to text when she was on her way home.
Jason didn’t have to go to work that day. He hadn’t had to go anywhere since the fall, when the software company he’d worked at for eight years had decided he was redundant. Now he was “out of work”: a phrase that never failed to draw a morbid smile to his lips every time he thought of it. It made work sound like a can of pop in the bulky machines outside the grocery store. He was “Out of Work,” the same way it could be out of Pepsi.
Worse was the way Jason lied to Julie about what he was doing. Every day she would come home and he would rattle off a short list of emails he’d sent, job training he’d done, and companies he’d applied to. These were all fabrications. He’d stopped applying for jobs months ago, content to binge crappy television and play video games. He almost never left the house.
Julie would stroll into their apartment, drop her keys in the bowl and ask the same tired question: “How’d it go today?”
Jason would grin that fake little grin he’d mastered and answer the same way, “pretty good I think.” Afterwards he’d feel rotten, but he couldn’t help himself. The thing that cut deeper was the dimming light in Julie’s eyes when she saw him. It was a bright little candle that melted down week after week, month after month. Soon there would be nothing left but smoke.
He looked down the hole. It begged to be tested.
It took about forty minutes for Jason to gather the necessary items. He dug out a box of his old stuff from the storage closet and picked out a few things: a tattered notebook, an old stuffed bear, and a little toy star that played twinkle-twinkle when you pushed a button on its base. He also got a pitcher of water and a big pot lid, just in case.
The water went down first. Much like the coffee, it flowed freely down the hole, disappearing into the void. He couldn’t even hear it splash the sides. Next went the notebook, then the old bear, then a handful of loose change. One after another, each thing vanished into the darkness. Finally, Jason turned on the little star toy and dropped it in. The chiming notes of twinkle-twinkle were clear for only a heartbeat or two, before they were gone. Jason leaned over the hole. The toy should have played for about a minute—it should have found the bottom and landed with a crack at least—but there was no sound. There was nothing.
Jason stood over the hole for a long time.
A little while later, he went downstairs and knocked on the neighbor’s door. A suspicious old lady in horn-rimmed glasses answered. Jason stammered his way through asking her if she’d had any issues with her ceiling.
“Are you selling something?” the old lady asked.
“No.”
She shut the door in his face.
Back upstairs, the hole was waiting for him. It seemed a bit larger than before. Jason put the pot lid over top of it and sat on the couch to think. None of it made any sense.
Just before lunchtime, the pot lid made a mournful noise before toppling down. The hole was getting noticeably larger. Jason put a pencil on the lip and timed how long it took before the hole took it.
Four minutes.
It didn’t seem very fast, but doing a quick calculation in his head, Jason realized that the couch would probably be gone sometime that afternoon. After that, the TV, and the wall… and then what? Jason shuddered.
He made a turkey sandwich and stared at the hole from across the room. He thought food would calm him down and help him think. It didn’t. The hole was growing.
Julie called, just as a small end table Jason had forgotten to move tipped over into oblivion. “Hi, hun,” she said brightly.
“Hi,” Jason replied, eyes fixed on the thing.
“You sound weird.” She could hear the worry in his voice. He’d done a bad job of hiding it. “Everything ok?”
Jason almost told her. It would have been easy, but then again, she probably would’ve thought he was joking… or crazy. “I’m fine. Just working away.”
“Great.” She sounded bright again, but a slight hesitation lingered in her voice.
“Why are you calling?” He meant to say it calmly—cool as a cucumber—but even he could hear the jagged edge of his tone.
There was a deep pause. Dead air hummed. “My last meeting is going to run late. So, I won’t be home for dinner. Are you good to eat on your own?”
“Of course I am,” Jason snapped.
Again, dead air. “Ok. I’ll see you later then.” Julie answered stiffly.
Jason bit his lip. “Julie, I…” but before he could say any more, she hung up. The little flame of her affection had grown that much dimmer.
Once more Jason was left with his thoughts. They were bleaker than before. Should he just leave? What would happen then? Would the hole just keep growing until it consumed the entire living room? The entire apartment? The entire building? And what about Julie? It was fine that she had unwittingly dodged around the thing when it was just a little gap, but what would happen if she came home that night and he wasn’t there to warn her? Would she step through the door frame into an abyss?
Jason had to catch his breath. His mind was spinning like a top. He hadn’t even noticed he was dizzy until he opened his mouth and found himself gasping for breath.
There was something else in the apartment now. A dreadful feeling that hadn’t been there before; like the rumble you feel in your stomach or in your bones when the bass is too loud on a stereo. It was primal, and it was hungry. End tables, spare change and stuffed bears weren’t what it wanted.
There was only one more test Jason could do. He lay on his belly and inched his way across the floor until his face hung above the hole. The cold tingle inside had spread so that he could feel it now on the periphery, leaching outwards. He shivered and slid a little further forward. Then he put the plate from his sandwich on the lip of the hole and put his hand into the gap beneath it, ready to catch it when the gap expanded again.
The darkness of the hole was complete and sharp. It felt like icy needles poking into every inch of his skin. His mind screamed at him to pull his hand back, but he held still, biting his lip and suffering.
The plate didn’t fall.
The lip of the hole remained in place.
He pulled his arm out for a split second. It was like releasing the brakes on a car. The edges of the hole started growing again, very slowly creeping back. He put his arm in again, and the movement stopped.
Jason knew what that meant. He peered into the blackness. There was simply a black, freezing nothing. And it was waiting for him.
He couldn’t take it any longer. Every nerve in his arm howled. He could feel the cold slicing its way down to the bone. He jumped back from the edge, curling around his hand like it was a newborn. The skin was warm to the touch, but the agony was very real.
By the time the pain subsided, Jason was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, with his arm still tucked tight to his stomach. The sun was low on the horizon, casting long amber bars of light into the room. Most of these never reached him. The hole was half the size of the living room now. One leg of the couch was already dangling over the pit. It was growing exponentially. He didn’t have until Julie got home. The rest of the room would be gone by dinnertime.
Unless…
He didn’t want to think about that.
A few minutes later, the couch tipped sideways. The bottom of it hit the lip of the hole with a boom. Then the whole thing slid forward into oblivion.
“What am I going to tell her…” Jason muttered aloud. It was a stupid thing to say. He knew it, but he was well beyond reason now. His whole life was plummeting down into darkness, and the only thing that could stop it was…
“Maybe it won’t be so bad…” he whispered, wrapping his arms around his knees. He knew it would be. There was nothing good down there. Likely, there was nothing at all. He would just fall forever, end over end, into nothingness.
It spread further and further across the room. The TV went next, then the bookcase, and finally the kitchen table and chairs. If Jason had wanted to retreat to the bedroom, it was now impossible. A great black gulf stood between there and where he sat. It had already started onto the kitchen tiles.
The room had grown colder, too. It was as though the emptiness of the hole was creeping outward into the apartment, robbing it of warmth and comfort. Soon, only the hole would exist.
I could run.
The thought was stark and sharp as glass. The door to the hall was behind him, past the kitchen. He could easily make it to the stairs and down the nine flights to the street. Nothing could stop him. Nothing but the dreadful certainly that the hole would follow. It would yawn wider and wider until there was nowhere to go. That or it would simply open again elsewhere. Either that night or the next. He couldn’t stay awake forever. It wouldn’t stop. Not until it had fed.
He stood on the edge, toes already over the lip. There was barely any space left to stand. The slightest nudge would have sent him toppling downward into the gaping black mouth. He knew what he had to do. The necessary thing. He hoped she would see the note he had left by the door—that she would understand.
Then he was drifting forward, arms at his sides like a child stepping nervously off the high-diving board. His stomach was in his throat. It was so cold. He didn’t feel it at all. The emptiness was happy to have him.
Julie came home an hour or so later. She put her keys in the bowl and tossed her coat on the back of a chair. The apartment was frigidly cold, so much so that she could see her breath puffing out like cigarette smoke.
“He must have cranked the AC,” she thought. It took her a moment before she realized she didn’t know who would have done such a thing. There was no “he.” She’d lived alone for a while now. Work kept her very busy. At least the place was nice and clean. Just a few pieces of tasteful furniture: a couch, a bookcase, a TV. The same things everybody had. All of it was dust free, and well organized.
There was cold pizza in the fridge. She didn’t take the time to heat it up. It tasted better that way. She sat on the couch and looked at her phone.
