It was a windowless square room, eight feet on a side. Earl Barrett walked its tiny perimeter obsessively. Its most recent occupant had vanished overnight, and Earl couldn’t even yell at a guard over it because this area wasn’t patrolled in the evenings. There were no cameras in the hole, only in the adjacent hallway. Earl had checked that footage earlier to no avail.
Jeff Archer, head guard on shift, stood at the open door. In addition to being a superb guard, Jeff was a nerd, always going on about science documentaries he’d watched.
“So they were talking about infinity, see, and explaining that it’s all around us,” Jeff said. “They said imagine an inch of empty space.” He held his thumb and forefinger up about an inch apart. “Now cut that space in half.” He moved his fingers closer together. “Then again.” He moved them closer yet. “You can basically do that forever and your fingers will never touch, because there are infinite little spaces between them. Cool, huh?”
Earl stopped his pacing and stared at Jeff. “What do you think the odds are that our prisoner was able to walk through this rock wall? Infinitely small?”
“There you go!”
“Make yourself useful. Collect everyone in my office. We have a full staff today, yes?”
Jeff nodded.
“Split the guys into four groups. One manages roll call and mess, one searches inside, and two search outside, fanning northeast and southwest. Got it?”
He nodded again.
“We need to keep this quiet, understood? No talking to prisoners, and only necessary details to team leads.”
“Yes sir,” Jeff said, and headed off.
Earl stretched and rubbed the back of his neck. He thought of lunch with Rita before remembering she was gone, had been now for three years. He’d eaten lunch with her every day for two decades, so he could be excused for forgetting. Still, he was ashamed every time it happened.
He entered his office an hour later and the phone rang, as if it had been waiting for him. He saw on the display that it was Gregory Reine, Chief of Police. He let it ring while he went to the small fridge in the corner of his office and grabbed a Dr. Pepper. A Pepper always calmed his nerves.
“I hear your guards are patrolling the woods this morning, Earl,” Reine said as soon as Earl picked up. “Something gone missing?”
“Like did I lose a contact while jogging or something?”
Greg chuckled. “Yeah, something like that.”
“It’s just an exercise, Greg. Do your men hang out around my prison now and wait for something to happen?”
“No. A jogger called in. Apparently one of your guys surprised her.”
“Listen, Greg, it’s a drill. With all due respect, I’m busy.”
“Okay. For your sake I hope you’re being straight with me.”
“Goodbye,” Earl said, and hung up.
He found Greg annoying, but he didn’t hate the man, although he had every reason to. Instead, he put the blame for his failed marriage where it belonged — on his cheating wife, not on her new partner. Besides, he had to deal with Greg all the time in a professional capacity, so a seething personal vendetta was imprudent.
He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and thought about the nonsense Jeff had been saying earlier about infinity. His marriage had seemed infinite, until it wasn’t. Even in the home stretch he’d been happy — clueless, but happy – and he’d foolishly thought Rita had been too.
His cell phone rang. It was Jeff.
“Initial patrols are complete, sir. Nothing to report.”
“Help me out here, Jeff, is there any place we haven’t looked?”
“We haven’t checked the arrival bays in the back. And there’s the pit.”
Earl rubbed his neck and tried to think. If word got out about this, there might be a public outcry. The aging prison’s safety had been a talking point in the previous year’s mayoral election. Nonsense, but propaganda often made a more effective weapon than the truth. “Okay, take a few of your guys to check those areas. Call me when you’re done.”
Twenty minutes later Jeff stood at attention in Earl’s office. He had just shared some concerning news.
“So the prisoner is dead, and his body is in the pit, in Utility Shed B?” Earl repeated back to him.
“Yes sir.”
“With a bullet wound to the head.”
“Yes sir.”
“Did anyone touch the body?”
“No sir.”
Jeff’s team were waiting in the hallway. Earl opened the door and motioned them in, then locked the deadbolt. For safety reasons, every door in the prison was securable by deadbolt requiring a key from both sides.
“I’m informed that you boys have found the missing prisoner. Since nobody can walk through walls, I have to conclude this was an inside job.”
Nobody moved or made a sound, but Earl felt the mood in the room tighten.
“Archer, Handy, White, you’re the only ones besides myself with a key to the hole. Has anyone had access to your keys in the past twenty-four hours?”
Three no sirs.
“Okay then, you three stay. Everyone else can leave.” Earl unlocked the door. “And remember to keep your damned mouths shut.”
Once alone with the three remaining guards, he gestured to a video camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling.
“I want you to remember that you’re being recorded. I’m going to interview you separately, and after that I’m calling the police. Jeff, you first.”
Ray White and Dennis Handy looked at one another as they sat down. Earl locked the door behind him.
Earl had a penchant for getting information from people. As a young man he’d worked security at a shopping center and had often drilled suspected shoplifters before the police arrived, a practice meant primarily to soothe the owner’s hunger for comeuppance since it had no real legal merit. Still, he’d always enjoyed making the guilty sweat. As much as he relished exacting punishment, however, he was not a big fan of the hole. Watching that heavy door close onto absolute darkness, not knowing when or if you would ever see the light again – personally, he considered it inhumane. This wasn’t to say he was above using it in extreme cases; it was also effective.
He would use it today because he had been betrayed by one of his own, something he simply could not abide. He didn’t know Handy and White all that well yet, but he knew Jeff very well, and liked the kid. Still, he would put him through the wringer today. If Jeff was innocent this would be a ruined day for him, one he would be reticent to speak of afterward. If he was guilty, the truth would ooze from him like a sliver squeezed from a finger.
Arriving at the hole, Earl motioned for Jeff to enter while he himself remained in the hallway. Jeff followed orders, as he always did. He was a tall guy, so he had to duck to avoid braining himself.
“Jeff, tell me…” Earl began, but he was interrupted when the ground shifted disconcertingly under him and the hallway filled with the sound of rock grinding on rock.
Earthquake, Earl thought, and instinctively spread himself against the wall.
Earl noticed with some wonder that the doorway to the hole had grown ledges at the top and bottom. It dawned on him that they weren’t ledges at all, but the boundaries of the hole’s floor and ceiling, which were coming together like the plates of some enormous C-clamp. Jeff tried to scramble to safety, but even though he only had a few feet to go he never made it; the room slammed down on him like a giant mouth.
The boom of the room collapsing made Earl’s teeth slam together hard enough to hurt. He threw his hands up and squeezed his eyes shut, sure he was about to die. The world fell quiet beyond his eyelids, until eventually he opened them and took a cautious look around.
The hole was back to normal. The wan light from the hallway made familiar patterns on the walls. There was no sign of Jeff, no gore from him being crushed. It was as if he’d never been there.
Earl was shaking violently. He felt cold all over. It’s shock, he thought You’re in shock. And why not. You just saw a room eat a young man for breakfast. He laughed, but what came out was a stuttering sob, a fragile, terrifying sound that echoed back at him in the empty hallway. He slapped a hand over his mouth and held it there until he was sure he wouldn’t make the same noise again.
He took a moment to gather himself, then went back to his office. Handy and White were having a conversation. They looked up when he entered. He was surprised to hear himself speak in a sharp, confident voice: “Dennis, you’re up.”
An hour later Earl stood in the pit, a small triangular enclosure against the main building serviced by an exit door and cordoned off by a razor-wire fence on one side and a high concrete wall on the other. Against the concrete wall stood Utility Shed B.
Earl fumbled the big key ring from his side, unlocked the shed’s door, and swung it open. Inside he found nothing, but not any usual nothing. A peculiar sort of nothing. Earl thought, with sick fascination, that the late Jeff Archer would have appreciated this particular flavour of nothing: a complete and total absence, not just of light, but of reality itself. Earl couldn’t keep his eyes on it; when he tried, his focus slid away like a bare foot glancing off a wet rock, and he ended up staring at the side of the shed, or his own shoes. He had to stop trying after a few attempts because he was getting a headache.
He closed the door and re-locked it, then stood in the hot sun for several minutes, unsure what to do. How had things gotten away from him like this? There had been a time when he’d commanded the respect of powerful men. Now he was just a timid old fart. He lowered himself carefully to his knees, then laid down on his belly. He entertained the thought of never getting up. As he lay there, watching his own breath lift combs of dust, something occurred to him that made him smile.
He got up, shook himself off, and headed inside.
It was time to call Police Chief Reine.
Earl ushered Greg into his office, gestured for him to sit.
“That’s alright,” Greg said, “why don’t we go to the hole? I want to examine the scene for myself.”
“We will,” Earl said, “but first I want to ask you something.”
“If you’re going to ask me to have your back on this, I can’t. You should have called this in hours ago. If you’re arraigned, I’m going to tell the truth.”
“No. Not that.”
Greg folded his arms. “Okay, what is it?”
“Why didn’t you ever stop yourself? Or at least tell me before Rita did. It would have been the right thing to do.”
“Okay,” Greg said, and turned to walk out. When he got the door he turned back to Earl. “You know what, I questioned whether I should come here today. But I thought, well, it’s been a while, you and I should be able to act professional with one another. I guess we can’t, so I’ll send someone else out to deal with this.”
“I’m sorry,” Earl said. “You’re right, it was unprofessional of me. Please.” He shouldn’t have asked, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. Even though he’d known he wouldn’t get a straight answer, it had felt damn good to ask. But he couldn’t have Greg leave now.
Greg stood on the spot for a moment, then said, “Alright, Earl.” He stepped back in the room. “I accept your apology. Let’s get on with this.”
“Absolutely,” Earl said somberly. “Thanks.”
As they approached the hole, Earl stopped.
“What is it?” Greg asked.
“I’m going to stay here. I’ve already drawn my own conclusions, and I don’t want to taint you with my bias. Go on, take a look. Give me your professional opinion. Tell me just how the hell a man disappears from a secured room like that, because, frankly, I’m stumped.”
Greg stared at Earl for a long moment as if trying to assess if he was being bullshitted. Then he nodded his head slightly, apparently satisfied, and started again toward the hole.
At the entrance he said, “Not much here. Nothing but bare…” Then the all-encompassing rumble filled the hallway; the floor began to shake.
The hole had one more trick up its sleeve. An enormous tongue shot out into the hallway and pinned Greg to the wall. Earl had just enough time to think that it looked like the dripping underside of a colossal slug before it jerked back through the doorway, pulling the crushed remains of Greg Reine along with it.
Earl clapped. He shouted. If only Rita could have…
Her voice floated through the hallway like a forgotten dream. He thought he was hearing things, but then she was there, at the far end of the hallway.
“Earl?”
“Rita?”
“Earl,” she said again, starting toward him, smiling easily. “Greg said I should stay in the car, but I wanted to say hi.” She continued toward him.
Toward the hole.
He ran. God how he ran, even when it was too late, he ran.
But the hallway was infinite.
Six months later Earl sat in Dr. Christopher Belwin’s therapy room at the Kingston Mental Health Facility in Ontario. Dr. Belwin had established Earl’s insanity at his trial, and during therapy sessions the two had become something akin to friends. The room was decorated in a calming blend of maroons and greens, the tranquility enhanced by a large, colourful oil painting of orchids on the wall. No stereotypical leather couch here; Earl and Dr. Belwin – Chris – sat on black padded swivel chairs at a casual angle from one another. A low coffee table spread with pamphlets on mental health separated them. There was a trust inherent in this room when Earl visited that he knew was not present for all of Chris’s patients. The leather straps on the arm rests of his chair, hanging unused, were blatant evidence of this.
Every session started with him and Chris watching the Green’s security camera tapes from the fateful day of the escape. So far this had been futile on Earl’s part, like the utility shed in the pit all over again — his mind simply refused to see, and he was forced to look away. Only today was different; today he had seen.
The hole hadn’t killed anyone. Of course it hadn’t.
The grainy video had no accompanying audio, so it all played out in an eerie antiseptic silence. He’d dispatching Jeff and the other guards with bullets to the head as they stood staring at him from the hole. He remembered now that he’d stashed their bodies, one by one, in Utility Shed B, beside the escapee, whom he’d also killed – that had been on the tapes from the night before, the tapes only he had reviewed. He’d killed Greg Reine with two shots to the chest and then danced deliriously around his body.
Worst, though, was Rita’s death. He had sprinted for her, and as he had, he’d pulled his pistol from his waist holster and fired three times. Weirdly, his gun arm had moved contrary to the rest of his body, a limb with an agenda of its own. He’d run like a madman to get to her, his one arm pumping furiously while the other leveled itself and fired.
“It’s going to be okay,” Chris said once they’d finished watching and Earl had had time to gather himself.
“Yeah, I’m alright,” Earl said, clearing his throat. “I think maybe for the first time in a long time.”
Chris smiled. “Can I get you a Pepper, Earl?”
“Sure, that would be great. Thanks.”
Chris went to a corner of the room where he kept a mini-bar stocked with comfort food for patients. He fetched Earl a cold Dr. Pepper.
Upon his return, he asked: “Are you really okay? You look pale. Do you want to lie down?”
Earl had been staring at the orchid painting. Now he turned to Chris.
“No, I’m fine. I just have to use the washroom.”
“Okay. You know where it is.”
He sat on the toilet seat, dropped his head in his hands, and moaned. His friend was right, he wasn’t feeling well at all. He should have said something when there had still been time, before the oily orchids had drooped right out of their ornate gold picture frame and bent to the floor. Instead, he’d acted like a nervous child with car sickness, trying to convince himself that as long as he sat still it would pass.
The shaking began, reverberating through his legs, rattling his insides, followed by the horrible roar of shearing concrete. He closed his eyes and tried to recall, one last time, lunches with Rita; watching television with her, eating in a shared bubble of silence.
Before he lost his nerve, he threw the washroom door open and leapt into the madness beyond.
THE END