HOLE

Tucker thanks the hostess for his iced coffee before leaving the shop. 

“Of course! Please come again.” She smiles and waves goodbye. 

The sweetness of iced coffee was his first taste when he got out of the psych ward. It made him less sad about missing precious time with his parents, as it reminded him of caramel candy his mother gave him as a child. He tried explaining it to her, but in her old age, it is difficult for her to remember most things. Even now, as he sips from his straw on his way out of the coffee shop, he recalls the moments during festivals or store visits when she handed him candies that tasted just like it. Most of his memories are the horrors of the asylum where they poked and scrambled his brain, mixed with vague visions, like dreams, of days before his psychotic episode (as the doctors called it). 

“Hey, watch out!” someone shouts.

Tucker stops to see the commotion, and as he turns his head, headlights blind his eyes. His world becomes dark; he becomes submerged in the familiarity of euphoria and death. 

Various human body parts fall from a dark gray sky. Garbled voices fade into screams as his spirit delves further down into a part of Hell, more horrendous and putrid than the Inferno. 

The fingers, legs, and heads squirm and flop like gasping fish. There’s a vast fire in the distance; it’s gray like everything else, but it’s the only substance in this strange plane that he can fully perceive. The flames crackle louder, and Tucker’s spirit becomes overwhelmed by the heat, yet he continues forward, speeding through a vast tunnel of discarded human parts to which the end is a horde of creatures crawling in the same direction. Beside the ranks of demons is a massive, horned beast pointing at the white light. As his spirit nears it, a soft, feminine voice speaks, “your son is going to be fine.” A crippling force of energy bursts from the void of light; Tucker’s spirit weakens and diminishes into nothing. He hears the voice again. “There is something concerning… about the back of Tucker’s head.” He understands the woman, but Tucker’s mind is elsewhere, deep in a tunnel, watching the hundreds of thousands of hideous monsters disappear into the light to express concern. Although the spot appears harmless, the doctors want to keep him for a few days. If he could scream, his lungs would burst hearing his mother’s voice agree to keep him there for longer. He questions if he’s dreaming, or if he never left the ward—perhaps it is another trick from the wretched Inferno! Tucker screams, but to no avail. His full physical body now stands among the monsters as he peers into the light. Vague images of his near demise replays, and all he can ask himself is how could he have been so careless? 

He can’t take his life for granted and just die after all he accomplished in the Inferno: murdered people with his bare hands; overcame his deepest fears and tests of agonizing pain; witnessed again and again the strange, false death of his mother, and through it all, he never never knew if he would ever escape. It was Hell. 

He staggers toward the light, getting tackled and trampled along the way, but persistent still. He charges with them, reaching out to his old self. 

“It’s… cold on the other side.” 

*** 

Steady beeps, the smell of mothballs, and the sound of someone gargling awake Tucker out of an anesthesia induced slumber. He gazes down at his blurry, frail hands and asks himself, “am I… alive?” 

“Of course you are, Tucker.” A man in a lab coat smiles at him from his bedside. “The hospital is ready to send you back home.”

“Home?” Tucker repeats. 

“Yes. We’ve done all we can do to heal you.”

“Heal?” Tucker’s mind is a blank space. For a second, he knew why he was in the hospital, but now it escapes him. “My mother…”

“Don’t worry. She and your father will pick you up today.” 

Exhaustion and a pounding headache leaves Tucker speechless. He can’t fathom why his brain won’t stop screaming for help, yet he won’t dig deep for reasons either—it hurts too much. Instead, Tucker stares at the white wall, lulling himself with a song he created for dark days in the Inferno. A knock at the door catches his attention, makes him blink an eye, the only reaction he can muster. Even when his mother and father walk in, Tucker has zero enthusiasm or motivation for anything. 

The doctors help his heavy body into the wheelchair to prepare him for release. Everyone appears to be a glob of black paint on a red canvas, or sometimes the scenery changes to a white hallway and everyone speeds past him in a blur. 

Sleep beckons him. The leather of the wheelchair is just as comfortable as the hospital bed. As his head tilts down for sleep, the shrieking voice that begs for help in his mind startles him. 

“You okay, son?” asks his father.
“I… I think so.” 

His mother assures they will have him home in no time, just enough to eat and then get some more rest. She presumes he was asleep the entire time he was in the hospital, but necessary introspection and hellish nightmares wired Tucker’s mind. A chilling breeze brushes his skin when the hospital doors open. His first reaction to the different weather is to scratch the back of his head. 

“Be careful not to damage the bandage, Tucker,” his mother says from the passenger seat. “We only have enough to change it according to the doctor’s recommendation.” 

“Yes mother.” He stops scratching but leaves his hand in place, counting how many times something thumps against his palm. 

Without notice, a gravelly voice intrudes Tucker’s thoughts and speaks to him in a foreign speech. He somewhat comprehends the sinister language, but trying to decipher it makes his head hurt even more. The back of his head itches, throbs, and aches. The foreign words grow louder and exacerbate the pain until a soft voice asks him for help. “You want… help from me?” He ponders who the interloper might be. All he sees are clumps of shadows moving in dim gray light until his father announces their arrival home and interrupts the search for the mystery dweller.

Nothing about the house has changed. The faint scent of lavender and old furniture still lingers, so does the traumatic experience of going into his father’s office that night. He knows what he saw wasn’t real. The doctors told him it wasn’t, yet the fear won’t go away. 

“Try not to think about it.” His father, who caught him looking at the office door, suggests. 

They open the door to his room, and as soon as the bed comes into view, his exhaustion becomes overwhelming. Like a dead weight, he drops on his bed. His mother’s lips press against his forehead. “Goodnight, dear.” 

“Goodnight,” Tucker yawns. And when the lights go down, so do his eyelids.

In his dream, a woman in a bloody and torn-up doctor’s outfit turns around and screams, “help!” 

“Who are you?” 

“Who said that? Tucker?” She yells. 

“How do you know my name? You can’t see me?” 

“Please… something hideous grabbed me and put me here!” She runs and disappears down a pitch-black tunnel. “Get me out of here, please! Tucker!” 

He chases her through the desolate plane, and when he reaches the tunnel, it is different. Unlike the scared woman who ran in, there is a disgusting layer of rotting skin that blocks him. Unafraid, yet cautious, he reaches out and touches the layer of skin with a pointed finger. Before he touches it, he gasps awake to an unnerving poke on the back of his head. Now, he’s panting in a dark room, cold sweat dripping down his face. Similar to how he woke up every day in the psych ward. Contemplating the dream he had becomes a battle between staying awake and enduring the excruciating pain of his headache.

Tucker falls back to sleep, having learned nothing, and drifts back into the nightmare where he left off. The skin is still intact. This time, he punches his fist through—a muffled scream shakes everything. Tucker pulls the skin down enough to see inside. More darkness, though the air is brittle cold. 

“Hello?” He shouts. 

No answer. 

He rips the skin and pulls it down, yells, “hello” again, and still no response, only a distant rumbling. A shriek echoes, scares his legs numb. He can’t run away from the stampede of monsters running toward him. The head of the woman he saw hangs by the teeth of a hideous, bug-eyed demon. They spread her other body parts out among them, chewed and half-eaten. 

Uncontrollable shaking and a rapid breath, legs stiff as floorboards, concerning heartbeat—he begs himself to wake up, “if this is all a dream… Please?”

“Tucker! Let me go!” 

“Wha–” He awakes to his mother gasping for air in his grasp, and a knife in his other hand. Murdering her never crossed his mind until this moment. He remembers hearing her voice in the Inferno. She was there, watching over him and plotting his demise, orchestrating every trial he endured to save her. “Why the fuck are you in my room?” He leans in close to stare at the deception in her eyes. “Who are you? You’re not my mother!”

Through restricted breath his mother replies, “you were supposed to die there.” 

The shock of her words releases the firmness of his grip. “What did you say?” 

“I knew something was wrong…” she coughs. “When your doctor disappeared out of the blue–”

Images of the woman Tucker saw in his nightmare flash in his mind. “How?” Tucker asks, ignoring what he believes to be lies. “How did I get to the Inferno?” He tightens his grip. “You put me there… didn’t you?” 

She begs him to stop. He pushes the knife in his mother’s throat. Her gasps dissipate, and her frantic, teary eyes become vacant. Anger helps drive it in further. A familiar voice in his head convinces him to go off the deep end—slaughter her, to make her regret being a horrible mother. It also tells Tucker to leave nothing left to recognize, and with a smile on his face, he obliges. A dreadful memory of the Inferno accompanies every blood gushing stab. It’s natural for Tucker to kill, so when the haunting voice of his subconscious orders him to murder his father next, he removes the knife from his mother’s face and exits the room. 

In the quiet hallway, his father waits for him. “We knew we had little time left. No matter how many times we’ve tried to kill you, you just keep coming back. Inflict whatever I deserve,” he mutters. 

Uncontrollable rage gives Tucker the strength to tackle his father to the ground and pierce his eyes and throat, taking his life with the same weapon he used to kill his mother. The inner voice applauds his barbaric efforts. “Their souls belonged to me.” Tucker jerks at the tingling in the back of his head, and when his finger digs inside the back of his head with ease, his heart pounds against his chest. It’s larger than his hand!  He reaches further into the hole in his head until a hard shell surface grabs him. “And now I have every tool I need.” The mysterious voice continues. 

***

A chain of rotted arms reaches out of the hole, stretches out to the bodies of Tucker’s mother and father and pulls them into the disgusting void where they will remain for eternity. The vile demon God, Hailsgream, ruler of the lowest depths of Hell, waste, and filth, presented himself to Tucker’s mother in a dream, manipulated her vulnerability and made her believe sacrificing her own son would cure her mental illness. Only fools make deals with devils and Tucker’s parents were no exception. The God reveals this and more to Tucker as it guides the distorted and obscure creatures of its army out of his decaying skull. It took decades of planning to manifest the ritual; three sacrifices needed to create a portal for Hailsgream to walk among humans like other demon gods. With Tucker’s body as a host, albeit now an inhuman carcass, the God of all things vile will infect humanity and expand the lowest parts of Hell.

The house rots from the inside-out, grows appendages and mold and demonic maggots, the walls morph into human flesh, and a river of green and gray acid develops on the floor. The smell alone is enough to kill or induce sickness throughout the neighborhood. Surrounding nature decomposes and forms a purple and black hue in the atmosphere. Not long before this part of the world is devoured. 

THE END