The Dark Corner

There was a hole in the ground and the hole was hungry. 

Throw in the little girl and the boy will follow. Strapped up and ready to fall, down he went, sack and all. 

The moon participated in this conspiracy, its silvery emanations peeking through the tendony branches of the trees like a Peeping Tom. 

Nothing was said, nothing was mentioned. 

A storm raged over and it rained and it rained and the hole filled up and then it drained. 

By morning, the only thing in the blue, blue sky was a sun that baked the wet, wet leaves. 

# 

“This place been in your family long?” 

“Heck, Mr. Pickles,” replied Beanie, sitting on the other side of the table, a blank porcelain plate and steaming teapot between them. “I haven’t even been in my family long. Who owns things for a long time now anyway?” 

The windows in the kitchen were misty with spiderwebs. In the driveway was a van with vinyl wording across the side door: Pickles’s Landscaping Services. 

Mr. Pickles’s brow was flushed and sweaty. He scribbled furiously into an oversized notebook, which he had withdrawn from his overcoat. “Nice location. Secluded. As is ideal—for you and everyone else. I haven’t noticed any cats. That’s another good sign.” 

“Oh, yes, right,” said Beanie, “Those cute fluffy things. Can’t stand them either. Cats? Yuck.” 

Mr. Pickles dabbed at his forehead with a red handkerchief, saying, “Some weather we’re having. Ninety-five degrees in October. Nothing says spooky like a heat-wave.” 

“Golly, I’m so glad you’re here to talk about the weather. More cookies?” 

“The pumpkin pie on the windowsill smells awfully good.” 

“It’s awfully hot,” asserted Beanie. “A shame you came so early. Maybe something for this afternoon.” When the oven dinged, a watermelon grin came over her face. “You’re right on time for a second batch of oatmeal cookies though.” 

Mr. Pickles went into a coughing fit and his face ripened into a tomato and veins like garden worms surfaced below the skin of his temples. “Sorry about that. The heat gets into my lungs.” 

“More tea?” 

He pocketed the handkerchief. “Buttering me up won’t change the facts. Inspections like these come only when alarm bells start sounding. And I heard them all the way from Wyoming.” He was already pushing himself up with his walking stick when he said, “I think it’s time we went out back and saw what’s going on.” 

“Your inspection, huh.” 

“Yep.” 

“Out there in the garden.” 

“That’s generally where the garden inspection happens.” 

She reluctantly opened the back door for him. Fitting on his wide-brimmed hat, Mr. Pickles, with spavined movements, waddled out into the large, spacious property, his walking stick working as an extra leg. A wooden fence with peeling, curling paint scars enclosed the garden, and beyond it​,​ copious amounts of autumnal trees led northward into a thickened natural wood. 

She joined him outside carrying an umbrella, which got Mr. Pickle’s attention. 

“You expecting rain?” he said, grinning. 

“You can never know what you don’t know.” 

“You’re an odd one, Beanie. But it’s a lovely place you’ve got here. And all the trees starting to lose their leaves. Idyllic.” 

“Of course—leaves can’t stand the trees so any chance they get to scoot, they scoot. Once a year that happens.” 

Mr. Pickles hobbled around the backyard for some time, tapping at the arbor and moldering furniture and ornaments—a couple of gnomes fishing in an algae-ridden pond, a rubber boot holding up chrysthans—and then he commenced kicking at the sward, trying to free himself of a root that had caught him. “Goddamn root got my ankle.” 

“Gee, that’s unlucky,” said Beanie. “Don’t be so brusque. The more you struggle the tighter it’ll get.” 

Finally​,​ Mr. Pickles broke free of his bind. That’s when he really noticed how wild it was out here. Noises in the trees made him swing his head around. What’s that over there? was his expression. “Thought I saw some big yellow eyes. Thought I heard some rustling. I hope it wasn’t a cat.” 

The ground rumbled and they both heard the grumble from the belly of the earth. 

“Golly, that wasn’t me,” she said. 

“Of course it wasn’t.” He fitted his walking stick under his arm and slipped on a pair of leather gardening gloves that had been stuffed in his back pocket. “It came from … Oh, carrot.” He raised the handkerchief to his nose. “That smell. You got a sewage leak, Beanie?” 

“If I were a betting lady​,​ I wouldn’t be betting on that.” 

“I think you might be right. There’s something else going on here.” 

In the vegetable garden—where turnips, pumpkins, and squashes were in varying stages of rot—he discovered that the twisting, leafy vines all appeared to lead to a hole, around which was a scattering of rotten clumps of peaches and broken bones small enough to have belonged to an animal. A large animal maybe. There was a long one that could have been a child’s tibia. 

“You haven’t been feeding it peaches, have you?” Mr. Pickles asked. 

“No, there was a hiker a week ago, had a basket of fruit. Odd thing, he didn’t want to give it up, so he went down with it.” 

The notebook was out again​,​ and Mr. Pickles was making observations in pen. Occasionally he spent a moment squinting at the pumpkins and turnips that had grown in such a way that they had human faces scrunched into them. “I’ll be honest. It doesn’t look good.” 

Beanie’s face took on the wrinkled aspect of a lettuce when she frowned. “Oh, golly.” 

“When’s the last time you fed it?” 

“Just last night! Two little kids wandering in the woods! A sack each!” 

“This is a bit of bad marmalade then. I just don’t know what to tell you. You’re going to have to feed it more, and more often.” 

“More?” 

“And more often.” 

“How big you think Cornville is? Soon it’ll just be me, Boyle, and the sheriff. They’ll team up and bury me in my own backyard.” 

“You own the land​;​​ you own what’s on it. You’re responsible for it, Beanie. In the early days of the European settlers some fraternity types made blood contracts to look after this land. Anyone still in possession of those original plots is required to uphold that original deal. It doesn’t matter a lick if you like it or not.” 

“This isn’t even my family land. I bought this place only five years ago.” 

“And when you signed that deed you took on this ancient burden—that’s why it’s important that land goes into the right hands. I fear you might have already attracted the wrong attention.” 

Beanie, standing there diminutively, picked at her fingernails, her head bowed as if in prayer. 

Mr. Pickles, swatting at an engorged fly bothering his nose, continued: 

“They’ll come for you and you won’t even know it at first. They wear other people’s faces because they don’t have faces of their own. I was just in Nebraska last month. Hiram Hersch had a hole as stinky as yours by his old outhouse. Well, I warned him, same as I’m warning you now. You know what happened?” 

Still​,​ she didn’t look up and remained in cogitation. 

“His wife woke up the next morning to someone wearing her husband’s face. I ain’t one to tell a tall tale. He was sitting at the breakfast table as though nothing was out of the ordinary. But she knew—oh, boy, did she know. Now, I was on the road by midday and I didn’t turn back and I don’t want to know what’s become of that farmstead or the entire town. But it’s been happening all over the country the last couple of years. It’s like they can’t be sated like they used to be. The holes start stinking up, and then Orchard Keepers come and take over the properties and the owners. And the owners, Beanie. Maybe they’re trying to put wrong things right, or maybe they’re in cahoots with the creatures of the earth.” He paused and retched, pressed the handkerchief harder against his nose. “My job is to make sure this doesn’t keep happening. So, I’m imploring you—fix your damn responsibility.” 

When Mr. Pickles finished talking, he struggled to get down on one knee and have a closer inspection of the aperture. There were places of the earth that were separate from the earth and yet connected to the earth, and they hungered. Well-sized holes, concealed by weeds, piles of scrap and crap. Most holes had a pungent scent. This one was worse. It had chronically chthonic flatulence. 

A steady stream of hot air billowed up and out. The walls of mud expanded and contracted, and when the warm breeze faltered for a moment he could hear the deep guttural rumbles of a hungry tummy. 

While he was looking down with his back to Beanie, the handkerchief fitted over his nose and mouth, she reached for ​a​​ shovel sticking out of a mound of dirt. Clasping the shovel so tightly that her knuckles stretched white, she got it above her head and brought it swinging across the back of Mr. Pickles’s head. She felt the wooden handle shudder in her hands. He fell hard on the ground but he was still conscious. Bleeding but conscious. Blood dripping off his neck onto the soil, but still conscious. 

Two tortoiseshell cats galloped out of a hedgerow and took turns smooching him. 

“Were you going to hit me with that shovel?” he said, in some kind of delirium. One of his eyes had turned black and puffy. He touched the back of his head and looked at his fingers. “Did I fall into strawberry pudding? No, I think you did hit me. I bit my dang tongue, too.” 

She hid the tool behind her back. “I wasn’t. I didn’t. You tripped over your dang feet.” 

“And then you were going to feed me to the hole. This is a severe infraction, Beanie. I’m going to have to report this.” 

“You haven’t given me a lot of options, Jack Pickles. The hole is hungry. I’m doing as I was told. The children were too small. You’re not small. You’re just right.” 

“Not me, you dingbat! The Orchard Keepers are going to turn you into a sock puppet. I hope you aren’t too attached to your skin. In the meantime, the hole is going to get hungrier and hungrier until it eats up the entire town. Help me up?” 

Then he realized Beanie was grunting and groaning and he was rolling and rolling toward the garden mouth. 

“Beanie!” he managed to shout. “Don’t do this!” 

The ground shifted. The opening moved as a mouth moves. It began to dilate—the bones and peaches rolling down into it—and odiferous belches of sphincteral gas geysered up, up, up. Many of the turnips had expressions of ravenous surprise. 

A root snaked out and wrapped around his legs. 

“I’m begging you, Beanie!” 

“You gotta be gobbled up, Jack Pickles. The land’s gotta be fed and I gotta feed the land. Those words belong to you. There’s only so many bumpkins I can throw down here. You know it, I know it, it knows it.” 

Mr. Pickles dug his fingers into the soil to try and prevent his doomed fall, but the network of hampering roots ​​​was​ pulling him netherward. He was flailing as he went down, down, down, so he screamed, screamed, screamed. A thin twig switched across his cheek, drawing blood. He’d lost his hat and his stringy hair looked like spider legs across his balding pate. 

A ​​solitary cloud covered the sun, and the garden dimmed. 

Then a sullen and irreversible crack thumped out as bones began to splinter. A mighty scream came after. Beanie opened the umbrella just as a stream of blood spurted out of the hole and rained down onto the garden furniture, the gnomes, and the canopy of her en-tout-cas. The last thing she saw was Mr. Pickles’s face cursing her, veiny and red and about to pop like a bulging zit, and then when that too dropped out of sight, the screaming came to an awkward cessation. Another deluge of blood vomited out of the hole while she stood there solemnly and whispered to herself a sullen threnody. 

# 

The weather vane was having a seizure in the gust​s​ of wind. 

Beanie heard the squeal of the sheriff’s car out front. Through the window she saw him get out cupping his eyes from the evening sun. He was by the garden gate looking over the vegetable garden when Beanie walked out, hands on her hips. 

“Help you, Sheriff?” 

“Just admiring your garden, Beanie. Kinda looks like faces on them turnips and pumpkins, don’t you think?” 

“You can get a better view of them from the kitchen window.” 

The sheriff mounted the porch and walked through the door that was held open for him. Beanie put on a teapot to boil. 

“Let me get right down to the belly of it,” said the sheriff. “This morning a man came into Boyle’s Diner. He drank carrot juice and ate a piece of cherry pie. The tragedy being that it was the last piece. Anyway, he made a show of announcing to everyone that his name was Jack Pickles.” 

“Jack Pickles, you say?” 

“You heard of him?” 

“No, never heard that silly name in my life. But go on. Though before you do, I hear pumpkin pie can help with a story, and I just so happen to have one, nice and cool.” 

The sheriff was licking his lips when he accepted the plate with a perfectly cut slice of pie on it. “I think we should go out to your garden,” he said, already standing up. “It’ll be nice to watch the sunset through all your lovely trees. In fact, we could find a spot in the garden while I tell you about Jack Pickles, and you tell me how those vegetables got their faces.” 

Beanie was just getting to her feet when she saw it. The lines around his face. Like seam lines in a pair of jeans. That made her aware of the red blotches on his collar, absorbed by the fibers. And then she noticed his hands and the loose skin, as though he were wearing a pair of skin gloves. 

“So​,​ all this is about Jack Pickles?” she asked. Her voice didn’t have the authority in it that it once had. 

“That’s right.” 

“And people at Boyle’s Diner said he had breakfast there this morning?” 

“They told me right to my face.” 

“To your face, huh? That face right there?” 

“Sure. His words were, ‘if someone hears about ol’ Jack Pickles going missing, go check on Beanie McKenzie on Sprout Lane.’ This is Sprout Lane, if I’m not mistaken.” 

Beanie swallowed and nodded and the sheriff watched her throat clench up, and she said, “How come I got this feeling you aren’t the sheriff?” 

“Feelings, Beanie. Just feelings. Let’s go see that hole.” 

“What hole?” 

“You know the hole.” 

“I think I want you to leave. I’m all of a sudden not feeling well.” 

The sheriff stabbed a piece of the pumpkin pie with a fork, and when he opened his mouth the entirety of his face shifted downward, exposing another layer of lumpy skin and part of an orbital socket that contained an enlarged eye squeezing against the cavity. His mouth and lips looked like a deflated balloon. 

“Excuse me,” he said. “Now that’s embarrassing. Wow, this pie is something else.” He licked his lips with a gluttonous tongue, a drippy tongue, a wiggling tongue. “You just can’t beat homemade baking, can you? Come on, Beanie. We’re going to the garden even if you don’t want to. And you know that.” 

The teapot bubbled and steamed, steamed, screamed. 

Robert Weaver is the author of several short stories, novellas, and novels, including Blessed Skeletons, Ride Upon Midnight, and Candle Horror. When not writing or reading, he enjoys listening to falling rain, drinking coffee, and shaking an angry fist at the sun. He’s an advocate of having a year-round countdown to Halloween.