The hole in the field

At the end of my eighth year, or perhaps at the start of my ninth, my family moved to a suburban area. Ten years before it had all been countryside. Since then, developers had converted it into an inane sprawl of identikit houses. It was the kind of place designed for young families.

I attended a school near to our house. Although I had few friends at the school, I was not especially ostracised or left out. I was happy enough.

There was one oddity about the school itself: in the centre of the main playing field was a large hole in the ground. It was wide enough that you could have dropped a car or a van straight down it. The grass grew all the way up to the edge of the hole. Indeed, in some places it even continued a metre or so into the hole’s gently curved entrance. Although I didn’t have the courage to get close to the hole, I could see it was deep. I would get within a metre, or half a metre, from where it began to curve down, and I would be seized by a sense of vertigo. I imagined the hole plunging deep into the centre of the earth. Of course I knew that must be nonsense, but I couldn’t bring myself to get closer and look.

The other strange thing about the hole was that no-one seemed to pay any attention to it. There was no fence to stop the children approaching the hole. There were no signs to warn them away from its edge. Nonetheless, the children avoided the hole. No-one went closer than a few metres to its edge. They seemed to be ignoring the hole. There had been a storm drain at my old school and my friends and I had spent hours throwing whatever we could find down into its murky depths. Nothing similar happened here.

Occasionally a ball would go off course, kicked by some child, and bounce off down into the hole. The children would gaze at the hole a couple of moments, and then would go and find a new ball to continue their game with, or start a new game. I never saw a child complaining about the loss of their ball, or any curiosity about retrieving it.

The teachers mirrored the children’s lack of interest. They would patrol the playground, cup of tea in one hand, monitoring and scolding the children as they played. I never once heard any of the teachers even mention the hole, let alone warn the children away. They seemed aware of the hole; they gave it a wide berth as they wandered about, but they didn’t seem to care about it at all.

Of course, I was filled with an intense interest in the hole. I imagined that there must be some hideous story that caused the children to avoid the hole, some child that had fallen in, or a tale of monsters emerging at night. But the children I spoke to told me no such story. They were simply uninterested in the hole, or anything to do with it. It was just a fact of life, and they seemed more confused by my curiosity than anything else.

The only other child that I could discuss the hole with was Dylan. Dylan had moved into the area a couple of years prior. Perhaps he too could not ignore the hole because he hadn’t grown up in its presence. We would stand as close as we dared to the edge, and talk about it. I can’t remember our speculations with any precision. I suppose we tried to guess how deep the hole went, what was at the bottom of the hole, how it came to exist, why it had not been filled in. I don’t think we came to any particular conclusions.

It was Dylan who suggested that the hole might not have a bottom at all. This thought, once expressed, became a common theme in our conversations. We started to develop a shared belief that the hole wasn’t natural, but some kind of entrance to an endless, plunging abyss. We speculated that the hole descended not into the earth but was more like a hole in the universe itself.

We took to throwing objects down the hole and trying to listen to the sound of them hitting the bottom. No sound ever emerged.

One day, Dylan suggested we lie down on our bellies and crawl to the edge of the hole to get a better look. Our mutual imaginings had inflamed my curiosity, but they had also filled it with a kind of hesitance. I felt a dread that manifested itself as a tightness in my guts. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know any more about the hole than I already did. But Dylan seemed unconcerned and his confidence reassured me.

We approached the gently curving edge of the hole, crawling like commandos. I paused at a point where I felt the ground begin to slope down, but Dylan kept going. He crawled until the upper half of his body was definitely past where the curve began. Fear of having my cowardice exposed drove me forward to match Dylan.

From here, we could see almost to where a bottom might have been. Within a few metres of the top the walls became dark and earthy and featureless as the light dropped away.

As I gazed down into the depths of the hole, the spinning nausea I felt from standing close to the hole returned with a vengeance. The only time I’ve ever felt similar is on swings. I’d be standing on a swing, going higher and higher, leaning back as my face turned to the sky and I’d be struck by the sensation of hanging off the edge of our planet, gravity the only thing holding me from tumbling endlessly into the vastness of the heavens. I would become dizzy and unbalanced and soon I would have to stop swinging and sit on the solid ground for a few minutes to overcome the illusion.

Here, though, there was no such reassurance. I could feel myself planted firmly on the ground, but below me gaped a vast, eternal void. I knew, I was convinced, that if either of us crawled any further we would plunge forever into this uncaring absence. I knew nothing could stop our fall. I knew we would starve to death before we encountered any obstacle.

I could feel myself mentally withdrawing. I stared at my arms, extended in front of me, holding my upper body horizontal. I saw them telescope away from me until they looked like someone else’s arms. It was like I was gazing out through my eyes, but from a metre behind where my head usually was. I noticed I could no longer hear the sounds from the field. A rushing humming sound that seemed to emerge from and resonate within my ears had replaced all else. I felt like I was experiencing my body as if it were separated from my consciousness by a vast, invisible sphere.

I told my hands to move, to push me backwards, and, as if they had received a message over a distant ocean, they did. As they obeyed I became aware of my shallow, panting breathing. I continued to push myself away from the edge, to crawl backwards back up the curve until, finally, I was back on flat ground. I closed my eyes and hugged the grass, letting the cold prickles of the blades bring me back into my body. My breathing slowed. The sounds of children playing returned.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that Dylan was still leaning over the edge. I tugged his foot, irritable, afraid. He shook my hand off and continued to stare downwards. I called his name but he didn’t reply. I sat for some minutes, watching him, before even that became unbearable, and I stood and walked away.

From then on, we didn’t talk. There was only one thing that we could have talked about and I was not prepared to discuss it, nor was there anything to say. Dylan took to spending lunches in the same position, lying as close as possible to the hole, staring down into it. I avoided the field when I could, though given the small size of the school, this was limiting.

I still had to pass the field to reach the school gate at home time. I noticed that Dylan would be out in the field after school, lying close to the hole. No-one else commented about his behaviour. No-one even looked his way. I imagine, like most of us, he had a few hours free in the afternoons before his parents expected him home for dinner. I never saw his mother at the gate after school, so perhaps she worked.

One day, Dylan stopped coming to school. No-one said anything, but I noticed that his name was no longer called out in roll-call. He had friends in the class, but I never heard anyone say his name. When I asked the others in class what had happened to him, they just looked at me. I couldn’t tell if they they had forgotten him, or they could remember him and just didn’t care. I dropped it.

I continued to avoid the field as much as I was able. Six months later, my father got a new job. We moved away from that neighbourhood to another similar neighbourhood and I started attending a new school.