The Hole

The following is a short, introductory story that I've been thinking about. Let me know your opinions.


Lucie was 11 years old when they took her. Her mother and father had been arguing again in the kitchen. It seemed like all they did was argue these days. Her mother wanted to have the freedom to go out when she chose to, whereas her father wanted things to remain the way they were. Lucie knew it was only a matter of time before they came to blows again. She dug her head under the pillow, pulling it tight about her ears.

The arguments began the day that she first noticed the hole. It wasn’t large then, nothing more than a fingers width really. It looked like the kind of hole a mouse would make, all gnawed at the edges. Lucie would idly pick at it, making it bigger. It was just in the ceiling in the corner of her room, above the bed. She had to climb onto the top bunk to pick at it and she never could work out why she felt the need to pick at it. But pick she did and the more she picked, the more her parents would argue.

Eventually she could feel the cold air of the attic on her face as she picked at the hole, some hands-width wide after she’d been picking at it for a couple of weeks. There was something about the hole she didn’t like. She could hear whispering but could never make out the words. The cold air on her face seemed to carry these mutterings and for a time, they scared her and she didn’t pick at the hole.

Her parents didn’t notice the hole, even when they came into her room. The empty top bunk where her brother should’ve been, never got looked at by either of them. Her brother had gone missing the year before, his twisted body found two weeks later by the side of the road. Lucie didn’t know that his eyes had been burned out and black streaks like mascara we running down both his cheeks. His face had been twisted into a visage of terror. He was covered in dirt and thorns as if he had been dragged through a hedge. The crime remained unsolved.

Lucie was home-schooled, and during her regular breaks from her work, her mother would go off to speak to someone on the telephone, another man. Lucie would take the opportunity to retreat to her room and pick at the hole. Her mother would be 30 minutes on the telephone and Lucie would pick for the whole 30 minutes, concentrating on the black space beyond.

And so on this day, burying her face under the pillow to deafen herself to the noise of her parents arguing, Lucie knew that there was only one thing that could help her zone out from the sound of the glass smashing downstairs and the shouting of her parents. Clambering out of bed, she began to climb the ladder on her bed up onto the top bunk. As she did so, the noise from downstairs got increasingly loud; her mother’s shrill voice screeching abuse at her father, whose deep rumble intensified with a torrent of horrid, black words that Lucie had never heard before.

Lucie moved closer to the hole, her fingers flexing as if preparing themselves for the task to come. Her mind became focused on that black, black hole as her finger sought the edges and began picking at the wood and paint, the shavings falling onto her brothers’ bed. As she began to pick, the noises downstairs abruptly change from shouting to the sounds of objects slamming into flesh with horrendous force. Little Lucie can’t hear it. She breathes evenly as she focuses on the hole, her fingers digging and scratching. Her mothers’ voice becomes a piercing shriek that is abruptly cut off. The sound of feet stamping their way upstairs, dragging something with them becomes evident but Lucie continues to pick at the hole. The stamping feet stop outside of Lucie’s door and the picking of the hole becomes even more feverish, Lucie’s fingers moving at an almost preternatural speed.

The door opens and shadowed in the doorway is Lucie’s father, chest heaving as he has in his right hand a knife and in his left he has the hair of Lucie’s mother, still attached to her head which is still attached to the bloodstained body he has dragged upstairs with him. A feverish glint is in his eyes as he advances towards his daughter, spying her on the top bunk. He mutters something as he begins to climb the small ladder, the head of Lucie’s mother smacking to the floorboards wetly as he drops it in order to facilitate the climb.

Lucie feels a cold blast of air in her face and her hair wafts in the breeze. She can see something in the hole now and she squints at it, her fingers no longer working at the edges of the hole. She suddenly becomes aware of her father’s face as it appears over the edge of the bed, teeth clenched and sweaty. He glares at his daughter who looks at him calmly.

“Hello daddy”

Her father pauses for just a second. Just long enough to bear witness to his daughter suddenly being grabbed by the face by a scaled, taloned hand from the hole in the ceiling and tugged roughly through it in the blink of an eye. He shrieks in terror and falls back off the ladder, impaling himself in the belly with the knife he still clutched in a death-grip in his right hand.

Lucie’s father bled out. Lucie’s parents bodies were found 3 days later after Police were called by concerned relatives unable to reach the family.

Lucie was never seen again.

Until now...





(c) James Batty 2010