I don’t know why they call it a ‘hollow’ when it’s full of water (sort of). It’s a quarry. But if I’m being honest, I live in a town full of assholes, so it’s no surprise they’d fuck up something as simple as naming a rock hole without any drainage. If I’m being doubly honest, I don’t really know what defines a hollow, so maybe I’m the asshole. (And before you think to respond to this story with NTA or YTA, I know what sub I’m in. And this ain’t that kinda story.)
Kinda terrible start, right? I’ll get to the scary stuff, I promise, but the name has always bothered me. There’s no ‘Burke’ in my town either. Fucking gets under my skin. Anyway, lemme set the scene.
West Nowhere, Oklahoma - A while ago
I’ve lived here since around the time they stopped letting you smoke in bars. Houses were cheap and I had lucked out and gotten into a car accident back in Kentucky with a delivery driver for a company that rhymes with UPS (because it’s UPS). They apparently had a birthday party with booze for some brown-shorted regional manager. The driver was tipsy. The lawyer I went to seemed pretty thrilled. I got a broken arm out of the ordeal and a big fucking check. I did sign an NDA with the settlement, but fuck em. We don’t have UPS in this town and I seriously doubt their ‘legal team’ could find me, so fuck them too.
Now, I grew up a hair richer than poor, so when I found an obnoxious McMansion at the end of a cul-de-sac for sale at a pretty damn reasonable price, you better believe I bought it. It was gross in a way that my mom would’ve found charming; big Liberace chandelier in the foyer, a ‘piano veranda’ (whatever the fuck that means), and an in-ground hollow in the back. See? Doesn’t work, does it?
I decided that I would put on the air of a high society, Dynasty-type for the locals, just to see what would come of it. And when I was invited to a garden party at one of my neighbor’s houses not three days after moving in, I started concocting a back story. I’d be an oil baron, naturally; one brat kid in boarding school and a dead or ex-wife, it was hard to decide which. I had decided, however, that my son, Pemsley, was a murderer and that I had sent him away to cover it up. I had also decided to be an over-sharer.
My hosts were a couple next door—the Martindales. Fiona, Paulson Jr., Paulson III, and a child they (hopefully) nicknamed Bucket ‘cordially invited me to attend an afternoon of refined frivolity. Black tie optional.’ Refined frivolity. Fuck yes.
Like a prick, I ordered a tailcoat and top hat online and brought a six-pack of PBR. I think I was expecting a different reaction than the one I got.
“Thomas, thank you for attending our party. Would you like to refresh yourself in the back with a beverage of your selection? We have all been anxiously awaiting your arrival. Ha ha you are the talk of the town.” Fiona Martindale smiled in a frowning kind of way and asked if my children would like to play upstairs with Bucket. She gestured to my beers.
Now, if that all sounded stilted as hell, it absolutely was. And as much as I had come ready to fuck with rich people, I couldn’t tell if she was fucking with me. Perhaps I was out of my depth, I thought, as I hugged my dewey aluminum children close and followed her through the house. She had actually said ‘Ha ha’ by the way. And not that it really mattered, but her Liberace chandelier was bigger and grosser than mine. It made me jealous in a nonsensically petty sort of way.
Fiona introduced me around to a number of immediately dislikable people. The Tillersons were apparently on the other side of me and Hank (but everyone calls me Buck) Tillerson asked me if a young guy like me knew anything about how to leverage the economic potential of BitTorrents. I told him I didn’t have a computer. His skinny daughter looked like she was going to laugh but didn’t. And after an awkward pause, we moved along.
It became apparent that my neighbors were all wealthy, but not quite rich. None of them asked me what I did or really anything about me, and none of them really shared much. Honestly, small talk and pleasantries aside, the greatest impression that all of them gave was a sort of tense apprehension that almost seemed like fear. Even Fiona Martindale, who spoke like she was being poorly dubbed into English had a look of unease in her eyes.
It was bizarre and I was entirely aware of that, so I think it was with an overabundance of awkwardness that I told my fake secret to the Hamilton’s.
Fiona spoke first with the silky ease of a mannequin, “Theodore and Madelyn, it is with pleasure that I make the introduction of Thomas who is new to the neighb—“
“My son killed my wife!” I blurted. The waveringly receptive smiles on the Hamiltons’ faces dropped. But not like they should have. Their new expression—one that seemed off-puttingly identical between them—was calm, almost peaceful, like one of those statues you see of Buddha (the skim one, not the chubby one).
“I- I sent him away to hide him.. From the law,” I finished, less confidently than I had started. The Hamiltons nodded, as did Fiona.
Were they fucking with me? I wondered. But as I wrestled with whether or not to continue with my ploy, I realized that the party had grown silent. I looked around. Bradens and Bransons and Melodys and Makaylas, all sharing the same fenced-in herd bliss, nodded in perfect unison.
What the actual fuck…
I think I laughed, because screaming seemed a little over dramatic and with that, a kind of nervous chuckle made the rounds of the party. Still no talking though. All eyes were fixed firmly on me and in my get up, I felt suddenly like an accidental magician. I shifted my weight, cleared my throat and in the painfully drawn out silence that followed, I realized that it wasn’t just the guests that were silent. Everything was. No birds, no wind, no distant lawnmowers. Silent.
“So—“
“You really must see Burke’s Hollow,” skinny Tillerson girl (Samantha, maybe?) interjected about six and a half figurative hours too late. The Stepford Cult seemed to agree and as their enthusiasm returned, so did the looks of fear.
So, clearly a hard pass, right? Well, to quote my ninth grade Biology Teacher, discussing me with my mom at a parent-teacher conference, “he’s lucky he’s a good looking boy.” In other words, I’m fucking dumb, but I’m smart enough to title a story in a way that isn’t entirely random. So yeah, I went to Burke’s Hollow.
Did I go right then? Yep. Did the entire party exit en masse to accompany me? Yep. Did I choose the relative safety of my own car, so that I could privately vocalize my misgivings about this whole thing and potentially convince myself that maybe—just maybe—it was a bad idea? Nope. I was there to be a thorn, a troublemaker, and with the strange display of performative unity of my new neighbors, I was fucking curious. But mostly dumb. Which led me to..
The Hamiltons’ Mercedes - Backseat
(Quietly dying inside)
“So how many chairs do you own, Thomas?” Madelyn asked, as if it were in any way a normal question.
“Uh..Six, I think?”
She shivered and made a sound like a whimper. I began to wonder if I had been slipped some sort of hallucinogen. Theodore compulsively checked the rearview mirror like I was a toddler with a switchblade.
“Was it quick?” Theodore asked, apropos of nothing.
“Was what quick?”
“Your wife’s death.”
Oh that. Time to make a choice. My fuckery barometer told me that they were better at this than me, so I decided to fess up.
“Not really, Teddy. My son used a grapefruit spoon and he didn’t start anywhere you might expect.”
The answer surprised me as it left my lips. I actually wanted to be straight with them, to become a slice of normal in the whole fucked up adventure pie. But no, instead I doubled down on the insanity. Theodore forced a laugh, a loud one, and a second or two later, Madelyn joined in, though I swear she was crying as she did.
As Theodore’s hammy guffaws died down, he asked, “Is that how it always happens then—with a grapefruit spoon?” His voice cracked a bit. Madelyn reached for his hand, which had been tightly gripping the gear shifter. He gave it to her and squeezed.
What the fuck was happening? Were they summoning the courage to kill me? Had the Hamiltons offered their car, because this was their turn in some upper middle class murder club? Was it a sex thing? Fuck. Probably.
Once again, my brain’s autopilot took over the discourse. “Not always. Sometimes it’s a teaspoon or a serving spoon, but always a spoon. It really depends on the tenderness of the flesh.”
Tenderness of the flesh?! What was I saying? I thought, suddenly embarrassed by my side of the weird social play. I needed to stop. I wanted to, but perhaps the lizard part of my brain thought that a cul-de-sac kill crew would be less inclined to murder a fellow psychopath.
Now, I want you, the reader, to understand something. I know that basing spoonability on the tenderness of flesh is creepy, cringily so even. I didn’t want to be that weird. (Although, if we’re being honest, there’s a certain logic to it.)
Madelyn turned slightly toward Theodore. “Six chairs, honey…” Now, she was clearly crying and my patience for the theatre unfolding in the front seat was growing thin. Madelyn wept in the direction of Theodore, Theodore stared at me in the rearview, utter terror plastered on his face. He didn’t blink. Didn’t break eye contact.
Didn’t see the man lying down in the middle of the road ahead of the car.
“Teddy! Jesus, look out!” I shouted. His eyes shot to the road, the tires of the car screeched on the asphalt and as the car rocked backwards to rest, Madelyn finally turned to face me with a look of bewilderment in her eyes. Then she seemed to look at the man in the road. Then she turned to Theodore and asked him something that made absolutely no sense to me.
“You held your breath didn’t you? At Potter’s Crossing?”
Theodore was clearly searching his memory for an evasive truth. His brow wrinkled and the color drained from his face.
“I- Sweetheart I was just looking for clues, for confirmation. We haven’t had a visitor in so long and—“ He and Madelyn shared a look that might’ve been more fitting in a romance movie set on the eve of some hopelessly inevitable armageddon. He sighed apocalyptically. “Oh, Maddie…I’m sorry. I wish I could’ve met our child. Fuck. I hope she doesn’t favor her old man in the looks department though. She’ll be lucky to have your eyes. Your smile.”
Theodore wiped the tears from her cheek with his thumb. Madelyn smiled meekly and leaned into his hand. She closed her eyes. Ahead of the car, the man in the road began to crawl on his belly toward the grassy shoulder. I felt as though I had fallen asleep watching one show and awoken to a completely different one. If Theodore was dying, why pick this, of all times, to deal with that?
Theodore seemed to be fighting back tears of his own. “You’ll tell her the good parts, right? She’ll know about me? About her dad?”
Madelyn’s smile gave way to snotty, glugging sobs and she took off her seatbelt to hug him. Meanwhile, the guy from the road was lifting himself to his feet. And as I focused on him instead of the tender moment that seemed cheapened by my presence, I realized that something was very, very wrong with him.
From a distance, he looked like a fairly normal shabby alcoholic. His face looked bloody, like he had been in a hell of a scrap, and he limped, dragging his left leg slightly as he shambled toward us. Madelyn and Theodore took note of the man too as he approached. But once again, their conversation drifted a considerable distance above my dumb head.
“He’s happy, Theodore—look.” Madelyn said, with a peculiar ring of optimism. “Maybe that means that—“
I saw the Adam’s apple jump in Theodore’s throat. “Happy isn’t good with him, Maddie…”
Her moment of levity dropped. So had my polite observation of the what-the-fuck parade. I might have been a touch insensitive considering the emotional team building that was going on in front of me, but I had had enough.
“Who the hell are you people?! What is going on?! Why is Teddy dying?! Teddy, fucking fight it, man! You have a kid on the way? Well, then be there to raise her not to spoon out people’s entrails through the navel! Scoop of liver, Teddy. Another of spleen. Succulent like a—“
I caught myself being strange again. Why was I doing that? Madelyn looked back at me with a look that seemed almost like devastated rage. Her body shook and her face seemed to have gathered all the blood that Theodore’s had lost. Theodore stared out the windshield at the asphalt napper who had gotten uncomfortably close to the car and who—
WHAT THE FUCK!
—whose bloody face wasn’t a face at all.
Where a normal person’s face would have been, this guy had a rubbed raw patch of blood and bone that looked like he had gone down on a belt sander until it came. And looking at it, Madelyn’s comment about his being happy finally made sense. He approached the back passenger side door, lowered his non-face to the window and tilted his head slightly to the side. There was a smiley face embedded into the wet plane of bare bloody muscle on the business end of his skull. And the smiley face [this type :)] was made of a hodgepodge of screws that jutted out from the bloody pulp on the front of his head.
I screamed, the theatricality of which now seemed perfectly appropriate. The thing outside softly tapped on the window. Madelyn buckled her seatbelt and drew her knees up to her chest. Theodore sighed the kind of sigh that a smoker could never manage, and then he turned to Madelyn.
“I’ve always loved you, you know that right?”
She cried quietly and nodded.
“You’re strong, Maddie. You always have been. You’ll keep being strong after—“ He trailed off. I kept finding myself looking back at the smiley guy as the dread of the whole miserable moment crept up. Why wasn’t Theodore driving off? Why all of the masochistic resignation. Just drive. Just drive. Just fucking drive!
“What if you drove, Theo?” Madelyn croaked, pulling the only smart notion from my dumbstruck dumb fucking skull. “You said I’m strong…you meant that, right? So let me be strong. Drive, honey. Maybe it won’t—“
Theodore cut her off with a look, which I assume is cultivated over years and years of productive marital strife. “He’ll get in. And the only thing I will have bought is a few more seconds of time wondering which of us will die first. You’re the strong one, Maddie. I don’t think I could do it.” He paused to gulp down a shaky breath. “You don’t have to look when it—when it happens.”
Smiley’s tapping was getting more insistent, his ‘face’ so close to the glass that a few of the more prominent screws had started tapping too. Meanwhile, my mind fixated on he’ll get in and which of us will die first. Who the fuck did I get into a car with, and why the fuck was Smiley so tragically normal for them?
Theodore turned back toward me, a mixture of contempt and resignation and fear all smashed together on his face. The whole expression told me that I somehow carried a part of the blame for all this.
“Go on then. Open it,” he told me. “He’s waited long enough. We don’t want him to leave and do something worse.”
Okay, so, I’ve never had a stroke as far as I’m aware. I’ve never been around someone who’s been in the midst of one. But I’ve seen enough television medical dramas to know that occasionally someone suffering from one says things that make zero sense. A small, whimsical part of me looked back at Theodore and wondered if he was presently able to smile with both sides of his mouth or touch his own nose (those are both stroke tests according to TV). Another, much larger part of me, simply screamed, ‘FUCK. THAT.’
But my Judas mouth said, “Gotcha, Teddy.” And my hand opened the door.
Now, I don’t know why this next part seemed far fetched to me, given that I was suddenly being driven in the world’s most fucked ride share beside a living NOPE emoji, but Smiley could talk. And he did so without a real mouth. And he sounded vaguely (100%) Canadian.
“How are you guys doing today? Me? I couldn’t be better, personally. Always good to experience the great outdoors on a Saturday, isn’t it? So much weekend ahead. Wowee . You know, there’s nothing quite like laying your head down on Saturday night and knowing that the next day is just going to be more beautiful weekend. No stress at all. Well, unless you’re going to church, that is. Lotta dress-up in that case. You folks religious? Cause I’m not, not that there’s anything wrong with…”
Smiley could talk…A LOT. And as he did, something about the pleasant banality of what he said made me feel nauseous. It reminded me of reading brochures for amusement parks or tourist traps during family road trips when I was younger. A whole lot of useless information drawing my attention away from the movement of the road. Or maybe it was that after he sat down, he remained entirely still as he yammered on. Or maybe it was just the shredded face full of screws. Who’s to say?
What I could say was that I was not a happy camper. Madelyn continued to sob in the front seat while gently holding her belly. Theodore white knuckled the steering wheel and hyperventilated. And I, wanting absolutely nothing to do with any of it, looked out through the windshield. I watched the brown grass and sparse trees pass. I watched the road stretching on ahead.
Then I saw a small rusted sign on the side of the road:
Burke’s Hollow - 5 miles.
And a smaller, newer sign below it:
Beware the Hanging Man. Follow the Rules.
r/decogent