My new property has a sinkhole.
I was warned, when I purchased this house, that there was a repaired sinkhole in the back of the forty-acre property. This was a good thing, in my mind - repaired sinkholes rarely open back up, and they lead to a discount since everyone’s so horrified by the thought of a sinkhole swallowing them up in their sleep. So I put paid the $60,000 down payment I’d been saving for some time, planning to live in the house and put an RV park on the property in about a year’s time once all the permits went through.
Everything was fine until six months in, when the sinkhole started to reopen. I found its concrete cap in pieces. It shouldn’t have happened. It was poor-quality concrete, I guessed, or maybe the shifting ground had cracked it. Whatever the case, my lawyer said I had to fill it in again and fence the area off, lest I be liable for any idiot who trespasses onto my property and falls in despite the glaring signs reading “Sinkhole!” “Danger!” and “Private Property - Trespassers Will Be Shot.” Besides, I had to make sure the sinkhole was taken care of before I could even think about opening the RV park.
I called a different company than the one that did the initial cap, and they came out and re-capped the sinkhole. I fenced in the area for good measure, added some more threatening signs, and got started on my zoning permit for the RV park. This land was a good spot, at the base of the Ouachita Mountains, flat enough that RVs could park there but close enough to the mountains that one could go climbing, or skiing, or even venture twenty minutes to Lake Ouachita for all the watersports one could imagine. It was perfect.
I didn’t regret for a single second that I spent all my money to buy it.
Then, the cap broke again. The city came out, saying I needed a bigger fence, and another company to cap the sinkhole. I was getting irritated at this point. At this rate, they’d never approve my RV park license or commercial land use request. That night, I spent an hour sitting by that sinkhole, drinking a beer and staring into the bottomless, black heart of my enemy. I wasn’t afraid of it. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t.
Most of the concrete had fallen into the hole. I could see some of it sticking out of the hole’s sides, which was expected. I squinted, mildly intoxicated, and crawled closer to the hole. I could hear what sounded like water running as I lowered myself to the ground. There was something on the shattered concrete. Like scratches, in groups of three. I got a bad feeling. It made me think of what my pastor always said about demons, marking things in threes to mock the holy trinity. I knew demons weren’t real, or I should have, but I couldn’t stand staying close to that wretched hole. Maybe the devil was mocking me. The devil hated success, after all.
Once inside, I turned up the TV to drown out my thoughts. It was reality TV, which I hated, but it did the trick. It was so loud I almost didn’t hear someone knocking on the door.
“Come on in,” I said. I never locked the door. I didn’t need to. There were only two people who ever came by.
“Heard the sinkhole opened back up.” The voice of my neighbor Charlie came from the kitchen. I heard glass clank against the counter. He’d brought a six-pack. Good guy.
“Yeah,” I said, turning off the TV. Thoughts returned, anxiety about my dreams of owning an RV park, and fears this venture would fail like my others.
“It’ll never stay capped,” Charlie told me. He’d told me before, but I’d ignored him. “There’s something evil in the ground.”
“No way,” I said.
He walked into the living room and sat down. By his disheveled look, he’d had another fight with the wife and been kicked out. I told him he could always come by, I could use the company. It could be very boring living here sometimes, with nothing to do but drink, smoke, and stare into a bottomless pit.
“This was my grandfather’s land.” Charlie handed me a beer. “But before it was his, it belonged to John West.”
“So what?” I asked. “Of course it used to belong to some dead guy.”
“No, I mean John West. The John West.” He said the name like I should have known it. I nodded and took a drink of my beer, lacking the interest to press. He continued. “Rumor has it John West wasn’t his real name, but we’ll never know for sure. They say he was a successful gold trader who found treasure and then decided to retire here at the base of the mountains.”
Ok, treasure was enough to pique my interest. “Oh?”
Charlie nodded. “It was valuable stuff, Roman gold coins from what people said. I don’t know what it was doing here. He sold it, made some money, and everything was going well for a while. But then the coins started finding their way back to him.”
I chuckled. So it was just another of Charlie’s tall tales.
“No, really,” Charlie said. “The coins would appear where they shouldn’t have. In his bed, stuck to the ceiling, in his washtub covered in blood. One day, he woke up and there was a coin where his eye should have been, and he asked my grandmother, a healer, to help him. She was a witch - which was very controversial at that time, you see - and saw that the treasure was possessed. She helped him perform a ritual. They put the gold in a box, then he and my grandfather buried it somewhere on the property.”
“Then why haven’t you dug it up?” I asked. “That sounds like a lot of money.” A lot of money I could use, for sure.
“Because of what I’m about to say next,” he said. “The gold wouldn’t stay buried.”
“What do you mean, it wouldn’t stay buried?” I asked. My thoughts raced about the sinkhole, all the debt I was in, and all my hopes and dreams possibly being dashed.
“The coins found their way back to him again,” Charlie said. “They always did, no matter what John or my grandparents did to help him. There was a demon in those coins, something pre-Christian, a beast brought to the new world by foolish traders hoping to make a quick buck. One day, John disappeared. But he left a letter. In it, he left the land to my grandfather upon the agreement that no one ever occupies it, saying he had finally buried the coins for good.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
Charlie shrugged, then took another drink. “I dunno. But my uncle had to sell the land to pay off some debts, and now you live here. Maybe we’ll find out.”
Charlie and I watched some mindless reality TV before he left to go make up with his wife. It was dark at that time, but when I went to bed, I could only toss and turn. I was frustrated. That damned sinkhole. What was I thinking, buying this property? Was I really so arrogant, so foolish to ignore something as threatening and powerful as a sinkhole?
In my stained tank top and boxer shorts, I grabbed a beer and put my boots on. I then walked back into that corner of the property where that darn sinkhole still mocked me, sat on a rock, and stared into it as I’d done earlier. I’d spent all my money on this place. I couldn’t even afford to have the damned thing capped again, as I was still in debt from the last time. I sat there thinking that, cursed or not, I could have really used those coins. When I finished my beer, I threw the bottle into the sinkhole. The glass broke and glimmered in the full moon’s light.
But there was something else there, too. Something cubic in shape. No way.
I was just drunk, desperate, and stupid enough to crawl into that gaping maw. And so I did, shimmying down its side. It was hard to tell what was solid and what was not, so I slowly made my way toward the object. It wasn’t there earlier, and I could have sworn it moved closer to me as I crawled toward it.
I lifted it. It was heavy, but once I used all my strength, I was able to throw it to stable ground above me. I climbed out of the hole. The box had already popped open, and gold was spilling out. It was easy, too easy. But, being in that state I was in, I reached down and picked it up.
My heart raced. There was no such thing as demons, but it seemed Charlie’s story about the coins was at least somewhat true. I guessed that John West had just buried the treasure, now conveniently unearthed by a sinkhole. Now I could afford to cap that sinkhole a hundred times over. I could lay so much concrete over it that it would never see the light of day. I smiled.
But damn. I never should have touched that gold.
I sold it a few days later, to a local guy I knew wouldn’t report it. I didn’t want to pay tax on some old coins. But three days later, I woke up sick in the middle of the night, rushed to the toilet, and vomited up a gutful of gold.
Shit.
I walked to the neighbors’ place to see Charlie, but he was asleep and I’d hate to wake up the missus. She had quite a temper. So, not knowing what else to do, I made my way to the sinkhole. Broken concrete lay inside it, around it, covered in claw marks in groups of three.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“You.” The voice came from the darkness below. The dark ground shifted beneath the moonlight, revealing a human ribcage emerging from the dirt. So that’s what happened to John West.
I find myself out there more often now. Vomiting coins, pulling them out of my shoes, finding them in previously unopened beer bottles and soda cans. I tried to put the box back where I found it, only to wake up with it next to my bed. With every coin that appears, the money I got selling it disappears, and now I’m trapped, alone, and broke. And I know that any day now, I’ll end up in that hole alongside those wretched coins and the man once known as John West.