Short Story: Harlan’s Holes
I sat and stared at holes in my wall one day before I started writing this. I’m pleased with how everything flowed together.
In 2021, this story won in the Adult Category for the All Pikes Peak Writes annual competition, sponsored by the Pikes Peak Library District.
This short story is included in the collection Regarding Dead Things on the Side of the Road.
Harlan stared at the hole. Over the past week, it had grown from a tiny dot into something slightly larger than a quarter. More than once he’d gotten close to it, tried to look inside, then backed away for what he convinced himself was a lack of interest.
It was just a hole in the wall.
So what if it kept growing?
He first noticed the hole—a pinprick at the time—after a battle with one of those godawful cockroaches that came out every time the lights went out or the rain fell. He assumed it was nothing more than a bit of cockroach gut which had splattered across the wall when his size 12 steel-toed boot smacked the life out of it.
The following night, appreciatively cockroach free, Harlan took notice of the hole again, now the size of a pea. He let loose a grunt of feigned interest and turned his attention to his dinner. Five days and five dinners later—still roach free—the hole was spellbinding, like watching static and looking for patterns in the noise.
The room Harlan occupied in the basement of Mr. Applebee’s home was nothing he wanted but all he needed. If anything, it kept people from dropping by. He certainly couldn’t afford one of those pleasant apartments, the ones with a kitchen and bathroom, but then again, he didn’t need much. A chair, a television, and a few books were all that Harlan really wanted. Dinner came from a can. Empty Gatorade bottles and cardboard boxes worked well for collecting waste, and there was a garden hose just outside the basement’s little window for that occasional shower to wash away the smells.
What he didn’t need was a growing hole in the wall. If it grew any larger, he’d have to talk to Mr. Applebee upstairs, a task made more uncomfortable by a nasty mole on the old man’s face. Aside from dropping off the monthly rent, conversation was practically nonexistent. Harlan liked his privacy, assumed Mr. Applebee was the same, and as long as neither one of them intruded upon the other’s life, everything would be fine.
He stared again at the hole. There were things that lived in walls—nasty things with horrible, gnashing teeth and blood-red eyes. At least, that’s what the movies told him. Baring such evil, there was certainly something sinister behind the oddity, and the more he convinced himself it was nothing but a hole, the more his mind attempted to fill that void with nightmarish scenarios.
Harlan knelt down a few feet away. It really was less like a hole a more like a blemish, devoid of feature. It almost hurt to look at, like a blind spot in a featureless world.
He leaned closer and blinked.
The hole blinked back.
Surely that was his imagination. Holes don’t grow and certainly don’t blink. He backed up against a far wall and stared. As unnerving as it seemed, he wanted the hole to blink again, if only to let him know his mind hadn’t been playing tricks.
He slowly took a step closer. The hole stared back—a single eyeball in a masonry face. With each step Harlan took, it seemed as if the eye followed him. That was insane. Eyeballs aren’t in holes and holes don’t blink, especially in the basement of an old man’s home.
It was all bullshit.
Harlan relaxed and grabbed a blanket from the couch. He needed to get some sleep and forget about the thing in the wall that really—unquestionably—wasn’t a thing in the wall.
Curled into a ball on the couch, Harlan dreamed of a koi pond. It stretched end to end in his basement with a breaker box floating in the air above. The box was rusted, its door ravaged by years of neglect. Written in red paint across it was the word “OUT”. Below that, by some four feet, the water of the pond covered most of the stepping-stones.
Mr. Applebee’s wavering and ancient voice floated through the basement. “Check the breaker for me, Harlan. I think one of them is tripped. Something’s wrong around here.”
Harlan looked at all the fish swimming. He took a deep breath, stepped onto a stone in front of him, then gasped as the stone shifted. He fell, smacking his hip against something hard. Wincing, he reached for what had tripped him up.
The stone was a skull, a hole about the size of a quarter punched through its forehead. The skull smiled its rictus grin as if to say, “That’s what you get for stepping on my head.”
Mr. Applebee called again. “C’mon, boy! Trip the damn breaker.”
Harlan opened his eyes.
His basement room was dark save what little light peeked through the door to the kitchen at the top of the stairs. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, tentatively checked to see if the floor was no longer a koi pond, and went back to sleep.
“Do you have any Spackle?” Harlan sat at the dinner table in Mr. Applebee’s kitchen, his leg bouncing nervously.
“You got a hole?” Mr. Applebee rolled his belly around in his hands before taking a seat.
“Had a hole. Now got two.”
“Hmm.”
Harlan stared at the old man, but the sight of the mole—with an inch-long gray hair sticking out of it—made his stomach uneasy. He supposed it was just a symptom of old age, but the man was not blind. Didn’t the thing wave back at him when he looked in the mirror?
“Well?” Harlan asked. “Do you?”
“Where are the holes?”
“In the wall. Far side of the basement. They’re—” Harlan cut himself short. Did he really want to say they were growing? Why not tell him one of them blinked? He looked back at Mr. Applebee and tried again to avoid the mole.
“Ain’t got any.” Mr. Applebee cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
The second hole grew faster than the first. Within a day, it was nearly the same size.
Neither of them blinked, however.
The koi pond was no longer full of koi. The skull he’d stepped on in the last dream stared up at Harlan as he stood in the water. The breaker box with the red “OUT” across the door still hung over the middle of the pond. If dreams had meaning—and Harlan was never one to discount the vividness of the subconscious—then the breaker box must mean something relative to his life. Maybe it was asking him to trip his own fuse, force himself back into some semblance of life where electricity actually flowed through his synapses like other people, the happy people on the television. Was living in a basement with two holes in the wall that stared at him and eating out of a can really a way to live? Certainly the meager sum he coaxed from the government and a few odd jobs couldn’t sustain life past thirty. Could it?
The skull rolled over, the jaw left behind. Harlan reached down and picked it up. The hole in the top of the skull seemed like a third eye, staring at some far off place that he could only know if he were in the skull’s situation. It was a strange skull, almost bleach white, more like a model from a biology classroom than the dingy yellow he expected to see.
He dropped the skull in the pond and looked up at the breaker box. For the first time, Harlan noticed the door standing ajar, inviting him to look inside. He tentatively took a step toward it. Another step, and he was within five feet of the box, almost close enough to reach out and swing the door open.
Harlan woke in a sweat. Light filtered in through the small window. On the wall, the second hole had grown to be the same size as the first.
Stretched below, shaped like a jagged smile, a crack had appeared.
“Look, I really need some Spackle. The holes have grown and I’m afraid critters might find a nest.”
Mr. Applebee turned from the counter, his fat following him in slow motion. He lowered rimless glasses and peered at Harlan.
“Grown?” Mr. Applebee grunted and waddled toward the table. “Holes don’t grow unless you make them.”
Harlan tapped his finger on the table. “I need Spackle.”
“You want to cover up the holes?”
“And the crack.”
“The crack? You didn’t tell me about a crack.” Mr. Applebee took a sip of coffee from a stained cup and set it back down. “Are you up to something down there?”
“No, I’m not.” Harlan unconsciously stared at the mole, the hair waving back and forth—a single blade of gray grass in a liver-spotted field. “Do you have anything to cover the holes?”
“Well, now, let me see.” Mr. Applebee took another sip. The hair fluttered.
“Forget it.”
The crack opened slightly from the previous night, while the two holes remained the same size. No matter which way Harlan looked at the wall, there was now a face in it. He still hadn’t seen the holes blink again, and almost convinced himself that the first time was his unfettered, can-fed imagination.
Without further thought, he picked up two socks and a pair of yellowed underwear from the floor and stuffed them in the holes. It wasn’t what he wanted, but it broke up the scene enough to make it look less like a face and more like two socks and dirty underwear in a wall.
He stretched out on the couch, sighed and closed his eyes, waiting to dream of koi and electrical things.
The koi nibbled at his ankles. Harlan kicked a few times, then gave up. They were koi—fat carp with annoying designs on their scales. How much damage could nibbling koi do?
The breaker box called to him again, and he obliged, pushing past the koi in the pond to get closer. He reached the door and swung it open. Just like he suspected—but more of a surprise than a relief—there were sixteen switches, eight on the right and eight on the left. He looked at the numbers and tried to pair them up with the faded sticker on the back of the door.
On the sticker was a list of names. Were they indications of the room they controlled? There was no one else in the house except for Mr. Applebee. Harlan guessed someone had created the list long before he moved in. Then again, it was a dream and if the breaker box was supposed to represent something his subconscious wanted him to see, then it made more sense that nothing really made sense.
“Where’s my name?” He listened to his voice echo in his dream basement. It bounced off the walls and returned to him in vibrations that registered through his body. Talking was a bad idea.
He looked at the first three names: Marcus Whitney, Joyce Dublin, Douglas Homan. None of them were names he recognized. They were mysteries, just like the breaker box, the koi, and those damned holes in the wall.
Harlan wiped dirt off the list and read the rest of the left side. No familiar names. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe this dream was nothing more than a twisted expression of misfired synapses.
Then again, this was the third time it happened.
He shrugged his dream shoulders, kicked a dream koi off his ankle, and read the right side. David Brady, Harlan Hutchings, Richard Chiz—
Harlan Hutchings?
Written in faded red ink was his name. Reading it, however, made more sense than reading the names of people he knew he’d never met or wanted to meet. He noted the number next to his name and looked at the switch. Sure enough, the damn thing had been tripped.
Just as he reached up to turn it back on, a koi took a bite out of his foot.
“Did you read the rest of the list?” The wall’s voice sounded concrete, solid, and maybe a little dry.
Harlan couldn’t move. The socks and underwear were on the ground, and in place of the holes were two very distinct eyes. The crack had widened a little more and grew lips, albeit cracked.
“Well, did you?”
“Look, if you don’t have any Spackle, do you have some boards and nails?”
Mr. Applebee shifted his weight, jiggling the left breast. He coughed and took a sip from his cup. “You want to nail boards into the wall?”
“To close the holes.” Damn that mole. “And the crack.”
“Right. The crack.”
Harlan knew he would not listen. The man was an idiot with a huge, hairy mole.
“Well, now, let me see.” Mr. Applebee took another long sip. “Nope. Can’t say I do.”
“Fine.”
The face greeted Harlan as he stepped off the stairs. “How ya doing?”
“Not well.” Why was he talking to a wall? For that matter, why was the wall talking to him?
“Did you get the boards and nails?”
“No.”
“How about Spackle?”
“No.”
The wall seemed to let out a sigh of relief. “Are you ready to listen to me?”
“No.”
The next dream was more or less the same with one distinction: where there was a skull before that seemed to smile at him, there was now a head that definitely smiled back.
He stepped around the head without a body and waded toward the breaker box. He thought he felt the eyes follow him, and in his dream world, the head even licked its lips.
Harlan stopped and looked back. The head indeed watched him as its tongue glided across its top lip. Just above the eyebrows, right in the middle, was the same hole he’d seen when the head was a skull.
He turned from the head to the breaker box and swung open the rusty door. He ran through the list of names again, looking past his own. Number 4 belonged to Nancy Jensen, then Petra Miles—more names he didn’t recognize. Right under the fifth name, however, was a faded group of letters. They were hastily scribbled unlike the others, the ink lighter. It looked like someone had tried to rub it off. Harlan gave up reading the first name, but the last name he pieced together: Applebee.
The fat, mole-faced old coot upstairs had infiltrated his dream. Harlan looked at the corresponding switch. It had been tripped, just like his.
What the hell?
“So, flip it back.” A man’s voice echoed through the room, the four words resonating through Harlan’s body in waves.
He turned to the severed head. “What did you say?”
“Flip it back.”
Harlan looked back to the switch and reached for his own.
The head coughed as if to get Harlan’s attention. “So, you’re stupid, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, to reset a breaker, what to you have to do?”
“Turn it off, then back on.”
If the head could nod, Harlan imagined it would have done so. Instead, it stared back while running its tongue across its upper lip. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“Oh,” said Harlan, and he took a step back from the breaker box.
“Ready now?”
Harlan sighed, sat on the couch and stared at the two holes and crack in the wall. It wanted to chat, and who was he to ignore the plea of broken masonry? He snickered. If walls could talk, indeed.
“Mr. Applebee isn’t right in the head.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Listen and don’t talk.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re the fifteenth person to live here, in the basement. He doesn’t charge much rent so he can lure the degenerates of the world, those who, themselves, aren’t exactly right in the head.”
“Thanks.”
“Not a problem. Just pointing out things you already know. How many koi did you count in your dreams?”
“Five.”
“There were thirteen. You’re not very observant.”
“And the severed head?”
“Number fourteen.”
“And me?”
“Number fifteen. You’re next on the list.”
“Next for what?”
“I think you know the answer to that question.”
Harlan sat back. A wall just told him he was in danger. The dreams he had must have been messages imparted by whatever was living in the wall and making it talk.
Why not? If the wall could talk, why couldn’t it also invade his dreams?
Weird stuff.
Harlan raised a finger as if to make a point, opened his mouth to relay that point, then simultaneously closed his mouth and put his finger down.
“You want to know what to do about it, right?” The wall looked as forlornly as a wall could.
“Sure.”
“Flip the circuit.
“Flip it?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all?”
“Flip it off, then leave it off. What do you think the breaker box controls? If everyone was given the chance to see the breaker boxes that hang all over this world, there’d be a lot fewer people to see the breaker boxes that hang all over this world.”
Harlan nodded. “Fine.”
He slept. It wasn’t easy, and he tossed about on the couch until fatigue beat out fear and a mind racing with more questions for the wall. Despite the trouble getting to sleep, the koi pond, breaker box and severed head came to his dreams.
“So, are you going to do it?” The head licked its upper lip. If a severed head could bob up and down in anticipation, Harlan imagined that was exactly what it was doing.
“Settle down. I’ll do it.”
The head smiled. Harlan stepped over a few koi and walked to the breaker box. The door seemed more rusted, and he finally understood what the word “OUT” scrawled in red letters really meant. It was a release, and the breaker box was nothing more than an ethereal life switch.
He swung the door open and looked for “Applebee”, or the rubbed-off semblance of it.
There it was.
Number 6.
On the right.
This was it, a chance to save himself from becoming the fifteenth victim, a side note in the pages of history, a severed head or a ghostly koi swimming aimlessly in a dream pond in the basement of a demented man’s home.
“Do it!” The head’s voice echoed through the room.
Harlan reached up…and stopped. A thought, a memory, crept up and bit into him. Why, in the first dream, did Mr. Applebee call out to him? Why did he ask to check the breaker box? Did he know something was wrong with him, that his life was somehow not right, and he needed Harlan’s help to get it started again?
The head growled. “Turn the thing off!”
There had to be a reason. His own switch was tripped—like his own life. He knew he couldn’t flip it off and on again to save himself, but what if Mr. Applebee was crying out for help? What if Harlan—given this gift by the ghosts and spirits and otherworldly fish and basement walls—now had the power to put back into place a life that was off?
“What are you waiting for?” The head’s voice was steely through the room.
“I’m not sure this is the right thing to do.”
“He’s a killer. Look at my forehead. Do you think I grew a third eye just for the hell of it? Do you think a talking severed head is normal?”
Harlan looked at the head again, surrounded by koi. They all seemed to look right at him, pining for justice. He felt like an executioner standing next to John Wayne Gacy, seeing all the faces in the crowd waiting for him to carry out the one thing they could not, the one thing of which they were incapable. And not because each of the faces in the crowd didn’t want to, but because they couldn’t legally carry out the sentence. Here, though, in the dream basement koi pond of Harlan’s mind, he could do what no one else had the power to do.
Harlan reached back to the breaker without looking and flipped the switch.
Number 2.
Right side.
Wrong switch.
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All text copyright 2021, Benjamin X. Wretlind
