The folk on the wagon stepped around me, leaving me to gawk in awe at the hole.

By the way, the Elders had talked, I’d expected to find a couple hundred little holes, pocked throughout the field. But nothing could be further from the truth. What lay before me was one gigantic hole. From end to end, it might have been fifty yards across. The hold dropped another fifty feet with a spiraled path leading down along its sides. The quark screw paths were wide enough for horse and buggy to travel, though I doubted anyone would have been crazy enough to drive them down.

“Kids dug this in only three months?” I said to no one in particular.

“No,” the Reverend said as he headed under the marque style tent. “A lot of the adults helped them.”

That didn’t make any sense. I followed after him, ignoring the way seemingly everyone turned their noses up at me.

“I thought it was only the children affected?”

Inside the tent, a woman waited behind a makeshift table. I recognized her, but couldn’t quite place who she was. Her scowl told me she remembered me. Apparently, she was in charge of serving coffee to everyone. She handed a cup to the Reverend but appeared conveniently out of coffee. I wasn’t sure if I should take it as a slight or not.

“That’s right. But the children aren’t architects. After a couple weeks, they’d dug themselves into a hole they couldn’t get out of. So the Elders appointed Larry and Jerry to construct a safe pathway for the children to get in and out of the hole,” he said, blowing the rising steam from his cup of coffee.

“Come on over,” he said.

I followed him to some chairs beneath the tent. Dan and a few others were already there nursing their own cups of coffee and nodded a vague acknowledgment of my presence.

Somehow a cup made its way into my hand and sipped at it—a strong brew, piping hot. I sat in the chair next to the Reverend.

“Think of it like this,” he said. “A hole isn’t anything at all. It’s just the absence of something. In this case, that something is dirt. But where is that dirt now?”

I looked around. It was almost completely dark now, but I could see well enough to tell the dirt wasn’t here. Hell, the pile would have been unmistakable.

“You hall the dirt away.”

The Revered nodded. “Larry and Jerry hall it away. And they made the path so the children don’t kill themselves going in and out of the hole, and they generally remove any hazards.”

“Damn. They must keep busy.”

“That’s the idea.”

A quick wink from the Reverend told me there’s more to the story than what he was telling me. From what I could remember of Larry and Jerry, I could guess why they needed to keep busy. Neither were known for their intelligence and had a propensity for mischief.

I’m surprised you didn’t just exile them.

I sipped my coffee rather than vocalizing my thought.

Between the adults, the atmosphere was subdued. We all stood in pods of two and three, conversing—though no one migrated towards me. And at the same time, I knew they were all staring at me. I might as well have been a wolf amongst sheep.

“Larry,” the Reverend called. “I reckon it’s about that time. Why don’t you and Jerry set out the tools?”

Larry and Jerry had clanked armloads of shovels together as they walked the spiral path towards its bottom. Although visibility was dropping with the onslaught of dark, I could see them haphazardly discarding tools about every twenty steps.

I didn’t understand. And didn’t get a chance to ask, either.

“Here they come,” the Reverend whispered to me.

Holding my breath, I turned toward the bunkhouse

A few minutes later, Larry and Jerry re-emerged from the hole. They no longer carried picks or shovels. By that time, I’d dried my eyes and managed some degree of composure. But when I handed the Reverend’s handkerchief back to him, his gaze was fixed at a point behind me.

He must have sensed me looking at him, and said, “Its time"

*****

My guts wrenched as the first child emerged from the bunkhouse. She was perhaps eleven or twelve years old, had long brown hair with unruly tangles, and wore a stained pair of coveralls and work boots. A woman, perhaps forty-years-old walked solemnly beside the girl. I guessed the woman to be the mother.

I couldn’t say exactly what I expected to see, but it wasn’t her. And I kept looking at the girls face expecting to see droning zombie-like eyes. But this wasn’t the case at all. As they neared, it was the mother who appeared distraught. But as for the young girl, she appeared as normal as can be. If anything, she appeared determined, but that was all.

A sneaking suspicion crawled over the back of my neck. Perhaps the girl wasn’t sleepwalking. Maybe she was merely leading the precession and I was getting spooked over nothing at all.

As the girl made her way toward me, the Reverend moved subtly as if to block the girl’s path.

“May the Lord be with you, child, in your time of need.” the Reverend shouted, his voice slamming through the silence like an intercom.  

My guts leaped so hard inside me, I thought I’d puke from surprise. Similarly, I fully expected the girl to go into cardiac arrest. The reverend had been less than three feet from her face when he yelled.

But the girl didn’t fletch. She didn’t even bat an eye. She continued to walk at her same determined pace.

My mouth gaped and I stared in awe at the girl. How could she have not heard that?

The Reverend reached out for the girl’s mother as they passed. He patted the woman’s arm as they descended the spiral path into the hole.

What the hell was that all about? Why the yelling and the touching? It felt… wrong.

When I looked again at the Reverend, his eyes were cast downward and full of… what? It wasn’t a gesture with some specific meaning, but rather one intended to encompass a wider breadth of sorrow.

Over the Reverend’s shoulder, three more kids approached, each accompanied by an adult. It was difficult to tell in the low light, but I reckoned they aged between eight and eleven years old. All three were boys. Like the girl, they too were dressed in work clothes—suspenders over work shirts and cheese cutter hats.

It dawned on me then. Work clothes. If the children sleepwalked every night, then their parents weren’t likely to put their kids to bed in their nightgowns. They’d dress them in sturdy workwear.

Logically, it made sense. But this application of logic in this, God-forsaken situation, made my skin crawl.

The Reverend shouted his blessing to each of the three boys as they passed. And then to the eight that followed until I’d lost count of them all and the line-up ceased. And each group of children was accompanied by at least one adult. In the end, I figured a quarter of Paradise’s population were in the field.

“How many?” I asked when the children stopped coming. I didn’t want to know. But at the same time, I needed to know—couldn’t have gone on without knowing.

“Thirty-seven.”

I turned away and cupped my hand over my mouth. A few of the parents stared at me and scowled—their faces angry and defensive, desperate, and vulnerable.  My stomach felt squeezy and legs weakened.

“Are you alright?” The Reverend said. He spoke in a low voice, intended only for me.

If I opened my mouth to reply, I might have vomited. So, I quickly waved.

Wordlessly, the Reverend sidestepped so that he was standing between me and the gossip-hungry adults. I felt too sick to contemplate the gesture, other than gratitude. It was an act of kindness I’d not expected from anyone in town, least of all the Reverend.

It took about a minute of steady breathing through my nose before I could go on. I cleared my throat and stepped up beside the Reverend. He pretended not to have noticed anything had happened.

“If your… legs can manage, then you need to follow me.”

Heaving a deep breath, I nodded, and then followed him into the hole.

*****