by M. Tyler Tuttle
Ethel picks the baseball cap up off the ground and flicks a speck of gunk off the brim. “Those tourists,” she clucks to herself. “They always leave perfectly respectable things behind.”
She turns the cap this way and that as she makes her way back to her beach chair. The cap is that shade of tan that’s almost green, or green that’s almost tan, and it’s got a duck and the words Silly Goose On The Loose! embroidered on it in cheery yellow thread. Ethel gives the brim a sniff, deems it passable, and plops the hat atop her tuft of blue hair before taking her seat again.
“I am a silly goose,” she declares, drumming her pink orthopedic sandals on the sidewalk. “And I am on the loose.”
Behind her, the pit lets out a wet rumble like clumps of cottage cheese hitting a tile floor, followed by a very polite burp. The top half of a pizza box tumbles through the air and lands at Ethel’s feet. In bright red letters, she sees:
PIT LIKE NEW HAT TOO
“Oh, thank you, dear,” Ethel says. She puts a hand on her heart and turns around to smile fondly at the gaping hole where the bank used to be.
The pit stretches a hundred feet in every direction, with scraps of bloodied cloth and bird feathers clinging to its jagged edges. No one seems to notice the pit but Ethel, at least not until they’ve already taken a tumble over the edge. It’s always seemed silly to her how few people see something that’s right in front of their noses. No matter the season or the time of day, the pit flickers with a ghostly orange light and gives off a low hum. On nights when Ethel is alone in her beach chair, she can hear the quiet crackling of flames deep below the earth. The fires lick up into Boone’s Pit from—she chuckles to herself every time she thinks of this—well, Boone’s Pit!
Many years ago, when Ethel was still very small, the pit made the newspapers when it swallowed the bank in one decadent gulp. Ethel came to observe the pit, as was to be expected given the fact that the pit had eaten her father. But growing up the daughter of a bank manager is very boring compared to all the things one can do with a fiery pit: play hopscotch along the edges, watch bullies fall to their deaths in the gaping maw, roast marshmallows on chilly winter nights.
Ethel has been friends with the pit for many years now, long since the town forgot about its existence. She taught the pit its A-B-Cs when she got her teaching degree and applauded when the pit felt brave enough to share its first poems in the entrails of a seagull. She and the pit became enormous fans of the comedy series The Undertakers. Ethel spent many nights giggling at her laptop screen while ominous, bone-thrumming laughter echoed from the depths beside her. After the show’s cancellation the pit pulled back its flames and sulked for weeks, until Ethel cajoled it out of its depression with a Tesla full of dentists.
The pit just loves dentists, in much the same way Ethel herself loves the beach town’s tourists. Dentists rank among the pit’s favorite meals, alongside pizza delivery drivers, door-to-door salesmen, and the occasional eldritch cow. (Given that eldritch cows don’t live fully in our dimension, the pit must lure those in by itself with a series of atmospheric chanting and bubbling green smoke. But the rest Ethel can usually manage on her own.)
Ethel’s beach chair sits perfectly in the center of town, and therefore, perfectly in the center of the world. Ethel’s lived in Boone’s Pit her entire seventy-four years, and in her humble opinion, there’s no finer place in the world. A beach town is a lovely place to grow up, a lovely place to grow old, and a lovely place to rest when the rest of the world seems determined to spin on without you. And a town like Boone’s Pit, with the authentic saltwater taffy factory and the whitewashed boardwalk and the sunsets that seem to linger for hours, is the loveliest of all lovely beach towns. Even the whales seem to think so, as they sun their fins in the shoals each summer, waving to Ethel as they roll in the waves. At least, Ethel likes to pretend they’re waving at her. The whales make good neighbors.
In the fall, Ethel bids the whales goodbye and welcomes in the seabirds, who wing their way home to weather the mild winters with their fuzzy-headed babies. Back in December, Josie Baker’s daughter down at the tackle shop put a delightful button on her phone that teaches Ethel the differences between bird calls. All this winter when she sat in her chair on Main Street, tucked into a shady spot of sidewalk between the grocery store and the ticketed parking lot—where that rotten Maureen spied on her all season around the manual cash register—Ethel could tap away at the screen and learn to identify the chirruping whistle of a piping plover versus the merry little peeps of a spotted sandpiper. But by February there were no birds left and the fogs rolled in, so Ethel traded her tapping for her knitting and settled in for the spring. And spring in Boone’s Pit, of course, slides so slowly and deliciously into summer that Ethel’s days were like pages from a romance novel. She sat in her chair and counted the new cracks in the sidewalk and waited for June to arrive, because June brings the tourists.
Ethel just loves the tourists. When the tourists first spouted out of buses and took their first selfies in front of the tackle shop, busybodies like that no-account Maureen stuck their noses up and claimed the town had gone to the birds. And sure, maybe some of the women wore outfits that tinted Ethel’s cheeks pink, and maybe they talked too loud on their little cell phones and took all the good parking spaces, but Ethel thought they brought flavor to Boone’s Pit. A little spice, a little fun.
Just like Ethel’s new hat.
“What are you hungry for today, my dear?” Ethel asks the pit now, turning back to watch the tourists as they park their shiny cars in the ticketed lot. The pit gurgles while it thinks about it and that rotten Maureen eyes Ethel over her sunglasses. Ethel gives her a tiny finger-wave and even with her low-prescription sunglasses, Ethel can see the imperious way she sniffs before taking a crisp twenty from the sweaty hand of a young man with a mouth full of chewing gum.
There’s a wet, coughing smack like a cat dislodging a hairball, and a waft of sulfur ruffles Ethel’s hair beneath her new hat. A mess of gull feathers and red goo splats at Ethel’s feet. She stirs through it with the tip of her umbrella until it forms words.
SOMEONE FROM NEW JERSEY 🙂
Oh, bless its heart, Ethel thinks. The pit has learned how to use emojis. The smiley face drips with blood so it looks more like it’s sneering than grinning, but it’s the thought that counts.
That rotten Maureen is from New Jersey. Ever since Maureen’s refusal to fall into the pit—like she was supposed to—on that midnight stroll back in May, Maureen has had it out for Ethel. It’s like she thinks she’s superior to Ethel, somehow, which simply makes no sense. When one’s only role in life is to take sweaty dollar bills from tourists so they can throw you the keys to their gas-guzzling cars, one is not above someone who spends their days feeding those tourists to a hell gate.
“You know I can’t feed you Maureen, my love,” says Ethel to the pit. “How about a nice landlord? Or a high school vice principal? Oh, I know!” She claps her hands. “I’m sure there’s a nice young man somewhere who’d like to teach me about cryptocurrency.” Ethel looks from one side of Main Street to the other as if some hair-gelled young gentleman is walking up to her right that second. The pit boils in thought, then gives a courteous child’s scream of agreement.
Not five minutes later, a young woman comes around the corner from the grocery store. She’s in her mid-twenties, tall and curvy, at least two hundred pounds—a wholesome meal for any growing pit. She wears a blue swimsuit underneath one of those white and flowy cover-ups, the kind with all the tassels, and an oversized pair of red, white, and blue sunglasses wedged in her curly black hair. Ethel’s so busy divvying up her body parts into sacrificial components and calories that she doesn’t notice at first that the girl is crying.
“Dear,” Ethel says. The girl’s expensive red sandals stop in front of her beach chair. The girl gives a massive sniffle and rubs her eye. A thin line of snot dribbles out of one nostril and over her upper lip. Ethel puts on her best grandma voice. “Are you all right?”
“I,” is all the girl says before she dissolves into tears again.
“Oh my! Oh my!” Ethel springs to her feet and ushers the girl into her beach chair, then sits down on the curb beside her. “There’s no need to boo-hoo like that. What’s your name, darling?”
“Rebecca,” the girl says. Mascara pools under her eyes and lines her cheeks in dark rivulets. What will mascara taste like to the pit, Ethel wonders? Is it salty, like tears? Or more of a zesty flavor, like salsa? “My—my grandma calls me Becky, though.”
“Becky.” Ethel smiles and offers the girl some napkins out of her purse. Becky dabs at the mess beneath her eyes. A thin, sucker-lined tentacle, dotted every few inches with red-rimmed purple eyes, skulks its way out of the pit and slinks along the sidewalk. It moves to curl around Becky’s ankle but Ethel bops it smartly between two eyes and the tentacle freezes. The eyes look straight into Ethel’s and fill with bloody tears. The entire tentacle then flails in the air like a toddler having a tantrum.
Ethel casts a stern look at it and jerks her chin back toward the pit. The tentacle stops its crocodile tears and droops to the ground, dragging itself sullenly across the sidewalk in slow, tortured movements. It gives her one last put-upon look before disappearing back into the depths.
“Becky,” Ethel says again, when the girl has calmed her tears. “What’s got you all in a tuffle?”
“My boyfriend,” she says immediately. Ethel has a way with these girls. There is always a boyfriend or a husband or a lover, and he’s always done something wrong, and Ethel always knows how to fix it. “I’m sorry.” Becky sniffles again and makes a visible effort to pull herself together. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
Ethel knows why. It’s the mist rolling off the pit right now, the brain matter-colored fog that smells like a graveyard after it rains. This mist is made from the souls of salesmen. It’s a very powerful mental suggestive.
“It’s quite all right, dear.” Ethel smiles and makes a go on! motion with her hand.
“I just found out that Rick…” Becky’s face crumples. “Rick has—”
“Another woman?” Ethel arranges her face into a knowing, sympathetic frown, but inside she’s already celebrating. Becky wails. Ethel pats her arm, offers more tissues, and says all the right things. Within minutes, between Ethel’s quiet suggestions and a constant cloud of the pit’s mind-addling, they’ve made a plan. Becky will return shortly with Rick.
“And what will we do then, dear?”
“We’ll feed him to the maw,” Becky says dreamily. “So the hounds of hell may feast on his flesh.”
Ethel claps her hands. “Yes! Those good, good hounds will have a very nice snack.” She sends Becky off with a wave. The young woman drifts off into the distance, each of her footprints releasing a puff of white mist as she walks away.
“They’re so sweet at that age,” Ethel says. A sound like a small animal trapped in a garbage disposal rends the air behind her. A moment later, a diseased-looking rat with bones poking out beneath its skin drags a folded piece of paper to Ethel’s chair. She opens it and tuts.
PIT HUNGRY.
“I know, dear,” she says. “But she was only an appetizer, and I’m working on the full combo meal.”
The skeletal rat, still sitting at her feet, stops chewing on its own mangled tail and gestures at her to flip over the paper.
PIT NOT TALKING TO ETHEL.
“Well, that’s just immature,” Ethel says to the rat. The rat shows her his rear, scuttles off back toward the lip of the pit, and promptly throws himself back into the void.
“Excuse me,” a man says, in the voice of someone who has already said excuse me several times. Ethel turns away from the rat to find a tall young man standing right in front of her beach chair. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Do you need directions?” Ethel asks. “The quickest route to the beach is just down this way, past the old bank building.” She points helpfully toward the alleyway beside the decrepit building. Patchy grass makes a scraggly green footpath right into the pit’s gaping maw. One doesn’t even need to wear shoes.
“No thank you, ma’am,” the man says. Ethel peers up at his face.
Oh dear, she thinks to herself. Oh dear, dear, dear.
The man has striking blue eyes and a lovely mop of blond hair. There are seven freckles on his nose. His left ear is just the teensiest bit sunburned. But Ethel is more concerned with the blue policeman’s hat on his head and the shiny silver badge pinned to his shirt.
“How can I help you, officer?” She folds her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. She knows why he’s here. More nosy questions about that girl from the tackle shop, the one with the helpful birdcall program. She went missing back in December.
“When was the last time you saw Hannah Baker?” the policeman asks.
“Well, let’s see,” she says. “Hannah Booker, you said?”
“Baker,” the man says gently.
“Oh, yes.” Ethel squints at him through her sunglasses. “Not Josie Baker’s daughter down at the tackle shop?”
The policeman’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “The very same.”
Ethel makes her own eyes wide and round. “Well, I don’t think I’ve seen Hannah Booker since last year!”
“Baker,” he says again. “When would that be, ma’am?”
“Let me think… Sometime in December, that would’ve been. She put the most delightful program on my phone—would you like me to show you? It tells you which bird—”
“That’s all right, ma’am.” He sighs and flicks some sand off his shiny badge.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea where she is,” Ethel says. She isn’t lying—only those who fall into the pit know where it leads, after all. “I thought she went back to university.”
Beyond the policeman’s broad shoulders Ethel can see that rotten Maureen peeking out from the parking lot’s ticket booth. As soon as she sees Ethel watching her, Maureen disappears back into the booth and becomes very occupied with the cash register.
“What was the date, the last time you saw Ms. Baker?” the police officer asks.
“The date?” Ethel frowns at him, jarred from fantasies of a shrieking Maureen hanging from her ankles, as Ethel lowers the rope inch by inch into the flames. “I haven’t the foggiest, officer. It must have been sometime in December, like I said.”
“Would you say the date was December 13th?”
That rotten Maureen is watching her again. She’s half out of the ticket booth, arms folded across her skinny chest in satisfaction like Ethel’s done something wrong.
“The 13th?” Ethel repeats. Maureen disappears on the other side of the booth and Ethel leans past the policeman, trying to see where she’s going. “December 13th? I’m not sure. I suppose it could have been.”
“So, if I were to show you security footage,” the policeman says, stepping back into Ethel’s line of sight, “Dated just after midnight on December 13th, you might recognize Hannah Baker in it?”
“Perhaps,” Ethel says irritably. “She looked an awful lot like her mother, didn’t she?”
“And if I were to show you that security footage…” She stops looking for that rotten Maureen and peers up at him. He’s no longer smiling. “You might recognize yourself in that video?”
“What?”
The policeman’s face shines with intensity now. Ethel finds herself leaning away from him, pressing against the back of her beach chair.
“Just after midnight on December 13th, you, Ethel Wettleman, led one Hannah Baker down this very alley, did you not?” He takes a step closer to her. He doesn’t give her a chance to respond. “And on the CCTV footage from the grocery store, we see you exit the other side of the alley. Without Hannah Baker.”
“Well, I—I don’t remember—”
“Where is Hannah Baker, Mrs. Wettleman?” The officer looms over her now. The smell of sulfur is everywhere.
“How should I know?” Ethel snaps.
“I’m going to need you to come down to the station with me,” the officer says. He holds out a hand to her. “Just to answer some questions. Routine. You know how it is.”
Ethel lets him pull her to her feet. One of her pink orthopedic sandals slips off and she stumbles. The policeman steadies her but doesn’t see that she’s tripped on a horde of cockroaches. Their little armored bodies scramble frantically to form letters.
ETHEL?
“Ethel?” She recognizes Becky’s dreamy voice calling out to her, and a heavy stone drops into her stomach. “I’m back. This is Rick.”
Becky appears around the corner, dragging a paunchy young man with too-small sunglasses. He’s complaining weakly, but he’s getting a contact high from the mist still clinging to Becky’s eyes and Becky’s got a vice grip on his wrist.
“Ma’am, please stand aside,” the officer tells Becky.
The young woman raises vacant eyebrows at him. “I can’t,” she says. “I’m busy.”
“Oh, dear,” Ethel says. The officer tugs Ethel toward his car and she sees the cockroaches frantically reforming behind him.
PIT SORRY
Then:
ETHEL DON’T GO :’-(
Even plagued by dread, she’s proud of the pit for using another emoji. “I’ll be fine,” she calls behind her. She will not let the pit see how scared she is.
The pit begins to whine and moan. A rumble of rocks, a horrible tearing sound, like a tree ripping out of the earth, makes everyone look around. Across the road, that rotten Maureen hides behind the ticket booth.
“What is that?” the policeman says. “What’s happening?”
“We must feed him to the maw,” Becky says dreamily. “So the hounds of hell may feast on his flesh.”
“What the hell?!” the policeman shouts.
“EXACTLY,” says a voice no human was ever meant to hear.
The air fills with cackles and the braying of a thousand hunting dogs. Voluminous clouds of noxious, green-and-purple smoke, shot through with fire and lightning, billow out from behind Ethel. Becky holds out her arms like she means to embrace it—this thing, this horrible thing that has just crawled out of the pit.
It is the size of a bus, the size of a building. It has too many limbs, too many eyes, too many teeth to count. It is a miasma of blood and feathers clutching an orthopedic pink sandal.
“Oh, dear,” Ethel says again.
The creature squelches toward her, leaving a trail of blood and gunk and feathers in its wake. It swarms over the policeman first—his screams abruptly cut off as the creature hunkers down in front of Ethel like a child sitting on its heels. Two hands, lined in fur that looks sharp as broken glass, drop Ethel’s shoe in front of her and hold her elbows politely while she slips the sandal on. Ethel steps back, letting the creature nudge her across the road. A smaller, chunkier meat-blob bobs beside her and holds up her handbag. Another carries what looks like a road sign, except instead of a street name, her name has been gouged out by an unimaginably huge claw.
PIT LOVE ETHEL.
EVERYTHING WILL BE O.K.
The creature bobs its head to Ethel as if in a nod, and Ethel bows her head back. The miasma turns to go back across the road—and that’s when Maureen, ever the center of attention, decides to scream. She steps out from behind the ticket booth with she has her nails dug into her cheeks. Her mouth gapes in a grotesque shriek of horror.
Ethel and the creature exchange a look.
The wave of viscera swarms over that rotten Maureen. She stops screaming.
As the creature squelches and skulks its way back across the road and begins to spread from alley to alley, sidewalk to sidewalk, questing through the town like industrious mold, the street sign bobs in front of Ethel again. A handful of cockroaches crawl out to add a footnote to the pit’s message.
🙂
Ethel can’t help it. She starts laughing. And she’s still laughing, hours later, when the screams have finally stopped, and the fires are finally out, and there are no birds left in the sky. She’s still laughing when the creature, swollen to ten times its original size and bristling with bones, teeth, and mangled limbs, weaves drunkenly back through the streets and toward the pit. The creature hovers at the lip of the crater, leaning one way and then the other like a drunk trying to take off his shoes, then seems to collapse in on itself in a sticky, splotchy column before it flops into the depths.
The pit rumbles; the ground shakes beneath Ethel’s feet. She still can’t stop laughing, and she laughs even harder when the pit lets out the loudest belch ever heard in all seven hells, followed by the quietest, most contented sigh.
When Ethel’s giggles finally fade, she takes a look around. Sunset has come to Boone’s Pit, alighting on the ruin and destruction all around her. There are no buildings left fully standing. Smoke hangs heavy in the air. The golden hour makes the blood and detritus all around her glisten like perfect glasses of wine, like Christmas ornaments.
Questionable goop, purple and red and brown, continues to seep back into the gaping hole in the ground. There’s a sound like an old man hocking a loogey and Ethel’s beach chair—missing a corner and streaked with blood but otherwise still quite lovely, all things considered—rockets out of the pit and onto the patch of sidewalk where Ethel always sits. She makes her way across the street and goes to sit down. Then she pauses, walks over to something lying in a puddle of blood on the road, and clucks to herself.
Ethel picks up Becky’s oversized red, white, and blue sunglasses. She flicks a speck of gunk off the frame and puts the sunglasses on top of her head. They fit perfectly against her hat, right where it says Silly Goose On The Loose!
“Those tourists,” Ethel says when she’s seated again. The pit gives a sleepy wail of agreement. “They always leave perfectly respectable things behind.”
M. Tyler Tuttle (they/them) is a writer, journalist, and wandering pit demon from Baltimore, Maryland. Tyler holds a degree in Creative Writing & English from the George Washington University in Washington, DC, and is a graduate of The Loft’s Year-Long Novel Writing Project in Minneapolis, MN. Tyler’s work has been published or is upcoming in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Trace Fossils Review, Wooden Teeth, the Horror Over the Handlebars anthology, and Cursed Cooking. Their work has been considered for the Halifax Ranch Prize for Fiction (semi-finalist, 2021), F(r)iction Magazine’s Short Story Contest (finalist, fall 2023), and “Best Original Script” at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival (winner, 2022). You can catch up with Tyler online at TheHighwayMFA.com or @mtylertuttle on Twitter and Instagram, where they will be documenting their journey as an MFA candidate (Fiction) at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. If you look close—and if you’re very, very lucky—you’ll find them meandering through the wilderness with their dog Piglet, or dancing in a field somewhere, pretending to be Stevie Nicks.