Evening. I've been meaning to call for a while now, but I wasn't sure anyone would believe me. My name's Mack, I'm calling from Ellensburg, Washington, and I own a piece of rural property out on Manastash Ridge. About nine miles west of town. Been out here for years. Kept to myself mostly. Worked metal when I could find the work, did some fishing when I could get away. My wife worked at Central Washington University for a while, in the administration building. That's actually how we ended up out here, she got the job and we needed somewhere affordable. Now, here's the thing. When I bought this property, the previous owner, old timer named Henderson, he pulled me aside before we signed the papers. Told me there was something on the land I needed to know about. A hole. Said it had been there as long as anyone could remember, longer than the property records went back. The first settlers in the area, way back in the 1800s, they called it the Devil's Hole. That's what the locals still call it when they talk about it, which isn't often. Folks don't like talking about it much. Henderson told me the community had been using it as a dump for generations. Tires, refrigerators, old appliances, dead livestock, construction debris, anything you needed to get rid of. Everyone just hauled their garbage out there and tossed it down. The hole never filled up. Not once. And that's the thing, in all that time, nobody ever heard anything hit the bottom. You throw a refrigerator down a hole, you expect to hear it land. You hear metal hitting rock, something. But with this hole, nothing. Just silence.
So I kept using it the same way everyone else had. Threw my own junk down there for years. Broken furniture, scrap metal from jobs, whatever needed disposing. Easier than driving to the county dump, and free besides. The hole itself is about nine feet across, lined with old bricks around the rim. Looks almost like an old well, the kind pioneers would dig. But it ain't no well. Wells have bottoms. After maybe three or four years of living out there, I started getting curious. I'd been dumping stuff down there all that time, heavy stuff sometimes, and it never filled up, never even seemed to get close. So I decided to measure it. I figured if nothing else, maybe it was some kind of world record, you know? Something for the Guinness book. I got myself a one-pound lead fishing weight, the kind you use for deep sea fishing, tied it to some heavy test line, and started lowering it down. I figured I'd hit bottom in a few hundred feet, maybe a thousand if the hole was really something special. miles of line is hard to picture - Dennis' I let out my first reel. Nothing. The line just kept going slack, feeding down into the dark. Tied on another reel, kept going. Still nothing. No resistance, no sound, nothing hitting bottom. I went through reel after reel. I lost count after a while, but I kept records. When I finally gave up, I had let out about eighty thousand feet of line. That's over fifteen miles, straight down. And I never hit bottom. The line just kept going. I could have kept going if I had more line.
Now, my dogs, they wouldn't go anywhere near that hole. I had two good dogs at the time, a shepherd mix named Rusty and a mutt I called Pepper. Loyal as anything, followed me everywhere I went on that property. But when I'd walk toward the pit, they'd stop dead about a hundred feet away. Wouldn't budge an inch closer. Hair standing up on their backs, ears flat, whimpering. Sometimes Rusty would bark at it, this low warning bark, but he wouldn't approach. They wanted nothing to do with it. Animals know things we don't, if that makes sense. They sense things. One of my neighbors, older fella named Earl Hutchins, he had a hunting dog that died. Good dog, just got old and passed on in its sleep. Earl didn't want to deal with burying it, the ground out here gets hard in the dry season, so he brought it over to my place and asked if he could use the pit. I said sure, that's what folks do. He tossed the dog in, we stood there a minute kind of paying respects, and that was that. Didn't hear it hit bottom, of course. Never do. About a week later, maybe ten days, Earl comes running over to my place, white as a sheet. Says he was out in the woods near his property line, checking on some fence posts, and he saw his dog. Same collar, same markings, same limp in the back leg from an old injury. The dog just looked at him. Wouldn't come when he called. Wouldn't respond to its name. Just stared at him with these strange eyes, he said, like it was looking through him instead of at him. Then it turned and walked off into the trees. Earl swore on his mother's grave it was his dog. The same one he threw down that hole.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]