Hattsburgh Bay

May Gerolamo fell into a sinkhole and was never seen again. Although it might be better to say a sinkhole swallowed the entirety of room 109 at the Pit Stoppe Inn.

No one knew much about her. If she came to Hattsburgh in search of something, or to escape something, nobody was going to give her trouble one way or the other. Small port towns in Massachusetts aren’t made for out-of-town gossip. It was only after she’d died people started asking questions.

Records say public works was called in. They found, with some surprise, that the sinkhole went well over a thousand feet deep.

It ought to have been seen as nothing more than bad luck for May Gerolamo, but there were Jehovah’s Witnesses sleeping in the neighboring rooms, and they were alive and well, so when her body couldn’t be found, it was called an act of God by the motelier––a fat old woman named Stoppe. She said May Gerolamo was a loose girl with no regard for God. Probably she came here to get an abortion. Before long the whole town was in agreement that, while it was unfortunate she died, sometimes God or plain bad luck gets you.

The witnesses were quoted as saying that they could hear Gerolamo screaming all the way down, and then for some time after. When she stopped screaming, they weren’t sure if she’d lost consciousness, lost hope, or only then hit the bottom.

They were gone a few days later, and the whole thing was put to rest. Jokes were made, weeks on, about the cursed motel room. When the repairs had been made and the room was accessible again, people waggled their fingers and teenagers took bets over who would stay in 109 at the Pit Stoppe Inn.

The second time the sinkhole opened, it swallowed two locals. Lawrence “Larry” Burns and Aisling O’Shea. Larry and Aisling were going to get their rocks off after senior prom and could only afford the cheapest motel room in town––the accursed 109 off of Route 7.

Of course they couldn’t tell what was going on. Larry was bouncing so hard on top of her and Aisling was trying so bad to not throw up that they thought the shaking was coming from them. When the floor dropped out from under them, they only had time to yelp once and cling to each other before the rush of wind stole their breaths.

Much more of a fuss was roused for the second coming of the sinkhole. News trucks surrounded the motel, reporting from to Boston to Springfield how this was the second instance of the sinkhole rupturing. “Experts” said it could be from waterflow, or humidity, or proximity to the Atlantic. No report ever expanded on this––it was only used as a means to show that this reporter knew what was up, and the other pen-in-caps were jokes.

Stoppe claimed another act of God. She had a feeling the name they’d put down was a fake, as was the ID. And as it turned out, the O’Shea girl was 18, and the boy was still only 17, which––as far as Ms. Stoppe was concerned––constituted statutory rape. What more need she say? The town, though non-committal, agreed. God and bad luck and all that.

Aisling’s mother was furious, and tried to get the Inn to close, as well as sued for a hefty amount of money on libel and mismanagement and whatever else she could throw at the owner. But the state couldn’t put full blame on Ms. Stoppe, as this was––at the end of the day––a random and inexplicable occurrence. What’s more, the motel was a not-insubstantial source of income for the town. Vacationers looking for a small stretch sea often turned off of Route 7 to spend a few nights at the Inn, and that led to antiquing, book buying, and meals. The best they could do was split the motel in half, and fill the open space with concrete.

Marilyn O’Shea moved not long after this decision was put into motion––six months after her daughter fell into the Earth. On her way out, O’Shea, turned off of Route 7 and began to paint a memorial for her daughter in the parking lot of the Pit Stoppe Inn.

From beside the car, Marilyn O’Shea claimed to hear what sounded like growling. And that was the word she used––what started a whole hubbub––it growled. Before long the whole parking lot was shaking, and she could hardly grab the door handle of the car. She stumbled to the ground as if in a dream, unable to walk, and said she heard some kind of an explosion underground. Then the concrete fell away in one big chunk. The two closest motel rooms, as well as the two rooms above them, sunk into the ground. A crevice rippled down the parking lot toward Marilyn, stopping just before her car. It split right open, a slick of asphalt and mud slipping into the chasm. She barely made it out, so she said.

She was called crazy, and rather than settling into the new apartment, O’Shea tried to kill herself. They sent her to the Boston Medical Center for it. One way or another, it looked bad for the Pit Stoppe Inn. Word traveled. Fewer and fewer people stayed, and before long, corners were cut. Windows grew smudgy, mold overtook the rooms, toilets went unwashed for weeks at a time. It ate itself from the inside out.

Caution grew around the sinkhole repairs. It had spread into the parking lot––that much was obvious. Same for the four motel rooms that had fallen with it––taking out two guests, no less. Public works approached the motel like a cornered zoo animal: scared plain-shitless it might bite. By now it had been a total of six dead in the span of about a thousand feet. What more reason did they need to take it slow?

When they were able to fill the hole with enough sand and clay to determine its depth––that is to say, when they dumped a shit-ton and never saw the peak piling any closer to them––they determined it a hazardous zone, and the town insisted Stoppe shut the place down.

Ms. Stoppe went missing two weeks later. Her car sat in the parking lot of the motel, and the hole had spread across the lot. Any act of God that may have been felt too dicey for the locals to say. There were no fault lines in Hattsburgh. No deep-plunging sewer systems. The ocean was close, but still a shoreline away from the sinkhole. Most importantly, sinkholes didn’t open and close, open and close.

These unanswerable questions were quelled with more conspiracy and jokes. A giant cryptid living underground. A government facility deep in the earth. Mole people. A straight shot to Hell. It eased some tensions among the locals. Not all. The best they could settle on was to ignore the sinkhole, avoid it, and move on.

Days passed without anything, then weeks and months. By the one-year anniversary of Stoppe’s disappearance, locals laughed at themselves over their old worries, and vacationers were none the wiser. And the sinkhole remained unfilled. Snowfall came and went, cascading into the chasm of mud and stone, and the remnants of the motel––demolished with controlled explosives––rested far beneath the town.

One day the children of Hattsburgh Middle School had an ichthyologist visit and teach them about sharks. A shark, she’d said, is described as an opportunistic feeder. There is no anger, no sense of vitriol toward one species or another. People, despite being killed by sharks only five times on average per year, confuse these survival instincts for evil. Sharks aren’t even capable of recognizing a human as something separate from a trout. They focus on disturbances in the water and merely feast on the movement.

When a student raised his hand and asked if sinkholes thought like that, the ichthyologist laughed and looked at the teachers for clarity. They did not return her smile.

The fourth opening of the sinkhole brought down the road and surrounding forest encompassing Route 7 for a quarter-mile. It rattled like a bomb. The Hattsburgh Elementary, Middle, and High Schools each went into lockdown. Trees fell in droves and boulders tumbled into one another as they cascaded toward the black. A sliver of the Cape Cod canal caught the lip of the amassing sinkhole, and mounds of sand sunk away, the tide ebbing closer.

Three cars were swallowed as a result of the opening, with anywhere between five and eight people inside them. At least two of the estimated deaths were children leaving with their mother from Hattsburgh Elementary to a doctor’s appointment.

This expansion far outweighed those previous, to the town’s horror. With one of the main roads to and from Hattsburgh unnavigable, the schools and businesses on the edge of town were closed, and detour signs were placed between the Hattsburgh-Sagamore line. Before long the rationale had been made to cordon off the northeastern edge of Hattsburgh entirely, leaving the land to the hole.

Almost unanimously, one corner of the town’s population relocated. Homes sat abandoned, windswept with sand and stone. Streetlights hung on green or red without change. The sinkhole had claimed its territory, and the town watched, cornered, in anticipation.

Two nights on, a public meeting was held in the town hall. Over a thousand residents piled in and around the building. The rest tuned in on the local channels.

The meeting lasted well into the evening, with claims ranging from legitimate concern to audacious and supernatural pretense. One idea thrown around was that the sinkhole wanted. It wanted to expand. It wanted to swallow more of the town. It wanted to swallow more living things. And what if it wanted to swallow those who claimed to know all about it, like Ms. Stoppe? Or those who laughed?

It was scoffed at, but the schools’ faculty repudiated this. They were one of the closest areas near the sinkhole at the time of the expansion. It didn’t merely rumble. It growled. Like poor, crazy O’Shea had said. What’s more, that growling continued when the schools were evacuated. Many of the relocated teachers explained the tremors they felt––like the earth was quivering; either in fear, or such an eagerness as to hardly contain itself.

One man stood up in the crowd. His name was Marvin Buros. “I’m a bookkeeper for the Historical Society,” he said. A mere five-foot-five, Buros got his master’s in Indigenous Studies at Georgetown, and landed a job a state-and-a-half away from his hometown. His foreign nature cost him scowls and rolling eyes. He continued. “I’ve been working here for about five years or so. Never caught wind of anything so strange in my life, I’ll tell you.”

Someone heckled, “You’re hardly out of your diaper, son!” and elicited some laughs.

Marvin Buros cleared his throat, red-faced. “My point being, after the second or third… instance with the sinkhole, I pored through the town’s records. Obituaries, newspapers, even the minutes of town hall meetings, just like this. I wasn’t able to make out much, but…. Well, does anyone know about the Lost Colony of Roanoke?”

Some did. The first attempted colony in North Carolina in 1585. Their leader had ventured back to England for supplies, and when he returned years later, all 115 residents had vanished without a trace. It had been a coastal town––now an island.

“Something that isn’t always known,” Buros said, “is what was left behind. Namely, what was written. The only note of worth was carved into one of the trees: ‘Croatoan.’ As the years have gone on, it’s said that Croatoan was the name of an island now known as Hatteras. The reasonable explanation, then, is that the colony moved to the island, leaving a note for their leader, who tried to reach them but couldn’t on account of bad weather.”

One of the leaders of the town hall asked him to cut to the chase. Marvin searched for the courage to come out and say it. What had kept him up for nights since reading.

“The town records go as far back as the early 1800s, only 40 some-odd years after the village was officially incorporated as Hattsburgh. There aren’t many notes, but where there are… the name Croatoan comes up––more than once. Apparently the villagers here wrote about it in records we no longer have access to. Or at least, that’s my suspicion, based on the language they used. There’s a period of two years where nearly thirty villagers are referenced as having been ‘felled.’ Whatever records or suspicions they held pointed them in the direction of Roanoke and Croatoan.”

Marvin pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. His hands shook. “I made a copy of one of the letters…. I-It’s hard to make out everything, but the gist is…. The gist is this.” He read, “‘The pioneers have said Croatoan was not an island at all, but a “fading effect on the land.” It is to be understood by our brightest minds that some great movement or decay had been brought upon the land, leaving it an island. Croatoan may in fact not be the name of a natural landscape or even’ uh… Native American ‘territory, but a being of their religion. This or a force of nature, as the wind or the sea, which we know them to place great personage unto. Now it appears to have come to our own seaside village, rumbling beneath the dirt before swallowing homes thousands of cubits deep.’ And––and this is me speaking again––a later issue states: ‘We have taken to tossing our dead into the chasm. At this the land seems unperturbed, if not satisfied. It is said that the hole is filling back up to what it once was, at least in part. What weighs upon my conscience is eclipsed only by the silence in the ground. Whatever lay beneath, we seem to have satisfied it for the time being. But for how long?’”

Unsure of what else to add, Buros sat back down, and the meeting continued. It concluded with the agreement that if the sinkhole opened again, the federal government should be notified, and that, in all likelihood, the town was in no supernatural danger.

And then three nights later a young woman named Kimberly McGillis was murdered and dumped in the sinkhole. Although no official charges were ever made, Kimberly came home for summer break following her Sophomore year of college, getting drinks with some “old friends.” It was suggested she’d been drugged, but of course that couldn’t be proven either. The men took her body and shoved her down the nearest crack of sand and soil that sunk to the bottom of the sinkhole. They then took a car across the New Hampshire border and continued driving. Their parents insisted they went on a roadtrip for the summer––and indeed there had been plans to do so––but the trip was slated for a week from then. Either way, news spread, as it does. The sinkhole got her.

This was of course partly true. The sinkhole did receive another human body. And to be frank, the town cared less and less. This was a rancid apathy, but it was an unavoidable relief. For as the body was consumed, the sinkhole began to fill. For the first time since its initial split, one could see on the furthest edges of the sinkhole that the dark and sludgy substance of soil filled the cracks in the ground. The earth remolded itself, as noticed by a pair of curious surfers some days later. And not a hundred feet from the split did they find poor Kimberly’s torn underwear.

Before Marvin Buros heard the news, the door to the Historical Society had been beaten down by the hikers. It worked, they said. A body was shoved into the sinkhole––that college girl––and the sinkhole closed. Like with the Colonists.

A team was sent out to investigate. Buros was chief among them, alongside the surfers, two more employees of the Historical Society, and four cops. When they confirmed the story, a deal was made. A sickening deal, perhaps most of all due to the lack of deliberation. The town graveyard was scavenged in the night––the furthest patch, Lot H, known as the Crook of the Dead. Bodies were transported by tractor between bales of hay. They delivered ten bodies, alongside a dead dog and a sacrificial sheep.

The mutt carcass was thrown in first. One of the cops thought they may have heard a rumble––a growl––but couldn’t be sure. The lack of any real response led the group to question themselves at once. What the hell was this? What kind of mania were they wrapping themselves into? There was an argument over whether or not to sacrifice the sheep. An argument just as soon quashed. Down it went. The sound of its bleats were few and fading until there was nothing. Not even a thud. And no filled earth.

All they had left to offer were the bodies. Buros was grilled about this. Whether it would work, the implications of grave-digging and its unruly use, what to do if it didn’t work––or did. Buros emphasized his readings.

They tossed in one body and waited fifteen minutes. Nobody knew who the deceased was, but Buros requested they be only recently deceased, so as to “still have at least a modicum of nourishment.” Silence gripped at their clothes with a crisp wind. They waited, staring into the sinkhole. Some heard the body thud. Others didn’t––and in their minds, the body was instead caught by something.

The ground shook. A rumbling rose through the nearest crevice. Several members of the party fell to their knees. The plume of soil that escaped flew, by some estimates, fifty feet into the air before coming back down, littering them all with mud and sand. But the ground had settled back into place, and another hundred feet of land was made whole again.

It didn’t take long for the group to pile in the rest of the bodies after that. Four more trips were made to the graveyard with each team members’ car in the hope that they might seal the whole damned thing before dawn. And they nearly had. The group made it all the way back to graveyard of the Pit Stoppe Inn.

The hole had shrunk down to no wider than a manhole by sunup. They had a handful of bodies left––six or seven––and decided to leave them be. The rest could be filled in with basic soil. The party was covered in dirt and sand and mud, each of them reeking of sewage and soil.

In silence, they stood around the newly laid plot and breathed until they could barely bring to mind the beast beneath them. One by one, each townsman left their post and returned home, confident in their efforts. It was Marvin Buros who stayed. He was the one to sit the longest, feeling the ground beneath his hands and contemplating the history of the town.

Something was bothering him. In the texts, when referencing Croatoan and the Roanoke colony, he’d told the town hall almost everything he knew. But there was one note he’d withheld. Something that seemed too fantastic even for him. He’d kept it in his pocket all this time, something to show the others in case the dead didn’t calm the sinkhole. Pulling it out, he felt a tremor run through him. Or had it been the ground?

“The dead disturb the earth,” it began. “Whatever success it brought upon us was fleeting. Croatoan does not take to the dead. Not as a primary form of sustenance. It is to the ground as too much alcohol is to us, I fear. That is to say, it is sickening. And just as we must expel our ailments, so too”

The earth trembled beneath him. Buros was sure of it now. He shot to his feet, running to the last pile of bodies, and shoved them down the manhole. There was no guarantee the colonials were able to fill the entire sinkhole. Perhaps if he could just fill up the seal, it would be enough.

The bodies would hardly fit. He had to push them by their shoulders, their knees, their feet. In the end, six bodies were crammed inside the sinkhole, a single foot left poking out of the ground.

The rumbling continued, and Buros fled. It was hard to walk. He tried to sprint, falling to his hands and knees until he was crawling to his car––still rife with the stench of the dead. As he turned the ignition he saw the dirt before him bobbing up and down. It was coming apart in uneven clumps. The great expanse of land wavered as if on water, and Marvin Buros drove north toward Sagamore.

And this is the last point at which there is any cohesion in the tale. From here on, the story diverges, and no one is sure what’s true and what’s myth. All that’s certain is what became of the small town.

In one telling, the sacrificial bodies flew out of the sinkhole alongside a black, sludge-like bile. Corpses landed across the road or mangled in powerlines with the bile dripping from orifices and open wounds. Others smashed onto the roofs of houses and shops alongside mounds of dirt, making a few curious townsfolk look outside for a morning hailstorm.

To others, the sinkhole merely reopened, falling all at once and without eruption, pulling down hundreds of feet at a time, including the road which Buros drove madly down, and beyond.

His truck slammed into a new-formed lip of Route 7 head-on and flipped upside-down. This much is inarguable. Another certainty is that his body was never found. It is believed by some that he escaped, and others that he’d fallen through his windshield and into the abyss.

The previously untouched portion of Hattsburgh had little time to react to the hailstorm of dirt and corpses––or, perhaps, the sudden falling of earth––before the better part of half of the town fell for eternity, its residents swallowed at once and the ocean creeping into place. Across the harbor, in Provincetown, one could hear the sound of a thunderstorm rattling to the west, with the stringy, whipping sounds of wind; the kind that rattles through trees and sounds like distant screams.

Days later, the state of Massachusetts released a national statement expressing their deepest condolences and grief to any and all affected by the collapsing of more than half of Hattsburgh. After a “thorough investigation,” blame landed on an alleged underwater tunnel system of a long-since-defunct railway meant to lead from Portland to P-Town. There was no record of this, of course, and some accounts of aftermath will say that this was a lie told by scared-shitless g-men. Decades prior, public works was meant to have filled these tunnels, the state alleged, but in the 5,000-odd population of Hattsburgh, the message had been lost, or the funds not available to address the issue.

The tragedy soon passed into conversation, then into jokes, and before long, any unease on the matter had dissipated entirely. Conspiracy fractured the narrative, but nobody really gave it any credence. Sometimes God or plain bad luck gets you.

The half-Hattsburgh-shaped hole is now a bay, with the rest of town incorporated into Sagamore. Every winter teenagers will skate and play ice hockey over its solidified mass. In the summer old men will fish, and children will sit between their parents’ legs in kayaks and canoes. Only on the quietest of nights can one hear the ache of the earth beneath them. Sitting in the wide and gaping maw of Hattsburgh Bay, it’s said to almost sound like growling.

***

Danny Giancioppo is a Massachusetts-born prose and comic author, currently working at Boston University. While he's not producing literary and speculative fiction, he rides his bike around suburban Massachusetts and hangs out with his cat, Cappuccino.