The old man did not have that much life left in him. His daughter knew that much. Ever since his wife died, he had been fading away, and nowadays he spent most of his time doing sudokus in bed on a ten year old iPad or pottering around the backyard with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing a bulky white sweater despite the uncharacteristically hot Washington summer. His eyes had started looking lighter, like the baby photos of him on his mantel, as if he was completing his life cycle back where he started. His stare looked cooler and less focused every time she saw him, only once a week now. The 45 minute drive felt longer, and the scenery felt less pretty. It wasn’t like she did much for him anyways, nor did he have much to say. She just brought groceries, stood in the backyard with him, begged him to talk to some of his old friends online, never to any success, and left.

She remembered Saturday mornings when her mother was alive, the smell of chocolate chip pancakes that greeted her without fail, how they would ask about her job and if she was getting used to the weather and whether or not she’d met anyone special since the last time they’d talked. She’d get annoyed at all the pestering, but now she missed their conversations. She used to play scrabble with her father in the early days after her mother died and watch his face light up a little whenever he got a seven letter word. Now, he never wanted to play games, never asked her about herself, and didn’t have anything to talk about. It was miserable. She loved him, of course, but it just hurt to see him like that, to try to talk to him and never get anywhere. The weekly ritual exhausted her. She had half the mind to order the groceries online and start seeing him less frequently, but he weighed on her.

She had recurring nightmares in which he was standing at the center of a tall, wide wooden bridge over an incredibly deep canyon. Some of the planks had jagged holes in them just wide enough for someone to slip through if they were standing completely straight. Sometimes the background was forested, sometimes it was a desert, sometimes they were a thousand feet above an endless, placid body of water, but the sequence of events was always the same: she stood at one end of the bridge and he waved her over, but she was too scared to cross to him. He got frustrated, took a step towards her, and fell, his whole body disappearing instantly.

The old man believed that he was completely self-sufficient. The only thing he couldn’t do was drive his car, not since his wife died. He ate enough, slept from 9pm to 5am every night, and drank wine once a week. He didn’t feel sad, really. He didn’t exactly feel happy either, but at 78 years old, not feeling sad was good enough. It was good enough that only his right knee hurt if he put enough weight on it—he just didn’t put weight on it, walked slowly but resolutely, and carried on. He liked to watch birds, the only modern testament to the bones he’d spent 40 years of his life digging up. He didn’t use binoculars and couldn’t see especially well, but he enjoyed the shades of black and blue and brown darting between trees. His sight had started to go bad almost immediately after his wife died, like his eyes were always focused on something that wasn’t there, giving everything more than a few feet away from him the blur of a distant background. But he could make do, he thought, following what appeared to be a Steller’s jay into the woods behind his house. If birds could flit around 150 million years after the first archaeopteryx took flight, he could keep on going for a while. Suddenly, his right foot struck a root, sending him careening forwards and landing hard on the ground.

The old man felt alright, other than the stinging in his palms and the pain lancing through his bad knee. He got up warily and winced, inspecting his hands. They were scraped pretty bad, and a thin layer of dirt clung to them almost everywhere except for one small area. In the middle of his right palm, there was an oddly uniform circle about the diameter of his index finger that was free from any dirt or injury. It looked like he had held a large straw there for 30 seconds and taken it off. He looked back to where he got up from and noticed the culprit—a small hole in the ground. Something about it compelled him to sit down haltingly next to it. It looked pitch black. He held his right hand up to it and felt a warmth emanating from inside, damp and intimate, like the pant of a wild animal. Confused, he put the back of his hand to the hole, wondering if the sensation was just the feeling of blood rushing to clot the scrapes. The warmth was still there. He stuck his pointer finger inside and wiggled it around, but just felt the surrounding dirt packed in tightly. He didn’t reach the bottom.

The man went back inside and started washing himself. He was used to getting banged around from his days at dig sites. How many other men his age would be able to fall, hit the ground, get up, and clean themselves off? Obviously he enjoyed his daughter’s company, but she was always trying to take care of him, like he needed it. His pain tolerance was worse than it had been, though, he thought as the hydrogen peroxide singed his palms. His mind drifted back to the hole. Something about it . . . it seemed impossibly deep, and the warmth was confusing. The thought flashed across his mind that it went down twelve miles to that fiery primordial sea encircling the very core of the planet, but he shook it off. He was not going senile anytime soon. But his adventure had taken its toll, and he was tired. He went to sleep and had uncertain dreams that eluded him when he woke up.

The hole weighed on him as he made coffee and toast the next morning and sat outside, watching the sun’s first rays summit the Cascades and cast massive, gently sloping shadows on the trees below. He thought of a picture he had since lost of his younger self at Santa Monica Beach wearing aviators and a wide grin, his body tight and ruddy, his hair sun-bleached blonde. He absentmindedly touched the gray horseshoe clinging to his head and made up his mind to see how deep the hole went. He got a pencil from his desk cabinet and walked back to the site of his injury, feeling embarrassed upon seeing the clear handprints left in the dirt. At least it made the hole easier to find. He painstakingly sat down next to it without setting his knee on fire and stuck the pencil in. It went all the way down without meeting any resistance. No good. He sat there wondering if anything else in the house could suffice and thought of something ingenious. He would never go senile, he decided. Armed with scotch tape, a dental floss dispenser, and the pencil, he returned. There was not much floss left, but still enough to give the probing device three and a half feet of reach or so.

He lowered the pencil slowly with his left hand, holding the other end of the floss in his right. The contraption didn’t stop descending. He moved his right hand closer and closer until it was at the edge of the hole. Still no resistance. The image of the hole going all the way to the center of the Earth leapt through his mind again. He shook his head. He dropped the rest of the contraption into the hole and quickly put his ear to it, hoping to hear a dull thud or some other sound echo back up, but none came. Just the sensation of breath in his ear that made him recoil, like the hole was whispering to him in some language ancient and incomprehensible. He got back up to his feet and slowly shuffled inside. He texted his daughter. Could you get rope?

What do you need it for? she responded within the minute. For some reason, he didn’t feel like telling her.

Why?

So I know what kind of rope to get, for one. I mean come on, Dad, it isn’t like a normal thing to buy.

Thin as a finger and long

Ok? I’ll see.

Thanks

When the woman came back the following weekend, she was shocked to see a transformation had overtaken her father. It was subtle but potent, a glimmer in his previously dead eyes that took her aback. “You look different,” she said to him in the kitchen after they had finished unloading all the groceries.

“In a good or a bad way?” he said with the familiar vacancy, looking out the window above the farmhouse sink.

“Good, I guess. I mean, your eyes look . . . more alert? Happier, maybe?”

His reverie was broken as he turned to her. “More alert? I’m plenty alert.” She shifted back.

“Yes, of course, I just mean . . . you look like you’re moving with purpose.”

He paused like he was considering it. “Speaking of which, did you bring the rope I asked for?” She realized she’d forgotten to get it.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry! I completely forgot. What were you gonna do with it again?” His eyes flashed suddenly, vibrantly, in anger. She physically recoiled, taking two steps back. She hadn’t seen any sign of emotion from him in almost three years, and this was so quick and unprecedented that it felt violent.

“It’s fine,” he said, making a sound like his teeth were gnashing against one another. “I’ll manage.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I can just run down to the store right now and get—”

“I’ll manage.” His tone was no louder, but this time it felt final. He turned away from her. “I’ll see you next week.”

“O-okay, see you.”

She went out to her car without looking back. That night, she had the dream again, but things were different. She was the one standing in the middle of the bridge, and her father was on a cliff at the end. He was still calling her over, more urgently this time. She heard the sound of wood cracking behind her and turned around, but there was nothing there. She looked back towards her father and somehow just his head was sticking out above the solid ground. He had a huge smile on his face, like he was trying to open his mouth as wide as he could. His head too started to sink lower and lower. For an awful second, it was just his eyes staring through her before he disappeared entirely. Then, the sound of splintering again and the sensation of the ground giving out beneath her. She woke up screaming.

She was useless. The old man would figure it out himself. He didn’t need a rope to see how deep the hole went, he would dig it up. Like the good old days, a dig! His old trusty shovel was still in the garage, caked over with decades of dirt, and it hadn’t been used in quite some time. It was a piece of work alright, faded wood and rusted metal, certainly blunt, but the worn handle still fit his palm perfectly. He walked outside to the hole, fists clenched in anticipation, and plunged it into the dirt. The give of the soil called to him like a siren, bid him come closer, deeper. He felt 20 again. He dug and dug and dug, keeping steady pace, heaving large clumps over his shoulder, and when the sun went down he went inside and found his old helmet and helmet light and kept digging some more. At some point, exhaustion grabbed hold of him, and he curled up next to his site and slept deeply.

He dreamt he was back in the Badlands, watching the sunset slowly brush the striations in the rock faces, painting the landscape a million shades of orange and scarlet. He was working on a Megacerops fossil, a literal thunderbeast, neither rhinoceros nor horse but something mightier and more beautiful than both. Far to the west, on the peak of a rock almost entirely fox red, he saw the figure of a woman, translucent and bright. The sun beamed through her like a prism, casting golden light into his eyes and all over his body and glinting off his pick as if to say that something was there, something wondrous and enduring, a signal from the past to the future millions of years away like the skeletons of the birds he watched fly around, if only he would unearth it. He woke up with dirt covering his body, and inspected the results of his frenzy. The small hole was still there at the center of the pit he had excavated, and it was still warm.

The woman came back the next week with the usual groceries and a 30 foot length of thin, white rope around her shoulder. She knocked nervously on the door and waited for an answer. After a couple minutes, she heard the sound of clomping on the paneled floor, and as the lock turned, a shiver ran up her spine. Her father stood before her, grinning, leaning on the doorframe with his face resting on his hand. He wore an old gray tracksuit. His fingernails were long and yellow, and had dirt underneath them. The speckles in his eyes had spread, not like the old glint had returned, but rather like something new and alien had taken up residence. They looked golden, somehow. He was panting.

“Hello!” he said, unfazed by the startled expression on her face.

“Is everything alright? You’re breathing so heavily!”

“I was just getting some exercise out back. Gotta keep young somehow!”

“Sure . . . what are you doing?”

His face clouded slightly. “Oh! Just some cardio. Why don’t you come in?”

“Oh, okay!” She followed him inside. He was whistling. “You have dirt under your fingers.”

He looked down at his cracked hands. “Ah, so I do! Would you like some coffee?”

“Dad, I’m worried about you, what are you—”

“For the last time, don’t worry about me!” He whipped around to face her. His eyes were dancing and he stood directly under the kitchen light, his sparse hair like a halo, his face like an angel of retribution, and she noticed he had dirt in his hair, dirt on his shirt, dirt everywhere. “I’ve been digging, you see. Like I’ve always done, like I’ve done since I was old enough to crawl. A man digs all his life, you can’t just stop him. I saw a hole out back so I started digging. You always have something to say to me, always say I need to start living my life. Well, here I am living it! What do you have to say to that?”

She backed away from him. “I’m glad you’re getting back into your old habits Dad, that’s great, really. I just wor—” she caught herself. “I just feel like it’s a sudden transition for you to go into physical activity so quickly. Can I see this hole?”

“NO!” He bounded between her and the back door and pressed himself against the frame like a cornered animal, hunched over, every muscle beneath his papery skin stretched taut. For a moment, he looked like he was about to snap. He breathed heavily, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, his worn teeth contorted into a grimace. Then, he stood up and sighed, relaxing slightly. “I’m sorry, but I think you need to go,” he said, walking towards her. There was no menace in his movement, and it almost seemed like he was back to how he used to be, but his eyes still looked like someone—or something—else’s: hungry, possessive, bestial. She slowly backed up to the front door, stepped outside, and realized she still had the rope with her. She placed it on the doormat and, against her better judgment, decided to go around the side of the house towards the back, ducking under the windows so he couldn’t see her. She made it to the end of the house and peered around the side.

Out of nowhere, the door slammed open and she saw a figure bound towards the forest at an almost inhuman speed, faster than she’d ever seen her father move in her life, leaning forward, gnarled hands grabbing at the air. As he reached the end of the woods, he came to an abrupt halt and snapped his head around towards her. He was 50 feet away but she somehow knew he could see her, felt his golden eyes bore into her. Some latent reptilian instinct took hold of her, and before she knew it, she was scrambling back towards the car, slamming the door and racing off.

The old man shook his head as his daughter darted off. He should have known better than to do that. He knew better than to do that but it was a shame what happened and at any rate he had to get back to digging so he ran back to his pit. If his daughter had gone into the forest she would have seen that he had dragged his bed out there and had put it on the side of the massive excavation. He had broken his shovel on hard rock, had gotten his pickaxe out, and was hammering it down repeatedly into the hole or as close as he could possibly get to it. The hole kept going down and down and he kept driving the point into it. He was a fine man and he could dig like crazy and he had found so many bones in his lifetime and he was good at his job and he would find the bottom of the hole and the hole stared back at him and said come find me, come.

That night, the daughter dreamt she was sitting in the forest in front of a campfire, talking to her mother. Her mother looked old, almost as old as she was when she died. Light flickered across the crevices of her face. It was cold, and they were holding their bare hands out to keep warm. “I don’t know what to do, Mom,” she said. “Work’s been so busy recently, and I feel like I have less energy day by day. It’s so rainy all the time, and I just want to be somewhere else, anywhere else. ” Her mother nodded slowly, gravely. “And on top of all that, I don’t know how to deal with him, it’s just too much.”

“It’ll be alright dear,” her mother said, so quietly that she instinctively leaned in. “Give it a couple weeks. The earth will embrace him as it embraces me, and we’ll be together again.”

The fire blew out, and the daughter was thrust into darkness. She cried out, “Mom? Mom!” but there was no response. She tried to reach her hand out and banged it into a solid object in front of her. Moving her hands to the sides, she felt dirt walls enclosing her. The more she moved, the closer the walls got, until she could feel them pressing into her shoulders. She felt her head and it wasn’t her head but the head of some creature far bigger than her without skin or sinew, just an empty skull grinning in the dark. She woke up with her hands on her ears, crying.

The daughter waited two weeks like her mother said before going back to her father’s house. She was worried about him, of course, but couldn’t stop thinking about that gray shape darting towards the back of the forest, the awful look in his eyes. She felt some strange sense that her mother had come to warn her, that something bad would happen if she tried to go back earlier. She texted him asking if she could come over, and when he didn’t answer within 2 hours, she started the long drive over, unease sitting in her throat. When she got to the house, the front door was locked, the lights were out, and the rope lay there untouched. There was no response to her knock. She waited a while before walking to the back, looking around the patio and in the bedroom window where she saw the bed was gone. Panic began to bubble in her stomach. She hastily surveyed the back of the property and saw leading off into the woods, like something out of an old cartoon, a trail of mud. She followed it to the large pile of soil and stone, the bed, the dresser. She saw the clothes strewn everywhere, the bedsheets covered in dirt. It had rained last night, and everything was stained brown.

She inched forward until she was at the lip of the precipice, and gasped. Her father lay at the bottom, naked, his body splayed like the skeleton of an animal suddenly buried in a mudslide and fossilized for eternity, violent and clawing. His shovel had broken and still he kept digging and his pickaxe had broken and still he kept digging and his trowel had broken and still he kept digging until he was scrabbling at slabs of rock with his brittle fingernails. His head was turned to the side, he had a wide smile smeared across his face, and his eyes were empty once more.

The daughter called the police, filed a report, signed the death certificate. She organized the funeral and invited old friends of his. She wrote a eulogy that was touching enough to the few in attendance, called her father a great man, made conversation, and avoided the topic of how he had died. She met with his lawyer, inherited the house, and immediately made the decision to sell it, using the money to pack everything up and move to a small house in southern California an hour from the beach. She hired a realtor and landscapers. Over the course of three days, they were able to get all the stone back into the pit and pack the dirt on as if it had never been there at all.