Violet could have ignored the hole. Could have just kept her head down and minded her own business. After all, it was past midnight and the bus stop wasn’t far off. Yet the sound coming from the alleyway seemed so familiar, lingering in the air like an echo from a past life. Violet’s ears tugged her to a halt.
She was as late as she could allow herself to be—just a few minutes longer meant the bus would leave the city without her. She needed to get on that bus, needed to get out of town and back to her home. Her real home. No more towering monoliths, no more shitty men and women crossing Black girls off from their list, no more taking late-night calls just to pay her overpriced rent. She’d go home, back out bush to her mum. She’d hide behind those doors for a few months. Maybe a few years. Her mum would forgive her. She had to. That’s what mothers are for.
The sound spiked, jolting up in volume for a moment. In surprise, Violet dug her teeth a little too hard into her lip. She dropped her suitcase and covered her mouth with her hands. People kept moving past, oblivious. The noise was like a splinter digging into her skin.
Violet took an apprehensive step forward, then stopped again. A gleam of red appeared at the end of the alley. It glistened. With her mind made up, Violet huffed out a sigh and jogged toward it. At first, she went forward with confidence—just a quick look and then speed off—but as the sound got louder and the surrounding walls appeared to close in on her, Violet slowed to a dawdle. Now at her destination, she kicked away the contents of a strewn rubbish bag, then crouched to get a better look.
There, at the base of the building, was a hole. More of a gash, she figured. The edges crumbled away haphazardly, leaving only a space big enough to fit a large fist at most. In the subdued shade of the crevice, a damp red something moved.
Violet shone the torch from her phone and gazed inside. Beyond the opening, no more than a few inches in, churned a vortex of wet flesh. Reds and whites, muscle and sinew, skin and hair. It rotated like a whirlpool of meat cycling in on itself. The scent of iron and offal pervaded his nose. Violet narrowed her eyes as she considered what lay before her.
The beige building had existed since the city’s inception, possessed by forgotten memories. She remembered passing cafes and hairdressers moments before—venues not known for keeping meat in their walls. The possibility of an injured animal flittered across her mind, but whatever it was kept moving, flesh spiralling forever inward. Then there was that noise. It came clear to her, no echo or reverb, no city noises to drown it out. It was as if the hole emitted the sound directly into her heart.
Before Violet could mull this over further, a strange impulse took control of her arm and began to move her fingers closer to the entrance. A giddiness bubbled up from within as her dainty fingertips edged nearer. This feels good. This is the right thing to do.
A wolf-whistle snapped Violet’s attention away. She withdrew her arm and stood up. Two boys moved towards her from the other end of the alleyway. The first to step up was a teenager who’d missed too many dinners. His face had the hint of a moustache, but not quite—years of undernourishment hadn’t allowed his gossamer whiskers to thicken. His friend, a younger stocky boy, lingered, blocking her exit.
The older one bared broken teeth, and Violet couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a snarl. He leered at her and began to approach. With each step Violet felt her heart strain, like a cable pulled taut before severing. They reeked of danger and recklessness. Stray dogs roaming for their next feed or fuck.
Violet wasn’t prepared when he grabbed her. He snatched her arm up behind her back, cupped his other hand around her mouth, and wheezed into her ear promises of violence and suffering if she dared scream.
Violet wasn’t a fool, though. Her walks at night, the liaisons—they’d toughened her up. Muscle memory kicked in as she snatched the index finger from his hand over her mouth, yanking it up and to the side. A loud pop followed by a scream meant her next target was his throat. Not letting go, she spun out in front of him and directed her left fist in an arc against his windpipe. The boy shut up immediately as he collapsed to his knees, pulled his mangled finger free and clutched his neck.
In that moment of victorious adrenaline, Violet had forgotten about the other boy. Now thick arms wrapped around her throat. As he squeezed, blips of colour danced across her vision and her surroundings grew darker.
This is it, she thought. I’ll die out here. She thought of the stories she’d heard, of the people she knew who were found in gutters, beaches, alleys—graveyards for the lost, the unwanted.
In the darkness, she heard her attacker calling for his friend, shouting his name, but she couldn’t understand him. She couldn’t understand anything but her own mortality fast approaching. Her throat would be crushed, and her body would be discovered days later. Abruptly, his grip lightened enough for her to breathe again, and the whole world blurred its way back into sight. The alleyway, the filth and the puddles all returned at once, along with the older boy who was still on all fours. She tried to scream, shriek, do anything, but all that came out was a gurgle.
Her assailant shook her hard enough to hurt. He wanted her to stay still, and when Violet finally got a better look at where his attention was directed, she obliged.
Violet and the boy both watched the skinny older one, now on his stomach. He lay only inches from the hole and appeared mesmerised. The older boy ignored the calls from his friend and the pain Violet had inflicted. Instead, cautiously, he reached with his fingers and gently placed the broken digit inside. Then, as if his arm were a rod with a fish on the line, it began to be yanked forward. The boy’s expression, a look of innocent wonder, never once wavered while the vortex held him, his arm spasming.
Only another moment passed before the final sharp tug. He withdrew his hand, now bereft of a finger, removed up to the last knuckle. Blood pooled into the creases of his outstretched palm as he showed it off. Violet couldn’t do anything but stare mutely at the alienness of the whole scene. His face wasn’t squished into the anguish of a boy wracked with pain—he possessed the relaxed features of someone filled with contentment. Pure satisfaction.
The grip around her throat loosened some more, and immediately Violet ripped her way out of the younger boy’s clutches and began sprinting toward the light. Her flurried footsteps echoed as she darted towards the end of the shadows. She was close to the street, close to safety. Yet her panicked mind had a need to know how far behind they were. But when she glanced back, Violet found no pursuers, no snarling, rabid dogs frothing at their mouths. She slowed to a stop.
Back down the alley, she spied the younger boy now on his knees, plunging his arm into the hole up to his elbow. He wore the same dazed expression as his friend, who stood supportively by his side. His body jerked every few seconds, moving him incrementally closer to the wall.
The noise suddenly returned, with the familiarity of an old song Violet could barely remember the lyrics to. She closed her eyes. The hum on the tip of her tongue formed shapes of emotions rather than words or images. Like a mother calling out her child’s name in a busy street, Violet frantically searched the landscape of her memory for its origin. She failed, and opening her eyes, spied the boys again.
They beckoned her. The older one waved his bloodied palm, now missing all fingers; the other raised and waggled the ends of his stump in the air. They wore the same expression of dull bliss, an epiphany of joy.
She ran. Abandoning the alleyway, and the boys, she rushed back out into the open streets. She ran to the bus stop, without even taking a breath, and stepped onto the bus with seconds to spare.
Making her way towards the back seats, Violet breathed out loud panicked breaths. She ignored the quips of disbelief and concern of her fellow passengers, squeezing her eyes shut until the engine sputtered to life and the city was left far behind. As her mind blackened out the world around her, Violet’s barely conscious thoughts made one last vow: to never return.
*
A month passed. Thirty days of apologies, tears, second guesses and, finally, acceptance. Every day, Violet’s mother demanded that she show penance by cleaning, cooking and helping with her younger siblings. It was nothing but a farce, a way to mask her relief at her daughter’s return. Violet also played her role correctly, grumbling and moaning, arguing when appropriate. But when the kids went to bed, and the neighbours’ windows darkened, her mother would invite her out the back for a cup of tea under the stars. Violet had missed the night sky without the light pollution, and while gazing up at the swirls of the Milky Way, she would recount as best she could her time away.
Every night, hours were spent poring over new friends, the places she’d visited and the life of the city itself, all the while carefully dancing around the subject of how she made a living—and not ever coming close to talking about the strange, mysterious hole in the wall. Instinctively, Violet believed if she let it slip that she sold her body, the spell of normalcy would break like a blasphemous remark uttered during mass. Then there was the beige building and the boys with their bloodied hands. Her mum would think she had lost her mind.
And then on the thirtieth day, as the yellow hook of a moon hung low in the sky, Violet’s mother finally asked. She demanded she come clean, spill her means of survival and clear up certain rumours that had been circulating within the community. Like an oyster pried from the rocks, Violet at first sealed up tight, but as the tension between them became too much to handle, she reluctantly let slip the truth.
Her stomach churned with guilt as she uttered her final explanation, barely as loud as a whisper. Her mother sighed ruefully and shook her head. I’m going to be kicked out, she thought. Expelled and ostracised.
But her mother surprised her. Despite the disappointment on her face, the older woman let out a resigned sigh and squeezed Violet’s hand. A swell of emotion burst inside Violet. Relief mixed with despair, and her cheeks glistened with grateful tears.
The sacred bond between Violet and her mother smashed through the wall of doubt, and Violet felt born anew. Warm, loving arms enveloped her like a calming doona. Violet didn’t hesitate. She nestled her face into the crook of her mother’s neck and wailed until all her hurt, anger and pain drained away.
Her mother began to sway then, hushing her like a baby into sleep, before starting to hum. As Violet squeezed tighter, the rhythm seemed to make everything all right. It was a song, one she remembered from long ago. Something her mum had hummed to her since birth, maybe even before that, maybe when Violet was in the womb. Her motherly love allowed the pain and anguish to drift away like emotional flotsam. The repetitive melody brought forth images from her childhood of times when, as now, she’d lay cradled in her mother’s arms. The time a dog chased her on the way back from school. When she’d broken up with her first boyfriend. Then, she pictured the unforgiving streets of the city. The long nights, the cash in her hands. The landlord who wouldn’t fix anything in her unit but kept raising the rent. The bills that just kept coming. The alleyway. The whirling flesh. Two boys waving at her to join them.
Within the timbre of her mother’s voice, she now noticed a discrepancy. An incompleteness. Somehow the hum pervaded her mind with a wrongness that hadn’t been there before. It sounded like a cheap copy of the real thing, that song which sung from that gloomy alleyway.
She’d sleep on it, she thought. Leave the responsibility to a future version of herself. Yet the next morning when Violet woke, as she lay with her eyelids shielding her from the truth of the day, the song remained on repeat deep within. Like a worm burrowing in, every thought, every conversation and every action was choreographed with the tune in the background. It loitered like the memory of a bad dream.
The melody broke Violet a week later. Her mother had called out for her to help peg clothes on the line, and halfway through the task that familiar song hummed louder than ever through the air. Absent-mindedly, her mother began to sing to pass the time, and a strange yearning overcame Violet. The mental splinter itched again, a primal urge to know the truth.
Violet dropped the clothes and pulled her mother into an embrace. At first her mother was confused, but instinct took over and she returned the hug. After enough time had passed, Violet pulled away and smiled apologetically. There was something she’d forgotten, she explained, something she needed to retrieve back in the city.
*
The city was quiet for a weekday morning. The bus dropped Violet off on a street that used to be bustling but was now mostly empty. As she walked towards her destination, she found a crowd. A line of people stretched around the building and looped back on itself. People of all races and creeds stood patiently waiting for their turn. Many looked worse for wear—eyes bloodshot and erratic, their clothes dishevelled, as if they’d worn them to bed. Almost all possessed a look of despair.
When Violet joined the queue, she asked the person in front of her, a girl no older than sixteen with red sores dotting her face, if the hole had been advertised in the paper or on television. The girl laughed, shook her head, then explained that she’d recognised a melody coming from the alleyway, something she was certain she had heard in a dream the night before.
Violet considered giving her a warning, but before she could speak a smartly dressed man in a suit and tie almost walked right into her. Violet flinched, but he stopped just in time to check his watch. He seemed not to even notice the line, and quickly moved past them all on his way to who knows where. Then it clicked. Like a seamstress shaping a dress to form, Violet realised the hole conducted a unique ballad for each individual, which meant it must block out those it did not want. A psychic filter.
I’ve been chosen.
It took hours for Violet to progress through the line. Apart from some idle chit-chat, most people kept to themselves. Anxiety and fatigue almost forced Violet out of her place, but as the line behind her grew longer and longer, she figured if she left now there wouldn’t be a spot for her ever again.
Finally, as she made it to the alley’s entrance, the song lulled comfortably to the back of her mind. It all looked different in the sunlight. Gone was the gloom from the overcast sky, there was hardly any rubbish. It was as if the council had finally got around to cleaning. Maybe even put a pressure hose to the concrete to brighten the place up.
A moan from up ahead caused her heart to flutter. At the front of the line, a man with his left leg severed below the knee was being helped by two others who seemed to be guarding the hole. These young men escorted the mangled man away, leaving a trail of blood in their wake. Initially, Violet worried for him—blood loss from amputation was a scary prospect—but he waved at the crowd cheerily. The young men returned to give the next person a hand, and Violet realised it would all be okay. There was help if she needed it. She breathed a sigh of relief and stepped towards the inevitable.
In the line ahead of her, Violet watched each person offer a piece of themselves to the hole. Some only gave a single tip of a finger, while others gave whole limbs. One after the other, they were escorted away, looks of ecstasy on every face, before the two young men returned to the next in line. When only three people stood before her, Violet finally got a good look at the helpers standing by the wall, and had to choke back a gasp of surprise.
They were the teenagers who had attacked her all those nights ago. They had cleaned themselves up. Both sported respectable haircuts, were clean-shaven and, though a little shabby and possibly purchased from Goodwill, wore long-sleeve shirts and pants. Their appearance offered a vague aura of professionalism and maturity despite the speckling of blood on them, and they helped people along with a cheeriness and optimism reserved for old friends. They weren’t boys anymore.
Violet wanted to demand answers from them. But as she stepped forwards, her heart quickened at the thought of losing her place in the line. The two men watched her silently resume her position, the skinny one waving a fingerless palm, nodding in recognition and tapping his foot to a beat.
There it was. Always in the background. That sound. The song, lulling her to a state of calm, emanating from only a few feet away. Every sore muscle, every ounce of pain, vanished into the ether. The drying blood made her shoes stick to the ground, much like the floors of the seedy pubs she used to visit.
Finally, she stood before the hole and gazed into it with longing. Last time, it had been barely big enough to fit an arm into, but now, torn into the building, it was a large open wound. The spinning flesh seemed brighter now. More vibrant. More full of life. The countless offerings from those before must have only added to its exuberance. It spun in a churning mass like a concrete mixer of viscera, or a clothes dryer of uncooked brawn. It reeked of a butcher’s back room, a perfume that at once filled her with both sickening dread and excitement. The meat sloshed and gurgled, slapping violently into itself, yet it possessed a rhythm, comforting and inviting.
The electricity of adrenaline shook at her fingers and knees as she impatiently began to strip, discarding her shoes and clothing to the side. She wouldn’t need them anymore.
As Violet readied herself, the two helpers returned. They smiled at her. She figured it was a sign of acceptance, their way of saying that everything she did was completely fine. Hell, that it was right of her to do it.
She beamed in return, and then took a deep breath. The music blared louder than ever and drowned out any remaining doubts. She was so close.
Then, as the wall churned, Violet pushed herself inside.
