There's a Hole in Eagle Rock

By Reuel Hendricks

What was thought to be a simple residential purchase in Eagle Rock needing no more than a quick maintenance fix turns out to hold an opened gate to (literally) deep mysteries. Luke, slipping through the hole and down a floor resembling good old Idaho potato soil, discovers a cave stretching to an endless void. “How deep might it go? What secrets did it hold?” was all he could ask himself. Hundreds of feet deeper, strange sounds starts echoing to his ears, marking a massive turmoil of mysteries about to be unearthed. Right when he thought nothing could go worse (nor better), here comes a peculiar entity that might change the whole trajectory of his life—The Cave Spirit.

“You now have a story to tell. Only you can tell it. You know what it is like to try frantically and in vain to fight an enemy you cannot fathom. With your story, you may be able to permeate indelibly one man’s intellect of his ignorance,” that’s the message ‘it’ left him with.

Hendricks’ There’s a Hole in Eagle Rock is an engrossing novel that will follow the adventure of Luke as he and his missus moved in a riverside home in Eagle Rock. Thrown into a series of events that never in his life he himself expected, Luke’s person will be tied to a spirit within a cave that will let him experience life, death, and everything in between, opening his eyes to a much greater reality of mankind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662462573

Book preview

Chapter 1

This house by the river in the city of Eagle Rock was not new, but Luke and his missus fell for it and bought it on impulse.

It proved to be a financial burden until the large house was renovated and the four bedrooms upstairs turned into rentable sleeping rooms. A day care center was also started in the main living quarters.

From the first spring, Luke noticed a fair amount of water disappearing in a place or two around the yard. Working with the city engineers in past years, he had learned that a good share of the city was layered with lava rock at differing levels but holes, lava tubes, and occasional gravel beds left by the meandering Snake River would take surface water. Indeed, while working on the farm west of town, he had learned of sinkholes that could swallow an entire canal or a farm tractor or swather. There is a lava tube seventeen miles from town that a man can walk into a half mile or more until the floor of sedimentary sand meets the roof of the tube and ends the free descent.

Part of the basement of Luke’s house was not excavated and finished. One winter, while no work was available, he decided to excavate it out little by little. With more time than money and being in no hurry, he shoveled the soft dirt into buckets and toted them out by hand. The speed at which the project was going gave him more incentive.

One day, as he was using a crowbar on a relatively hard area on the floor, he poked through to an apparent void. The crowbar could not find the bottom. Pulling it out and poking and prying around, he soon had a hole a yard wide with hard lava sides about four feet down but with a hole in the middle like a bottomless bowl. With the bar, he chopped the sides of the hole to a size large enough to accommodate his body. Then going back to the house for a flashlight, he returned to the hole to examine further the cave.

Slipping through the hole to the slanted floor that looked like good old Idaho potato soil, he bent down to see the rest of the cave. But the rest was not going to be small. The walls were lava and in one place on his left, about thirty feet away and down, he could see where water had been running in, probably in fair quantity in the spring and summer because there was an obvious ditch or wash in the soil-laden floor. The wash was about three feet deep and a foot wide at the top. The cave must be a lava tube, he thought to himself, but it was much steeper than any others he had seen. It dipped rather sharply to the west or southwest. Leaving the extension cord light at the entrance and proceeding on buttocks and heels, he descended over and around the occasional lava boulders that were strewn about the floor. After descending into the cave, an estimated one hundred feet, he decided to return for another light as a safety backup, a warm top shirt, and some thought. This cave was not little. Dipping at a fairly constant angle and very slightly to the right or north, he could see no end.

Returning to the house, he closed the door to the basement and started a pot of coffee. He pulled his wife from the day-care TV room and told her casually of his discovery. She was mildly interested and related to him some discoveries of her own: three babies had messed their undies all at once, one two-year-old had broken a house plant, and a thousand dollars’ worth of bills had just arrived in the mail.

As he drank a cup of coffee, he tried to fathom his discovery: How deep might it go? What secrets did it hold?

It dawned on him at that time that the tube must be unique to his house—that it could be his private cave as long as he kept it secret. He talked with his wife at that time, helping her lay a couple of babes down for their nap and drinking his coffee at intervals, he managed to tell her to keep the discovery entirely under her hat.

With the babies settled, he sat down with a second cup of coffee and while thinking of how the exploring might go, decided to string an electric wire down the tube as far as he had wire. Then if the tube proved to go any distance, he could add more wire and more light. He had a roll of Romex electrical wire that was three hundred feet long. Some he had bought on sale a few years back when his brother-in-law had helped him wire another circuit into the old house. What was left of the wire should reach way past the point where he had previously penetrated the cave.

After finding the wire and tapping into the basement circuit, he started back down into the hole. With two flashlights, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a warm overshirt, he felt prepared to descend once more. As he fed the wire to the side of the path behind him, he soon reached the point to which he previously descended. Being more familiar this time, he was able to walk upright using a sidestep as one would descend any soily hillside.

With flashlight in his left hand and wire in both hands, the moving was fairly slow. But in ten or fifteen minutes, the end of the wire was near. Now with a bulb and a socket, careful connection was the next step. Luke was not afraid of electricity as long as it was only 110 volts and his rubber soles were on dry ground. However, the clay soil was a little damp. Nevertheless, with diligence, the hookup was made. Now with light in socket and turned on, Luke’s mind forced him to sit once again and try and fathom how huge this cave might be. The wash had shallowed out at this point, and the cave looked about as big as it had at the start with a few boulders embedded in the clay floor which appeared to be about the same depth. The cave seemed to be fairly consistent in width—about twenty-five to thirty feet—and no end in sight.

After exploring another fifty or seventy feet, he decided to return to the entrance for some more thought and wire. On the way out, he rearranged the Romex wire—hanging it on the wall where there was jaggedness to support it. After getting out, he fetched a light switch from the few he had in his shop. This way, he could turn on the light as he went into the hole.

The rest of the afternoon was spent pondering. Luke could not keep his mind on anything else for any length of time. The tube must go west to a point close to the river. The mighty Snake River was only about two hundred yards from his house.

Chapter 2

The next morning, Luke managed to scrape a few bucks together and bought some more Romex wire. Another one thousand feet would surely reach the end. If he had some leftover, it could be used for something else. Back in the hole with a light backpack partially full of provisions including a sandwich, the connection was made. The tube continued down but gradually declined in steepness to an 8 or 10 percent grade. Another light was installed at a point approximately two hundred feet from the first one. The cave’s dark walls and natural darkness seemed to suck the artificial light right out of the air. From the point where the second light was installed, Luke could only see for one hundred or one hundred fifty feet using sixty-watt bulbs. Still no end in sight.

Luke started thinking, as he continued trailing more wire, that maybe he’d better tell his wife or someone about the magnitude of this tube in case he fell or somehow hurt himself.

He thought, Just be damn careful for now. Next time, I’d better bring the wife as she is my most trusted friend. If I had an accident and she came looking for me, she’d flip a cork when she saw the hole I’ve descended into. And she’ll likely call the police. At the very least, this would no longer be my cave. My insurance company may cancel the insurance on my house when they found out it sat over such a chasm, even though a very strong lava roof would have to give way before there would be any danger at all.

Another two hundred feet, another light installed.

I’m glad I bought a thousand feet, he thought.

At this point, Luke could hear very faintly some strange sounds for such a place: water splashing and the cries of children or baby animals of some kind playing.

Aw hell, it must be my mind and the dark world here toying with it, he said to himself. Maybe spirits from another time, another place, would be in a place like this. Indeed, maybe they could see in a world of such darkness. Maybe this would be a perfect home for them. Maybe the darkness is toying with my mind again. But maybe this deep, dark, quiet world just makes a human mind more alert. There are no outside attractions or distractions as there are for any man in his natural environment, he pondered further.

Luke’s mind was working overtime. He found that when he sat down, became comfortable, and overcame the fear that naturally is associated with such an environment, his mind became very clear and perceptive. He had been in several other lava tubes and never heard or sensed anything, but then he was always in a hurry to find the end and then get out. One time, he had been down in one where the tube forked and sharply narrowed. He had taken one of the forks in a desire to reach an end and had become lost. Backtracking and crawling through holes to other tube channels, he had finally reached another major tube. Following it, he finally became aware that it was the one into which he had originally descended, and he found his way out. The many different forks at the deep end of this tube, which probably had a length of one-half mile, may have been, in fact, one tube which had caved in and left many smaller openings to the other side of the cave in. At any rate, the experience was scary, but hopefully, the experience had somewhat prepared him for this tube.

He wondered if he sat and listened in the other caves, where he had always been in such a hurry, would he have heard the sounds and sensed the strange things he was experiencing here. Up and at it again, he continued to the point where the light became dim, approximately two hundred feet. Another light hookup and more downward progress. Not so much downward now. The cave seemed to shallow out in steepness ever so gradually. The wash that was so obvious at the beginning was now nonexistent. After about one hundred feet from the last hookup, Luke was hearing the sounds again.

I’m sure in my conscious mind that the sounds must be real, he thought.

The sounds were still faint but still definite sounds of splashing and weird sounds like some kind of half-human babies playing or crying.

He sat down again and wished that he had been more perceptive in other caves to his surroundings.

Maybe something like these sounds can be heard in any of the large caves if one is quiet and not in such a hurry, he thought. In the woods, if you hurry, you seldom see anything and seldom hear anything but your own feet smashing brush and rock debris or your own breath. But literally hundreds—maybe thousands—of animals (big and small) hear, see, and smell you.

As a lad, Luke was raised in the river bottomland thirty miles north of here. The north fork of the Snake in that area is slow-moving and very crooked like a snake, much swamp and heavy brush is the resultant plant growth.

He remembered how he had sat lazily for as long as two hours while hunting deer there, and if he had sat long enough, the young deer would sometimes feed within a few feet of him, not knowing of his presence. Once his horse blew his nose the way horses do when they are bored or nervous as when approached by a stranger when tied and unable to run and spooked a herd of deer that had encircled him. At the time, he recalled, his horse was tied up more than one-eighth mile away. This is how wild animals usually react to man or anything associated with man.

But if these are animals, or reptiles or whatever that I am hearing down here, maybe they have never seen a man before, he thought. In the world above, the wild animals had learned to fear man. In fact, their very survival had surely depended on it in many, if not all, cases. So these animals, if they are animals, here in this world below might react in a very different manner when they sense my presence if, in fact, they have never seen a man before.

He