The Theater #3

The Theater #3 The Hole See below for preview pages

Oh dear…the pressures of a bitter divorce.  Two people who, at one time, loved each other so much they longed only to spend eternity together and now, the end of eternity cannot come soon enough.

And the impact of such a vicious turmoil…like what we have here in Tim.  A lonely, broken man spiraling downward in the wake of a cheating, deceitful wife.  A woman flaunting her tactless indiscretions as if they were gifts for her husband and finally heaving the final blow of asking for a divorce.  The pain and humiliation driving him to madness…but, is he crazy?  I mean, the right divorce can make anyone feel psycho.  Feeling as though he’s going nuts, Tim decides to see a therapist.  And so, it begins…

OUR STORY

As any therapist visit begins, she asks him to tell her what’s been going on.  Poor Tim is looking frazzled, disheveled, like he hasn’t slept or eaten in days.  He nervously sits on her brown leather bench (seriously, this is a couch with no back…in a shrink’s office…ummm, okayyy) and begins to tell his tale of woes.

He starts by explaining about this one restless night he was having.  (I’m sure there were many for Tim.)  He was tossing and turning and looked up at the ceiling of his bedroom when he saw a hole.  It didn’t seem especially unique.  By the looks of the house, he hadn’t been doing much to keep up the property since wifey left.  Apparently, she let him stay in the house until it sold because he had no other place to go.

There’s dirty clothes everywhere, food trash and beer cans all over the place.  It looks as if this guy didn’t just fall off the wagon, he plummeted. 

The next day he patches the hole.  And thinking it’s fixed, he finally gets what he feels is a good night’s sleep.

When he wakes up the morning after the fix, the hole is not only there again but, it’s bigger.  Now, that’s not right.  If you patch it, it shouldn’t come back AND get bigger within 24 hours…right?

Concerned that something is really, truly wrong with the house, Tim calls his soon to be ex-wife, telling her it’s not a good idea to sell the house because of this hole.  She, of course, doesn’t want to be bothered and tries to hurry him off the phone so she can continue her exploits with her new beau.  But first, she agrees to come by and look at this “hole” but really, she wants to make sure he’s not wrecking the house before she sells it.

Meanwhile, Tim is curious about this hole.  He decides to do some investigating.  In doing so, he finds that is not some regular hole in the ceiling.  He realizes by reaching up through the hole (thinking into his attic) that there’s actually nothing there.  He throws a few tennis balls up there, they don’t come back down.  He chucks a ball of yarn, a broomstick and a flashlight up through the ceiling and they are nowhere to be found as well.  Then, he decides to put a neighborhood cat through the hole so he traps it in a box and forces it up there.  It kicks and hisses and then…nothing.  He waits awhile to see if it comes back down but, it doesn’t.  He even put out some tuna hoping to lure it back out but, to no avail.

However, the box that he shoved next to this mysterious hole, was covered in black goo when he brought it back down.  Having no idea what it is, he takes it to the backyard outside his shed to burn it.  That’s where he sees a video camera. 

He decides to video whatever is up there through that hole.  But when he looks at the video, there’s nothing there.  Just black nothingness.

Then he goes up to the attic to look for the hole from the opposite side.  Yet he finds nothing. 

Now his brain really starts to turn gears.  And he calls his daughter…having a little chat with her as she is packing her stuff to leave her cheating boyfriend, although she doesn’t tell her Dad that’s what’s going on.  He asks her if she’s coming to see him but, she says no.

Then the wife shows up.  She’s pissed as hell at the fact that she has to come to the house.  Tim takes her to the bedroom and shows her the hole in the ceiling.  He tells her that he needs her to climb the ladder and reach through the hole so he can find it on the other side in the attic.  Annoyed, she complies and climbs the ladder. 

As soon as she’s high up enough, Tim pulls the ladder out from under her and stuffs her up into the hole…to be gone forever.

Just then, the doorbell rings.  It’s his daughter.

They hang out for the evening and fall asleep in the living room. 

When the daughter wakes up the next morning she decides to patch the “hole” before her Dad wakes up.

When Tim finally rises, he frantically looks for his daughter, realizing she’s gone up the ladder to the hole.  He braces himself to be thrust into nothingness but, when he pokes his head through the hole this time, he sees his attic…and his daughter is nowhere to be found.

Back at the shrink’s office, they are out of time for the session.  She walks him to the door and heads back to her desk to make notes on her patient.  She’s talking into her little handheld recorder about his delusional thoughts, increased depression and some form of dissociative disorder when she notices a hole in the top of her desk…just like the hole in the ceiling at Tim’s.  And she begins to pick at it…

THE END?

OPINION DOMINION

This was an excellent issue.  It reminds me a little of Stephen King’s story Thinner, in the way that the wife is supposed to die out of revenge and anger and yet the daughter falls victim as well, unbeknownst to Daddy.

The guilt that must follow something like that has got to be horrible.  In Thinner, he handles it differently, he doesn’t go to a shrink.

The artwork in this issue is good but, not as good as some others.

Although, I will say the story did flow well and it didn’t take long to get going like some comic books do.  All in all, this was definitely worth the read.
 
RATINGS
Overall 3.5/5
Story 4/5
Artwork 3/5