GLORY HOLE by Ray Garton

Austin Philpot inspected rest homes for the government, and he hated his job. They all had the same smells, no matter how much cleanser and air freshener they used — the smells of urine and human decay. He was forty-three years old and he dreaded old age. His biggest fear was ending up in one of those places. He and his wife Janine had only one child, Charles, who was now in college. Austin did not get along well with Charles and never had, so ending up in a rest home when he became old and helpless was a distinct and frightening possibility.

On that rainy Tuesday night in early January, Austin was on his way from Sacramento to Redding to inspect two rest homes — Sunshine Valley and Green Meadow. Such idyllic names for places filled with so much misery. He was not feeling well and feared he had some kind of stomach virus. He'd last eaten at a Mexican restaurant in Sacramento, and he wondered if the food had made him sick. He felt a little nauseated, but worse than that were the abdominal cramps he was experiencing. Things were churning and roiling inside him, and he hoped it didn't get any worse, although it was already doing just that. He hoped a restaurant or gas station turned up soon, because he was afraid he was going to have a colonic blow-out.

Interstate 5 was not busy at that hour — it was 10:42 — and Austin was sailing along at a steady seventy-five miles per hour in his Ford Taurus, with an eye out for Highway Patrol cars. The lights of other cars were twisted and distorted by the rainfall on the windshield, with which the car's wipers tried to keep up. He listened to a news-talk station from San Francisco; the topic was gay marriage and the discussion became rather heated at times. He'd tried to find some music earlier, but the only stations he could pick up played either country music or rap, and he could tolerate neither. So had settled for talk radio.

He groaned as another cramp seized him and twisted his guts.

Austin needed a bathroom, and fast.

He passed a sign informing him that there was a rest stop two miles ahead. He was just north of Corning. He would have stopped there, but there were only gas stations, and he did not like using gas station restrooms. They were typically filthy. Rest stops, on the other hand, usually were clean and well tended.

Finally, he came to a sign that read REST STOP with an arrow pointed to the right. He took the exit.
Behind the rest stop grew tall eucalyptus trees that swayed back and forth in the wind. There was only one other vehicle in the parking lot, a white pick-up truck with a camper on the back. There was a light inside the camper that glowed through the yellow curtains on the windows. Austin parked a couple of spaces down from the pick-up, quickly got out. He took his raincoat from the backseat, closed his door, and pushed the button on the electronic key on his keychain to lock it. He put on the raincoat and walked at a quick pace toward the restrooms.

The wind and rain were cold, and he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his raincoat, hunched his shoulders, and lowered his head.

The men's room was on the right, the women's room on the left, with a peak-roofed shelter in between. He hurried into the men's room.

Overhead, the restroom had two long rectangular fluorescent tube lights. One was out and the other had a slight flicker. Rainwater speckled the lenses of Austin's glasses, slightly distorting his vision. There were two sinks beneath a long mirror on the left. He noticed that instead of paper towels, there were hand-blowers on the wall. Past the sinks were three urinals, one of which was set low on the wall for little boys. Beyond them was a row of four stalls. Austin walked to the last of the stalls, stepped inside, and closed and locked the door. He took off his raincoat and hung it on the hook on the back of the stall's door.

The cramps hit him again and he bent forward at the waist, one hand on his lower abdomen. He grunted at the pain. There was more roiling deep inside him, and he moved fast.

He took one of the sanitary sheets from the dispenser on the wall, poked out the hole in the center, and placed it over the toilet seat. He turned around, dropped his pants, and seated himself on the commode. The paper sheet crackled beneath him.

Just in time.

He groaned with a mixture of pain and relief.

Diarrhea — the last thing he needed while he was on the road.

Austin felt more cramps, and sat there waiting for the rest of it, which he knew was coming. He turned his head and saw the hole in the grey metal divider that separated the two stalls.
"Oh, god," he muttered with disgust and a shake of his head.

The hole, about twelve inches in circumference, had been stopped up with wadded toilet tissue. Austin was on the road a lot, and he had seen plenty of them in rest stop and gas station restrooms. Glory holes, they were called.

They were a mystery to Austin. How desperate did someone have to be, he wondered, to stick his dick through a hole in a restroom stall divider for an anonymous blowjob? What if the person on the other side were some kind of psycho nutjob with a sharp knife? Aside from that, the very unsanitary nature of the act made him shudder. And how in the hell did people manage to cut holes through the metal stall dividers? It had to be a lot of work.

Another wave of cramps hit him and Austin suddenly felt clammy and weak. He leaned forward and groaned again as his insides seemed to explode out of him noisily into the toilet.

"Ohboy, ohboy, ohboy," he said with a sigh.

He sat up straight again and looked around.

The metal divider on his right and the cinderblock wall on his left were covered with graffiti. There were the usual crude drawings of genitals, phone numbers here and there, and vile little poems. Some of the more unimaginative people had simply scrawled obscene words. He turned to the divider and saw something written boldly just above the tissue-clogged glory hole: THIS IS HELL.
Austin frowned as he looked at the dried, dripping stain beneath it. All the glory holes he'd seen had pale stains beneath them where semen had dribbled down the wall. This one had similar stains, but they were not pale. Rusty reddish-brown stains ran down the grey metal from the hole.

He waited for more bowel activity, but it seemed to have passed. For now, anyway. He finished up, stood, and pulled up his pants. He tucked in his shirt, buttoned his pants, pulled up the zipper. He turned, flushed the toilet, then put his raincoat back on. He left the stall and headed for the sink.
As he passed the next stall, its door wide open, he peripherally noticed something that did not seem quite right. He stopped, took a step back, and looked into the stall.

What was it? It looked no different than the stall he'd just left — toilet in the center, tissue dispenser on one of the two graffiti-covered walls, sanitary sheets in a dispenser on the back wall above the toilet. But something wasn't right.

Something.

Then it struck him. There was no glory hole in the divider on his right. The hole in the divider in the stall he'd just used did not come all the way through to this stall.

Frowning, he went back into the last stall and looked at the glory hole, stuffed with toilet tissue.
Was it only half finished? The divider between the stalls was maybe three-quarters of an inch thick at the very most. Why had someone started it without finishing? Had they been caught?

Austin stepped into the stall and pulled the wads of toilet tissue out of the hole. The tissue fell to the floor in small round clumps. He bent forward and looked through the hole.

He frowned, squinted his eyes a little, unsure of what he was seeing.

The hole went all the way through. There was a bathroom on the other side, but not the bathroom he was in.

He left the stall and went into the next one again. He ran his hand over the spot where the hole should be, but wasn't. It was flat, solid, cold.

Austin went back into the last stall. He crouched down so his eyes were level with the hole. The skin on the back of his neck prickled with gooseflesh.

This can't be, he thought.

Through the hole, he could see a filthy restroom. The once-white tile walls were splashed with dark reddish-brown stains, as were the two urinals on the wall. The tile floor was covered with what appeared to be some kind of dark mold and was crawling with large insects.

Two men stood with their backs to Austin, each leaning forward over the urinals. Each man was shirtless and wearing only undershorts. They had manacles on their hands and were chained to the pipe above each urinal. They were bent forward with their hands pressed flat against the filthy wall, arms straight and elbows locked, stiff legs spread. Their backs were bloody and badly cut.
An enormously fat man stood behind them, naked except for a black leather mask covering his entire head. Rolls of fat hung from his body and jiggled with each movement, his skin pasty white and spotted with growths. In his right hand, he held a heavy chain. He raised the chain and whipped one of the men with it, then the other. The men screamed in agony, and the fat man swung the chain again and again.

The man on the left collapsed to his knees, arms stretched out over his head.

Austin's mouth hung open as he watched, unable to believe what he was seeing. It made no sense, and yet there it was.

A foul stench came from the hole, the smell of urine and feces, and something else ... something coppery and faintly sweet.

The fat man continued to whip the two men chained to the urinals, and they screamed with ragged voices, sobbing and wailing as the chain ripped open their already bloodied backs.

A round dwarf appeared from the right wearing Bermuda shorts and rainbow-colored suspenders, but no shirt. His hair was black and wild, growing long in all directions. The dwarf turned and looked directly at Austin, then rushed over to the hole. Instead of a nose, the dwarf had two oval-shaped holes in his face. He had no lips; his mouth was a ragged hole. His teeth chattered together noisily as he closed in on the hole.

Austin pulled back with a gasp.

The dwarf put his face to the hole. His yellow teeth clacked rapidly together in the ragged, bloody O that was his mouth, and he growled like an animal.

Austin nearly fell over backward. He stood up straight and backed into the cinderblock wall behind him.

Something crawled up over the bottom edge of the hole — something black and red that looked like a spider but wasn't, not quite. It had the body and hairy legs of a large spider, but the tail of a scorpion, which curled upward, its tip needle-sharp. The creature dropped from the hole and skittered over the floor toward Austin.

He cried out as he pressed himself to the wall, then stomped on the thing with his right foot. It crunched beneath his shoe.

Two more of the creatures appeared on the bottom edge of the hole — deep-red bodies, black legs and tails — and dropped to the floor of the stall. They made small chitching sounds as they scurried toward him.

Austin made a strangled sound in his throat as he crushed one, then the other under his foot. He clumsily picked up the clumps of wadded tissue, dropped some of them, picked them up again.
The dwarf continued to growl and clack his teeth together, and two more of the black-and-red creatures crawled up over the bottom of the hole, only to fall to the floor. They headed straight for Austin's hands as he continued to pick up the wadded tissues.

Austin cried out and pulled his hands back, then fell backward and landed on his ass with his legs spread, knees up. He slammed his right foot to the floor repeatedly until he crushed one of the creatures, then the other.

He got to his knees again and tried to stuff the tissues in the hole. They kept falling out, and he quickly picked them up and tried again.

Another of the strange insects fell onto the floor, but it crawled away from him and went under the metal divider into the next stall. Another fell out of the hole and followed it.

Austin finally succeeded stuffing the hole with wadded-up tissues, but he could still hear the dwarf growling and clattering. He turned to the cinderblock wall and scrambled to his feet leaning against it. He pulled the metal door open and stumbled out of the stall.

His breath was coming fast and his heart thundered in his throat. His hands and knees trembled and for a moment, he was afraid he wouldn't be able to stay on his feet. As he hurried for the restroom door, his eyes scanned the floor, looking for the black-and-red creatures that had escaped.
The door was pushed open and a man entered. He wore a denim jacket over a plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers on his feet. His black hair was shot with grey and balding on top, wet from the rain. He looked at Austin and started to smile, but then his eyebrows rose and he looked concerned.
"You okay?" the man said.

"You don't want to be in here," Austin said, his voice hoarse.

The man smiled. "I've been on the road four hours straight, so I have to be in here. Don't think I coulda made it another mile." He stepped around Austin and headed for the stalls.

Austin said, "But there's a ... a ... a ... "

The man stopped, turned, and gave Austin an inquisitive look. When Austin did not continue, the man said, "A what?"

That's a good question, Austin thought. A what?

"You sure you're okay?" the man said. "You look a little ... I don't know, like maybe you're not well."
Austin did not know what to say. How could he possibly explain what he'd just seen? He thought of the two creatures loose on the restroom floor and he said, "Nothing," then turned and quickly left.
He hurried through the cold wind and rain toward his Taurus. Rain speckled his glasses and ran down the lenses onto his cheeks like tears.

The lights in the camper were out, the windows dark. An SUV was parked a couple of spaces down from Austin's car.

He opened the door of the Taurus and was about to get in when he heard a long, horrible scream from the men's room. The scream went on and on and on.

Austin got into his car and slammed the door. He started the engine, backed out of the parking space, and left the rest stop driving too fast.