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They stood knee-deep in the scrub brush and the globemallow and considered the hole. Some responsible authority had fenced it off, the National Park Service probably, and Mulder gingerly pinched a strand of barbed wire and lifted it so she could duck underneath. A low cloud ceiling slid perpetually over them, like water flowing from the tap of the whiskey-colored mountains that ran along the horizon.
Scully straightened and took the wire from him, returning the favor.
Mulder coughed. He tucked his shoulders like some bat creature folding its wings for a dive. He held the crotch of his suit pants and bent, stepping awkwardly between the lines of galvanized steel thorns. It was easy to forget just how tall he was, Scully thought.
They parted company and circled, in opposite directions, the No Man’s Land between the fence and the pit. Scully kept a respectful distance from the edge. She watched Mulder get down on his stomach in the red dirt and belly-crawl to the precipice. Watched him shake his head in amazement and then back carefully away.
They met at the far side of the hole, their backs to the wind. The day was cloudy and dry and the air smelled faintly of dust and faintly of pinyon pine. She looked at Mulder and he looked back at her and gave her an arch smile. Then he bent and pried a rock from the packed terra-cotta at his feet, palmed it, and pried up another.
“Here,” he said, handing it to her. His fingers were warm and chalky. “Sink that three-pointer, Thunder Dan.”
She tested the weight of the rock in her palm (gabbro she thought. Or gneiss.) and her brain ran the numbers: effortlessly calculating distance and velocity and wind resistance with no required input from her conscious mind. We are truly amazing machines, she thought.
She lobbed the rock underhand into the pit and beside her Mulder feigned a fadeaway jump-shot; his own rock arching high into the air, hanging briefly at the apex, and then falling. Scully thought of the paradox of any object’s trajectory: how the rock inhabited an infinite number of positions in space along its path. An incalculable number of points, and yet somehow the whole thing took only a second: to leave his hand, to cross all of those immeasurable spots, and then to disappear forever into the hole in the limestone.
They waited, motionless. In the still air a Solitaire warbled its thrasher song. Somewhere a Jerusalem cricket tapped-out a rhythmic drumbeat. They waited on. There was wind in the pines, but the hole remained uncannily silent.
“The Well to Hell,” Mulder said summarily, cocking his head at it fondly. "She's a hell of a well."
“A putative borehole,” Scully said, folding her arms over her chest. She could sense Mulder winding himself up. She was still listening for the sound of an impact.
“It has sisters,” Mulder said helpfully, as if she had asked for corroboration. “Mel’s hole in Ellensburg. The Devil’s Kettle in Grand Marais. Erebus. Sheol. The Great Pit of Carkoon.”
Scully frowned at the last one, though she supposed the distinction was ultimately trivial: his list was entirely ridiculous. “And you think it goes...?”
Mulder gave a little shrug. He whistled a little riff of The Clash.
“Don’t tell me you actually believe that.”
“I do. I do actually believe it.”
“That this is literally a hole to Hell.”
He shrugged again. “Why not? Maybe the warm-up to hell is falling forever and ever down a bottomless hole. Maybe the fire and brimstone is the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Scully let her head fall back until she could see the dime-colored clouds wheeling overhead. “That is a singularly audacious theory, even coming from you.”
“Don’t you believe in Hell, Scully?”
“I believe in Hell as metaphor, Mulder. I don’t believe it’s possible to actually dig a hole there.”
He took a half step forward, rising on to his toes to get a better look into the cavernous depths. “So where do you think it goes, ‘Land of the Lost’?”
“No Mulder, I think it probably continues for a few hundred feet and then bottoms out. Maybe branches into smaller caverns, or ends in some natural spring or oil deposit.”
“Come on Scully, look at it. Listen to it! It sure sounds bottomless...”
“Well by that inductive reasoning, Mulder, the earth sure looks flat.”
“We did empirical research! We threw rocks!”
“That was far from empirical research. It would be wildly generous to call what we just did observational study.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “If we yell down it, is that empirical research?”
“If I push you in that hole, Mulder, then your findings might loosely qualify as direct observation.” She checked her watch. “And if we miss our flight you may just get the chance to test your Well to Hell hypothesis...”
A grin cleaved his face in two. “I’d pull you in with me, Scully. ‘T’is not too late to seek a newer world’.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think I’d be much help to you.”
“Sure you would. Someone has to map the Worlock genome.” He bent again, and selected a new rock, then stood and rolled it thoughtfully in his palm. “What if we did just keep falling, Scully?”
“We wouldn’t Mulder. Actually a common physics exercise posits the existence of a gravity hole: a hypothetical tube drilled from one side of the planet to the other, through the earth’s center. It has been suggested that such a journey would take around 42 minutes, although that calculation doesn’t account for a variety of complicating variables... the planet is not uniformly dense. From the highest mountain peak to the deepest ocean trench, the surface of the Earth varies some 12.3 miles, which might result in negligible variation, dependent on the hole’s starting and ending location. Whether or not to assume some degree of air resistance...”
Mulder brushed this off. “Okay, but regardless though.”
“There is no ‘regardless’, Mulder. There are only about 42 minutes of falling to be had, and that’s putting aside the impossibility of such a hole.... Realistically speaking you and I would meet a very abrupt, though not unanticipated, end, following a fall of several hundred feet.”
He let out a long breath through his nose and surveyed the open expanse of juniper and cliffrose. He rubbed his chin. He looked at her and closed one eye. “You don't believe it even a little? That’s it even possible we might just keep falling?”
Scully looked out over the sandstone. There was rockcress, and grama grass, and dotted throughout there were patches of jimsonweed. Datura. She recalled from some long-ago case that certain cultists considered it sacred: that they harvested it for it’s high atropine content. A poison. An alkaloid narcotic capable of inducing both visual and auditory hallucinations. What was it about the desert, she wondered, that so many psychedelics made it their home?
She sighed. “I believe in it as metaphor, Mulder. Come on, we’re going to miss our flight.”