The Plague Pit
(JG Montgomery)
2026
In the summer of 1666, when the bells rang not for prayer but for counting the dead, the pit was dug at the edge of the village. It yawned open in the clay like a rancid mouth that would not close. Men wrapped in scarves soaked with vinegar tipped carts of bodies into it—mothers, children, the old and the newly wed—each one marked with a chalk cross, each one swaddled in a stained white shroud that could not hide the smell.
The priest refused to stand near the edge. He was afraid. His God had deserted him. And yet, this was his calling and he shouted blessings from a distance, his voice thin and stretched with fear. Lime was poured, prayers were muttered, and the pit was filled before nightfall. By morning, the ground had sunk, as if the earth itself were swallowing the dead.
People said they heard coughing beneath the soil. Then again, villagers are superstitious people and say many things. The village shunned the area and learned to walk the long way around. The pit was left to its own devices.
By 1702 the cottages were gone, the road re-routed. Grass grew thick over the pit, greener than anywhere else, even in drought. However, sheep would not graze there and cattle bellowed loudly if forced into that field. When one did wander close, it returned trembling, foam on its lips, eyes rolling white. The pit remained silent, brooding.
In 1831, during another visitation of the sickness, a doctor came with instruments of iron and glass. He was a small, bespectacled man in the black hat and long coat. He took samples of the soil, sniffed, frowned, and declared the place unhealthy. That night, as he slept at the inn, he dreamt of cold white hands pressing up through the floorboards, nails black and broken, fingers searching for breath. He left before dawn and never wrote his report. In fact, never returning.
The pit waited.
In the twentieth century, houses were built. The land was cheap, the past long forgotten or dismissed as superstition. Children played football and cricket where the carts once stood. When it rained, the field flooded strangely, water sinking straight down in the centre, as if draining into a hollow that still remembered when it was open to the skies.
During the heatwave of 2003, a builder broke ground for a new extension. His shovel struck something soft, then brittle. Cloth. Bone. And a fluid like substance. The smell rose at once, old and sweet and wrong. He laughed nervously and filled the hole back in. That night he developed a fever. Within days he was dead. The doctors were baffled as his blood was dark with something they could not name.
They sealed the site. Tests were done. The newspapers reported nothing.
Now, in the present day, the pit lies beneath a car park, neatly painted lines crossing its centre. On warm evenings, drivers complain of a fog that clings low to the asphalt, of a sourness in the air. Some swear they hear coughing when engines are cut, a wet, rattling sound that comes from below.
Cameras have caught it too. The ground sinking by millimetres, tires slowly tilting inward, as if the earth is loosening its grip.
The pit is not done.
It has been waiting for centuries to be opened again.