Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27625196-20160121023629

I attended a small university in West Virginia. I’ve always been a very high-strung person, so naturally college was a difficult time for me, particularly around exam times. To deal with stress I often found myself taking long walks around my neighborhood. During my senior year, I found myself taking one such walk in the early morning after a heavy winter rainstorm.

The sky was still a reddish orange, and very few other people passed me on the sidewalk. Everything was still soaked from the night before, and enjoyed listening to water drops fall from awnings and window sills to spatter on the concrete below. The smell of fresh rain in the air had a very calming effect on me. I decided to make a beat to a nearby mini-mart for a snack.

I left the mini-mart with a coffee and a candy bar. While I was walking away, I tried to open the candy bar with my teeth, since my other hand was holding the coffee. The candy bar slipped from my hand fell into a puddle on the sidewalk. Then the candy bar was gone… It didn’t make any sense, it was just a puddle, it couldn’t be that deep. The only explanation was that there was some kind of deep hole in the sidewalk, but that made no sense. I reached down towards the puddle, and the moment my fingertips broke the surface, something grabbed me.

It was wrapped around my wrist. It kept pulling until my whole arm was underwater. It made no sense, there couldn’t be a whole this deep in the sidewalk. The thing around my wrist kept pulling, it felt like a human hand. Then, with one powerful yank, it pulled so hard my I fell, and my head went into the water.

It kept pulling, almost my entire upper body was underwater before I was able to fail my free hand out of the water and get a grip on the sidewalk. I couldn’t get my head out though. I opened my eyes and all around me was water. It looked like it went on for miles. The water was a murky, dirty, brownish color. But the worst part was the taste. It had this bitter, metallic flavor, like the blood from when you bite your tongue.

I saw things floating in the water. I couldn’t see them clearly, but they looked like human bodies. They swayed lifelessly, attached to ropes or chains that seemed to go downwards forever. Then I looked directly below me. I saw the thing that was pulling me.

It looked like a human corpse. It was bloated, and rotten. It was naked, and its pale flesh was covered in gashes and wounds. It had milky white eyes with no pupils, and its mouth hung open like it had a dislocated jaw.

I was running out of air, my lungs felt like they were going to burst. But seeing that thing, the pure, primal, fear it instilled in me, that gave the power to wretch myself free from its grasp. I tumbled back from the water and fell hard onto the sidewalk. The air rushed back into my lungs. I saw my coffee cup laying spilled beside me, and I saw the puddle still in front of me. I couldn’t believe what had just happened was real. I picked up the coffee cup and threw it at the puddle. It just made a small splash and then laid there. The puddle was just a puddle again.

I still have nightmares about that underwater hell, and about that rotten, dead thing that had tried to claim me. For months, every time I tried to drink water, it tasted like the murky, diseased water I had tasted in that place. I don’t go out after it’s rained anymore. I stay away from even small bodies of water. I know that thing is still out there, ready to drag me down to that horrible, bottomless abyss. And when I think about how vast that underwater world was, I wonder if that creature isn’t the worst thing that resides there. 