Talk:The Showers/@comment-28221360-20160416034547/@comment-31077845-20170218123331

Now hold on Azariah, that line could be interpreted in two ways depending on where emphasis is placed. If the one reads it as "I tried to convince myself that it was MY blood on the floor", indicated that he knew it to be blood but was trying to convince himself it was his own, then your statement would be true.

However, I read it without any specific emphasis, as in just "I tried to convince myself that it was my blood on the floor", meaning he's unsure what the liquid is, all he knows is that it's a dark liquid and that, whether it was because he was trying to convince himself he wasn't really in "the showers" or because he suspected the dark liquid was something far more grotesque, he found more comfortable to try to imagine was his blood.

With the description we're given, including that the liquid is thick enough that it struggles to make it through the showerheads and seemingly being brownish in color, I've always imagined it as being or involving a sort of corpse puree (with horrible animal cries possibly being animals being "processed" into the liquid. Notice the cries are described as continuous; if they just needed their blood they'd simply slit their throat and bleed them. You'd either hear nothing or one quick cry).

So yeah, we aren't ever sure what these children beings even are, so my thought has generally been either this liquid involves dead things but has other special properties and is mainly responsible for all the, let's call them "peculiar" attributes the children possess, or the children...things were created through some other process and they rely on this disgusting mixture for sustenance.

Plus, Mr. Mays gets covered in it and even after the narrator first encounters it neither ever refers to it as blood, just as "the liquid", despite the fact that blood is fairly easily identifiable both by appearance and its strong metallic odor. Plus while this isn't a given I'm assuming the acrid stench described as smelling like such things as vomit, burnt hair, shit, and rot is coming from the liquid (the narrator starts to smell it as the amount pouring from the showers increases) which, if my theory on it being or involving a "corpse puree" is correct would create all the oh so pleasant odors described. So anyways, that's always been my belief.