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Abortion/miscarriage Disregard for personal autonomy Blood Body transformation Death/dying Dysphoria Mental health issues Murder PregnancyBefore you hear what I’m about to tell you, I need you to understand two things.
Firstly, I do not know how to swim.
When you live in the place I do, it’s more or less a useless skill. I mean, the deepest water around is up to my shoulders at best, can you really blame me? I can’t say where I’m from for obvious reasons, but just know that most of it is a very arid, very empty desert with a whole lot of nothingness. Water is life here, and it's evident in that if you stray too far off the beaten path and away from water, you will get lost and you’ll be lucky if anyone sees you again before sundown. My village is settled neatly between two gentle rolling mesas and along a thin river in a sparsely populated community lovingly called ‘the valley’.
This place is old. Very, very old. The kind of old that you can feel settle in your bones when you walk along the same dirt roads that have been used continually for hundreds of years. Most of the community has been here since before this country was established, before we unwillingly became a part of it. Save for a few transplants that descend from the city to retire, everyone is family, even if all-in-all we are far and few between. The nearest ‘big’ city of a few thousand is an hour away.
But that leads me to the second thing you need to know: I loved Isabella, a lot.
We were like sisters; she was my mom’s brother’s kid, so my cousin, but we grew up close enough to be siblings. It may sound weird if you’re not from a family like mine or a community as tight-knit as ours, but we were always together. Because of how condensed our village is, we were also neighbors, classmates, and altar girls at church together. I saw her more than my own parents and I imagine it was the same for her. She was two months older than me, and always seemed to hold that fact over my head as some sort of superiority thing. Whatever. The important thing to know is that we were close.
We fought a lot, like real siblings might, maybe even more than I did with my blood sisters, and she could be the prissiest brat ever if given the opportunity. But I loved her then and I still do now, despite everything that’s happened.
We did everything together. School, catechism, sleepovers, meals. For how much we butted heads you’d think we wouldn’t want to spend so much time together, but it was the opposite. That was our love.
By far, our favorite thing to do together was visiting the river. Beyond the bend of the fields, and right down the road from our grandmother’s, you could find the heart of the stream, the place where it was its widest. The river itself is shallow most of the year, up to my hips everywhere except for the heart—there, it almost came up to my neck. Even better, right at the mouth of it was a gentle rolling waterfall that was smooth and eroded enough to go down kind of like a natural water slide. It was so overgrown with moss that it only hurt a little, and we’d race each other down (I always won, being the stockier between the two of us).
The river used to be much deeper apparently, by around ten to fifteen feet if what every old person in my life has claimed is true. But even when it is shallow it's a special place.
When we were young it was the local hangout spot for several of us kids. Any summer day we went there was guaranteed to be at least a few of our other cousins running around on the riverbank in ragtag hand-me-down bathing suits. We would all play together, share some sodas, and then walk each other home. It was amazing, a highlight of my youth that I won’t ever forget. It’s relatively safe in the daytime here, so we’d never need permission or someone to watch over us. But as we got older, fewer and fewer people came, and now it's rare to see even a single person there.
Maybe that’s for the best.
Even when it was just me and Bella we’d have so much fun. We would swim until we were tired and our fingers had pruned up like raisins, and then we’d lounge out on the shore and enjoy the warmth of the sun. From sunrise to sunset, we’d spend all of our time there, eating the bologna sandwiches my mom packed us and talking about life—who was dating who, how annoying our siblings were, what the future had in store for us. It was great.
And basically every time, we’d dare each other to swim over ‘the hole’ as it was ominously called. The hole could be found near the deepest part of the river, right beneath the edge of the waterfall where the water curled and formed a tiny whirlpool. The hole itself was only wide enough to fit a slim adult, and its depth was unknown. The rock underfoot would immediately drop off into a very cold, dark nothingness that seemed to go on forever. We had joked that it went to the center of the earth, and every time we visited, we would try our hardest to get to the bottom. We never did. I think that no one ever will, and I can only pray for whoever tries.
But back then, not knowing any better, we’d work our damndest to make it happen.
This is where that part about me not knowing how to swim is important. See, we would always dare each other to swim over the top of the hole and drop down as far as we could before we had to come up for air. And I always won because I always cheated. I’d take a comically big breath and do some obnoxious underwater squat to make it seem like I had really gone down, even flailing my arms and letting my breath escape as bubbles for dramatic effect. Isabella was none the wiser. It wasn’t like I could have admitted that I couldn’t swim; it would have been just another thing she’d hold over my head as the inferior cousin.
Yet she’d try her best and never got farther than me, until the time she actually did. I’ll come back to that. Maybe she had been cheating too, and was somehow worse at doing that than me. Maybe she just really sucked at swimming. It doesn’t matter.
Afterwards, when the sun had started to dip under the horizon and the mosquitoes grew borderline homicidal, we’d share a towel—because she always forgot hers—and walk down the road to our grandmother’s house. She was a much older lady and hardly spoke English, but she was the most comforting person I’ve had in my entire life. She would chastise us for being out with wet hair when the temperature was dropping with the onset of dusk, before ushering us in to shower and curl up around the wood stove. By the time we were clean and in comfortable clothes, she’d have hot cocoa ready on the stove for us. We would warm up with a cup, and ‘cause grandma didn’t have a TV, she’d tell us stories to fall asleep to until our parents came for us.
She had the best stories, and despite the language barrier, they were nothing short of enthralling.
Most of her tales were scary, I won’t lie; the grieving spirits of dead mothers treading the river shore, unspeakable monsters waiting in the abandoned mines on the mesas, of the old man with the black hat that would wait outside your window if you stayed up late. They were intended to be lessons, I know that now, but she would spin them so creatively. I wish I could remember them as vividly as she told them, because maybe if I had Isabella would still be here.
The most important one was of the spirit beneath the river.
It always started the same way: I would brag about beating Bella in our faux competition in the hole, and she would frown, this deep, unhappy old lady frown, and sigh with the weight of decades upon decades.
‘Don’t mess around in that river, mija. Nothing good down there.’
She'd tell us that you couldn’t swim over it if you were one of three things; a very young child, an expecting mother, or a girl and bleeding. All very strange conditions. Because evidently, there was something deep and terribly hungry in the hole, and it fed on the young. She said that a very long time ago, back when the world was all animals and spirits, coyote had stolen the water beast’s young, and now it needed to feed in revenge. When I was a little older she’d add on to it, talking about how her mother warned her about it when she was a little girl because one day, while pregnant, she had slipped while wading during the dry season and fallen into the hole, and the very next day, the baby was gone. Just like that.
I asked my mom once, and she chalked it up to grandma severely misremembering a miscarriage her mother had had on account of her age. It sounded plausible then, but now, I think grandma was right.
When it happened, Isabella and I were older. It was a year ago, almost to the date. Grandma had passed three years before. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years because of the pandemic and us having moved away for school. I had grown to miss home a lot, and hated the outside world more than ever. Being back was a welcome relief. She didn’t share my sentiment.
Isabella and I went to the river, the same as we did every summer, though less frequently now as the years passed. If the old people had complained about the river’s depth before, they would have been miserable with it then. It was the shallowest it had been in my entire life, hardly up to my thighs in the thick of it. The stream was light, practically stagnant, and the waterfall was but a slow trickle threatening to dry up altogether. This place had been in a drought since long before my time, but never had it been so meager.
Usually, there was a brief flood period every spring that would leave the river full enough to not dry out before winter. Not this time. Come late November, it would be barren enough to walk across with little resistance.
The river was a ghost of what it once was. Shallow and still and devoid of any local life like it used to have. It was quiet, unnaturally so, with nothing but the singing of cicadas and the soft bubbling of its stream to fill the void. The community as a whole had been getting smaller and smaller with every passing year, and the river was truly symbolic of that.
Bella and I still made it work. We rolled out our towels and tanned, splashed around a bit, and ate the same bologna sandwiches we’d been having since we were kids. And then she reminded me.
“Hey, remember that game we’d play with the hole?”
I shrugged. “Sure, the one you always lost at?”
The comment earned a punch to the shoulder but she still laughed and pointed her lips in its direction. “Wanna try for old times’ sake?”
Of course, I said yes, and between giggling and attempting to shove each other into the shallow murky waves, we waded over to the usual spot. Even with kicked-up sand and stagnant water, it still stood out like an inky black portal hiding all of the river’s secrets beneath the surface. I still didn’t know how to swim, and the water was too shallow for me to cheat and squat like I’d always done, so I suggested she go first. I figured it was as good a time as any to reveal my deep, terrible secret after making her look a fool.
“Oh? Scared you’re going to lose?” was all she said before pinching her nose and dropping in. It was the last thing she’d ever say to me.
I really had expected her to comically sink down to all but her chin and laugh, proving for once and for all that the hole was not in fact bottomless. Maybe it just seemed like it was so because of our lack of depth perception and the illusions of childhood fantasy. But she didn’t. No, she slipped right beneath the surface of the water without so much as making a ripple. It was quiet. Painfully, unnaturally quiet. Several seconds passed, and then a minute.
“Bella?” I called. “You made your point, you can come up now!”
Nothing.
Another minute passed.
I started to panic. Really, really panic. I still couldn’t swim but I was scared, so I did the best thing I could think of. I crawled closer, sat on its edge, and for the first time ever, actually dipped my entire leg beneath its rim and into the ice-cold abyss beneath. I tried to squint and see but the pale flesh of my calf disappeared entirely in its depths, and if it wasn’t for the chills wracking my body from the sheer cold of it, I might have worried about it disappearing too.
I tried to feel her out, but there was nothing. I reached at least three feet down and there was nothing but ragged, tight stone walls to scrape my toes against. My heart dropped and I started to breathe harder, desperately shouting her name and trying to reach deeper.
All I could feel was a light tug, like some sort of suction. A force pulling me down, deeper in the dark murky water. It had always been there, I remembered. As a kid, it had somehow felt stronger, but now it only acted as a mere suggestion.
‘Come down, a little closer,’ a voice in my head had whispered.
And then there was a weight like a hand grabbing my ankle tight enough to hurt, icy and firm. I screamed and struggled to stand up, desperate to get away. And as I pulled my leg up and away from the hole, so with it came Isabella. As soon as I recognized her, I grabbed her from the water and pulled her up, crying and sobbing out apologies.
At first, she seemed fine, peering around with glossy eyes and this sullen, dazed expression. I held her face and kept repeating her name but it was like she couldn’t hear or see me. Her face was pale, stricken, drained of any color save for the faint blue of her lips. And then she coughed, and dark, muddy water came spilling from her mouth. It kept and kept until I was sure she was going to choke. It eventually stopped, but there Isabella was, now twenty pounds lighter and violently shaking. She keeled over and that was when I noticed. The skin of her feet was gone—all of it. Scraped away like she’d been the victim of some bad accident, leaving twitching, throbbing muscle and tendon beneath. White like ivory peeked out and that was when I saw it–little pock marks where the red-stained bone was, marring it unnaturally. Not unlike teeth marks.
Something had been gnawing on her.
The rest was a blur.
At some point, I called the police to send an ambulance. But if you know how truly inaccessible rural communities are, you also know how long it takes to get any help. Thirty goddamned minutes spent holding my shaking, catatonic cousin on the same shore we’d safely played on for years before.
They came, not soon enough, but they came, and I had to watch as she was wheeled away into the back of an ambulance.
It would be the healthiest I’d see her for the rest of her short life.
She died five days later from severe dehydration and organ failure. Ironic, right?
In her final waking moments, Isabella was manic, scared, and so utterly violent she had to be restrained and sedated. She’d stopped speaking in any recognizable way, and her eyes stayed unfocused and glossy till the very end. I visited her as soon as I could, but she had already been too far gone, not recognizing me for more than a few seconds before shrieking. I only knew about the rest of it after talking to her parents, my aunt and uncle. Bella had developed a hauntingly real, visceral aversion to water; I know now that the technical term is hydrophobia. She couldn’t be bathed and refused water to the point that they had to give her an IV, which she promptly pulled out. Only to see her own blood and make the connection that that too was water, before completely mutilating herself with just her fingernails in an attempt to remove it. She had to be restrained and sedated until she took her last breath.
The day after she died, it flooded worse than it had in years.
The most reasonable conclusion they could come up with was that she had somehow contracted rabies or some sort of brain-eating amoeba months before. They said it had started to physically manifest only after she’d scraped her feet while diving. They wanted to run an autopsy to test her brain, but if they did I don’t know. My aunt and uncle moved away a few weeks after her passing, and our village is lonelier than ever now.
Everyone was willing to pass it off as some freak accident, but I couldn’t. I dreamt of my sweet Bella a lot, of her cold, lifeless, sunken eyes that had bore into me in the days before she died. I knew that something did this to her. That chill in that hole was unnatural, unearthly, a sharp, painful contrast to the otherwise sun-warmed river. Like it wasn’t even water down there but something else, something thinner and sinking.
And worse, it’s been calling to me.
I had been taking the dogs out for a bathroom break one evening about a month ago when I first heard the sound. Splashing, and a lot of it, from the arroyo situated between the road and our house. We get beavers in them sometimes, so I’d trudged over to look, only to find that the ditch was empty. Not just of beavers, but of water too. I had forgotten that they’d shut them off because of the drought. I tried my best to move past it but I kept hearing it, that horribly familiar splashing like flailing arms trying to climb out of that hole every goddamn night.
I had remembered our grandma’s story and cursed myself for not having her around to ask about it. So I did the next best thing and looked through local papers. I spent nights hunched over digitized censuses and local archives, pouring over every document written and published for our village over the past several hundred years, every published local legend or account, looking and searching for some sort of answer, even a word to corroborate what I’d seen.
Until finally, it happened. I saw the pattern.
Every few years there were cases of it. Of little kids and babies disappearing into the river, of young women, some expecting, vanishing into the deep after one chance visit. Their deaths were always ruled as accidental, or never reported past ‘missing’. And after every bout of them, there was a flood and intense summer rains that came like clockwork. All the way until the past fifty years. Fewer and fewer kids had been dying, if just because there weren’t as many around. Because as we slowly depopulated, whether it be from folks moving away or giving in to old age, there were less people around to disappear. I’d noticed it in my lifetime too, how there were half as many people now as there were when I was a kid. I didn’t get it at first, but now I do.
Shortly after my realization, the river started calling my name. It would start as odd garbled sounds that were hardly recognizable, not unlike the ragged babbling of a stream, until eventually, it was a full-blown whisper in some horrible, wretched tongue I’d never been witness to.
‘Cass,’ it would whisper and cry every single night, an alluring song that pulled me to seek out that dark, damp hole again.
I felt like I was going crazy. Maybe I was grief-stricken and losing my shit after months of trying to heal—that’s what I’d thought. That the pain of losing someone so close to me, after years of feeling alone in a foreign place that wasn’t quite home, had taken a toll on me that I couldn’t bounce back from. Maybe I was ruined forever. Maybe I’d been like that even before this happened.
It took me making a mistake to eventually realize the truth.
I fucked up, but I get it now.
It took me venturing to that godforsaken place again. I was upset and not in my right mind, still mourning Bella’s absence in my life after I came home for the summer and nothing was the same. And so in a fit of hysterics, I stood over that inky black hole in the middle of one lazy, overbearing afternoon, and I stepped in.
I’m sure Bella was looking up at me from the afterlife, cursing me for being stupid enough to follow her. But I had to. And I know now.
I slipped under the surface and there was that force again, slowly dragging me down and consuming me in an instant. I don’t know how long I was there. It couldn’t have been long—I didn’t drown after all. I was pulled impossibly deep, down beneath all the rock and the slate and a living, breathing, terrifying history that looked at me as if I was a speck against the grand backdrop of all its monstrosity. My body felt like it was torn apart and put back together as it was pushed into some forbidden corner of the earth that no one had ever spoken of. It felt like just a moment, but it was long enough to feel It.
It doesn’t have a name, not one that I can say. There aren’t words to really describe It as more than a feeling, but It is a Thing. An ancient, hungry Thing. I felt Its presence like a bad omen, and I instantly knew of what It was.
It is a being far, far older than me, than grandmother, than the village, and maybe even the mountains. It speaks in a forbidden tongue that I could never reciprocate even if I tried, and in it, It whispered Its name to me. I’ll never forget that sound. Clear as a bell, even within the deep murky waters.
And then It started to eat, and I realized.
It fed, and It fed on young blood. This Thing, be it god or demon or something far older than either of those things was ravenous, and tied to its hunger was the very waters that served as the lifeblood of our valley. In an instant, a history of the land flashed through my brain. It had been known before when human beings first settled here and sought Its benevolence. It was going to be here long after.
‘If you take care of me, I will take care of you.’
All of those children. All of those babies. Grandma’s unborn brother. The sudden drought. Isabella. It all made sense.
And before I could even comprehend it, that Thing spit me out, seemingly disgusted by my aged flesh and blood.
Not all the way, because I had to claw my way up, up, and through that claustrophobic hole until I could breathe again.
When I pushed out of the water, my skin had gone white from the cold and blood loss. I fainted after that.
I woke up hours later in a sterile, painfully white hospital room to my mother sobbing over me and a doctor trying to explain to my half-conscious form what had happened. I was told I was lucky I was found when I was after some fisherman had stumbled upon me and sped to the ER.
And then the bad news. My entire left foot and most of the other had to be amputated. There wasn’t enough of me left there to salvage.
It was a shock. For a long time it didn’t feel real. It still doesn’t. I get phantom pains where those parts of me should be, forgetting until I try to stand up and fall over. I was closely monitored, especially after what happened to Bella. The doctors were scared I had the same sickness she did. And for a while, I truly did think I was going to die the same way she had.
Every time anyone spoke, it was like I was trying to understand them from three feet underwater. I swear, I could only think in that awful, evil language I’d heard.
And then it started. The fear. It’s hard for me to rationally explain.
The first time a nurse had tried to bring me a cup of water I instinctively screamed and shoved her away, terrified to be near anything that would remind me of the Thing I had felt. I couldn’t bathe without screaming myself unconscious, couldn’t even think of water without breaking into a cold sweat—until I didn’t have enough liquid in my body to even do that. It hurt, more than anything in my life had. I was convinced that this was it. The IVs were useless when all I could think about was that Thing finding its way back into my body, consuming me from the inside out. I had an innate fear of water, and now I was going to slowly dehydrate to death just like Bella had.
And just like her, it rained the entire week after.
For better or worse, I didn’t die.
I think that I might have just been over the cusp of being too old for that Thing to devour. Isabella had been a year younger than I was now when It bit her, and though we both developed the sickness, I got better. Because after three days, words started being coherent again and I was slowly able to reintroduce myself to drinking.
Or maybe It chose me. Maybe I was special.
To this day I try to keep contact with water minimal. Because when I touch it or drink it, I can feel It thrumming deep beneath the ground, in this massive, underground lake where It continues to call to me. I shower far less than I probably should and only drink water when absolutely necessary. I’ve made life bearable by keeping myself on the brink of dehydration constantly, because it always tastes wrong. I avoid other people, if just because sometimes I can hear that cursed language intruding on my waking thoughts, spurring me on to do the unthinkable. It sounds horrible, and I’ve heard the hushed rumors going around about how unsightly and isolated I’ve become, but I don’t care. Because It whispers my name every night, calling for me to come down and venture into Its depths.
It’s got a job for me, and I’m scared.
I’m scared because I have a choice to make. After my venture in, it rained so abundantly that for the better part of a month, the whole valley was flush and lively. I don’t think I’ve seen it that green since I was very little, back when we still had a monsoon season and the river was deep enough to swim in if you could. For a while, it was like we’d gone back in time to when things were richer, vivid, alive in a way I haven’t seen since my childhood. The world felt the way my grandparents and all the other old folks had described it. Before everyone left, before crops died and arroyos went barren, before the world had continued on without us.
I’ve seen what It does now. Even a taste of my spoiled, old blood was enough for a feat like that, and even the river rose higher. I think It didn’t devour me because It wanted me to see. It was a display. A promise.
About a week ago, a new family moved in. They aren’t from here, and in typical close-minded fashion, my community probably won’t take to them. We don’t like outsiders.
They live across from my grandmother’s old house. And they have kids. Lots of them. I’ve seen them out on the road playing where kids shouldn’t be, tempting fate because they don’t know any better. The youngest one still rides a tricycle. They’re playful, naive in a way I’ve come to loathe. Sometimes they go out to the river, wading around obliviously, too tall to swim in its shallow waters. Totally unaware of the monstrosity on the other side. What remains of my leg aches when I see them there.
They remind me a lot of Bella and I.
I know it’s terrible, but I could tell them about the game we used to play. Because maybe, just maybe if It gets young blood after so long, things will get better.
I know it’s awful and that I’m a horrible person. But you need to understand.
I had never felt attached to this place before, not really. Not until It bit me and my eyes were opened. It is an ancient, awful being, I know that. But the future is uncertain and I’m scared. I’m scared, not because of the beast beneath the waves, but of loss. My community shrinks every day, and people like them would never be accepted here anyways. And besides, those people aren’t good parents. They have so many kids, I’m sure they wouldn’t notice or even care if just one went away. If you knew how special my home was, you’d probably do the same.
Or maybe that’s just It influencing me from afar. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.
Isabella and grandma would be so unhappy with what I’ve turned into, but they wouldn’t get it. There’s a reason our grandmother was scared of what she didn’t know. There’s a reason Isabella died and I didn’t. She wouldn’t have the strength to do what needs to be done. She had grown tainted by the outside world, by false promises and people that couldn’t care less for a place or people like ours. She didn’t want to come back. Maybe if she did it would be different.
What they don’t know is that we could restore our little oasis in the desert to what it once was, or even better, back to the way the old folks talk about how it used to be. With green, fertile pastures, endless opportunity, and a thriving, bottomless river so deep that the danger within is long, long forgotten. Out of sight. Out of fear.
At least for a few years.
I’m a horrible person, but I know what I need to do. I’m sorry, Bella, but sometimes evil is a necessity for survival. This is a cruel thing, I know it, but I think you forgot that we live in just as cruel of a world. I miss you so goddamn much but even your sacrifice wasn’t in vain. I’ve been promised a place in the world to come if I answer It; there’s a place there for you too, if you want it. Our God has called me to worship and I know nothing else anymore.
I just hope you can understand.
Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.
Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.
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