Down the Drain, Page 2

  By the time he got home that night, it was long past dark. His muscles screamed, the sawdust in his nose half suffocated him, and all he wanted to do was get in bed. Instead, he searched the house again.

  Bedroom: empty. Bathroom: nada. Office: catless. Utility room: no Selly.

  He opened a can of tuna and left it on the porch, hoping the scent might draw her home if she was anywhere in the vicinity. More likely, some stray would end up with the snack, but it didn’t hurt to try.

  He brought a beer into the bathroom and turned on the shower. By the time he’d gotten out of his filthy work clothes, he’d changed his mind and decided maybe tonight should be a bath night. His aching muscles could use a soak. He reached past the shower curtain, shut off the water to deactivate the showerhead, turned it back to hot, and plugged the drain.

  While the tub filled, he checked the tuna on the porch and found an empty can but no Selina. He went into the kitchen for a second beer.

  Maybe you can actually drink both this time.

  He’d left his second beer on the coffee table when he fell asleep the night before. He'd awakened to find a nasty water ring he’d either have to ignore or sand out when he had the time. Which, if this week was any indication, would be never.

  He found some of Eileen’s old bubble bath under the sink and thought, what the hell.

  He poured a few capfuls into the bathwater; the surface frothed and bubbled like the concoction in a witch’s cauldron. It smelled sweet, coconuty. He set his bottles on the tub’s edge and lowered himself into the suds.

  This time, he fell asleep before he opened even one of the beers.

  FIVE

  When he opened his eyes, the water had cooled to room temperature and he had another erection.

  Had he been dreaming of Eileen? Of something else?

  He couldn’t remember. He blinked, a little disoriented but mostly just tired. He used his foot to turn on the hot water and decided to ignore his hard on.

  He splashed soapy water into his face and through his hair before reaching for one of the beers and twisting off the cap. His penis bobbed in the water, buoy like. The water warmed, and the alcohol worked its way into his system; he started to doze again. He was half asleep when the tub moved beneath him.

  He opened his eyes and blinked, more disoriented now than ever.

  What was that?

  He still held the beer and had almost spilled it in the water. He set it on the ledge beside its twin and rubbed at his drooping eyelids.

  It happened again. The floor shifted beneath him.

  His first thought was that one of the joists beneath the bath had given out, rotted and split, and that the tub might crash through the floorboards and into the crawlspace beneath the house at any moment. He started to push himself up and out of the water, but then the floor rippled again and he lost his balance. His elbow smacked the side of the tub. He heard a crack and wondered if it had come from the basin or one of his bones. The beer bottles wobbled—two little drunkards—and fell to the floor. The open bottle didn’t break but spilled its innards across the tiles. The other shattered; a beer geyser sprayed everything from the toilet to the mirror to the door across the room.

  Bruce ignored the beer, bent his legs, and tried to turn into a kneeling position, but the bottom of the tub felt like quicksand now. He couldn’t get purchase, couldn't seem to control his body at all. He would put a hand out to brace himself, and the seemingly solid surface of the tub would suck it in, grab it and hold on like some sort of sentient being.

  He started to turn. No, the tub started to turn him. He struggled, twisted, strained his already-strained muscles until he ached from head to toe. The tub turned him facedown in the water and held him there. Bruce fought it, broke the water’s surface and sucked in a long, gasping breath. The tub jerked him back into its depths.

  This is ridiculous, not real, just your imagination.

  Ridiculous: yes. Real: yes. Imagination: no.

  He wrenched his head back and managed to suck in another partial breath. In his struggle for air, Bruce almost didn’t feel the tub’s floor reconstituting around his still-hard cock.

  If anything was impossible, surely that was it. That he could still have an erection, that he hadn’t wilted like a drowned flower.

  Now he was pulling back both his head and his groin. The tub let him get his face above water but wouldn’t let go of his other head. It gripped him tight, jerked him furiously, an overeager lover. Bruce spit out soapy water and screamed. The tub continued jerking, rubbing him raw. Bruce saw some of the bubbles begin to pinken and realized he must be bleeding. His screaming intensified. Water splashed over the edge of the tub, mixed with the puddled beer and pooled near the sink where the floor dipped down a little.

  He thrashed. He continued yelping, groaning. And yet, he felt himself approaching climax. Disgusting. Incomprehensible. But true.

  The tub stroked for another few seconds, and Bruce spilled his seed despite himself. His hips bucked, and his mind went fuzzy, just as it had when he’d pleasured himself the night before, just as it always had when he’d come inside Eileen with her breathing in his ear and scratching his back.

  The tub let go as unceremoniously as it had grabbed on. Bruce swung his legs over the tub’s edge and backed out of the water, reaching for his sore penis and breathing so irregularly he was almost hyperventilating. Through the bubbles, he watched the drain slide from the middle of the tub to its usual spot at the end. The bathmat was gone. Maybe sucked into the drain, maybe melded with the tub’s surface during its...what? Morphing? Yes, he supposed that was as good a word as any.

  He took another step back, afraid the tub would reach out and grab him again, molest him again. Water, bubbles, and blood streamed down his body. A pink thread of semen dangled from the tip of his now-flaccid penis for a second before detaching and landing in the hair on his lower leg. In the tub, the band-aid he’d applied the night before floated to the surface. It had a single bloody streak down the middle.

  Bruce grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist. Crazy as it was, he didn’t want the tub to see him naked any longer than it had already. Not that it seemed to be able to see anything at all.

  Are you serious? he thought. Of course it can’t see you. It can’t do anything. It’s a goddam bathtub. You’re still sleeping, and none of this is real. Open your fucking eyes already.

  Except there was no chance this was a dream. He’d never had dreams this lifelike. Or this freaky.

  A huge air bubble escaped the tub’s drain and blurped when it reached the soapy surface. And then the water level started dropping. Bruce could hear the liquid surging through the pipes beneath the floor. He continued backing away from the tub, watching where he stepped to avoid shards of the broken beer bottle. His crotch throbbed, and his legs shook. He thought he might not be able to make it out of the bathroom, that his body would betray him, buckle beneath him, and he’d fall within striking distance of the tub.

  Striking distance?

  He shook his head and rubbed his eyes; then he slammed his palm into his forehead. As if he might be able to bludgeon the last five minutes out of his memory. Again: smack. Harder: SMACK.

  Pinpoint bursts of light flickered across his inner eyelids. The last of the bathwater swirled down the drain with a sound that almost reminded him of chuckling. He peeked out between his fingers like a scared little kid and finished backing out of the room.

  In the hall, he closed the bathroom door and sat down with his bare back against it. For what seemed a very long time, he tried to regain control of his breathing. His chest hitched, his throat trembled, tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.

  Not real, he kept thinking. There’s just no way any of that could have been real.

  His oozing wiener begged to differ.

  You have to destroy it. Whether it really happened or not, for your own sanity, you need to get the sledgehammer from the shed and bust the thing into a million
little pieces.

  Could you solve crazy with even more crazy? Bruce didn’t think so, but he also didn’t think he could get past what had just happened without doing something. Destroying the tub seemed liked as good an idea as any.

  He pushed himself up and hurried through the house. He grabbed his keys from the side table by the front door and stepped outside. On the porch, the wind got hold of his towel and whisked it off his body. It was too wet and heavy to go far. It fell in a heap on the ground just beside the porch. Bruce let it go and hurried to the shed wearing nothing but a little blood on his inner thighs.

  The keys jangled when he poked them at the shed’s locked door. He glanced over his shoulder.

  Someone might drive by.

  No one’s going to drive by.

  Someone might see.

  The only way anyone’s going to see you is if you keep dawdling out here on the lawn all night. Get inside. Now.

  He found the right key, unlocked the door, and hurried in.

  The sledge hung from a rack on the wall to his right. A pair of shovels flanked it, one square-headed and the other round. Bruce ignored the rest of the tools, although there were enough of them in the small place to start a hardware store. He needed only the hammer for now. He pulled it off the rack and hefted it. The wooden handle slid through his hands and felt as smooth as plastic. Years of sweaty use had worked like polish on the tool.

  Brownish gunk caked the sledge’s head.

  Blood.

  No, not blood, just mud with plenty of red clay mixed in, but it gave him a chill nonetheless.

  He slung the hammer over his shoulder and backed out of the shed.

  You better hope nobody drives by. If ever a person looked like an all-out psychopath, it’s you right now.

  Was he a psychopath? Could you set out on a mission to slay a bathtub monster and still call yourself sane?

  He scurried across the side yard, his penis flapping against his legs, his bare feet getting stuck in the mud and making sucking sounds when he pulled them free that reminded him of the noise his manhood had made when the tub had finally let him yank it out of its drainhole.

  He left muddy footprints on the floor inside the front door but ignored them and strode across the house. Now that he was safe from prying eyes, he didn’t have to worry about things like modesty and decency. Or even sanity.

  He stopped at the closed bathroom door and allowed himself a little time to build up his courage before wrapping his fingers around the knob and letting himself in.

  If not for the spilled beer, you never would have known anything had happened here. The water had finished draining from the tub, leaving behind only a few sudsy remains; towels and dirty clothes lay heaped on the floor where they'd been when he left; and the array of toiletries spread across the vanity hadn’t moved an inch.

  See? Just a dream. Or maybe a brain tumor. It didn’t happen. No, sir.

  Bruce moved closer to the tub, shuffling instead of walking, keeping his weight on his back foot and leaning toward the door so he could rush that way should the need arise. He peered over the edge of the tub and saw his bandaid stuck to the edge of the drain. A long, silver protuberance flicked out of the hole like a metallic tongue, wrapped itself around the band-aid, and retreated with its prize. Bruce licked his own lips and stared, momentarily unable to swallow or breathe.

  He was so focused on the drain he almost didn’t notice when the tub’s floor began to bulge. It started as a tiny, roving bump–he saw it from the corner of his eye–like a disoriented mole burrowing just beneath a lawn’s surface. Bruce turned to look at the bulge, watched it grow to the size of a softball, and then a basketball. He didn’t wait to see if it would reach beach-ball size. Instead, he gripped the sledgehammer very low on the handle, giving himself the maximum amount of leverage, and swung the thing with as much force as his overused muscles would allow.

  The sledge hit the bulge and bounced off as if it had struck rubber instead of fiberglass. Bruce had to let go of the tool and duck to keep it from rebounding into his face. It flew over his shoulder and struck the mirror above the vanity instead. Safety glass tinkled onto the vanity and into the sink, crackling and popping. The sledgehammer fell on the faucet head first and dented the metal. Bruce expected water to come shooting out of the fixture, but apparently the hammer hadn’t had enough force to cause that kind of damage.

  The tub squealed. Whether it had a kind of rudimentary vocal chord system within its plumbing or used some telepathic ability to beam the sound directly into his head, Bruce wasn’t sure. But the scream was real. No doubt about it. Not a scream of pain as much as an indignant yelp of surprise and fury.

  The tub hadn’t broken apart the way he’d expected it to, but a long crack had appeared across the bulging surface. He retrieved the sledgehammer and swung it again, careful this time to aim it so it wouldn’t ricochet into his face.

  The sledge’s muddy head struck the tub again, and the crack widened. This time, Bruce managed to hold on to the sweat-polished handle and let the hammer glide back to its position on his shoulder as easily as a baseball player taking a practice swing. The tub continued to scream at him, but now it supplemented the anger and animus with screams of real agony. Bruce swung a third time. A fourth. A second crack crossed the first, making a jagged X. The tub tried to grab the sledge’s head each time it impacted the surface, but it wasn’t nearly quick enough. Despite its flexibility, it didn’t seem to be able to extend itself very far.

  Now that he'd gotten the angle down, Bruce hammered at the thing like an expert demolitionist. He swung until his muscles began to spasm and he was afraid he might lose all control and drop the tool on his head. He’d busted a good sized hole in the center of the tub’s bulge. He caught his breath and gave his muscles a chance to relax, then lowered the hammer to his side and peered into the new, giant drainhole he’d made.

  Inside, something moved.

  Bruce took an immediate step back.

  The thing inside moved again. Its reflective surface looked as if it were made of porcelain scales. It shifted from one side to the other, and back; one of the scales retracted to reveal a huge, glossy eye. Blue. With a speckling of green. Just like his own.

  The scale slid back over the eye, and the thing moved again, this time toward the opening, surging. The tub had re-solidified—you could tell just by looking—the flexibility, that monstrous somehow-life, was gone. The scaly thing inside worked its way out, and the fiberglass cracked, groaned, and snapped. Bruce hefted the sledgehammer, bent his legs to lower his center of gravity, and widened his stance.

  His heel came down on a long beer-bottle shard. The glass sliced his foot open all the way to his big toe. He tried to readjust his footing, but the sledge unbalanced him and the blood leaking from his sole combined with the spilled beer and soapy water made for an extremely slippery surface.

  He fell.

  His injured foot skidded in the small (but not that small) pool of blood and flew out in front of him. He waved his free arm like a tightrope walker, but it wasn’t enough to catch his balance. He tumbled back onto his rear end. He didn’t feel any shards of broken bottle or mirror digging into his butt cheeks and guessed he must have missed all but the smallest pieces. Lucky.

  Lucky? You think there’s anything lucky about this fucked-up situation?

  Another loud crack reverberated from within the tub, and Bruce heard the thing inside pushing its way out, scales against jagged edges.

  Those aren’t the kinds of scales you’re supposed to have in your bathroom, he thought and held back a laugh he was sure would have sounded absolutely loony.

  The thing surged up, now partially visible over the edge of the tub. Its scales weren’t uniform but jagged, like broken tiles. Hair poked out in tufts from between the cracks—a patch here, a patch there—and although there was no way he could be certain, Bruce thought the stuff looked more than just a little bit pubic. The eyes stared at him from the sides of
the thing’s head, snake like, but with those eerily human irises that reminded him so much of his own.

  The creature opened a hole in its face that Bruce guessed you'd call a mouth. The opening had no lips, nor could he see gums or a tongue within the black maw, but the lines of broken tiles above and below the opening were most definitely teeth.

  No. Fangs.

  Whatever you wanted to call them, they were undoubtedly the gutting, filleting, bone-crunching, life-ending weapons of a carnivorous hunter. The creature snapped the teeth together, cocked its head; it opened its mouth again and let out a long, watery, whistling-kettle hiss.

  Bruce scooted back, but there wasn’t much room to move. He'd always considered the bathroom roomy; now it felt like a broom closet. When his back hit the vanity, he’d created maybe three feet of space between himself and the emerging thing.

  The creature lifted a hand to the edge of the tub. Its fingers were bent but stiff. They appeared to be composed of segments of PVC pipe and jointed with L-bends of the same material. The ends of the digits came to points, as jagged as most of the rest of the beast. When they clacked against the tub, you could hear they were hollow. They didn’t look like the most articulate body parts, but Bruce guessed they could do a lot of damage. Enough damage.

  The monstrosity let out another of those steamy hisses and leapt at him.