From the Sewer

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A few days ago I got hold of a hard drive pulled out of some old computer. It looked pretty rough — streaks of some kind of grime on the casing, traces of green corrosion on the board — clear signs of exposure to moisture. I took it mostly for parts — magnets, platters, the motor — but decided to check whether it still worked and see what files were on it. Surprisingly, the drive turned out to be fully functional and in decent condition.

Most of the files were of no real interest — movies and clips, mostly of well-known content, music that didn’t match my taste, pictures of cats and internet demotivators, photos taken with a crappy Nikon point-and-shoot showing drunk faces, several Word documents with copy-pasted stuff (clearly from a browser) about Jewish conspiracies, GMOs, vaccines — pretty dumb and formulaic. There were also a few internal memos asking for office supplies or something like that. A standard, almost certainly pirated Windows XP, the usual set of cracked software, World of Tanks and a couple of second-rate games. In short, very ordinary, dreary content.

At the very end I decided to sort all the files by creation date and found a text file typed in Word. It described some strange things. It was written quite poorly and with an overwhelming amount of profanity, so I decided to do a bit of literary editing before posting it. The text began with a long ramble about work, beer drunk with “buddies,” and other everyday stuff — that part is completely uninteresting, so I’m omitting it.

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…Before going to bed I went to take a shower. The bathtub around the drain looked kind of dirty. I didn’t pay much attention, thinking it was probably time to do a general cleaning at home. Instead of remembering that this dirt hadn’t been there an hour and a half earlier. Anyway, I got into the tub and started washing. I noticed that the water was draining poorly — apparently the drain was clogged. The plunger was in the toilet, and I didn’t feel like wandering around the apartment naked and wet, so I decided to deal with the drain later.

However, the problem solved itself — the drain started gurgling and the water began to go down quickly. Meanwhile, I had soaped up my hair, so my eyes were closed. Then I shifted my feet and… felt as if I’d caught on something. Something was holding my leg. I got scared, opened my eyes, which immediately filled with soap and started stinging, so I couldn’t see anything. I quickly rinsed off the shampoo and opened my eyes again.

From the drain hole stretched some cloudy white, thin threads, the ends of which had attached themselves to the skin of my leg, pulling it tight. Then a murky струйка seemed to shoot out of the drain, and another thread stuck to my leg. Then another. And another. I jerked — it was painful and completely useless; the elastic threads only pulled my leg even closer to the hole. That’s when real FEAR set in.

I immediately panicked. Thrashing around and trying to tear my leg free from the sticky threads, which were only increasing in number, I was just getting closer to the drain, and blood was oozing from torn skin. Then I saw a knife on the shelf. At some point I must have cut something in the bathroom and forgotten it there.

I grabbed the knife and slashed at the threads. A few snapped, but most of them turned out to be too strong. I managed to deal with another dozen fibers and just in time pulled my hand back when new ones rushed out of the drain — now in the direction of the hand holding the knife. I gained a bit of distance, but the knife didn’t bring much success. The second attack had the same result. The pain from my tearing skin was gradually becoming unbearable. I tried again to break free, jerking violently and trying to rip it off completely, but human skin is a damn tough thing. Only tears came to my eyes from the pain. My leg was already right next to the drain hole. A little more, and it would start pulling me in — I thought.

The idea that this thing was alive and should be afraid of boiling water came to me suddenly. I grabbed the showerhead and turned the hot water on full blast, aiming the stream at my leg. It became hot — very hot. Then insanely painful. But not just for me. The fibers started to peel off and tear away one by one, and after about twenty seconds my leg was free. I jumped out of the tub and slammed the bathroom door shut, then went to tend to my mangled, scalded limb, leaving bloody footprints on the linoleum.

About ten minutes later, having treated my leg with peroxide and bandaged it, I decided to take a look at the bathroom. The light was on — I hadn’t turned it off. I cautiously cracked the door open and looked inside. The sight was deeply unsettling — the tub was filled with a solid mass of whitish, cloudy threads that slowly swayed. Its surface sagged downward, resembling a hammock. Deep inside it, a bottle of shampoo was rocking back and forth. I recoiled in horror and ran to the room, locking myself in and turning on the light. I still have that nauseating image burned into my mind.

…I’m an idiot. I should have run out of the apartment immediately, but instead, like a fool, I sat down to write about this damn monstrosity. Just now I stepped out of the room and saw those threads coming out from under the bathroom door. There are already many of them, and new ones appear every few seconds. They’ve already blocked the hallway, and I can no longer reach the front door. I slammed the door to the room shut and stuffed the gaps with everything I could find. Now I have only one way out — the window.

The good thing is that it’s only the second floor, so I have a fairly good chance of not breaking myself. And another good thing is that it’s summer — it’s not cold. Because there’s also a bad thing — I’m wearing nothing but my underwear.