Cast-Iron Bathtub

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It happened a long time ago, at the end of the millennium. In our old apartment, we had a cast-iron bathtub from Soviet times. The bathroom was about two by two meters, and the heavy tub took up half the room. No decorative panels, the space underneath was open for all to see—and for dust to gather. Nothing special; you could find the same in many homes across our country. For years, all sorts of junk lay under it—tiles, basins with sand, and other unidentifiable things.

There was enough space at the ends, so on the side closer to the door stood the cat’s litter box. We had cats. House cats. Fat balls of fur. When the older one died, about a year later a kitten appeared in the house. We named him Chizh. Black, with white ears and tail. He promised to grow into a proper fluffy cat. But for now he was small, and everyone had to fuss around him.

The kitten had a problem—he wouldn’t use the litter box for several days at a time, would meow pitifully, and relieve himself where he shouldn’t. We tried placing him in it, coaxing him gently, even speaking sternly, trying to teach him that this was where he had to go. Nothing helped. He would meow miserably, run away, hide all over the apartment, get stuck somewhere, and do his business there. We had to drag him out and clean up in the most unexpected places.

It was an ordinary day. I was home alone. The kitten was running wild. I was keeping an eye on him out of the corner of my eye. At some point I heard that pitiful cry he made whenever he got stuck somewhere narrow, dirty, and dark—under a wardrobe, for example. This time there was one difference—the crying was coming from under the bathtub.

I looked underneath. It was dusty, cluttered with junk I didn’t even want to touch, and I couldn’t immediately see where the kitten was. The crying came from behind the litter box. I moved it aside and carefully squeezed in from the end of the tub, feeling along the wall with my hand. The meowing grew even more pitiful, and there was a rustling as it moved farther away.

I forgot to mention—this bathtub had another peculiarity: about twenty years before us, the previous owners had somehow managed to crack it. A cast-iron bathtub. Lengthwise. I have no idea how. They had simply welded it back together and cleaned it up. Among other things, the legs had been welded in pairs with thick metal sheets attached, blocking the view from the end. Carefully pushing forward, I tried to look behind one of those sheets. It wasn’t as dusty there—dust didn’t reach that far—but there was almost no light. Something shifted in the darkness, meowed, and crawled even farther away. I should have stopped there, but I foolishly squeezed in farther and reached out toward it. My torso was already completely under the tub. That was when I realized I was getting stuck.

The meowing little lump fled to the far corner and hid. I tried to move back and realized that some metal pieces were pressing into my ribs. Where would metal come from here?! A wave of panic, still mild, gripped me. Moving slightly, I understood that any jerk backward would impale me on some unseen rebar. I was trapped.

The panic intensified. I tried twisting, changing position. Useless! It was too narrow for that. I almost wanted to meow pitifully myself. Unlike that fluffy little bastard, I couldn’t crawl out of such a tight space on my own. A two-meter-tall man stuck under a bathtub! Idiot. I cursed myself and tried to figure out what to do.

Suddenly there was a “jolt.” Or not exactly a jolt—I don’t know. It felt as if everything around me had shifted. As though the entire building had tilted toward the wall behind the bathtub. In the next moment I realized I could move forward. I don’t know how, but I could turn slightly onto my side and slip past the support; my shoulder fit between the tub’s side and the wall. But I couldn’t move backward. Not even a millimeter. That was terrifying.

For about ten minutes I panicked. When it subsided, I started thinking again, and a crazy idea came to me: crawl all the way around behind the tub and get out from the other side. In theory, if I’d squeezed in here, I could squeeze out there… Or at least I’d end up stretched out behind the tub. The relatives would come home—what a surprise that would be!

I began squeezing forward. There was unbelievably little space. I couldn’t turn my head properly; all I could see was floor and dust. My temple and shoulder scraped against the rough underside of the tub. The metal sheets blocked the view at the ends. Nothing major, but… When I finally stretched to the other end and, without getting stuck, managed to peek around it (at first I was glad—there seemed to be more room), in the next moment I discovered ANOTHER WALL. A fourth one. Pressed up against the tub. I had crawled past three walls surrounding the bathtub. And now there was a fourth. Because of the metal plates I couldn’t see the whole picture and couldn’t understand when, at what moment, this monstrous transformation of space had occurred.

I panicked. I felt my mind slipping away, replaced by animal terror.

What was happening? Where were the pipes? The sink? The light? Where was I?!

After some indefinite time, the storm of emotions gave way to an icy calm of doom. The fear didn’t disappear, but instead of paralyzing me, it was itself restrained by a sense of unreality.

I had to get out. I still couldn’t move backward even a millimeter. It was as if the space behind me was compressing in some unimaginable way, pressing against my body from all sides. But I could still crawl forward. Turning onto my side again, bending my knees slightly and straining, I squeezed between the tub and the “alien” wall, as I called it in my mind. From that angle I could see the space under the tub—and the opposite wall. It was fairly visible, though I couldn’t identify any light source. Just a sort of ambient glow. My legs were hidden by a metal plate. A bit more—and I was stretched along the “alien” wall.

All this time, the pitiful meowing hadn’t stopped. It seemed to come from… always from the corner opposite me.

I kept moving forward.

The second turn—where the door should have been, where the litter box should have been, where I had entered this nightmare. I crawled through the end section relatively calmly, if you don’t count the inner madness of the situation. There was enough space to pull my legs along. Looking around the next corner, I saw nothing new. I felt in my gut that all the walls were now “alien.” In the middle under the tub lay “alien” junk. Though I’d never paid much attention to it before, I could say for sure that we didn’t have stacks of dusty, broken circuit boards in our bathroom. At least that’s what I managed to see—I couldn’t stretch a hand or foot beyond the narrow space in which I moved. And I still couldn’t turn around—crawling backward feet first was impossible, and there wasn’t enough room to turn. So I continued, stretched along what was now the sixth wall.

It was a mad cycle. I made a second loop, once again reaching the place where, by normal logic of space, I had started. Now in the middle lay broken dishes, scraps of film, rags.

After the third return to the “starting” point, I realized the pitiful meowing had grown more distant… And it no longer sounded quite like a meow. More creaking, with metallic notes. My strength was fading; it was hard to breathe. But I had no choice but to keep pushing myself forward.

After the sixth or seventh loop, when I once again reached the “starting” point, I saw with both joy and horror that there was no wall beyond the next turn. But it was the other side of the tub! In our building, on that side should be the elevator shaft. By then I was so delirious from crawling in that idiotic space that I didn’t care where I had ended up.

I crawled out into that space. It was dark. The only light came from beneath the tub. The room was the same size as our bathroom. I stood up and stretched, my joints cracking. For a moment I felt euphoria, but then the feelings returned—I had to get out. I reached over the tub and touched the wall that was now where the middle of my bathroom should have been. It felt like rough, wet concrete. I began thinking what I could use to break through it when bubbling water sounded from the tub below.

I looked down. From a murky, thick sludge two enormous eyes looked at me, glowing with a dull violet light. A scraping meow rose from the water.

I jumped in shock and terror and hit my head hard against a ceiling that suddenly seemed very low. A boom filled the space. The thing in the sludge sloshed to the other end of the tub and began whining in an even more metallic voice. From behind the walls came hollow creaking and knocking.

Panic returned, and fear demanded only one thing—run. But where? The only path my fevered mind could devise was down, under the tub! Back! I dove into the opening I had just crawled from and began squeezing forward. As I lay on my side and pushed my hands ahead, I felt that strange “jolt” again. The world tilted the other way, and I was almost glad of it. Now I crawled on my other side. The walls began repeating again, enclosing the tub from all sides. I didn’t stop to rest or examine the debris.

As I crawled, it seemed to me that the scraping sounds were pursuing me, that at any moment something would grab my legs… But fortunately nothing caught me, and I felt immense relief when around the turn I saw the tiled floor of my bathroom, brightly lit by the bulbs.

After crawling out, I went to the balcony and smoked there for several hours. I was covered in an unbelievably thick layer of dust, a lump on my head throbbed, all my joints ached, but I didn’t care. I didn’t go near the bathtub until evening.

When the family came home, I didn’t tell them anything, just joked about where I had dug up so much dust. The kitten was found—while I had been God knows where, he had done his business behind the cabinet and was happily racing around on the bed. After that incident, I moved the litter box to the toilet, and the kitten had no more problems. The older (now) cat never had any. And under the bathtub I stuffed in as much junk as possible so no one could crawl in—or out. I also tried to bathe less often in that tub, and only with the door wide open. In general, since then I’ve been wary of enclosed spaces, leaving windows open, doors too. In the new apartment, I installed a glass shower.

And now, after all this time, I think: that creature… it meowed like a kitten.

It was luring the kitten. And when I crawled in there, I must have scared it—it hadn’t expected a grown man instead of a small animal.

I was damn lucky it wasn’t ready for a human encounter.