24 May Barrel Babies

Part I

Darla Winn noticed it first in the kindergarten nurse logs.

She had worked in the school system for fourteen years—long enough to understand the rhythms of childhood illnesses and the minor oddities that occasionally came with growth. Warts. Rashes. Learning difficulties. Sometimes a child would faint during gym or complain about something no one could quite pin down. Parents came in worried, teachers whispered diagnoses they were not qualified to give, and the school would return to normal by the end of the week.

But something had changed this year.

The new students were different—not in their personalities or behavior, but in ways that clung to biology. She kept finding anomalies during routine screenings and minor injuries: an extra digit hidden beneath an underdeveloped nub on the foot; a child with soft webbing between her fingers, like something halfway formed then halted. There were missing fingernails on infants with pristine hygiene records. And just yesterday, she had tended to a boy with two sets of molars in his lower jaw—none of which had erupted until he was five.

Darla had quietly started a file. She used her own stationery, made careful notes by hand, and kept the folder in her locked desk drawer, never entering the information into the district system.

There were now seven children in her log. All were in early childhood programs. All had been born within a ten-mile radius of Grainer Hollow Elementary. And none of their parents seemed particularly surprised when she mentioned the defects.

Some didn’t respond at all.

Others became defensive the moment Darla brought up prenatal care or birth complications.

The boy with the second row of teeth had a mother who bristled at her questions and asked flatly if Darla had a medical license. The girl with the webbing had a father who insisted she had been born in Milwaukee, even though Darla had seen the Grainer County hospital bracelet on the child’s arm the previous week, still half-tangled in the threads of her jacket sleeve.

Darla had tried bringing it up—gently, cautiously—to Principal Klee. He had smiled in that tired, managerial way that suggested he did not want to deal with her but also did not want to appear negligent.

“These things come in waves,” he said as he poured his coffee. “You’ll find a cluster of asthma, a bunch of speech delays, a group of kids with flat feet. Patterns always emerge when you’re looking too hard. But they usually don’t mean much.”

She had wanted to argue. But she didn’t. Not yet.

Instead, she kept looking.

The dreams had returned, too. They always came in fall, when the mornings began to crust with frost and the wetlands filled with fog so dense it muffled the sound of birds. In these dreams, she stood on the bank behind the school, staring into the cattails, waiting for something to rise. Sometimes she heard crying, but she couldn’t find its source. Other times, there was just the soft, sloshing sound of something substantial moving beneath the surface.

Last night had been different. She had seen her daughter again.

Nora had been dead for nine years. Stillborn. A silent delivery in a darkened room. The doctor had not let Darla hold her at first. They had wrapped her too quickly, as though contact might damage them both.

But in the dream, Nora had moved.

Her skin had been pale and smooth, her eyes slightly too wide, and her mouth opened as if trying to form a word. She had looked up from the reeds behind the school and said, “It’s under us.”

Darla had woken with her hands clenched against her chest and her nails digging into the skin beneath her collarbone.

She had not cried.

Instead, she had dressed early and walked to the school before sunrise, cutting behind the parking lot and pushing through the treeline that separated the playground from the marsh.

The path was overgrown but still visible. Children used to come this way when they wanted to sneak a smoke or carve things into the trees. Now, with the new fence and security cameras, it had mostly gone untouched.

She stepped carefully, listening to the squelch of her boots in the wet grass and the soft rustle of cattails overhead. A layer of mist hung just above the marsh, shimmering faintly in the morning light.

Then she heard a distant sound, muffled by the reeds and filtered through waterlogged earth. It was not a frog or bird, or even the wind. Rather, it was rhythmic and hollow, as if something were breathing inside metal. She followed the sound until she found a storm drain nearly hidden beneath a collapsed wooden fence. The grate had rusted through at one corner, creating an opening large enough for something small—or something that used to be small—to squeeze through.

The air around it smelled wrong. Not just like decay or algae, but akin to the metallic bite of blood mixed with something sweeter. Rot and sugar. The kind of smell she had first noticed in the delivery room, just before they told her Nora had never taken a breath.

Darla crouched by the drain and placed one hand against the wet concrete. It vibrated faintly. Whatever sound had been moving through the pipe was gone now, but she could still feel the residue of its rhythm.

Something had been moving in there.

Something that had lungs. Or gills.

She stood slowly, brushing dew from her knees, and looked out toward the rest of the marsh. The trees stood still. No birds moved through the branches.

From somewhere deeper in the reeds, a sound echoed back to her. It was faint but unmistakable.

A child’s voice, calling her name.

“Mommy?”

Darla did not run.

She walked back to the school with measured steps, memorizing the route, the landmarks, and the distance between the rusted grate and the edge of the playground. Once inside, she washed her hands, changed her shoes, and placed a fresh page in the log folder in her drawer.

This time, she didn’t write down a name.

She wrote:

“Possible connection between drainage infrastructure and marsh proximity. Recommend environmental survey. Drain near east boundary vibrates. Strong scent. Voice heard.”

Then, beneath that, in smaller letters:

“Dreamed of Nora again. She is closer.”

She closed the folder, locked the drawer, and turned as the first bell rang.

Children began to stream past her office, laughing and shrieking as they always did.

A little boy limped by, his sock soaked with blood from a cut on his foot. His teacher called to him and scolded him gently for running. He looked up at Darla and smiled.

For a moment, his eyes glinted—too round, too wide. Almost translucent.

Then he blinked, and they looked normal again.

Darla stepped back into her office and shut the door behind her.

She did not sit down. She simply stood there, her hands shaking, trying to remember if she had ever looked closely enough at Nora’s eyes when she was born.

And if they had even closed.

Part II

Two days passed without incident, though Darla remained hyper-aware of the children in the halls. Every irregular movement caught her eye, every cough seemed deeper than it should have been, and every unusual skin tone appeared more unnatural. Her inner rational voice tried to convince her that stress had begun to distort her perception. But when she looked again at her private log, the dates and entries hadn’t changed.

There were now nine children listed. One had been added just that morning—a girl named Kayda, whose mother had brought her in for a scraped chin. Darla had gently lifted the child’s sleeve to examine for swelling, only to find the girl’s upper arm covered in small, raised nodules beneath the skin. They were too symmetrical, too ordered, to be a natural rash. They reminded Darla of fish eggs.

The mother said they had appeared three months ago and that their pediatrician had called it “subcutaneous calcium pockets.” She did not elaborate further and seemed irritated by Darla’s interest.

That night, Darla returned to the path behind the school.

The sky had turned overcast, and the marsh was darker than it had been during her first visit. She brought a flashlight, although the beam barely cut through the mist. The reeds remained shoulder-high, swaying despite the stillness of the air. She could hear the soft crackling of insects, but no birds and no frogs.

She reached the collapsed fence and crouched beside the storm drain. The rusted grate had not moved since she last saw it, but the mud around it bore strange indentations. They were not boot prints and did not belong to any animal she could easily identify. The closest comparison that came to mind was the soft, rounded edge of an infant’s foot—though larger and stretched oddly wide.

She leaned closer and angled her flashlight down into the tunnel. The beam struck a curved surface below, something metallic and slick. It reflected the light in faint, dappled patterns, like oil in water. A thin sheen coated the interior of the drain, and where it pooled near the opening, it emitted a smell even stronger than before.

This time, it made her gag.

She forced herself to remain steady, bracing one hand against the concrete as she steadied the flashlight. Deep inside the tunnel, far beyond the reach of the beam, she caught movement. It was not rapid or jerking, but slow and serpentine. Something shifted behind the fluid, stirring sediment that drifted upward like ash.

Then the sound returned.

A deep, slow thudding—not quite like breathing, nor mechanical. It echoed softly through the tunnel, building into a slow rhythm that pulsed against her fingers as they touched the wall.

She pulled back and sat on the edge of the collapsed fence, trying to regulate the panic building in her chest. The smell clung to her skin. The sound stayed in her ears.

She did not know how long she sat there before she realized something had been left behind.

A manila envelope leaned against the broken chain-link fence. It was damp, the corners curled from moisture, but it had not been there earlier. Darla scanned the area and saw no movement in the reeds or along the trail behind her.

She opened the envelope carefully.

Inside were photographs—medical scans, thermal images, black-and-white snapshots of what looked like fetal deformities in various stages of gestation. One image showed a child’s open mouth. The teeth inside did not resemble human dentition at all. They were conical and backward-curved, bearing a resemblance to those of a lamprey.

Beneath the photographs, she found a folded sheet of paper. The ink had bled slightly from exposure, but the message remained legible:

“They knew. The dump sites were never sealed. The marsh is still absorbing. The soil isn’t dead—it’s gestating.”

At the bottom of the note, in a different ink and shakier hand, were the initials: RC.

Darla returned home in a daze and locked the envelope in her filing cabinet beneath her log. She sat awake for hours, reviewing the photos by lamplight, until the dream took her again.

In this one, Nora was waiting at the edge of the marsh. Her skin was no longer smooth but dappled with pale, translucent spots. Her limbs were longer, her fingers spread wider apart. When she turned to speak, her voice came from somewhere behind her face, as if her mouth were only a suggestion.

She said, “You forgot where they took me. You let them take the pieces.”

Then she smiled, and Darla saw the same conical teeth.

The next morning, Darla called the number printed in tiny type at the bottom of one of the thermal scans. It had been labeled as a sample from 1996 and included the source—Dr. Raymond Crest, Environmental Toxicology Consultant.

The number rang three times before a man answered. He did not speak. He simply waited.

“Dr. Crest?” she asked.

No response came.

“My name is Darla Winn,” she continued. “I’m a nurse at Grainer Hollow Elementary. I received something yesterday—photos with your name on them. I think you’ve been watching what’s happening out here for longer than I’ve been alive.”

The man still did not answer, but she heard a faint rustle, like someone shifting paper near the receiver.

“I want to know what’s happening. I think you do, too. Please—just let me ask you some questions. I’ll come to you. Just tell me where.”

The line disconnected.

She stared at the phone for several seconds before it rang again. This time, it displayed no caller ID.

She answered immediately.

The voice that spoke was dry and thin.

“If you come here, do not touch anything.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Where are you?”

“I’m where they dumped it,” he said. “Bring gloves.”

The call ended.

That evening, Darla followed the directions Crest had left on her voicemail. The house he lived in was barely that—a small, dented trailer parked half a mile from the edge of the marsh, its aluminum siding stained with black streaks. The surrounding land had sunk unevenly, and the tires supporting the trailer had vanished into soft ground. Tall reeds clustered around the steps, and the porch light blinked at irregular intervals.

She knocked twice. When no one answered, she stepped back and waited. After nearly a minute, the door opened a few inches. A pale, watery eye looked out through the gap.

“Do you live alone?” she asked.

“Not entirely,” the man replied.

He opened the door wide enough to let her in.

The air inside smelled of mildew and something else—ammonia, maybe, or formaldehyde. The walls were lined with filing cabinets and sealed crates. A central table held a microscope, several cracked Petri dishes, and a wide glass container filled with liquid. Suspended inside it was a creature scarcely the size of a fist. Its body was shaped like a frog, but its limbs ended in what appeared to be tiny human fingers. Its mouth had no jaw—just a round, gaping orifice rimmed with nodules that quivered faintly.

Crest did not sit. He leaned against the counter and watched her without blinking.

“They said the water was clean by ‘84,” he muttered. “EPA came out, ran tests, and declared the runoff ‘within acceptable thresholds.’ But they only tested surface samples. They never cored the basin. Never looked underneath.”

He pulled a file from the cabinet beside him and handed it to her.

The photographs inside showed satellite images of the marsh over three decades. In each image, the terrain shifted subtly. New shapes emerged in the water. The most recent photo was marked in red, circling an area that resembled a swollen vein, branching off from a central point near the old waste facility.

“It’s growing,” he said. “It doesn’t die. Doesn’t even age. It divides. Fuses. Crossbreeds.”

“With what?” she asked.

Crest stared at her for a long moment.

“With us,” he said. “Or at least it tries to. It’s been attempting replication since the early eighties. It learned what a host looks like, but not what makes one viable.”

He turned away from her and opened a second crate. Inside were more samples—some tissue, some bone, and one sealed jar containing a fetus no larger than an orange. Its skin was translucent. Its eyes were black pits, and its mouth had no lips. It appeared to be smiling.

“They didn’t just dump chemicals,” Crest said. “They dumped genetic modifiers, runoff from experimental growth agents, and hormone disruptors. The company didn’t know what half of it would do, and they didn’t care. All they needed was for it to sink.”

Darla felt her hands tighten around the file folder.

“This thing,” she said, “it’s still alive down there.”

He nodded once.

“I believe it’s building something.”

“What kind of something?”

“I think it’s building a body,” he said. “One piece at a time.”

Part III

The rain began as Darla left Crest’s trailer. It came in a steady, unscented sheet, falling without thunder and barely rustling the reeds. The sky remained a pale, unbroken gray, with no visible movement in the clouds.

She drove in silence, her windshield wipers scraping against glass slick with marsh pollen and road dust. Crest’s words repeated themselves in her mind like scripture from the text of a religion she never subscribed to.

It’s building a body.

That idea would not leave her. Not even as she pulled into her driveway, not as she stripped off her shoes and left them by the door, not as she stood in the shower for twenty minutes letting the hot water scald the back of her neck.

She opened her locked drawer and pulled out the folder. She laid each page out across the dining room table, aligning the thermal scans beside the hospital records, the notes beside the photographs, and the final report from the old Grainer Fertility Center—now permanently closed.

Every document pointed back to the marsh. Every outlier curved toward something underneath.

When she finally slept, it was shallow and restless. Her dreams came in fits.

Nora appeared again, standing beneath a storm drain, her face partially submerged in black water. Her mouth moved, and although no sound emerged, Darla understood every word.

You left me there. I waited, but you left me.

She woke with her fists clenched so tightly that her fingernails had left crescent-shaped wounds in her palms.

She called in sick the following morning and returned to the school just before dawn, parking her car several blocks away. She walked the rest of the distance along the edge of the fence, cutting across the east yard until she reached the far drainage corridor. The grate still sat half-submerged in moss and rust. The marsh beyond it buzzed faintly in the mist.

This time, she came prepared.

She wore rubber boots, gloves, and a padded jacket, and had brought a small flashlight and a breathing mask from the emergency kit in her trunk.

The drain led to an old utility tunnel that extended beneath the school property. No one had used it in decades. The district had once planned to repurpose it for geothermal upgrades, but the funding had evaporated after a failed bond vote.

She moved carefully into the mouth of the tunnel, crouching low to avoid the jagged metal teeth of the broken grate. The concrete interior curved downward, the surface slick with algae and dark runoff. Her boots squelched with each step. The air grew colder the farther she went.

After twenty feet, the tunnel widened into a small maintenance corridor. Exposed rebar jutted from the walls, and rivulets of moisture traced paths down into the sloping floor, where it pooled into a narrow channel that continued deeper underground.

The smell grew stronger with each step. It was chemical at first—metallic and acrid—but soon became something else entirely. Beneath the surface scent was a kind of sweetness that stuck in the back of her throat and made her teeth ache. It was the scent of decay, but not of rot. It was the scent of something transforming.

A single pipe jutted from the wall up ahead. It had been broken off years ago and now served as an impromptu shelf for debris carried in by runoff—scraps of plastic, tangled weeds, the husk of what had once been a raccoon, now bloated and hollowed from within.

She stepped past it, following the slight curve of the corridor. Her flashlight began to flicker, its battery drained faster than expected. She tapped it gently and pressed on.

After another fifteen feet, she saw the door.

It had been painted green once, but the color had long since peeled away. Rust coated the hinges, and the lock had broken under pressure from the shifting concrete around it. The door hung crooked in its frame, leaving a gap wide enough to shine her light through.

Inside, the room sloped downward and widened into a chamber she hadn’t known existed.

The walls were lined with large metal barrels, many of them ruptured or partially sunk into the surrounding earth. The floor had once been concrete, but now it appeared soft and uneven, covered in a thick mat of black moss or algae that seemed to respond when she stepped on it.

Several shapes were scattered across the far wall. At first, she thought they were industrial debris—sections of pipe or insulation—but as she approached, she realized they were bones.

Small ones.

Infant-sized.

Some were clean and white, picked dry by time. Others retained fragments of tissue or cloth. One still wore a plastic hospital bracelet.

She leaned closer and brought her flashlight to bear.

The lettering had mostly faded, but a few letters remained. The last name was still legible.

Winn.

Her knees weakened. She steadied herself against the wall.

She had not told anyone the hospital had used her last name on the records. She had not shared that detail with Crest. No one else should have known.

She took a step back, but her boot slipped slightly on the pulsing moss. When she looked down, she realized it wasn’t moss at all. It was a network of gelatinous tissue, translucent and vascular, like the lining of a womb.

She staggered away from the wall and turned to leave. The flashlight flickered again, then died.

Darkness swallowed the corridor.

Then, from somewhere within the chamber, a wet, sloshing sound began. It came from deep within the structure, each movement accompanied by a soft suction, as if whatever was rising from the was separating itself from a surface it had adhered to.

She could hear breathing—but it wasn’t hers.

It was rhythmic, too slow to belong to a mammal, and punctuated by small, gurgling gasps, like fluid being sucked through a narrow channel. Something moved near the barrels. She could hear the sound of skin brushing metal.

She reached into her coat for the backup penlight and switched it on. The beam was weak but enough to see the floor.

A new trail had formed behind her. It was viscous and glistening, as if something had crawled across the membrane, dragging weight behind it.

Then a voice echoed from the far end of the room.

It was small. It was unmistakable.

“Mommy.”

Darla’s breath caught in her throat.

“Come see me.”

She aimed the light toward the voice.

At first, she saw nothing. Just the barrels. Then something shifted between them—something small, curled against the floor.

It was shaped like a child but with limbs too long and thin, as if someone had stretched the proportions of an infant across a marionette. Its skin gleamed with translucent patches, its mouth twitching erratically.

The eyes opened. They were Nora’s.

“Why did you leave me?” it asked.

Darla took a step back. Her boot sank halfway into the membrane. She yanked it free and began backing toward the corridor.

Behind her, something groaned. The wall bulged inward, distorting with pressure. The membrane stretched and began to split. A fluid hissed from the opening, and several of the barrels collapsed inward, crushed by the weight of something moving beneath the chamber floor.

The child-thing between the barrels began to laugh. It was a quiet, wet sound, unformed and gurgling.

Darla turned and ran.

The corridor closed in around her as she retraced her steps, the sound of her boots echoing in the confined space. Behind her, the laughter grew louder, mixing with the slosh of something far too large trying to follow.

She reached the grate and clambered through, scraping her back on the rusted metal as she emerged into the marsh. She kept moving, crashing through reeds and wet grass until she reached the far end of the school yard.

Only then did she stop to breathe.

The sky above remained unchanged. Gray. Motionless.

Somewhere behind her, the marsh had gone silent again.

She walked home in a fog. Her boots left black streaks on the sidewalk. She did not stop to clean them. She stepped into her house, locked the door behind her, and sat down at the kitchen table.

She opened the file again. She took the old ultrasound photo from its plastic sleeve and turned it over.

There, scrawled in red ink, was something she had not noticed before.

“No heartbeat. No movement. No breath.”

Beneath it, in a different hand:

“Still developing.”

Part IV

Darla called the school the next morning and reported that she would be out again. Her voice remained calm, even as she stared at the mud-streaked boots by the door and the faint handprint still visible on the back of her jacket—one she could not recall receiving.

She spent the early hours disinfecting everything she had carried with her into the drain tunnel. The mask, gloves, and penlight went into a sealed trash bag. She triple-wrapped the boots and set them in the outdoor bin. Then she scrubbed her hands until her knuckles bled.

She returned to the dining table and reviewed everything again.

There had been no camera down there. No witness. No record, aside from the things she had carried in and out of that chamber. Even the hospital bracelet she had tried to retrieve from the infant remains had disintegrated in her hand. Her only proof now lived in the pages of her notes, the photographs from Crest, and the sound that still echoed faintly in her ears when the house fell silent.

She knew that if she remained quiet, if she said nothing, if she filed the experience away as trauma or hallucination, she could resume her job without consequence. She could ignore the bruises on her shin, the tremor in her right hand, and the knowledge that whatever lay beneath the school had whispered in her daughter’s voice.

But she also knew she could not live with that choice.

At 10:00 a.m., she drove to the school and asked to see Principal Klee.

He met her in the front office with his usual strained smile, glancing briefly at the secretary before ushering her into his office and closing the door.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You’ve been out for a few days. Staff’s been wondering.”

“I’m not here about myself,” Darla said. “I’m here about the students. The things I’ve been documenting.”

Klee’s expression did not change, but a slight tightness entered his posture. He folded his hands on the desk and leaned back.

“Darla, I know you care about the kids,” he said. “You’ve always been thorough. But you’ve also been under a lot of stress.”

“This isn’t about stress,” she said. “This is about something living beneath the school. It’s affecting the children. It’s affecting pregnancies in town. I have proof.”

She placed a copy of her notes on his desk, along with one of the photographs from Crest’s envelope. The image showed a malformed fetus with webbed limbs and translucent skin, suspended in fluid.

Klee didn’t touch it. He stared at the photograph, then slowly slid it back toward her.

“You can’t show this to people,” he said. “You can’t go around telling parents their kids are infected or defective. Do you understand the panic that would cause? The lawsuits?”

“I’m not speculating. I’ve seen where it’s coming from. The drainage system behind the east fence leads to a buried chamber. There are remains down there. Bones. Infant bones.”

Klee stood and moved to the door.

“I think you should go home,” he said. “Take some more time off. I’ll arrange for a substitute nurse for the rest of the week.”

“You’re not listening.”

“No,” he said, “I’m not. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this kind of hysteria. You’re not the only one who’s come forward over the years. But every time someone makes these kinds of claims, they wind up walking them back—once they realize how little they actually know about what goes on around here.”

Darla stood as well. Her hands trembled, but her voice remained steady.

“You knew,” she said. “Maybe not all of it. Maybe not what it would become. But you knew something was wrong with that land. You still built the playground next to it.”

Klee didn’t respond. He opened the door and waited for her to leave.

She walked past him without another word.

That evening, she tried calling Crest. The line rang until it cut to static. She tried again an hour later. This time, it went straight to voicemail. She drove back to his trailer just before dusk.

The door was open.

A sheriff’s cruiser idled in the tall grass out front. Two men in uniforms stood near the porch, speaking quietly to a third man in plain clothes. Smoke drifted from the interior of the trailer, thin and bitter.

One of the officers turned as she approached.

“I knew Dr. Crest,” she said. “Is he all right?”

The officer frowned.

“There was a fire,” he said. “Short-circuited equipment. Electrical fault, most likely. He was inside. Didn’t make it.”

Darla stared past him into the trailer.

The walls were scorched black, and the ceiling had partially collapsed. Everything inside appeared melted or charred beyond recognition.

Except for a single file cabinet, which stood mostly intact near the rear corner.

She saw a plain envelope on top, its corners curling from heat.

“Did he have any next of kin?” she asked.

The officer shook his head.

“No family that we know of,” he said. “Lived off the grid. Strange guy, but harmless.”

Darla nodded and stepped back. She waited until the officers had moved toward the cruiser before turning away and walking back to her car.

That night, she visited the old Grainer County Birth Records Office. The building had not been updated since the mid-1980s, and most of the archives were still stored on paper. The clerk on duty, an elderly woman with tremors in both hands, barely looked up as Darla signed in.

“I’m looking for stillbirth records between 1985 and 2000,” Darla said. “Specifically within the school district boundary.”

The woman raised an eyebrow.

“You’ll be lucky to find anything,” she said. “Most of the older files got pulled during the last audit. Some were destroyed. HIPAA stuff. Privacy compliance.”

“Were any of them flagged as medical anomalies?” Darla asked.

The clerk hesitated.

“There was a cluster, back in ‘89. Four stillbirths in two weeks. All delivered at Grainer General. But that hospital burned down in ‘94, so the files are mostly gone. Why are you asking?”

“I’m a nurse at the elementary school,” Darla said. “I’m seeing patterns. And I think they started decades ago.”

The woman tapped her pen against the counter.

“You’re not the first to notice,” she said.

Darla looked up sharply.

“Who else?” she asked.

“Parents. A few doctors. One OB-GYN left town without explanation. Said the air wasn’t right. That was back in ‘91.”

“Do you remember the name?”

The clerk nodded.

“Dr. Sagan. Olivia Sagan. Moved to Michigan, I think. Claimed she was sick. But some of us think she knew something and got out before it got worse.”

“Did she leave any notes?”

“If she did, they didn’t survive the fire,” the clerk said. “Or they were taken before it.”

Darla left the building with a photocopy of a birth certificate belonging to one of the infants from the 1989 cluster. The child had been unnamed. The certificate bore a red stamp marked “non-viable.” Under ‘cause of death,’ it simply said “unknown systemic failure.”

She stopped by her house just long enough to grab her flashlight and a new mask. Then she returned to the marsh.

The night air carried a low hum, and the reeds rustled without wind.

She approached the rusted utility building she had first discovered beyond the east trail. The fence surrounding it had collapsed entirely. The door hung open now, as if waiting.

She stepped inside.

The interior smelled of mold and oil. The walls were lined with pipes and rusted electrical panels. Several barrels sat in the far corner, corroded and partially sunk into the floor. Labels had peeled away or dissolved entirely, leaving only faint impressions.

Darla approached one of the barrels and pressed her gloved hand to the metal. It felt warm.

She looked down and saw the same gelatinous membrane she had found beneath the school, stretched thin across the floor.

On the wall above the barrels, someone had tacked photographs and notes. They were water-damaged and curling, but still legible.

One photo showed a newborn with fused eyelids and a split palate. Another displayed a thermal scan of a subterranean cavity—one that glowed with heat and movement.

In the center of the board, a newspaper clipping had been pinned. The headline read:

“Young Brohm Spearheads Flood Recovery Project”

The article featured a photo of a man in his twenties—Harold Brohm, now Councilman Brohm—shaking hands with contractors in front of a pile of industrial waste barrels. In the background, men in waders stood knee-deep in marsh water, stacking barrels behind a temporary barrier.

Darla stepped back and looked around the room.

The pipes overhead creaked softly. A drop of moisture struck her shoulder.

The floor vibrated beneath her feet.

Something had awoken.

She turned and fled the building, pushing through reeds until she reached the school perimeter. Lights burned in the windows, and a janitor moved inside, oblivious.

She reached her car, opened the door, and sat in the driver’s seat, breathing slowly until her hands stopped shaking.

That night, she dreamed again.

Nora sat on the floor of her old nursery, surrounded by toys. Her skin shimmered faintly in the lamplight. She looked up and smiled.

“We’re almost done,” she said.

“Done with what?” Darla asked.

“Building me.”

Then she opened her mouth, and Darla saw something inside—something growing, twisting, moving independently of her body.

The sound it made was not human.

Part V

Darla stood outside Councilman Brohm’s office for twenty minutes before she knocked.

The door was already cracked, and his voice called out before her knuckles made contact with the wood.

“Come in.”

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The councilman sat behind his desk, sleeves rolled up, a stack of manila folders spread across the surface. His hands moved carefully over a blueprint, one she recognized from her early research. It detailed a proposed expansion to the marsh trail—a recreational walking loop that would pass directly over the same buried structure she had found beneath the school.

He looked up as she approached.

“Nurse Winn,” he said. “I heard you’ve been under the weather. I’m glad to see you’re back on your feet.”

“I saw the drain,” she said without greeting. “I saw what’s under it.”

He paused for a moment, then closed the folder in front of him and folded his hands neatly on top of it.

“I see,” he said. “That must have been very upsetting.”

“I found infant remains,” she said. “I found growth chambers. I found barrels. Hundreds of them.”

“I don’t know what you think you saw,” he said. “But that area is off-limits for a reason. There are structural hazards—collapsing ground, unstable waste containers, biohazards from thirty years ago. Nothing down there is active.”

Darla took a step forward and placed a photograph on his desk. It showed a malformed fetus—one of Crest’s oldest images—with a handwritten label: Sample Recovered from Drain Core, Viable Until Week 18.

Brohm’s face remained still, but a slight tension entered his posture.

“That came from your dump site,” she said. “And it’s still producing. You know that. You’ve always known that.”

“You’re making accusations you can’t support.”

“I have a witness,” she said. “I had one, at least. You killed him.”

Brohm stood from his chair, walked to the window, and stared out at the courtyard below, where children ran in circles around the jungle gym.

“I never killed anyone,” he said. “But I’ve spent my career protecting this town from things it couldn’t afford to know. People talk about cleanups, about exposure, about litigation. But if the truth had come out in 1984, Grainer Hollow would have died overnight. We would have lost everything. So we buried it. Literally. And we moved forward.”

“Into what?” Darla asked. “A town full of sick children and missing babies?”

“Into stability,” he said. “Into progress. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”

Darla stepped back.

“You’re a monster.”

“No,” Brohm said. “I’m a custodian.”

He turned back toward his desk and reached for his coat.

“If you go to the media with this, they’ll dismiss you. You don’t have names, you don’t have dates, and your only expert witness is dead. All you’ll do is frighten people.”

“I’m not here to frighten them,” Darla said. “I’m here to end it.”

That night, she returned to the marsh one final time.

The trail to the drainage tunnel was saturated from recent rain, and each step produced a sickening suction sound beneath her boots.

She wore a full-body coverall scavenged from the school’s science lab, sealed at the wrists and ankles with tape. A mask covered her mouth, and a headlamp strapped over her forehead illuminated the reeds before her.

She crossed the threshold of the collapsed fence and descended into the drainage corridor.

The air grew colder with each step. The tunnel’s walls glistened with condensation, and a steady trickle of fluid ran along the center channel. The scent was sharper now—less chemical, more organic. It reminded her of a maternity ward after delivery, when blood and antiseptic mixed in the air.

She followed the slope downward, past the place where the barrels had burst and the walls began to thrum beneath the film of organic growth. The deeper chamber lay just ahead, hidden by a formidable curtain of membrane now drawn across the passage like a biological veil.

She pressed through it.

The interior had changed. What had once been a hollowed-out pit lined with barrels had become something monstrous, its surfaces veined and pulsing. Dozens of sacs lined the walls, each containing a partially formed infant or something close to it. Some floated in fluid. Others twitched weakly as she passed.

The central floor had sunken, forming a shallow basin filled with viscous, dark fluid. In the center of it lay the creature.

The thing in the drain.

Its shape defied anatomy. Parts of it resembled a fetus—limbs curled, head oversized, spine still partially unfused. But its size exceeded that of any infant. Its skin stretched tight over muscles that throbbed independently. Umbilical cords tethered it to the rusted remains of the old barrels, still draining their contents into its body.

She stepped closer.

The Thing shifted. Its head tilted, though no eyes remained. Its mouth opened and closed slowly, expelling breath in long, wet exhalations.

From behind it, a smaller figure emerged.

This one was childlike in shape—more coherent, more defined than the other forms. Its limbs moved with control. Its face shimmered with familiarity.

Nora.

She stepped from the fluid and walked toward Darla with unnatural grace. Her feet left no prints in the membrane beneath her.

“You came,” Nora said.

Darla could not speak.

“I missed you,” Nora continued. “I waited so long. I learned how to speak. I learned how to shape things. I made myself from pieces.”

Darla raised the flashlight, but the beam flickered and died. The headlamp dimmed.

Nora’s eyes reflected nothing, her skin undulating rhythmically.

“I wanted to come home,” she said. “But they wouldn’t let me leave.”

Behind her, the larger creature began to rise. Its limbs uncurled, and the cords connecting it to the barrels tensed and drew fluid with a sucking sound.

Darla stepped back.

Nora extended her hand.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “You left me once, but you don’t have to leave again.”

“I didn’t leave,” Darla whispered. “You were taken from me.”

“I was given to something else,” Nora said. “It needed a blueprint. You gave it one.”

Behind them, the walls trembled. The sacs bulged, and several burst, releasing steam and fluid into the air. The thing in the drain groaned, a sound that reverberated through Darla’s chest.

Then another voice echoed through the chamber.

“I see it now,” Councilman Brohm said.

He stood at the edge of the passage, a gas can in one hand and a lit flare in the other.

“This is what we covered up. This is what we let grow.”

“Don’t,” Darla said. “You’ll kill everything. Including the children.”

“These aren’t children,” Brohm said. “They’re failures. Attempts. Mutations.”

“They’re not finished,” Darla said. “They’re still forming. They’re trying to become something.”

Brohm lit the flare.

“I can’t let this continue,” he said. “Even if I die here, it ends.”

He tossed the flare into the chamber.

Fire burst across the membrane and ignited the air. The sacs erupted in flame. The creature shrieked—not a sound made by lungs or throat, but by muscle tearing against itself.

Darla ran.

She leapt over the channel, scrambled up the corridor, and burst through the grate into the open marsh. The sky above had darkened, rife with smoke and steam.

Behind her, the earth convulsed.

The ground collapsed inward, dragging reeds, soil, and remnants of the structure down into a yawning sinkhole. The fire consumed the corridor as the creature thrashed one final time and vanished beneath the rising water.

Sirens approached in the distance.

Darla collapsed near the edge of the school’s rear parking lot, coughing against the smoke and staring at the widening hole where the drain had been.

By the time the first responders arrived, the marsh had swallowed the structure completely.

In the official report, the event was labeled a spontaneous ground collapse, accelerated by a methane buildup from decaying industrial waste. No survivors were listed. Brohm’s body was never recovered. No mention was made of fetuses, growth sacs, or biological structures.

Darla returned home under supervision. She was interviewed, evaluated, and cleared. The incident was deemed “psychologically destabilizing,” and she was granted indefinite leave.

Three weeks later, she uploaded every file she had collected to a public server and mailed anonymous copies to four investigative journalists.

She waited.

The stories were published, but quickly dismissed as hoaxes. Photos were flagged as altered. Sources discredited. The town moved on.

Grainer Hollow Elementary was permanently closed. The land was deemed geologically unstable and reclassified as protected wetlands. The school was torn down, the rubble used to reinforce the banks of the surrounding marsh.

Six months passed.

Then, one morning, a child was found wrapped in a blanket on the steps of a rural church two counties east. The note left with the infant read only:

“She belongs to the water, but not anymore.”

The nurse on duty swaddled the girl and smiled down at her.

She had perfect skin. Perfect hands. Perfect features.

But her eyelids shimmered faintly.

And beneath them, when they moved, the eyes had no whites.