06 May The Gutter Man

Part I

I know exactly how this is going to sound. But I’m not writing this to go viral, and I’m not looking for sympathy. At this point, I’ve stopped caring whether anyone believes me.

Something happened to me when I was a kid. And now, all these years later, it’s starting again. That’s the real reason I’m writing this. If this ends with me—if I disappear like the others—maybe someone else will know what to watch for.

It started during the summer I turned ten, in a town so ordinary you wouldn’t know it existed unless a factory shut down or a school bus tipped over. One of those Midwest places that barely registers on the map. The kind of town where nothing ever happens—until something does.

That was the year I met the Gutter Man.

* * * * * *

Our house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, next to a narrow strip of undeveloped woods that stretched behind a row of plain, two-story homes. In the middle of the street was a storm drain—just a wide, rust-colored grate pressed into the curb where the runoff flowed during heavy storms. The other neighborhood kids and I used to race sticks down the rivulets and watch to see whose would vanish into the drain first.

I remember the day it began. It had rained hard all morning—a thick, muggy downpour that soaked the grass and made the air feel slow and swollen. By late afternoon, the clouds had cracked open, and sunlight spilled through in golden slats. I was riding my bike up and down the street when it broke, the wheels hissing across wet pavement. The whole neighborhood smelled like warm tar and earthworms.

That’s when I saw it.

At first, I thought it was a dog or maybe a raccoon, clambering out from the storm drain. But the way it moved didn’t match anything I recognized. I squeezed the brakes hard, skidding sideways across the asphalt.

Something was pulling itself out from the shadows beneath the street. It resembled a person, but only in the vaguest way. Its limbs were elongated and too thin, with joints that bent in directions they shouldn’t. It reminded me of a puppet missing strings or of something with bones in all the wrong places—or maybe none at all.

What haunted me most, though—what I still see when I close my eyes—was its face.

It wore a mask. Not the kind tied on with string or made of rubber. This was something fused to its skin, white and smooth, almost porcelain. It had no features beyond a pair of black, gaping eyeholes and a narrow slit where the mouth should have been. It looked like it had been chiseled from a statue and buried, then pulled out and worn by something that didn’t understand what a face was supposed to be.

I froze on my bike, every part of me locked up.

The thing climbed out onto the curb. Its movements were stiff and disjointed, like a marionette being operated by someone who hadn’t figured out how to mimic a person. And then it did something that lodged itself permanently in my memory.

It bent over and lowered its face to the puddle that had formed near the drain—and it started to drink.

It didn’t lap at the water or dip a tongue in like a dog. It drank, fast and desperately, pressing its mask to the surface and pulling the water into itself with long, fluid gulps.

It made no sound—only the silent, frantic motion of a thing that hadn’t tasted water in a long time and didn’t intend to waste another second.

I didn’t run. I should have. Every part of my body was telling me to move, to get away, to scream. But I didn’t. Maybe I was too scared, or maybe I was just too curious. It hadn’t noticed me yet—or at least, I didn’t think it had. It stayed hunched over the puddle, drinking greedily, the ridges of its spine flexing with each swallow.

Then it stopped, and its head turned toward me. I don’t know how it saw me. Those eyeholes were empty. But I knew, in the deepest part of myself, that it had noticed me—that it was watching.

I felt something warm spread down my leg. I didn’t even realize what had happened until later.

I reached into the mesh side pocket of my bike and pulled out the half-empty bottle of Gatorade I’d been drinking. Lemon-Lime. It was warm from the sun and slick with condensation.

Without thinking, I leaned forward and rolled it across the road. The bottle bumped to a stop just in front of the thing’s hand—if you could call it that. Its fingers were too long and too many, and they bent at unnatural angles, wrapped in dark, leathery skin. It reached out and paused, as though considering.

Then, gently, it picked up the bottle. It drank with the same intensity it had shown at the puddle, gulping until the plastic crumpled in its grip. When it finished, it dropped the empty bottle and nudged it back toward me. And then it looked at me again. It didn’t say anything. It didn’t move toward me. It simply turned its body—bones compressing, joints folding inward—and crawled back into the drain. I heard the faint scrape of skin on concrete, the creak of something compacting itself into the cramped space. And then it was gone.

I stayed there on my bike for at least ten minutes, too stunned to move. My muscles ached with tension, and my skin prickled. I didn’t dare look down the drain.

Eventually, I turned around and coasted back to the house. I scraped my knee on the lip of the driveway, but I barely felt it.

* * * * * *

That night, I didn’t sleep. Every creak of the house made my heart stutter. Every drip from the bathroom faucet made me flinch. I lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, afraid to close my eyes in case I opened them to find that face staring back at me.

The next morning, I glanced out the front window. The empty Gatorade bottle was sitting next to the storm drain, right where I’d left it.

That was the beginning.

He never spoke, never made a sound. He never left footprints—and he never asked for more—but he was always thirsty.

I didn’t tell my parents or friends—I didn’t tell anyone. Who would have believed me? Still, I kept bringing him drinks. Water bottles. Juice boxes. One time, I offered him chocolate milk. He threw it back at me like it was something spoiled. But everything else, he took. And always, he drank.

He started appearing more often—not every day, but more than before. He always showed up alone, and always after a storm. I would be standing by the curb, and I’d see the pale arc of his mask rise slowly through the grate. He never climbed out completely. Sometimes I saw only his hands, or the edge of a shoulder, or the glint of a bone-white eyehole. And I would give him something to drink.

I started calling him the Gutter Man. It was the only name that felt right.

There were days when I’d spot him even when it hadn’t rained—folded up beneath porches, crouched beneath swing sets, hunched behind our garden hose reel like a shadow wearing skin. He didn’t always take the drinks I left. But he never hurt me. Not until the day I crashed my bike… and he smelled the blood.

Part II

As that summer deepened, I became used to seeing him. I realize how insane that sounds, even now, but it’s the truth. When you’re a child, your brain bends to accommodate what it can’t understand. You normalize the unthinkable. Especially when the thing haunting your neighborhood never actually hurts you—at least, not at first.

He became something I lived with, like a secret shadow tucked beneath the sidewalk. He was a ghost, a parasite, or maybe something else entirely, but he was mine.

Whenever it rained, I knew where to find him. I’d slip outside and crouch by the storm drain, waiting for that familiar shape to rise. He would unfold from the shadows below the curb, moving like he was learning to walk all over again. Every part of him was wrong, but he never lunged at me or tried to grab me. He only drank. When he finished, he slipped away again.

Sometimes days passed without a glimpse of him. I’d wonder if he had left for good. But each time the sky darkened and the water pooled, something always appeared beside the grate. A bottle cap. A crushed juice box. Once, a milk carton that had been twisted into the shape of a flower.

I never knew what those things meant. Maybe they were gifts, or warnings. Or maybe he was just learning to imitate. I wasn’t sure which possibility frightened me more.

My parents didn’t notice. If they did, they assumed I was going through a phase. I began hoarding drinks in my room, sneaking juice from the fridge at night. My mom started yelling when she realized I was carrying two thermoses on every bike ride. I told her it was just hot outside—that I needed to stay hydrated.

In retrospect, the irony is obvious. It wasn’t me who was thirsty.

* * * * * *

I remember the day it changed.

It was early July, just after another heavy rain. The streets were still wet, slick with leftover puddles and streaked with runoff. The sun had come back strong, turning the sidewalks into mirrors; the humidity was overwhelming. I was coming back from the corner store with a plastic bag swinging from one handlebar. Inside were two Sunny D bottles and a Gatorade. Lemon-Lime, of course. It was the ’90s, don’t judge me.

As I turned onto my block, my front tire clipped the edge of a pothole. The bike jerked sideways, and in the next instant, I was airborne.

I remember hitting the ground. I remember the sound of my skin sliding against the pavement. When I sat up, I saw blood, thick and red, pouring down my arm, tracking from my elbow to the base of my palm. And then I heard it—a rhythmic clicking noise—like wet joints cracking or claws skimming against concrete.

I looked up and immediately saw that he was already out of the drain.

The Gutter Man was crawling toward me, emerging from the opposite curb. I hadn’t seen him come up. One moment, the street had been empty. The next, he was there—fast and low to the ground, limbs folding and unfolding like ropes sliding across wet tile.

His face never turned away from mine. He didn’t speak or charge. He just crept forward, inch by inch, never breaking eye contact, and I was too stunned to move.

His hand reached me first, and I watched as he touched the gash on my arm. I flinched and hissed between my teeth. Not from pain—the wound already burned—but because his fingers were freezing. His touch felt like ice, like he’d just crawled out of a winter grave. As he hovered over the wound, the blood began to rise. It trembled, lifting from my skin in long, slow threads, as if it recognized him.

Then he drank, pressing the narrow-slit mouth of his mask against my arm, and drew the blood in.

I felt the pull, and it made my stomach churn. My vision blurred at the edges, and a pressure built in my chest like something was unraveling inside me. Still, he never lost control. He was careful—measured, even—as if he understood exactly how much to take.

After a few seconds, he pulled away. When he did, his mask was streaked red. I watched him swallow. Then, he leaned back and began to retreat. His limbs bent in slow, unnatural arcs as he reversed direction, sliding into the mouth of the drain.

I sat on the pavement, staring at the wet concrete and the trail of blood still dripping from my elbow.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and thought about the way he had moved, the way he had fed. He had tasted blood now—my blood. And for the first time, I understood something I hadn’t before. The water he always drank—what I’d assumed was all he wanted—had only been a substitute. It was never enough to satisfy him.

And now, he was done waiting.

The next morning, I wrapped my arm in gauze and told my mom I had fallen into a mailbox. She believed me.

But I didn’t believe myself anymore.

* * * * * *

I stopped going near the storm drain.

For two weeks, I stayed away. I crossed the street to avoid it. I pretended I didn’t know what waited there.

And then, the neighbor’s cat vanished.

Her name was Ribbons. She belonged to the Mendez family a few houses down. One morning, she simply didn’t come home. That evening, I saw something crouched beside their kiddie pool, its face lowered toward the water. It was dark, and I couldn’t see clearly, but whatever it was, it was drinking something that didn’t look like water.

I told myself it was a raccoon.

The next day, a dog went missing.

Scout. A dachshund from two blocks over. No one heard anything. One minute he was barking, and the next he was gone.

And then, a girl from the next neighborhood didn’t come home.

Her name was Ellie Whittaker.

The police found her backpack wedged inside a drainage culvert, but that was all.

No body. No tracks. No sound.

Just a bag and an open pipe.

I stayed awake for days after that.

I tried everything I could think of. I brought him apple juice. Bottled tea. Even chocolate milk again. He didn’t throw it back this time, but he didn’t take it either.

I left a six-pack of spring water by the curb as an offering.

The next morning, the bottles were gone.

But so was the squirrel that used to live in the maple tree outside my window.

I found it curled beneath the bushes—completely intact, but empty. Not torn apart. Not eaten. Just… drained. Like someone had sucked the insides out and left the skin behind.

A few days later, I found a raccoon. It was lying near the sidewalk, its eyes collapsed, the body caved in like a balloon after the air had been let out.

That’s when it hit me.

I couldn’t keep up.

He wasn’t waiting for me anymore.

And when I wasn’t there to bring him something to drink, he went out and found his own.

* * * * * *

In August, we left town for a family vacation. My dad had managed to get the week off, and we drove three hours north to a cabin by a lake. Supposedly peaceful. No TV. No cell service. Just firewood and water and the hum of insects in the trees.

I spent the entire week feeling sick.

As soon as we pulled back into our driveway, I dropped my bags and ran down the street.

The storm drain was waiting.

And next to it sat a single shoe.

It was small. Blue. Velcro strap.

Danny’s.

He was nine.

He had been my best friend.

And he never came home.

Part III

Danny’s mother came to our door the next morning, her eyes red and swollen.

She asked if I had seen him. She said he had ridden his bike to the park the afternoon before and never came home. She told my mother that the police were already looking for him. As the two of them spoke in the living room, I stood in the hallway, frozen, listening to her voice tremble and break.

I wanted to say something.

I should have said something.

But I stayed silent.

I was ten years old, and I believed—truly believed—that if I spoke, the Gutter Man would hear me.

And the next time he came crawling up from the drain, he wouldn’t be thirsty. He would be angry.

* * * * * *

They found Danny’s bike the following day. It was lying on its side near the retention pond by Pine Circle. The back wheel was still spinning slightly when they arrived. There were no tracks. No signs of a struggle. No torn clothing. No blood.

And no Danny.

Somehow, that made it worse—the absence. It felt like he had been lifted out of the world without warning, like someone had paused reality and erased him mid-frame.

That night, I cried in the shower. Not just because he was gone, but because I couldn’t shake the guilt that had anchored itself in my chest. It weighed on me, heavy and constant, whispering that I was the reason he disappeared.

I had fed the Gutter Man.

I had brought him water and juice and Gatorade.

I had trained him.

And now, someone else had paid the price.

The police returned to our street that week. They knocked on doors again, asking questions, showing Danny’s photo. They wanted to know if anyone had seen a strange man near the storm drains. Officers brought in dogs to search the culverts. They dragged the pond. But nothing turned up.

Not even a shoe.

For a while, the neighborhood went quiet.

But silence is never permanent.

* * * * * *

Over the next month, four more children vanished.

They were different ages. They came from different schools. They didn’t know each other.

But they all had one thing in common.

Each one had last been seen near a drainage area.

One girl disappeared while walking home during a light drizzle. Her umbrella was found the next morning, snapped in half and lying beside an open storm grate.

People didn’t talk about it openly, but fear was spreading. Children stopped playing outside when it rained. Schools saw attendance drop every time storms were in the forecast. Parents walked their kids to and from the bus stop, even if they had to take time off work to do it.

I kept wondering whether the Gutter Man remembered me. Whether he resented me for cutting him off. Maybe I had opened a door I couldn’t close. Maybe he didn’t need me anymore.

Maybe I had been his first taste, and now he had discovered something better.

I didn’t see him during that time. Not clearly. Not like before.

But I felt him.

Every time it rained, I watched from the window. Occasionally, I caught glimpses of something at the edge of my vision—an arm reaching from beneath a grate, a flash of white slipping down a storm tunnel. Once, I woke to find the glass fogged on the inside, as if something had pressed against the window while I slept. Another morning, I found a crushed juice box lying on my pillow. Its plastic had been gnawed at, and two faint red fingerprints stained the side.

That was his message.

He missed me.

He still wanted something from me.

And he was getting closer.

* * * * * *

By late September, the mayor declared a state of emergency. Trick-or-treating was canceled. After-school activities were suspended. The police increased their presence, patrolling neighborhoods at night. Volunteers organized search teams and combed through parks, sewers, and woods.

No one was arrested.

There were no suspects. No real leads.

Only stories and silence.

Then one night, a boy named Caleb—someone I vaguely knew from school—disappeared while walking home with his older brother. They were just a block from their house when the streetlights flickered out. His brother said it was only dark for a second, maybe two.

But when the lights came back on, Caleb was gone.

Later, his brother told the police he had seen something slithering toward the gutter. He described it as a figure made of wires and bones.

No one believed him.

But I did.

* * * * * *

That week, my parents sat me down at the kitchen table.

They didn’t sugarcoat it.

“We’re moving,” my father said. His voice didn’t waver.

I didn’t argue. I already knew why.

“It’s not safe here anymore,” my mother added. Her hand trembled slightly as she reached for mine. “We’re not going to wait until this thing finds its way to our front door.”

I nodded. I didn’t protest. A part of me had hoped that, if we left, the Gutter Man might forget me.

Maybe he was bound to that street. Maybe he belonged to those woods, those drains, those nights soaked in runoff and dread.

But I knew better.

Hope is not the same as safety.

Hope is just what we use to survive fear.

* * * * * *

The day before we moved, I went down to the storm drain for the last time. The sky hung heavy with gray clouds. The air smelled damp and metallic, like rain was waiting just out of reach.

I stood over the grate and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Something moved in the darkness below, and before my eyes, two pale hands slowly rose into view.

I turned and ran, and I didn’t look back.

Part IV

We moved two weeks later.

The new house sat on a quiet street in a different city, and for a while, I convinced myself it might be enough. The town was bigger. The roads were better maintained. The sidewalks were clean, and there were no woods looming behind the neighborhood. There wasn’t even a proper storm drain on our block—just gravel ditches and runoff trenches that stayed dry most of the year.

It felt safe.

Or, at least, safer than the place we left behind.

For nearly a year, I said nothing about what had happened. I never mentioned Danny or the others. I didn’t talk about the Gutter Man, or what I had seen that summer. I even started to believe I could forget.

But forgetting isn’t the same as escaping.

Some things don’t let go.

Some things wait.

* * * * * *

By the time I started high school, I had stopped checking the grates outside every building. I stopped listening for that wet clicking sound I used to hear in my dreams. Life moved forward. I grew taller, got a driver’s license, and joined the track team. I even started dating a girl named Jamie during sophomore year.

She had black hair, a crooked smile, and a laugh that could clear a room.

I fell for her the way only teenagers can—completely, irrationally, and without any plan for what came after.

I never told her about what happened before we moved. I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, or worse, broken in a way she couldn’t fix. I thought I had left it behind. I thought we were building something new.

But even new things cast old shadows.

She broke up with me two weeks before prom.

She said I had walls I wouldn’t let her through. She said it felt like I was always waiting for something—not something exciting or hopeful, but something dark. Something that lived just behind my eyes.

And she wasn’t wrong.

Because by then, I had already started seeing them again.

Not directly. Not like before.

It began with reflections that didn’t make sense. A glimpse of something pale and long-limbed in the surface of a puddle. A shape crouched behind a sewer access pipe. Once, I saw a figure clinging to the underside of a bridge during a thunderstorm, its mask tilted back as if it were drinking the rain.

They weren’t hiding anymore.

And I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

* * * * * *

The night everything changed again didn’t start with lightning or broken power lines. It began quietly—with a drizzle that painted the streets in a dull sheen and turned the curbs into rivulets.

I had just finished my shift at the pizza place and was driving home. The roads were almost empty, and the glow from the streetlights stretched across the pavement like reaching fingers.

That’s when I saw him.

He was standing in the middle of the intersection, still and silent, facing the car head-on. He hadn’t changed. Same pale mask. Same black eyeholes. Same motionless posture that made him look like a statue caught between gestures.

I hit the brakes, hard enough to make the tires screech.

But by the time the car stopped, he was gone.

There hadn’t been a splash. No movement. Nothing.

He had simply vanished.

* * * * * *

That night, I didn’t even try to sleep.

I sat by the window, watching the storm roll across the rooftops. Every time the rain hit the glass, I flinched. At 3:12 a.m., I heard a sound on the back porch—something light but deliberate.

I found a bottle sitting on the welcome mat.

It was a Gatorade.

Lemon-Lime.

Unopened.

My hands were shaking as I picked it up. There were prints on the plastic—long, oily smudges that dragged from the middle down toward the base.

I dropped it straight into the trash.

He had found me again.

Even after all that time.

Even after all that distance.

He hadn’t forgotten.

* * * * * *

Over the next few weeks, things escalated.

The sightings came more frequently.

Sometimes it was just one figure—watching from a ditch or rising from a grate. Other times, I saw two. Once, I spotted four of them standing waist-deep in a flooded retention basin near the high school, motionless and hunched like mourners at a graveside.

I began carrying bottled water in my backpack again.

I didn’t do it because I wanted to help them.

I did it because I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t.

One day, I left a bottle at the edge of the sewer behind the gym. The next morning, someone found a dead dog there—eyes missing, fur soaked, skin collapsed inward like the fluids had been drained from its body.

People started whispering.

They called them “the mask people.”

Teenagers dared each other to throw rocks into the culverts behind the strip mall. A teacher refused to use the staff bathroom after finding strange smears around the floor drain. No one made the connection.

But I did.

I had lived it before.

And I remembered the rules.

You either gave them what they needed, or they found it on their own.

* * * * * *

Jamie reached out to me again during that time.

We had started texting here and there, nothing serious. Then we met for coffee. Then again. The distance between us shrank. She hadn’t changed much, but her laugh was quieter now, and her smiles never lasted long.

One night, she told me about a dream she’d had.

She said she had woken up on the bathroom floor with her arms stained red. She couldn’t remember how she got there. She wasn’t hurt, and there was no blood in the room, but the bathtub drain had been clogged with something thick and dark.

She asked me what it meant.

I told her it was probably stress. Maybe she’d eaten something bad. I said it didn’t mean anything.

I lied.

Because the night before, I had the same dream.

Only in mine, it hadn’t ended when I woke up.

When I opened my eyes, I found a wet handprint above my bed.

Pressed flat against the ceiling.

And it was still dripping.

Part V

I didn’t tell Jamie the truth.

I wanted to. I rehearsed it more times than I can count. But how do you start that conversation?

Hey, remember that thing I never told you? Turns out I might’ve fed it once, and now it’s following me again. Also, there’s more than one now, and they live in storm drains. Want to go out sometime?

Instead, I kept it buried. I convinced myself that silence would keep her safe.

But lies don’t disappear. They linger. They ferment. And when you leave them in the dark long enough, they begin to rot.

* * * * * *

The signs came gradually at first.

Lights flickered for no reason. The water pressure would vanish, only to surge back violently a few seconds later. I started hearing strange gurgles from the sinks and bathtubs, even when the faucets weren’t on.

Then came the noises in the walls—moving from room to room, as if something were crawling through the pipes.

A girl at school screamed in the locker room after gym class. She claimed something reached out of the tile and grabbed her ankle while she was showering. She insisted it had fingers—long ones—and that they were cold. The teachers assumed she was having a panic attack. She dropped out the following week.

I stopped using the sink. I stopped taking baths if I was alone in the house. I shoved towels into every drain I could find and double-checked them each night.

Even with all that, I still heard the breathing, muffled and wet. Sometimes I heard knocks. Sometimes they came in threes. But no matter what, every time, they came from below.

* * * * * *

It all came to a head two days before graduation.

Rain had been falling for a week straight. The streets were beginning to flood, and the gutters overflowed. Classes were canceled, and people started cracking jokes about building arks. But I knew better. I recognized the pattern. They were getting thirsty again.

That night, Jamie called me.

Her voice trembled, almost drowned out by the static on the line. She said something was wrong with her house. Water had started seeping up through the basement floor. There was a smell—metallic and sharp. Something was moving in the crawl space. She was crying, and didn’t know what to do.

I told her I’d be there in ten minutes. She only lived four blocks away, but I made it in seven. I parked on the lawn because the driveway was underwater and sprinted through the storm. Rain pounded against my shoulders and blurred my vision. I could barely see the porch light through the downpour.

I banged on the door, but no one answered. I shouted her name, but still there was no reply. I did the only thing I could then: I kicked the door in—and immediately found myself standing in ankle-deep water. The air inside the house was damp and heavy. The smell hit me instantly—one of wet soil, mildew, and something else, something older.

I called out again and waded through the front hallway, the carpet squelching beneath my shoes, and found the basement door open.  Of course, it was open.

I descended one step at a time. My flashlight beam cut through the haze in the air, revealing a staircase slick with condensation. The sound of dripping echoed from somewhere below. The basement was flooded.

Jamie stood in the center of the room, water reaching her shins. Her eyes were wide and vacant, her arms hanging motionless at her sides. And she wasn’t alone.

Four of them stood around her, forming a loose circle. They no longer crawled, but stood fully upright now, though they had to stoop beneath the ceiling. Each of their heads was tilted toward Jamie’s, the pale masks fixed on her like worshipers gazing at a shrine.

I whispered her name, and slowly, she turned to face me—and she smiled. But it wasn’t in relief. It wasn’t happy or grateful. It was soft and reverent. It looked like submission.

Then I saw what she was holding. A bottle. The same brand I used to carry, in the same color, with the same shape. She offered it to the nearest figure. Without hesitation, he—or it—accepted the bottle and drank, greedily.

I stepped back, nearly slipping on the wet stairs.

Jamie spoke, but her voice no longer sounded like her own. It came hollow and low, as though filtered through water. “They don’t want to hurt us,” she said. “They just want to live.”

One of the others turned to look at me, then another. And then the rest.

The first stepped forward.

I didn’t wait to see what they would do. I bolted, slamming the basement door behind me and fleeing through the flooded kitchen, past the toppled lamp, and out into the storm. I didn’t stop running until I reached the car. Only then did I turn back.

They stood in the open doorway, clustered in a line. They didn’t pursue me, but I realized quickly that they didn’t have to. She was theirs now. And I knew—deep down—I wasn’t getting her back.

* * * * * *

I didn’t attend graduation or tell anyone I was leaving.

I packed a duffel bag with whatever would fit, emptied the cash from my nightstand drawer, and drove until I ran out of familiar highway exits.

Even now, I don’t stop moving for long.

Sometimes I see them in places I shouldn’t—in the gaps between tiles, behind the mouths of dumpsters, or reflected in puddles that haven’t been there a moment before. I stay away from cities with too much rain and never settle near drainage systems.

But they’re still spreading.

They’re no longer tied to one town or one neighborhood.

It only takes one bottle.

One person willing to share a drink.

And then they move in.

Quietly. Permanently.

They’re patient.

They’ll wait a year, or ten, or twenty.

But eventually, the water rises.

Eventually, someone gets curious.

And eventually—someone gets thirsty.

Epilogue

I’ve done everything I can to move on.

I changed my name. I relocated to a different state. I work odd hours, keep to myself, and avoid anything that resembles a routine. Patterns attract attention. Attention gets you noticed. And the last thing I want is for them to notice me again.

I never drink from the tap. I avoid showers if it’s rained in the last twenty-four hours. I keep a towel or drain stopper in every sink, every tub, every toilet. I travel light and stay nowhere for long.

But despite everything, it’s getting harder to stay ahead of them.

Last month, someone left a juice box on my doorstep. It was still cold, with condensation beading on the foil like it had just come from a cooler. I didn’t touch it.

And tonight, the rain has returned. It isn’t a thunderstorm. It’s not the kind of rain that causes flash floods or knocks down trees. It’s the soft, steady kind that settles into everything—gutters, grass, clothing, skin. It’s the kind of rain they like best.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep running.

Maybe I’ve already run too far in the wrong direction. Maybe this was never about distance. Maybe the moment I gave him that Gatorade, I let something in—and it’s never truly left.

They’re not confined to one town anymore.

I’ve seen signs in cities, in suburbs, in rural dead zones far from any sewer grid. A collapsed dog by a truck stop drain. A bottle left on the lip of a quarry pipe. A pale shape reflected in the black water of an irrigation canal.

They’re spreading.

And the worst part?

They don’t need much.

Just one moment of sympathy. One flicker of curiosity. One generous act.

One bottle.

That’s how it starts.

That’s how they grow.

So if you’re reading this—if you’ve found this written on the back of a napkin, scratched into the wall of a rest stop stall, or posted on some forgotten message board—then listen carefully.

The next time you see something crouched near a puddle on the side of the road, don’t stop.

Don’t stare.

And whatever you do, don’t offer it something to drink.

Because once you feed it, it remembers.

And it doesn’t stop.

Not ever.