24 Jul The Siphon Beneath San Marcos

They sent us out just three days after the water started receding, while Aquarena Springs still smelled like algae and rot. You could see where the flood had chewed up the shoreline, deposits of tangled grass and fish bones clung to the fencing that marked the perimeter of the Spring Lake Wetlands Boardwalk. Every few minutes, a silt plume would rise from the lake bottom, clouding the shallows and making the water appear bruised. The tourists were gone, the glass-bottom boats dry-docked and caked with mud. In their place was the soft, constant murmur of pumps, boots, and radios.

Recovery mode.

I had a waterproof field notebook, three dye tracer packets, and a list of ten sites to sample from. The tracers were fluorescent, harmless to the environment, but easy to detect with the right sensors. The goal was to study how water was moving through the aquifer after the historic rainfall. That’s what I told myself. The goal was to measure, test, and map the area. But even then, I already knew something was wrong.

Tony Santos was ahead of me, hauling the sensor rig over the rocks near the old headwaters. He was an undergraduate in wildlife biology, barely twenty-one, but sharper than most grad students I’d worked with. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the surface of the river.

“You see that?” he asked.

“See what?”

“The color—it’s off. It’s too clear.”

I squinted downstream. He was right. The riverbed shimmered, almost as if someone had squeegeed it clean. There was no algae film or sediment. You could make out individual pebbles, and even the old bottle cap stuck between two stones. The water wasn’t just clean; it looked filtered.

We reached Site 3, a shallow depression where two flow channels converged. I crouched and broke the seal on a dye packet.

Tony watched. “Still think it’s limestone scouring from the runoff?”

“I think it’s too early to jump to conclusions.”

“You always say that.”

I shook the packet into the water and set the timer. In normal flow, we’d detect tracer remnants at the next downstream site in a few minutes—maybe longer, depending on how much sediment had been displaced. But twenty seconds passed, then thirty. Then one minute. Still, there was nothing.

The UV reader picked up zero parts per billion.

Tony walked twenty feet downstream and scanned the river again. He gave me a look of curiosity, and perhaps mild concern.

“Try another one?” he called out.

I opened a second tracer, double-checked the seal, and dropped it in. This time, I watched carefully.

The green plume unfurled, rippling with the current. Then something happened. It didn’t travel downstream; it curled inward, funneled into a shallow divot in the bedrock, and then vanished.

I stood up. “There’s a hole,” I muttered.

Tony was already sloshing back through the water, peering into the depression.

“It’s not even that deep,” he said. “But it swallowed the whole signal.”

I pulled out the probe and swept it across the surface. Still nothing. It was as if the tracer had never existed.

We both stared at the spot for a moment. Tony reached into the depression with a gloved hand and felt around. His expression shifted.

“It’s warm.”

“What?”

“Here,” he said, moving aside so I could feel it, too.

He was right. The bedrock surrounding the hole was cool, but the opening itself had a slight warmth, barely above ambient, yet noticeable, and it pulsed gently.

I withdrew my hand. “Could be geothermal,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. The Edwards Aquifer wasn’t known for heat vents, and this part of the channel had been mapped in full two years ago. There were no sinkholes or fractures there before.

Tony stood and wiped his hands on his waders. “Maybe it opened up during the flood?”

“Maybe.”

We logged the site and proceeded to the next one, but I kept looking back. The flow rates weren’t just higher than expected—they were being redirected, as if something underneath the aquifer had opened its mouth.

* * * * * *

Later that afternoon, I brought the sample data back to the field lab inside the Freeman Aquatic Building. The university’s power had only partially returned, so we were running on generator backup. The lights flickered as I processed the UV scans. We were still receiving zero readings downstream, and the tracer had disappeared completely, with no signs of dilution or decay, not even any residuals in the silt samples.

Dr. Vargas came by just before dusk. His lab coat was still damp from fieldwork, and his left knee clicked when he leaned against the counter.

He glanced at the printouts. “You test Spring Lake?”

“Headwaters. Site 3 specifically.”

He tapped the chart. “That anomaly. Could be a false read.”

“I ran it twice and got the same result.”

Vargas frowned. “Did you document flow rate?”

“It was too fast to measure accurately. It pulled the entire tracer volume into a point sink.”

He was quiet for a beat longer than I liked. “Maybe a new fracture in the karst. Floods can open them.”

“I know,” I replied, “but this one was warm.”

That got his attention. He looked up, something unreadable in his eyes. “Warm?” he repeated.

I nodded. “And the flow’s not dispersing. It’s channeling.”

Vargas didn’t respond. He just placed the data sheets on the counter and turned to leave. Before he walked out, he paused in the doorway.

“Stick to protocol, Cedric. And don’t go freelancing. No diving alone.”

It sounded like concern, but it felt like a warning. And it wasn’t the first time he’d said something like that.

Tony called me at 6:42 the next morning.

“I think you should come down here,” he said. “Spring Lake boardwalk. East side.”

I was already half-dressed when the call came in. I hadn’t slept well. I’d dreamed of dry limestone corridors with no walls, and of endless narrow passageways that bled light from somewhere above, like the sun was caught in a funnel.

I didn’t mention the dream, and told him I’d be there in twenty.

* * * * * *

The east end of the boardwalk was still roped off with caution tape from the flood. Tony stood just beyond it, perched awkwardly on a collapsed plank, waving me down to where the lake shallows met the tangled reeds.

I stepped over warped fencing and made my way toward him. “You didn’t touch anything, right?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but you need to see it.”

The water was knee-deep, opaque with silt, but even then I could already make out something white and coiled beneath the surface.

He reached in slowly and carefully lifted it. The thing that surfaced looked like a freshwater turtle, but its body was contorted unnaturally, its limbs pulled tight to its shell, its neck twisted back in a spiral—and its eyes were missing. There were three others nearby, similarly bent, their carapaces cracked or misshapen. A dead gar floated behind them, bent into a crescent with its spine kinked upward like a bowstring.

“They weren’t like this yesterday,” Tony said. “I walked this whole area. They weren’t here.”

“You sure they weren’t carried in with the current?”

Tony shook his head. “It’s too shallow. And they’re too intact.”

I pulled out my phone and started snapping photos. I tried not to gag. The bodies looked fresh, like they’d been frozen fresh and thawed just recently. The asbence of decay was unsettling.

Tony crouched again, lifting the edge of a reed cluster, and pointed toward a dark patch beneath. “There’s an opening,” he said. “You can see it better from below.”

I followed his line of sight to where a shadowed divot in the lakebed formed a perfect oval about the size of a manhole cover. It was darker than the surrounding silt, and it didn’t seem to reflect light the same way. I watched curiously as a current funneled leaves into it. They vanished without resistance, without swirling or buildup.

“I think it’s connected to the siphon we found upstream,” Tony said, “or it’s another one.”

I didn’t answer. I was already cataloging possibilities: erosion-induced conduits, fault activation, or flood-caused sediment scouring. None of them explained the bodies or why the water temperature had been warmer at the point of disappearance.

“I want to get a sonar read,” I said. “We’ll try from the surface first.”

The side-scan sonar unit was something the university had retired three years ago, but it still worked fine when coaxed. I calibrated it onshore, then waded out into the reeds with Tony guiding the array over the sinkhole while I manned the receiver.

At first, the signal bounced normally, picking up the usual pebbles, tree roots, and small fish. Then the reading blanked.

The center of the screen dimmed to pure black—a drop zone. The unit had scanned an area with no reflective surfaces. There was no rock face or floor that I could see.

Tony adjusted the position, and still, there was nothing. I tweaked the frequency. At first, there was indistinct noise, but then, to my surprise, something deeper rose up, a rhythmic pulse. It was faint and slow, far too uniform to be current interference, and too organic to have emanated from equipment.

Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.

I adjusted the gain and played it back. The pulse remained. It had no reverb or secondary echo. It was as if something was absorbing the sound.

Tony stood frozen beside me. “That’s… not normal,” he said.

“No.”

I pulled the array back to shore. My hands were shaking, though I didn’t notice until I tried to disconnect the cables.

“We should report it,” Tony said.

“To who?”

He shrugged. “To Dr. Vargas, or to Parks and Wildlife. Someone.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Not until we confirm.”

“Cedric, those turtles didn’t twist themselves like that.”

“I know.”

We packed the gear in silence.

Later that night, I cleaned up the audio and ran it through analysis software on my laptop. I cross-referenced it against known biological signatures, including heartbeat frequencies, whale calls, and seismic events. The closest match wasn’t even aquatic. The cloest match was with that of slow, shallow human respiration. And whatever made it would have needed to be massive. Not to mention, there were no peaks and no variance, just the inhale-exhale rhythm of something enormous sleeping.

I saved the file and shut the laptop.

Outside, the wind had picked up again. Rain was coming. It wasn’t quite a storm yet, but something bigger was shifting. You could feel it in the ground if you sat still long enough.

* * * * * *

I got the first call just after 8 a.m.

A homeowner near Sessom Creek reported that their backyard koi pond had vanished completely, along with the water, fish, and pond liner. Even the decorative stones around the edge had collapsed inward, like a slow sinkhole had opened beneath it.

By 10 a.m., there were seven more reports.

By noon, I was standing ankle-deep on what should have been a full-flowing stretch of the San Marcos River.

The water was gone.

It hadn’t receded gradually. It wasn’t pooling in an overflow channel or spreading out into the wetlands. Whole segments of the riverbed looked as if someone had pulled a plug in the earth’s surface.

I’d seen dry beds before. This was different. It wasn’t just dry. It was clean—too clean. The rocks at my feet were bare and polished smooth, stripped of moss and silt. A glimmering film clung to the low spots where puddles remained, but even those were draining into tiny sinkholes that pulsed when watched too long.

Tony jogged over from the opposite bank, eyes wide. “There’s another one,” he said breathlessly, “by the footbridge. Bigger than the others.”

“How big?”

“Car-sized. It wasn’t there yesterday.”

He caught his breath. “A deer fell in, slipped while drinking. It was gone before it hit the bottom.”

I drove out to the site with my field kit and a GPS drone. The hole Tony had found opened beneath the edge of a pedestrian path leading toward the wetlands trail. It was steep-sided, maybe nine feet across, and perfectly round. The grass around the rim hadn’t even browned yet. It looked like the ground had opened in an instant.

The drone dipped low and hovered. Depth: indeterminate.

I lowered the temperature probe. Ambient surface temperature: 71 degrees Fahrenheit.

Inside the hole, it was 82 degrees and rising, the warmth seemingly coming from nowhere. And beneath the drone’s static was the breath-like sound again, muffled and fainter, but still very much active.

Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.

* * * * * *

Officer Elaine Dorsey met us at the site around 3:30. She was dressed in plain clothes but wore her badge on her belt. She’d heard about the deer and the other reports as well.

“Water table’s dropping faster than the city can measure,” she said. “Residential wells in the hills are already dry. It should’ve taken weeks for it to drop this much.”

“It’s not natural drainage,” I told her.

She gave me a look. “I figured.”

I showed her the drone footage, the sonar readouts, and the blank heat differential charts. She didn’t flinch.

“I know that area,” she said, nodding toward the trail. “It used to be part of the old floodplain…. but that hole’s new.”

Tony crouched beside the rim, frowning. “The deer that fell in didn’t make a sound.”

Officer Dorsey looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I was maybe twenty feet away,” he said. “It slipped. I saw it fall. There should’ve been a splash or something, right? Or a thud. But there wasn’t anything. Just… nothing.”

She studied him for a moment, then turned back toward the sinkhole.

“I’m going down,” she said.

I hesitated. “I wouldn’t recommend—”

“I’ve done cave rescues before. I’ll lower myself a few feet and shine a light. If I don’t see a bottom, I’ll come right back up.”

She moved fast, too quickly for me to stop her.

Tony and I helped anchor a rope to a live oak near the path while she strapped into her harness. The whole time, she was calm and methodical, almost eager.

She dropped in slowly, boots scraping the sides of the shaft. Ten feet. Fifteen.

“Anything?” I called.

I got no response.

She adjusted her headlamp and looked downward.

That’s when it happened. There was a shift, like pressure pulling inward, but unlike any tremor or quake I’ve ever experienced.

The rope went slack.

“Dorsey?” I shouted.

Tony leaned over the edge and froze. “She’s gone.”

“What do you mean she’s gone?” I cried.

He just pointed. The rope had been sliced clean through.

I dropped to my knees and stared into the dark. There was no sign of her, and no echo when I called. In the depths, all I could discern was that same slow, endless breathing.

* * * * * *

Back at the field station, Dr. Vargas pretended not to be surprised when I told him.

He rubbed his temple with two fingers and asked for my notes. “Dorsey was off-duty,” he said. “There’s no official record of her being there, is there?”

“She was wearing her badge!” I snapped.

“That’s not what I asked.”

I slammed the folder on his desk. “How long have you known something was down there?”

He stared at me for a long time.

“I’ve seen flow anomalies before,” he said at last. “The spring does strange things after big storms. You get inversion layers, subterranean backflows, localized upwellings…”

“This isn’t flow. It’s consumption.”

He nodded subtly. “I think it started in 1972,” he said. “The flood that year was worse than this one, in terms of damage. A few students disappeared. One of our first cave divers, too. And someone filed a report with a phrase I never forgot.”

He opened a drawer and pulled out a yellowed folder. Scrawled in shaky pencil across the top page were six words: “The siphon calls during the third.”

* * * * * *

I didn’t tell Tony I was staying overnight.

He’d already started quietly pulling back from the project. I could see it in the way he flinched when I brought up the site. We both knew Officer Dorsey hadn’t simply fallen into a void. She’d been taken. But where I leaned in, Tony retreated. The difference between us couldn’t have been more stark.

I told him I needed to process samples late, that I’d crash at the lab and regroup in the morning. He offered to stay, but I turned him down. It wasn’t just curiosity anymore, but fixation, like a sliver of something had broken off inside me, lodged under the skin behind my thoughts. I couldn’t stop thinking about the pulse, the heat, and the way the earth exhaled.

“The siphon,” Vargas had called it. Or maybe not him, but someone. Someone from that 1972 report. “The siphon calls during the third.”

Third what? Third flood? Third witness? Third offering?

I couldn’t sleep, not even at my desk with the door locked and the lights off. So just after 2 a.m., I packed up the portable audio sensors and returned to the lake.

When I arrived, the wetlands were silent, except for a few frogs trilling in the distance. The mist clung low to the boardwalk, creeping between the pilings. Everything was still.

I reached the spot near the sinkhole and set the first sensor, followed by another, deeper, by the edge of the boardwalk. The last one I secured just above the exposed cave mouth Tony had found earlier that week. Then I sat with my back against a cypress root and watched the red LEDs blink to life.

For the first hour, nothing happened, and I drifted, not quite into sleep, but something more akin to falling sideways into someone else’s memories.

In my vision, I stood barefoot on a limestone shelf at the bottom of a massive, darkened cavern. There was no water or silt, just bone-dry stone etched with grooves, some natural and some not. Above me, a black circle pulsed in the ceiling. There was no wind, and yet I felt as if I was being pulled upward.

A sound echoed, low and droning, like something vast was breathing through a tunnel.

I raised my hand, and something unseen touched me back, instantly filling my head with an inexplicable pressure.

Then, everything went still.

* * * * * *

I woke to the clatter of something metal dragging across the dock behind me.

I sat up fast, disoriented, to find my gear bag missing. I scrambled toward the edge of the boardwalk. One of the sensors, the largest unit, was missing from its tripod. The marks were clear. Something had pulled it straight across the mud and into the water. There were no tracks, clawprints, or tire marks, just a furrow in the earth, as if gravity itself had sloped inward in a single direction.

The tripod lay on its side, one leg bent at an unnatural angle. The unit it had carried, an ultrasonic hydrophone, had vanished without a trace.

I should have left right then, but I didn’t. Instead, against my better judgment, I walked to the edge of the exposed cave, now wider than before. The water surrounding it had receded another inch. The edges looked chewed, as if by repetitive motions.

The sensors still recording emitted the same steady sound, repeating at thirty-two-second intervals: A low, guttural inhale, followed by a brief hold, then an exhalation, and finally, silence. It was the same pattern I’d heard from the sinkholes, the same rhythm I’d envisioned.

I shut off the recorder and sat there, staring into the dark, shallow mouth in the riverbed. I didn’t want to look away.

I don’t remember how long I sat there, losing all track of time. Eventually, the sunrise chased the mist back into the trees, bringing me back to my senses.  I gathered what gear remained and walked back up the trail alone.

I didn’t speak to anyone that day, not to Tony, nor to Vargas. But when I looked in the mirror that night, there was something off about my eyes. It was then that I realized I could no longer remember what color they were supposed to be.

* * * * * *

It wasn’t hard to break into Vargas’s office.

I already had a key. A leftover from an old TA position I’d held the semester before, never returned, never questioned. The lock hadn’t changed, and neither had the furniture. I spotted the same framed bathymetric maps, and the same worn copy of Groundwater Dynamics in Karst Terrains, open on the desk, its spine cracked down the middle, as if it had been read to death and then ignored.

But the files I needed weren’t on the shelves. They were in the locked cabinet behind his desk, the one with the flimsy hasp and three-ring binder stickers peeling from the drawers. It took five minutes, a bent coat hanger, and more nerve than I expected to work it open.

Inside were the kinds of documents you weren’t supposed to keep in a university building. Field logs that had never been digitized. Microfiche packets. Polaroids of terrain that no longer matched any known maps. A handful of typewritten reports on fading letterhead from the Texas Water Development Board, some dated back to the ‘60s.

I dug until I found a folder labeled ”Spring Anomaly / ‘72 Event.” It had been folded over twice and re-stapled in a way that made it clear it hadn’t been opened in years. But the first thing I saw when I lifted the flap was a page I recognized from the copy Vargas had shown me earlier: ”The siphon calls during the third.” Only this version had more.

The full sentence, handwritten in pencil along the margin of a water flow chart, read: “The siphon calls during the third flood. It opens when the land forgets itself.”

I read the line three times, feeling the strange phrasing settle into place like a sliver. |When the land forgets itself.” What the hell did that mean?

Below it, someone had added: “The new hole is not karst. It moves.”

The rest of the file painted a picture I didn’t want to believe.

Field notes from 1972 described the same features we’d found last week—flow anomalies, sudden sinkholes, wildlife spiral deaths, even the abrupt disappearance of a biology student named Calvin Marsh. One report detailed how divers attempted to explore the newly opened void beneath the river, only to find their lines severed less than thirty meters in. A diagram was scrawled beside that entry—just a circle. There were no notes or arrows, and no cross-section, just a black disk.

Another entry referenced “discontinuous timekeeping,” noting that two field workers had returned from separate zones with chronometers that differed by twenty minutes despite synchronized departure.

At the bottom of the packet was a short, handwritten letter addressed to Dr. Gerald Vargas, Hal’s father, dated 1998:

Gerald,

I don’t know what we activated this time. The markers are the same, but the rate of loss is worse. That hole east of the university field station took a horse trailer last week. It left no sound.

If the siphon is like a lung, then maybe we’re inside it. Maybe the floods are just its breath.

This is the second one. You know what that means.

—B.

I flipped the page. On the back was a penciled list:

1. 1972
2. 1998

I didn’t need to do the math. The third flood was upon us.

I made copies of the most critical pages and left the originals. I didn’t trust myself not to lose them. The copier buzzed in the back corner of the lab at 2:37 a.m., spitting out paper in dim blue flashes while the overhead fan clicked above me like a slowing metronome.

When I left Vargas’s office, I paused in the hall. His overhead light was on—and I hadn’t turned it on.

I stood still, listening. Around me, everything was silent.

I stepped back in, just enough to glance around the desk. Nothing had moved, and there were no signs of entry, but the air smelled strange, faintly of copper and wet stone. And beneath that, I detected a hint of something else—the scent of wet roots, freshly broken—bringing to mind a memory I couldn’t quite place, struggling to surface in my mind

Back at the apartment, I spread the papers on the floor. Assembled, they didn’t offer an answer so much as a sequence. The pattern repeated every twenty-six years. 1972. 1998. And, of course, now. And each event escalated—more flow loss, more wildlife death, more disappearances.

But why? Why three? Why wait?

I stared at the note again: It opens when the land forgets itself. A poetic phrase, but I was a scientist. I didn’t trust poetry.

Still… there were places where the earth held memory, such as strata, fossil imprints, and river channels, which told time through sediment. Maybe the phrase wasn’t figurative. Maybe forgetting meant disruption. Erosion. A break in the natural layers that usually remembered how to hold together.

And what came through that forgetting? Something older, ancient and long-forgotten, that had opened before, and was now opening again.

* * * * * *

It started raining again the next morning, heavy and relentless. The kind of rain that made you feel like the soil was rising to meet it. Storm drains were clogged within an hour. The university canceled classes by noon. By then, runoff was pouring back into the lowlands, and Spring Lake looked swollen again, its banks submerged beneath a torrent of churning gray.

I knew what this was. The third flood had come.

I called Tony.

“I’m going back down,” I said.

There was a long pause on the line.

“You shouldn’t.”

“There’s something active under the aquifer.”

“Cedric, this isn’t our job anymore. You saw what happened to Officer Dorsey. And if Vargas is covering this up—”

“I’m not asking permission.”

I gave him the coordinates and told him he didn’t have to come, and then hung up.

Ten minutes later, he messaged me: “I’ll meet you at the research tunnel. Bring spare batteries.”

* * * * * *

The old tunnel was tucked behind a gated utility outpost near the northeast edge of campus, mostly hidden by reeds and a rusted pump shed. It hadn’t been used since the early 2000s, having been sealed off after a minor collapse cut access to the lower aquifer labs. The university left the warning signs up, but forgot to remove the keypad panel.

The code hadn’t changed: 1-9-7-2.

Inside, the air was thick with mildew and faint traces of diesel. We descended three flights of stairs, passing rusted equipment and broken handrails. At the bottom, we reached a door labeled: EDWARDS AQUIFER MONITORING STATION – SECTOR B. I turned the handle, and the steel groaned before giving way.

The corridor beyond dipped downward at a shallow incline. Water trickled along a gutter trench in the floor, vanishing into a narrow grate that pulsed every few seconds. The walls were lined with old data cable conduits, most of them torn open or half-submerged in flood silt.

Tony followed closely behind, his headlamp sweeping across dark stains and calcified scum that lined the concrete. He didn’t speak, and neither did I.

I checked the pressure gauge clipped to my belt; atmospheric readings were shifting, dropping slightly with each hundred feet we walked, as if we were descending into a vacuum.

“How deep are we?” he asked.

“Forty meters. Maybe more.”

“There’s no way this tunnel should keep going.”

I didn’t answer because he was right. The tunnel should’ve bottomed out already. But instead, the slope steepened, and gravity began to change. It started with our footsteps, which became lighter, as if we were wading through lower gravity. It wasn’t zero or totally weightless; it was just muted. My boots no longer slapped the concrete. Instead, they kissed it. When I stopped moving, the silence pressed in like a blanket of insulation.

I tested a drop of water with my fingertip, and it curved upward as it fell. It wasn’t fast, but it was noticeable.

“Something’s wrong with the pressure,” I said.

Tony pointed at the ceiling. “Look.”

Above us, the concrete had changed. The lines appeared off-center and skewed. The support beams curved upward slightly, but they hadn’t been built that way, not originally. Clearly, they had shifted.

A moment later, the corridor opened into a natural cavern. We took another step each and, without warning, we found ourselves standing on raw limestone. The ground dipped forward and expanded into a massive cavity where water once flowed. Stalactites clung to the ceiling like ribs, and the walls were striated with root-like columns, which were neither plant matter nor anything organic. Instead, they were calcified, porous, and pale as bone.

I crouched down to touch one. It flexed under my hand.

Tony was shaking. “That’s… not limestone.”

“No.”

“It’s organic.”

“It was.”

He backed away. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“We’re already here,” I replied.

I pushed forward. The floor leveled out and widened into a channel that was empty now but shaped as if water had once rushed through it in vast sheets. On either side, the tunnel narrowed again, funneling into a mouth-like arch that led deeper into the rock.

It pulsed slightly, and with each cycle, the air grew warmer.

“I think we’re in the siphon,” I whispered.

Tony didn’t respond.

I turned to look at him, but he stood frozen at the edge of the arch with his face pale and his head tilted upward.

“Tony?”

He raised a shaking finger, and I followed his gaze.

High above us, nearly fifty feet up, the chamber ceiling split open into a perfect black circle. It didn’t reflect light, nor did it refract it. It simply consumed it, leaving behind a disc of absence. And from its center came the sound I had heard on the sonar recordings.

Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.

However, it wasn’t just sound. It was a memory. As I looked into the circle, something unfolded behind my eyes. Flashes appeared, of people I had never met and events I hadn’t lived. I saw a child on a metal playground during a lightning storm, a pair of hands reaching through floodwater for a dog’s collar, and the interior of a diving bell with water rising above the glass. None of the memories were mine. They belonged to the siphon.

I stepped backward, feeling the air grow heavier, and turned to tell Tony to run, but he was already walking forward. He did not appear panicked. To my surprise, he looked calm.

“Tony,” I called. “Don’t—”

He didn’t stop. He stepped into the arch and vanished, folded inward like human origami into a whirlpool drain. There was no scream or resistance; he was simply gone.

I ran forward and grabbed the sonar pack from my shoulder, wedging it into a narrow fissure in the wall, and flipped it to max output, feeling the pulse surge. A tremor rippled outward from the wall. Cracks formed as dust fell. Then something shrieked, like the thrum of an amplified tuning fork.

I turned and ran. The ground behind me quaked, and water exploded upward from the lower chamber as the collapse spread. Roots split, and the tunnel warped sideways. I scrambled up the incline, slipping and half-dragging myself through the concrete corridor as the pressure equalized in jolts behind me.

By the time I reached the access stairs, I was soaked and bleeding from the nose. I didn’t stop moving until I reached daylight.

By the time I reached the surface, the rain had stopped, the river had risen two inches, and Spring Lake shimmered again as if nothing had ever happened.

* * * * * *

The lake was quiet.

I watched it from the hill above the Freeman Aquatic Building, seated on a bench soaked with runoff and shaded by a cypress tree that had somehow survived all three floods. It was just past dawn, but already hot. The surface of the water steamed faintly in the low light. Below, the river flowed as if none of it had happened, but I had the scars to prove it had.

My arm was bandaged from elbow to wrist. I had a mild concussion and a cracked molar, and blood vessels in both eyes had ruptured from pressure stress. The hospital had kept me overnight and let me go with a bag of prescriptions and a note advising rest and “low-stimulation activity.” There was no mention of what I’d seen, nor any record of what lay beneath the aquifer.

They didn’t ask many questions. I told them I’d fallen into a cave. That I’d slipped. That Tony had gotten separated in the dark and hadn’t made it out. That much was true. The rest I left behind with the tunnel.

Dr. Vargas was already waiting for me when I got back to the lab. He didn’t look surprised to see me alive.

“You went down,” he said.

“You knew I would.”

He nodded, slowly. “And?”

“It’s not a cave. It’s not a void. It’s not even a place.”

He sat in silence while I unrolled the sensor data, including the sonar pulse logs and the residual hydrophone feed, which I’d managed to salvage from the main unit. It was now warped and partially overwritten by static, but still bore the signature sound—thoom, thoom, thoom—like a tide with lungs.

I showed him the photographs of wall structures shaped like ribs, and of bone-pale roots, fibrous and branching in fractal patterns that repeated too perfectly to be organic. The final image from the drone, taken just before I’d triggered the collapse, showed Tony’s back—arms slightly raised, like he was in prayer—and the black circle overhead, wide open, smooth as obsidian and infinite in depth.

“I think it sees us,” I said.

Vargas said nothing for a long time. Then he opened the bottom drawer of his desk, slid out a bottle of water, and held it up to the light.

“It drank the floods,” he said. “All three. And it left no trace. No turbidity spikes. No sediment plume.”

“You knew it was down there?”

“I suspected.”

“You let people die, Vargas.”

He looked at me, and for once, the polished calm in his face cracked. “I filed a report in 1998, after the second event. I tried to escalate it, but no one would classify a karst anomaly as a public threat. You can’t warn people about a hole that isn’t real yet. It moves and shifts, and when the flood comes, it calls.”

“Calls what?”

“Histories,” he said.

* * * * * *

That night, I listened to the hydrophone feed again. I isolated frequencies, filtered out the background static, and boosted the midrange. Underneath the low rhythm of breath, there were other sounds. They weren’t exactly voices—more like echoes of speech. Ghosts of language. Fragments that sounded like underwater recordings of public broadcasts. Emergency bulletins. Snatches of crying. Something that may have been a prayer.

And beneath that, there were layers older still. Stone grinding against stone. Thunder heard through miles of rock.

It wasn’t just feeding. It was keeping. Memories and moments, all devoured and stored in something that didn’t distinguish between time and matter. Something that remembered everything, but only in pieces.

I stared at the spectrogram until my eyes blurred, and then I saw it: the pattern. The pulses matched heart rhythms. That’s when it occurred to me that this was planetary in nature. The cycles were synced to the Earth’s tide, tilt, and moon. The siphon was part of a larger system, a valve of sorts. It wasn’t a predator, but a function. And when the floods came, when enough pressure built, it opened, in order to relieve or restore something. But what?

The next day, I returned to the site.

The research tunnel had collapsed completely. The outflow grates were sealed with concrete by emergency crews who hadn’t been informed of the reason. A new fence had been erected, hung with fresh danger signs, but the lake still shimmered like nothing had changed.

Near the boardwalk, I saw a group of volunteers rebuilding the trail that had been damaged by flooding. None of them knew what lay just beneath their boots.

One of them smiled at me. I didn’t smile back.

That night, I woke to static in my head—a burst of sound, faint and grainy, like a radio signal buried under miles of interference. I sat up and reached instinctively for my laptop, but the screen was blank. The sound wasn’t coming from the machine, but from inside me.

And in it, I heard Tony’s voice, just a fragment, one sentence: “It remembers you.”

Then there was silence.

* * * * * *

I don’t remember the exact moment I decided to go back. There was no eureka moment, last straw, or journal entry that triggered me to act, just a slow, accumulating pressure that continued to build until I felt I had no say in the matter.

The entrance to the research tunnel was sealed, but that didn’t matter.

The siphon was still open. Perhaps not in the same place, but somewhere. Because that’s what it did. It moved. And I could feel it moving now, like a weather system just below conscious thought. It seemed to have eyes under the rock, watching me think.

I returned to the eastern edge of the wetlands just after midnight. By then, the rain had stopped for good. The moon hovered low over the cypress canopy, and the river was glass again, still and bloated and waiting.

I didn’t bring sonar, sensors, or a safety rig, just a headlamp, gloves, and a crowbar.

The same section of the boardwalk where Officer Dorsey disappeared was partly submerged now. I stepped over the collapsed rail and followed the same path she had. At the trail’s end, the ground was unexpectedly soft. My boots sank a quarter-inch into silt where the trail used to be solid gravel. And in the center of that patch, beneath a dome of mist, a hole had opened.

This was different than before. It didn’t look natural. It looked prepared.

I crouched near the rim, where the edge shimmered with condensation. The air drifting from within was warm again, and strangely, it seemed fresh, as if it hadn’t existed until now.

I knelt—and something exhaled. Suddenly, I found myself overwhelmed with information. A flicker behind the eyes, the same as before—visions I couldn’t control. Tony’s face, lit by a headlamp. The twisted turtles, arranged like symbols. A girl I didn’t know, reaching for something underwater, then vanishing in a single frame of darkness.

Then I heard Tony’s voice, clear as day, calmly calling to me.

“Cedric.”

I leaned forward, and the surface tension of reality softened. And for a moment, I understood. It wasn’t a voice, not really. It wasn’t Tony in the way I’d known him, only his fragments of him, stored in the folds of a memory that didn’t belong to him anymore. He was part of it now—and it wanted me, too.

I stood up and took a step back, but I couldn’t run, because that’s when I saw the gear. My old sonar pack. The one I’d jammed into the fissure to trigger the collapse. It lay at the edge of the hole, mud-covered and bent, but whole. It was as if it had been returned. A gift. A trade. A warning.

I stepped closer, the crowbar shaking in my hand, and something shifted beneath the surface. It felt, strangely, as if gravity was concentrating in one direction, like the presence behind the void had adjusted its attention and was now preparing to receive me.

I didn’t realize I was crying until the tears came to rest on my lips.

I whispered, “Tony…”

And something answered.

That’s when I understood: Tony hadn’t been taken. He hadn’t screamed because there was nothing to fear once you gave in.

The siphon had called, and he’d answered.

I dropped to my knees, with my hands on the sonar unit. It was warm, as if it had been held.

I gripped the crowbar and stood again, muscles trembling. Some part of me—maybe the last rational one—knew what I had to do. If this thing moved, if it changed locations and opened in pulses, then it could be forced shut, at least temporarily. But I had no explosives or excavation gear. What I did have, however, was the sonar, and leverage.

I wedged the crowbar into the muddy lip where the hole opened widest and drove it deep, until it hit something firmer. Then I jammed the sonar pack against it and flicked the power switch.

The signal burst to life. The low-frequency pulse built rapidly. A moment later, the ground trembled, and the warmth in the air reversed, cooling rapidly, as if something had recoiled.

A sharp crack echoed through the earth below me, the crowbar bent, and the sonar shrieked, like a spine had been fractured deep beneath the world. And as it did, something screamed with it, telepathically, writhing in unfathomable agony.

I turned and ran, again, for the last time.

By morning, the hole had collapsed, and the wetlands were flooded again. But at least the sinkhole was sealed.

There were no more animal deaths. No more drain points. The river returned to its natural course—slow, silty, and full. I told the game wardens that I’d found my old sonar unit during cleanup. That Tony had likely been lost to a collapse. That the data was corrupted. They didn’t press. There was no body, no evidence to contradict my claims.

No one wanted to explain the impossible.

Dr. Vargas handed in his retirement paperwork the same week. His office was boxed up in a day. He never said goodbye, but perhaps he didn’t need to. The siphon was closed, after all.  But then again, it wasn’t gone. Not forever.  And it never would be.  For the moment, it had simply stopped asking.

* * * * * *

Two days later, the news began referring to the incident as a “geological anomaly.” That was the official term used in a short, cautious report published on the university website and then regurgitated in slightly more colorful form by the local affiliate: “Localized karst instability causes temporary water displacement.”

There was no mention of the missing officer. No mention of Tony. No mention of me. They thanked Texas Parks and Wildlife for their swift response and reminded readers that the Edwards Aquifer is, as they put it, “an evolving underground network subject to natural fluctuations during extreme weather events.” The river, they assured us, had simply done what rivers sometimes do.

But I knew better, because rivers don’t breathe, and they don’t remember your name.

Classes resumed by the following Monday. Most students returned without noticing anything had changed. The water in Spring Lake shimmered just as brightly as it had before the first flood. The turtles floated in lazy circles beneath the surface. The glass-bottom boats drifted back into rotation with fresh coats of paint and cheerful grad students narrating ecological trivia through megaphones.

Every so often, I’d hear one mention how the lake was “one of the most consistent-temperature springs in the world,” holding steady around 72 degrees year-round.

I waited for someone to say it had risen recently. No one did.

I walked the boardwalk trail alone that week. The collapsed section had been replaced with new treated, pressure-washed planks. You could still see the faint line in the wood where the original boards ended, an almost imperceptible shift in grain and shade, like a scar under new skin.

There was no sign of the sinkhole. No warmer-than-average wind. No voice in the reeds. But I knew where it had been, and I knew it could return, not just here, but anywhere.

* * * * * *

The lab was quiet when I returned. Vargas’s office was empty—his nameplate removed, his books boxed and gone. A new assistant occupied the front desk. She smiled when she saw me and handed over a manila envelope without a word. It had no return address, just my name in black marker, and one stamped word: FOUND.

Inside was a reel of Super 8 film, and a note, unlined and typed on real carbon paper: “You’re not the first, but you may be the last. Watch this somewhere quiet.”

I borrowed the analog projector from the media center and threaded the reel in the basement lecture hall after hours. I shut the doors and killed the lights.

The film buzzed to life in jittery silence. Initially, it displayed what I expected: archival footage, from the early 1970s, of San Marcos during a previous flood. The streets looked familiar, but the cars and clothes dated it clearly: bell-bottoms, faded work trucks, and overgrown sideburns. Floodwater rushed down Sessom Drive, up over the sidewalks, swallowing tires.

Then the footage cut to Spring Lake. Onscreen, three men in university windbreakers carried diving gear along a trail I knew well. Two lowered a camera case onto a raft. The third stepped into view and looked directly at the lens.

And he was me.

Not someone who looked like me.

Me.

He had the same posture. An identical jawline. A matching scar above the brow.

He smiled—just slightly—and turned.

The reel flickered, cutting to a frame of him standing at the mouth of a cave. It wasn’t a karst opening. It wasn’t natural at all. It was a perfect circle, black, featureless, and familiar.

He stepped forward.

The frame burned out, and the reel spun down.

I sat in the dark, in silence, long after the machine stopped.

Eventually, I stood. I didn’t rewind it.

I left the envelope behind.

Whatever message the siphon was sending had already arrived.

* * * * * *

I didn’t sleep much after the reel.

I tried a few times, with the lights off and my phone face down, with white noise machines humming nearby. But it wasn’t the sound that got to me—it was the image. Me, in 1972, smiling, stepping toward the cave mouth like it wasn’t the end of something, but the start. Like I’d done it before and knew what I was doing.

I searched the university archives for records from that year. Enrollment lists, staff logs, even local phone books. I found nothing with my name, not once. There were no matches in faculty listings, and no facial recognition hits in the old yearbooks—but the footage was real. The lab confirmed the age of the film, the make of the reel, even the degradation pattern. It had been developed in the early seventies, they said, and there was zero evidence of tampering. One technician even called it “eerily pristine.”

The projector is now gone, checked out anonymously, and has yet to be returned. Meaning there’s one less machine capable of showing the past.

I told no one, not even Tony’s parents, Vargas, or the university. The official story was set in stone: it was an accidental collapse, caused by an isolated sinkhole, leading to structural fatigue. No one wanted to hear anything else, and the people who might have believed me had already gone quiet.

I thought about leaving town and moving north, back to Houston, and erasing myself, but something held me here. Maybe it was guilt, or perhaps it was the siphon itself, still watching, holding me against my will, subjecting me to its unseen influences. Maybe part of me needed to be near it, just in case it opened again—not because I had any hope of stopping it, but because someone had to remember.

That’s what it takes, I think. That’s what it wants. To be remembered. Because if the land forgets itself, it opens. And if we forget it, then it never closes.

I still walk the river sometimes, always alone. I follow the trails where the water once pulled itself inward, tracing the soft patterns left in the earth—spirals in the reeds, ridges in the stone. The scars haven’t healed completely. You can see them if you know where to look.

Last week, a new report came in from a volunteer downstream. She said the water near her station had grown warmer, by just a degree, or maybe less, and shrugged it off.

I didn’t, because I know how it starts. The siphon doesn’t sleep or die. It bides its time.

And when it calls again, I’ll be the first to hear it.

God forbid I already have.