The Summer Below

The summer was supposed to be perfect.

Jayla had made a list: get her lifeguard recertification, work mornings at the pool, spend nights at the lake with Theo, and maybe—finally—tell him she liked him as more than a friend. They’d joked about it during senior week. He’d touched her hand and hadn’t let go.

But on the last day of school, Theo told her he was leaving early.

“I got in,” he’d said, smiling but not really. “The marine biology internship. At Waymarc.”

She’d managed to smile back. Told him she was proud. Waved goodbye and locked herself in her room for hours.

He texted her once a week, sometimes less.

So instead of laughing on Theo’s boat or swimming under fireworks, Jayla sat on a cracked white chair, watching toddlers eat too much chlorine and scream. Lifeguarding in ninety-degree heat wasn’t as romantic without a best friend to make faces at across the water.

And then things started getting weird.

At first it was little stuff—easy to ignore. The pool lights glitched blue and purple like someone installed disco bulbs. The water level dropped overnight even when no one used it. She mentioned it to Mr. Cavallo, the facility manager, who just grunted and disappeared into the pump room for twenty minutes.

Then one morning, she arrived to find the lifeguard tower knocked over, and a line of wet footprints leading away from the pool—bare feet, long strides. They stopped at the fence and vanished.

When she checked the cameras? That night’s footage was just static from 2:41 to 3:07 a.m.

Jayla wasn’t sure what freaked her out more: the glitch, or the silence from the grown-ups.

Theo called the next evening.

“I can’t stay on long,” he whispered. “But... I found something. Out here. It’s not—what they said it would be. There’s a lab under the docks. They’re tagging things that shouldn’t exist.”

Jayla sat up straighter in her bed.

“What do you mean ‘shouldn’t exist’?”

Theo hesitated. “Something with gills. And... fingers.”

Static crackled through the speaker.

“Wait,” she said. “Theo, are you saying it’s—?”

The line went dead.

Jayla tried to brush it off. Maybe he was just trying to scare her. Maybe this was his version of flirting.

But then Carla, the other lifeguard, quit. No notice. Just left her uniform in a locker with a Post-it: “This place is off.”

Jayla started staying late. She claimed she was “extra cleaning” to make the time pass, but really, she was watching. And recording. She used her phone to take video every hour. At 2:48 a.m. on Tuesday night, she caught it:

The water rippled hard. Something large moved beneath the surface. A shadow—wide, low, almost like a manta ray, but faster. The pool lights flashed and then died.

And then, just for a second, something looked back up at her from the water.

She didn’t scream. She couldn’t.

The next day, Mr. Cavallo didn’t show up.

Theo came back two days later.

She didn’t expect it. One moment she was wiping down sunscreen-slick chairs. The next, he was standing in front of her, pale and sunburned, eyes bloodshot, hair longer than she remembered.

“I needed to see you,” he said.

She didn’t say anything. Just stepped forward and hugged him. He held on longer than usual.

They sat together on the lifeguard deck that evening, legs dangling. The pool below glowed faintly.

“I saw something in the water,” she said.

“I know,” he answered. “I saw it too.”

Theo told her what happened at Waymarc.

The internship wasn’t just fieldwork. There were levels below the lab—sublevels not on the map. The marine samples weren’t just animals. One specimen looked like a human fetus with scaled skin and gill slits. Another had webbed limbs and molted under UV light. Theo snuck photos.

“They called it an evolutionary regression study,” he said. “But some of the things... they looked recent. Not fossils. Alive.”

One night, he followed a staff member to the off-limits wing. Inside, tanks stretched wall-to-wall, full of green-blue water and shadows too large to be fish. He saw one pressed against the glass, humanoid in shape, but with thin skin, translucent organs, and no eyes. Just skin where eyes should be.

“It waved at me,” he said. “Like it knew I was there.”

Jayla went cold.

“They’re connected to the pool,” she whispered. “There’s something under it.”

Theo nodded. “I found a map. The town’s entire plumbing system connects to the old naval research base on the coast. It shut down twenty years ago... officially.”

“They’re using the water systems.”

“To travel. Or feed. Or hide. I don’t know.”

Jayla leaned back, staring at the stars.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

Theo looked haunted.

“I think it’s already too late.”

They returned to the pool at 3 a.m.

Jayla unlocked the gate with shaking hands. The night was silent—too silent. No crickets. No wind. Just water lapping gently against concrete.

They sat on the edge, feet hanging just above the surface.

“I kept thinking,” Theo said, “this summer would be our beginning.”

Jayla looked over at him.

“I thought so too.”

He reached for her hand. She let him take it.

Then something broke the surface.

It wasn’t loud. Just a gentle ripple and a faint hum, like metal vibrating underwater. The pool glowed blue for one second. Then dark.

Theo’s phone buzzed.

He checked it and went pale.

“What is it?”

He showed her the screen.

Unknown Number: YOU WERE WARNED.

Jayla’s phone buzzed too. Same message.

They scrambled back from the water’s edge.

Behind them, the old floodlights flickered on. But they weren’t yellow. They were blue.

Footsteps echoed near the gate. But no one was there.

The message on Theo’s phone changed.

DO NOT RETURN.

At dawn, they sat on the bleachers. The air smelled like chlorine and ash.

“I wish we never looked,” Jayla whispered.

Theo didn’t respond at first. Then, “I think we were meant to.”

“Why us?”

“Because we weren’t supposed to matter.”

Jayla stared down at the drained pool. The surface was calm. Empty.

But she didn’t believe it.

A low drone echoed in the sky.

A helicopter passed overhead, unmarked, silent.

Both their phones powered down at the same time.

Dead.

A light flickered beneath the pool.

Blue.

Then black.

This had officially become the WORST SUMMER EVER.