Alphabet Phobia

Chapter One

Ablutophobia – Fear of bathing, cleaning or washing

When I was 5 years old my mother put me in the bathtub. Nothing unusual about it, just a bath. I was playing outside in our sandbox and got dirty. Cassie was my mother's name, and she was a lovely mother. Every night, she rocked me to sleep, sang me lullabies, and fed me rich, nourishing meals. She had no idea that leaving the bathroom for less than a minute would leave me scarred for the rest of my life. I've been in and out of foster homes since then. It was straight to the nuthouse after I turned 18. When I was nine years old, my mother died by suicide. I'm guessing the custody battles and jail time were too much for her.

When you're five years old, you still believe in monsters under your bed and the boogeyman. When I first told my mother about what I had seen, she dismissed it as a figment of my imagination. "Woah that's one big imagination you have," with a big comforting smile on her face she said, and "what else did you see?" For her, it wasn't real, but for me, it was.

Let's go back in time 20 years.

The telephone rang. Cassie said, "Oh gosh, okay, I'll be right back." She stood up from sitting on the toilet lid. I was wearing a lovely one-piece blue swimsuit with light green flowers on the straps. She had previously bathed me, and all I was doing now was playing with bath toys in the tub. The air thickened as she left the room. The temperature of the water seemed to rise by ten degrees. I'd never taken a bath by myself. She was always there. I was too young to understand what should and should not happen in the bathtub, so as the water began to rise, I had no idea what to do.

Once the water got up to my chin I started feeling things touch my toes. I reached down and grabbed what was touching them. A rubber duck. After I grabbed the duck I still felt something touching my toes.

I lowered my gaze to the water. The water had been clear before, but now there was a gray fog whirling around it. I felt around the bathtub's bottom for whatever was touching me. I didn't feel anything. The water started rising so much to the point where I started to float. One by one weird things kept happening. The drain began to gurgle as if it were emptying, but the water level continued to rise. The shower head started dripping black water.

My mother was on the phone. The water was rising. Black liquid was dripping on me. That something was still touching my toes.

Now, before I tell you this part, you should realize that I had never watched any horror films or television series, so my "imagination" was limited. Basically, I'm trying to convey that there isn't a single film or television show I've ever watched that could have made up anything like this.

The gurgling came to a halt. The dark liquid kept dripping. The tub was on the verge of overflowing in two seconds. I reached down and felt something with my hand. Finally, I had discovered something other than my rubber duck, which had fallen out of the bathtub onto the floor. Unfortunately for me right when I had felt it, the water started to clear up.

Looking down into the bathtub water I saw hands. Covering the whole bottom of the bathtub. Hands. With fingers. Wiggling. All over my feet. I did the only thing anyone would do in that situation.

I screamed.

My mother ran into the bathroom and swooped me up. I still saw the hands and the dripping, but she didn't. I screamed and cried. My mother tried to comfort me and she held me until I stopped crying.

Ever since that day whenever she tried to put me in any body of water I would scream and thrash around. It got so bad to the point where the neighbor called the police. They came, they took me, my mom got so hysterical that they took me to the point where she went insane. She became wild and began threatening police officers, resulting in her incarceration. She committed suicide two months after being released from jail.

Now I am in an insane asylum where they have to drug me in order to bathe me. Even thinking about taking a bath will cause me to have multiple panic attacks. But anyways it was probably my imagination.

Right?