The Thing in the Water

My wife and I were expecting to have a lovely dinner at a restaurant, for our anniversary. We ended up ordering takeout, munching on Chow Mein and orange chicken with chopsticks while we watched the news forecast. The storm was not going to let up.

We had luckily gotten takeout before the storm got worse, but it looked like the rainfall was already rising to a level we weren’t expecting. Several houses in the neighborhood were already close to getting water inside of their homes.

My wife, Patricia and I kept checking outside, dreading the water getting worse. It looked like we were not going to spared, so we decided to start saving as much of our stuff as we could once we were done with our dinner. I could see my wife’s fingers shaking as we started to go through the stuff that we needed to save.

“Babe, don’t worry. No matter what happens, we are going to be alright.”

“You don’t know that. What if we are stranded here for days without power? What if we need to be rescued? Any bad shit could happen during a storm!”

I resisted the urge to laugh. Patricia only cussed when she got angry. It was one of the few things that I loved about her.

“We have plenty of flashlights, babe. We’ll be okay.”

Patricia rolled her eyes. “You never take anything seriously, Mark.”

“Then why did you marry me?”

“Because you asked me to marry you. How could I say no?”

Patricia gave me the smile I remembered on our wedding day, and I felt the urge to spin her around the room. But there was no time for that now. We started in the kitchen, saving what we could, placing everything on the counters. Then we switched to the living room, and made our way slowly to the rest of the house.

While I was going through our bedroom searching for things that we couldn’t lose, I heard a voice outside of the window. It was pretty loud, and it sounded like a yell. I shut off the light to get a better look through the blinds.

An older man was standing outside, and he was pointing at the water. An older woman was standing near him, who I assumed to be his wife. We had barely moved into the neighborhood a couple of months ago, so I wasn’t exactly familiar with a lot of people here yet. I could see that the water was already at their door, but the man kept pointing at something in the water.

I tried to get a better look at what he was seeing, but at that moment, the power went out. I heard Patricia curse from across the hall. Then I heard something over the thunder that sent a chill down my spine.

A single scream. Coming from the man across my house.

I tried to get a good look, but it was too dark to see anything. Until a flash of lightning gave me a visual of what was happening. I couldn’t explain what I was seeing at first. For a split second, the man was now in the water, reaching out for his wife. She was holding onto his hand, trying to pull him to safety.

Something dark in the water was dragging him away.

I blinked several times, wondering if I was imagining things. And I heard the woman scream next.

They were cries of agony.

I ran out of the bedroom, and almost crashed into my wife down the hall. She was holding a flashlight, and she let out a mini scream when I almost bumped into her.

“Jesus, Mark! What are you — ’’

I brushed past her, heading toward the front door.

“Mark! Mark, what are you doing?!”

I ignored my wife’s cries, and I opened the front door. I could see that water was already about to arrive at our door through another flash of lightning. The water level was rising. And that same black thing I saw was now in front of our house.

Patricia continued to yell out for me, but I had to know what was out there. I took a couple of steps closer, my feet now touching the water. In another flash of lightning, I could finally make out its shape. It was a flat black thing, flowing directly toward me. Something shot out at me, and splattered onto my chest.

I touched my chest, my fingers coming away with a sort of sticky goo, along with something red. It took me a second to realize once the pain started to kick in, that it was my blood. Lightning flashed, and when I looked down at my body, my whole chest was littered in red.

I yelled when I saw my chest literally start to cave in. It was like watching ice cream melt. I turned around, and for a moment, I saw Patricia reaching out for me from the front door, her mouth wide open. I didn’t realize she was screaming my name until my heart gave out. I no longer felt pain once I hit the water.

The last thing I thought of was our wedding day, and how beautiful Patricia looked in her wedding gown, smiling up at me.

Once Mark was dead, Patricia was forced to watch, as the black thing stretched toward her dead husband, swallowing him whole. He was nothing but a skeleton once the thing took him. Patricia was frozen in shock as the thing flowed toward her next, shooting out black goo.

The black goo landed on her face, and Patricia did not scream once, not even when her whole face began to fall off, splashing into the dark depths.

This horror story was inspired by a family member, who asked me if I could write a story about a storm happening in the neighborhood, with a beast lurking in the flood. This story was inspired by the flood that happened in my neighborhood this weekend, and I also got a little inspiration from Stephen King’s The Raft.

Thank you for reading!

Emy Quinn