The Thing Beneath The Shower - Short

[Rye]

Author's note: It's a Lovecraft-esque close-to-reality horror/fantasy letter to my bro, written in a stream of consciousness in response to an actual physical letter he wrote to me. I strongly suggest writing a physical short story to a sibling or friend you don't see often, it's pretty cool, and a meme worth spreading. Editing has been minimal to preserve the spirit of the letter, so excuse that.

The Thing Beneath the Shower
From the desk of Prof. Ryan Whittaker,

Dear Broseph,

I was intrigued by your letter and felt compelled to respond. I would like to know more about your investigations into the insalubrious duopoly and its sinister vessel. I urge caution, however, as such organisations tend to be ruthless and without conscience when it comes to their more vile secrets.

I have some ghastly and morbid facts to relay myself, unfortunately. Our parents are missing, presumed dead. I could not tell the police what happened, but I can tell you. You may not believe me, but at least my conscience can be eased in the meantime. This current misadventure starts from the most mundane of problems that must be a regular occurrence in many houses across this septic isle; the cowboy-built shower leaking.

While the parents had been away, deep in the mountains of Spain, excavating Moorish settlements or some such thing, I had noticed, upon exiting the shower, that the carpet was wet.

Initially, I thought nothing of it, assuming it was just water from my person, making the carpet wet. By the time the parents had returned, discolouration in the dining room’s ceiling had taken hold. A dark black water-stain lies there, like a disease on the plaster, threatening of worse damage beneath the epidermis.

I only realised the carpet remained wet for far longer than it ought to when the area was wet underfoot before I had showered myself. I peeled back the saturated carpet and underlay and noticed darkening of the floorboards beneath. Oh crap, I thought, and resolved to cease using that particular shower. Thankfully, the en suite shower in the parents’ room still worked, so I used that until their return.

Upon their return, I apprised our stepfather of the shower situation, and he seemed quite disgruntled at the news. He went to investigate and pried away the plastic casing around the bottom of the shower. A foul air exhaled from the gap and forced him to cover his face and exit the bathroom.

Once he had regained his breath he murmured, “Deep Joy,” in a sarcastic tone. I felt guilty about what had happened beneath the shower while I was meant to be looking after the house, so I hung around. The smell was dreadful and oddly familiar. In its own way, it was a smell I knew intimately but could not place, mixed with standing water, mildew, decay and must and those other smells that belong in the corrupted versions of Silent Hill bathrooms.

Our stepfather opened the window to let the terrible fumes out. The odd chaotic hues the air had taken on at its edges faded. We looked at each other in a moment of breathless, disgusted confusion, hands clasped to our noses and mouths like ninja-masks. Given his iron stomach as a doctor, he held his breath and started feeling around beneath the shower.

“It’s odd,” he said, “I can’t see anything in here. Hang on. Wait a minute. I think I’ve found the culprit.”

He grunted, clearly seizing on something out of view.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s-,” he started, but never finished. In a scene I find difficult to relay for emotional and physical reasons, he was dragged under the shower. You may be asking yourself how a man could fit beneath the shower. You would be right to. I still ask myself that and I find it difficult to answer though I saw it with my own eyes. He was garishly compressed, and I confess I just stood there, not sure what the Hell I should do. I resolved to grab his foot, trying as hard as I could to pull him out. With a terrifying “pop” noise, however, he merely vanished beneath the shower all together, like a shadow that’s had a torch shone over it. I dropped, prone, looking underneath the shower. I saw a rapidly shrinking form, black, like oil, with clumpy, hairy tentacles with no visible flesh, retracting into the leaky pipework around the drain mouth.

I recoiled from the thing, repulsed, and knocked my head on the bath’s glass curtain. My head swam, the sting of pain spreading in pulses of blood within my skull. I steeled myself and looked in the bottom of the shower, at the plug hole. I saw what looked like spider’s legs skittering out between the chromed, metal spokes. They were not spider legs, however; they were limbs, all right, but they were made from filthy, tangled, prehensile hair. They coiled and stretched angrily, then disappeared into the drain. I backed off, unsure of what to do next.

I tried to leave the house and make for my car, to drive to work or Chris’ house, or anywhere else. The front door was locked, and my key merely turned, trackless in the lock. The windows would not budge. The back door was jammed and locked in a similar fashion. I realised I could not find our mother in any of the rooms, or the dogs and cat. I came to the conclusion that they had come to a similar end to our stepfather: the thing beneath the shower had taken them.

I sat, a sense of futility overwhelming me. Was I trapped here? Had it somehow gained control of the house? It looked that way. Why hadn’t it taken me? I had no idea.

I contemplated my means of escape. Smash a window? They were double glazed, and resisted any force I could muster. Naturally, the phone and internet did not work. I contemplated self-destructive get out clauses, but found them too irrelevant; after all, I could always commit suicide after I’d tried everything else. No, I realised, the only solution was to know my enemy, confront it and defeat it.

I examined what I knew: it seemed to originate in the shower, it appeared to be hairy, implying life, it stank like living things. What do living things hate? Bleach. Fire. Things of that purgatory nature.

I searched beneath the downstairs sink for weapons of chemical warfare. I found a blue bottle of bleach, a can of Raid, matches, cleaning mousse and window cleaning fluid. I put them in a plastic bucket and returned to the shower.

I poured the bleach into the drain until it overflowed. It bubbled and gurgled and the bubbles were full of that chaotically hued gas. The whole shower groaned and swayed in its fixings, but it soon returned to normal. The drain drank the bleach. Had I won?

Of course not! Hair twisted in long strands from the plughole and reached out for me like a nest of snakes. I sprayed it ineffectively with Raid, when that failed, I struck the matches and turned the Raid into an improvised flamethrower. The hair refused to light, or even singe. I escaped the bathroom and withdrew to my room.

Something about it seemed strangely familiar, I thought, panting in fear, something about the hair colour. I heard it in the walls of my room, scratching in the cavities, pressing against the wallpaper. I feared for my life, odd, since I was considering suicide only moments earlier. The tendrils of the thing split out from the walls and slammed the door shut.

I waited for the final blow to strike, but it never came. The bristling, hostile monster couldn’t attack me. I noticed the thing’s colouring; brown and blond streaks, just like my hair. Just like.

And that’s when I knew. Where it was from. What it was. It was a part of me, and I think I know what part.

As you presumably recall, my beloved Jess split up with me before the parents came back. At first I was merely in shock, I felt little but dissatisfaction. The following day, however, my emotional state was a warzone. My psyche was ravaged within and without by total turmoil. I howled like a big, dumb wounded animal. I suffered by any reckoning.

I felt the need to purge myself of Jess and my worldly suffering in the purifying, clean heat of a shower. The heat scoured my skin, incredibly hot and powerful, even for the shower as it was.

I stayed there for God knows how long. My initial sadness flushed up through my aesophagus and pelted out into the shower and drained away. I envisaged the suffering and desire melting off my body with the water. I brushed my hair and the knotted, dead parts swam down the plughole.

My suffering has gained a physical form, beneath the shower. It has spread throughout the house and conspires to keep me here. It has produced strange, autonomous copies of the dogs and cat for me to feed and maintain, so long as I do not escape. The only way I think I could get this letter to you is to give it to the postman when the postbox becomes over-encumbered and he has to use the letterbox. I will attempt to pass him this letter before the creaky contraption devours my fingers.

I don’t know if this letter will get to you, but hope of detection and escape is all I have left. I am no longer sure if it was our parents that came back, or if it was just a cruel hallucination on behalf of the thing beneath the shower. Please, contact them, or send help to me. Until then, I will have to feed the dogs and cats and remain anchored to my own mental prison.

-Rye