by Strand, Jeff
He went downstairs and turned on the television, turning the volume way up so he could hear Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives over the shrieking and splashing and apocalyptic-sounding chaos upstairs. After about ten minutes, the noise stopped, replaced by footsteps thundering down a hallway and the loud squeak of Junior jumping on his bed.
Sasha came down the stairs, dripping wet. There were plenty of towels in the bathroom she could have used, so her dripping-wet status was clearly being used to make a point.
"Bath's done," she said.
"Thanks. He suddenly thinks he's going to go down the drain."
"I know."
"Does this mean our kid is dumb? I mean, kids do have some silly fears, but anybody could look at that drain and see that he's not going to fit."
"He's four."
"I know that. It's not like I expect him to understand how nuclear fission works. It just seems to me that if you look at that tiny little drain and think you're going to get sucked down there, then maybe you're kind of a simpleton."
"Chester!"
"What? Am I not right? You have to admit, that's a pretty unintelligent thing to believe, even for a four-year-old."
"When you were a kid, did you imagine that there was a monster in your closet?"
"Yes, but there actually could have been. I don't mean that there could have been a real monster, but if there was one, it could have fit inside my closet. The logistics work out. Even a monster under the bed makes sense; it would be a tight fit, but something could lie under there waiting to eat you. But this whole drain thing...you don't need MythBusters to do some elaborate experiment to disprove it. Chester Jr. may be a dullard."
"Are you just going to sit there insulting our son, or are you going to get me a towel?"
"I'll get you a towel."
* * *
Chester's next day at work was even longer, more tiring, and more stressful. He came home wanting nothing more than a cold beer and some television programming that he could understand without being fully conscious.
Unfortunately, as soon as he plopped down on the recliner he heard Sasha's car pull into the driveway, Junior in tow. Her job was closer to the day care, and so most days she brought him home.
When she led him through the front door, Chester saw that the four-year-old was covered with dirt, head to toe, as if he'd been mud wrestling. There was also a pink blob in his hair that looked like gum.
"What happened to him?" Chester asked.
"He dove into a pool of mud."
"Why didn't they clean him up?"
"It happened after I picked him up. I was talking to Helen and he went and did a belly flop."
"Did he get mud all over the car?"
"I made him sit on a blanket. Could you get him cleaned up while I start dinner?"
Chester took Junior upstairs, then turned on the faucet to start the bath water.
"No!" Junior said.
"You have to take a bath. Look how much dirt you've got on you. If you don't wash it off, little plants are going to sprout—" Chester stopped, realizing that he was trying to combat an irrational fear by instilling another irrational fear. "Dirty kids smell bad," he said. "Do you want to smell bad?"
"Yes."
"You can say that now, but the Stinky Kid is the most shameful spot on the social ladder." Chester stuck his index finger under the water, testing the temperature. "It'll be a fun bath. Millions of bubbles." He poured a generous amount of bubble bath into the water.
"I'll go down the drain!"
"Who told you that would happen?"
"Nobody."
"Did you see it on TV?"
"No."
"Have you ever watched somebody go down the drain with your own eyes?"
"No."
"That's because it doesn't happen. And I'll be here the whole time. I'll hold on to your wrist. You can't go down the drain if I'm holding on to your wrist, right?"
"The soap's all slippery."
Nice. The kid understood the science of soap upon one's ability to grasp things, but not the inability of a human child to fit down a drain.
Chester got Junior out of his dirty clothes, which was not a quick or silent process. He shut and locked the bathroom door to prevent escape, then hoisted the kid into the tub.
"No! No! No! No!" Junior screamed, as if he were being lowered into the soap bubble-covered pits of hell.
"It's either this or a garden hose!"
"Garden hose! Garden hose!"
The hose had been a bluff, although if Chester could be certain that no representatives of any of those child protection services were watching...
No. This kid needed to get over his fear of bathing. Chester lowered him into the tub, and Junior shrieked as if his flesh was sizzling underneath the water. Chester held him up for a second to make sure that his flesh really wasn't sizzling underneath the water. It wasn't, so he set him down in the tub. The child kicked and splashed water around as he had the night before, but Chester held him firm.
"Please, Daddy! Please!"
Chester dunked a washcloth in the water and started wiping dirt off Junior's wailing face. It would be awkward when the police showed up to interrogate them about what the neighbors probably thought was a baby-butchering operation, but he'd let Sasha deal with that.
"Quit splashing!" said Chester. Jeez, the kid had already emptied half of the tub, and the water level was draining fast.
Too fast.
Faster than if the drain plug had simply popped out.
As the sight of soapy water gave way to the sight of soapy porcelain, Chester gaped at the drain, which was now sufficiently large enough to accommodate a four-year-old boy.
There was also the new addition of sharp stainless steel teeth that outfitted the entire perimeter.
Junior's slippery arms slithered through Chester's grasp.
Chester lunged for his son, but Junior had already slid halfway down the drain. Chester grabbed a fistful of his hair and squeezed tight.
"Don't worry!" he shouted. "I won't let you—"
The drain chomped down, biting Junior in half.
The boy was suddenly much less noisy.
Okay, there was no worse horror and tragedy for a parent than the sight of their child being killed. That said, Chester had to compartmentalize these reactions, place them in a different part of his brain for the time being, and focus on the more important question: when Sasha walked into the bathroom, as she eventually would, would it be worse if Junior were completely gone, or if Chester were holding the top half of his corpse?
Junior didn't look good. As unsightly as Chester might have imagined a child bitten in half would look, this was worse. It was almost as if the drain's teeth had taken a cue from the garbage disposal blades and gotten some rotating action in there.
Sasha would be really, really distressed to see her son in such condition. It was best just to feed the rest of Junior to the drain and spare her that grisly sight. Also, Chester didn't know the depths of the drain's hunger; perhaps feeding it the second half of the boy would sate it and save other innocent lives. It would be almost heroic.
I can't do this, Chester thought, looking into his son's dead eyes.
Except, well, Junior clearly had seen the drain-mouth before, or he wouldn't have been scared. So why didn't he provide more useful feedback when questioned about his fear? The past minute or so would have been much more pleasant if he'd simply given more solid data.
Chester really couldn't let Sasha see Junior like this. Letting go of his child would be the hardest thing a father could do...but, technically, Chester wasn't a father any more.
Junior's body, which was now lubricated with more than just soap, suddenly slipped out of his hands and into the drain's gaping maw. Its mouth slammed shut.
Crap. Feeding the rest of him to the drain was what Chester was going to do anyway, but it irked him to have that decision taken away.
The drain shrunk back down to its original size, as if
it had never transformed into a steel-fanged mouth. In fact, the only evidence that Junior had even been in the tub was all of the blood, and a kidney.
This wasn't good. Chester had assumed that, when explaining the situation to his wife and the authorities, the mouth would still be there. He could just point at it and say, "Look! That's what ate my son!" Having it be a regular drain was going to make things more challenging.
There was a knock at the door.
There was a 99.9% chance that this was Sasha. It didn't matter who it was; their presence would be inconvenient.
"Is everything okay in there?" Sasha asked.
What to do? Downplay what had just happened, or share the unimaginable horror of the event? She'd probably be angrier if he didn't tell the truth right away, so he went with the "share the unimaginable horror of the event" option.
"Our son is dead!" he bellowed.
Sasha opened the door. She was mad, probably because she thought he was making a tasteless joke about the death of their son. But when she saw all of the blood, her reaction changed to something that was pretty much in line with what Chester would have expected.
After giving her a few minutes to calm down enough that her screams wouldn't drown out the sound of his explanation, Chester told her what had happened. The part where he accidentally dropped the second half of Junior into the mouth sounded worse in the telling, but by the time he said it out loud it was too late to pretend it hadn't happened.
"We have to save him!" said Sasha.
Chester frowned. He thought he'd made it clear that their son wasn't alive anymore.
Sasha climbed into the tub and peered down the drain. "Get an axe!"
"We don't own an axe."
"Yes, we do!"
"No, we don't."
"There's one in the garage."
"You mean the hatchet?"
"Yes!"
"Okay." Chester hurried out of the bathroom, but then, remembering recent history, hurried back in. "You probably shouldn't hang out in the bathtub, in case the mouth comes back."
"Just go!"
Chester ran downstairs, through the kitchen, and into the garage. He found the hatchet, which still had the price tag stuck on the handle, then rushed back to the bathroom. Sasha had not been eaten.
"Break it open!" Sasha said.
"You can't just chop a bathtub apart with a hatchet!"
"Do it, you idiot!"
"Don't get pissy with me. You're the one who let him jump in the mud."
Sasha leaned out of the tub and grabbed the hatchet out of his hand. She began to smack the blade against the bottom. The porcelain chipped more than Chester thought it would, but overall, the tub remained intact.
"Get me some bricks!" she said.
"We don't just keep bricks lying around! This isn't a construction zone!"
"Then get me something heavy! Anything!"
Chester hurried back downstairs, trying to think of a suitably heavy object they could use. Then he remembered that they did indeed have a few concrete bricks lying in the garage, leftovers from when they'd replaced the steps to the front porch, and went to get those.
When he came back in with an armload of bricks, Chester was surprised to see how much progress Sasha had made with the hatchet. Working together, with Chester bashing the bricks into the side, it wasn't long before they'd demolished a large portion of the tub. If there'd been any possibility of rescuing Junior, which there wasn't, they now had enough room to maneuver to do it.
"Where is he?" Sasha screamed. She looked half-crazed.
Chester patiently explained again what had happened.
"What did you do to our son?"
"I didn't do anything! The drain ate him!"
"There's no way he could fit down that pipe!"
Admittedly, the pipe was far too narrow to fit a child, even one who was small for his age. But obviously the world worked in ways that were significantly different than what Chester had previously understood to be the case.
"I'm sure the pipe expanded at the same time the drain became a giant mouth!"
"Bullshit! That's not possible!"
"Or maybe it secreted some kind of enzyme that quickly dissolved him! That makes sense, right? It could be like the way a fly eats things!"
"Tell me what you did to him!"
"I told you what happened! You saw me take him up here! What, do you think I've got some kind of secret passageway or something where I can hide him? Do you think that I'm so efficient at chopping up a body that I could get all those pieces down the drain that quickly? He was hollering less than a minute before you came up here, so unless I was able to slice his entire body into drain-sized pieces in less than sixty seconds, it happened the way I said!"
"Liar!"
"I'm not saying that my side of the story holds up to established scientific principles, but it doesn't make sense to have happened any other way! I certainly didn't play a recording of Junior screaming to throw you off the track and buy myself extra time!"
Instead of accusing Chester of anything else, Sasha closed her eyes and began to quietly sob. The enormity of Chester's loss hit him all at once, and he began to sob as well.
Then he stopped sobbing as he realized how badly they'd screwed up.
"We can't replicate this!" he said.
"What?"
"If we hadn't chopped up the bathtub, there was the chance that the drain-mouth would have shown up again! Yeah, it could have been like that Warner Bros. cartoon where that frog only sings when there are no witnesses, but still, it might have shown up when the police were there! We could have had the tub on twenty-four hour webcam until it did something. But now..." he gestured to the destruction, "what have we done? Oh, dear God, what have we...?"
Chester stopped talking, because now there was a hatchet blade in his chest. "You son of a bitch," she whispered.
After some brief gurgling, Chester toppled over onto what remained of the tub. He grabbed the exposed portion of the drainpipe and tried to pull himself away from his newly homicidal wife. It wasn't a very productive method of getting away from her, but the hatchet in his chest had compromised his ability to effectively make decisions regarding his escape method.
The enzymes secreted by the pipe quickly began to dissolve his hand. It hurt even more than getting whacked with the hatchet.
Chester screamed. Not because he had been stabbed in the chest with a hatchet, and not because the enzymes secreted by the pipe were dissolving his hand, but because the drain mouth was back.
It was now horribly misshapen and missing half of its teeth, and it chomped away at Chester like a dental patient trying to eat before the Novocain has worn off. He tried to roll out of its deformed jaws but succeeded only in pushing the hatchet further into his chest.
Sasha shrieked and grabbed the hand that Chester still had left, trying to pull him away from the tub.
Something large, soft, and wet slid across Chester's back. Its tongue?
The drain's teeth continued to chew on him, sinking in deep but lacking the strength to actually bite him in half. As Sasha pulled him away, they bit repeatedly on his torso, and then his legs, and then he was free.
"Give me the hatchet," said Sasha, gesturing to the weapon.
Chester did not have the strength to yank the hatchet out of his chest, or even explain this fact to his wife, so he settled for helplessly patting the handle. Sasha wrenched it out, which hurt worse than when it had gone in, howled with primal fury, and slammed the hatchet against the drain mouth, again and again.
I'm pretty sure I'm bleeding to death, Chester mouthed at her, but she was too preoccupied to pay attention.
Soon, the drain was...dead? Did that term apply to a porcelain-and-metal drain monster? If nothing else, its teeth had all been knocked out and it was no longer chewing. Sasha continued to bash away at it. She kept going even after the blade popped off of the hatchet and she was using only the wooden handle.
As Chester realized that
it was pretty much over for him, he felt a sense of peace. Yes, he was going to die, and yes, his son was dead, and yes, his wife was almost certainly insane now, but at least there was proof. Perhaps he hadn't died a hero, but at least people wouldn't think he was some sick psycho child killer.
Then the mouth changed back to an obliterated bathtub.
Fuck it, thought Chester, as he died.
ALIEN FACE
I fired four more shots into his chest, emptying my pistol. Matthew V. Cloak, the Lakeland Mangler, dropped his knife, looked at the growing bloodstains on his shirt as if confused by how they got there, and then fell to the ground.
I walked over and crouched down next to him. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and—dammit!—realized that I'd left the picture of my niece in my other jacket.
"That was for Abigail," I told him. Not as effective without the visual aid, but hopefully he'd figure out who I was talking about.
It didn't take long for Cloak to bleed out. After I was sure he was dead, I called it in.
We were deep in the thick woods. It would take at least an hour for backup to get here. I didn't think anybody was alive inside his cabin, but I had to go in and make sure. My experience as a cop leaned much more toward breaking up drunken fights in bars than taking down serial killers, so I was certain that this was going to be the most horrific thing I'd ever seen.
I opened the front door and stepped inside. The cabin had an odd smell but not the rotting smell I'd expected. The smell of preservatives, maybe?
The sight, however, was every bit as bad as I'd expected.
We'd believed that the Lakeland Mangler had killed seven people, but just a quick glance around his cabin proved that the number had been at least twice that. His souvenirs were proudly displayed. Hands. Feet. And faces. Lots of faces.
"Mangler" had never been an accurate description. Cloak, an ex-surgeon, did careful work. Many of the faces, all young women, on the mannequin heads were still recognizable, including Abigail's. When I saw her, I simultaneously wanted to fall to my knees and sob, and to go back outside and kick Cloak's corpse until there was nothing but red.
