Rowan Marsh
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The weep’s stirring today. It’s been quiet in its pit for the last few days, gurgling over whatever Freckles throws into it. Like digesting, we think. It was a joke once, when the toilet first started weeping at its base, crying all the time, soaking beneath the tiles whenever we flushed. It made a sound—grrg, grrg, grrglub—then out came the water and everything else with it.
“Eat shit,” I’d say, ‘cause a broken toilet deserves as much. After a while it stopped being water, and this pale muck seeped through the pipes. The sewer air grew sour on the tongue, a stench so heavy it marinated the brain, made us smell copper and blood started drip, drip, dripping down our throats.
Now, hovering over the edge of the bathroom, just where the linoleum starts curling down into the undulating pit, the bleeding only comes and goes. Not nearly as bad once we started feeding it.
We want it to eat.
Don’t want it crying again.
Freckles says she threw in the car battery when I join her on the couch. Total band-aid. We’ve tried batteries before—lithium, AAA, the ones in the remote—and when it’s not a whole rotisserie or the frozen meat in the garage, it’s lightbulbs, books, furniture, gasoline, cans upon cans of beans and corn and soup we’d scrounged from the food drive. Whatever we can spare. Lilly was about the last good meal the weep had this week, and still that pit grew another foot across, crying all over the floor, melting linoleum into fondue.
The weep is picky now. It only ate shit ‘cause it had to eat shit. Then it tasted the pipes. Then the earth and the floor and the toilet got sucked down and disappeared deep into its fleshy mess. By then our bathroom had become a pit, its little cave.
We keep the door open now, too, knowing the noise it makes when we can’t see it. Like it misses us.
God, I really don’t want it crying again.
I toss Freckles some chips so she remembers to eat. I’m not sure she’s handling herself since the other day. All that clawing and yelling, begging me daddy don’t, don’t, not that, anything but—but the weep was crying, seeping out. I had to do something. I had to let it have Lilly.
Can’t blame the girl for missing her mom.
A grrglub shakes the floor. Digesting the rest of her, I think. From the couch I can see a slurry of flesh, still drifting apart after the weep bloated Lilly up, pushing through her like a hand through a cobweb until she was loose, sticky thread.
Wish it ate faster.
Freckles takes a deep breath of sucker-punch air and looks to me. “What next?”
I pick around the room, skipping over the TV, the coffee table, the carpet. It’s all going to go, but… “It’ll want something bigger.”
Freckles wipes the blood dripping down to her lip, or maybe it was a tear. “What about us? Where are we going?”
I stop trying to hide how tired I am of telling her: “Nowhere, baby.”
She quiets down. Curls into her legs. Stares at me hard, thinking it’ll change my mind. Freckles used to be able to do that when she was littler, knowing her mom and I would give her anything she wanted; just sparkle those oaky eyes, sunlight through leaves, with a smile for good measure.
There’s no smile there anymore. Just a bloody nose.
No. We can’t leave.
The weep found us, from the pipes, the earth, the fucking skies, wherever it came from—we have to feed it. If we don’t, it’ll eat the world until it finds us anyway. It cries and floods and grows if it can’t feel us watching… what does Freckles think will happen if we up and left?
“Death,” I remind her, “for everything and everyone.”
I wait for Freckles to nod again. She does, like a good girl.
“Come on,” I say. We haven’t tried sandbags yet. Stuff a few full of dirt… stave off the flood like a hurricane. Yeah. Yeah, that could work.
The weep can sense us just outside, and it’ll go faster if we stuff these bags together. We get three bags in when I jab the dirt and pierce what’s bubbling underneath—pale, stringy liquid oozing out like a cyst in the earth.
The weep is here, too.
Cracks bulge and split from the house, stretching further back into the trees, even further back to where the pipes lead, toward the cistern, the research center, the YMCA, the school, the whole damn town.
I can hear a cry churning in the pit.
Three bags are enough for now.
Freckles follows close with the last bag. We toss them in, sacks splitting open, congealing with the weep, swallowing, dissolving muck and grass until—grrg, grrg, grrrglub. That noise…
It’s not enough.
Strands of fleshy weep sift and writhe, gesticulating worms quivering, crying out for more—a wail we can only hear in our guts. Churn my stomach, ripping it from the inside to steal what little is in there. I choke back chip bile as it feels its way back through my gullet. I feel Freckles behind me, gripping my shirt as it all drivels out of her.
Freckles… Those eyes beg me to make it stop. Stop the crying, I can’t take it. I can’t. I can’t!
It wants something bigger.
Freckles will have to do.
I can barely grab hold of her before I feel her hands thrust—gravity takes me, slapping my cheek into the weep’s burbling mass.
Threads wriggle in and burn through my vision—stretching it apart, melting film on the fizzling image of Freckles above me, eyes bloody red. I expect to hear a scream, her splitting image shrinking, running away.
But Freckles doesn’t move.
She’s right. It needed something bigger than her.
Rowan Marsh is a writer and comic book editor. He often writes stories of folk horror and Southern Gothic oddities, pulling from his roots of living in the overgrown haunts of Florida. He was raised by a well-meaning family in the suburbs and wishes he could live in the woods.
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