“Did you say the water?”
“You heard me!”
Now what?
The cranium-jangling thrum of water rushing through the pipes ceased, replaced by Maggie’s tromping downstairs. Gerald’s attention veered away from the hockey highlight video he’d plugged into on his laptop. He slumped and sighed as the film continued to stream.
She’s so ridiculous. We both took freaking showers this morning! The water is fine!
“Jerry. Don’t pretend you can’t hear me.”
Gerald glanced up at his wife, feigning ignorance. He removed his earbuds and pressed pause.
“The water, Jerry. Have you used it since breakfast? Notice anything wrong?”
“Wrong? With the water?”
“Are you deaf? Yes, the water! It’s freaking boiling! An hour ago, my shower, no problem. Totally normal. But now, less than an hour later, Jerry, I go up there, and…”
“The temp wobbles. Adjust the knobs.”
Maggie’s gaze was pitiless. Gerald averted his eyes and played with a paperclip.
“Brilliant take, Gerald. Yes, I’m completely unfamiliar with indoor plumbing. Asshole.” She drew a deep breath. “There’s something wrong, Gerald. Even if you turn on the cold water by itself and let it run! The water is steaming hot and stays that way! Now, do I call a plumber, or do you wanna have a look first?”
Gerald gazed at the frozen image on his screen and grimaced.
“That stupid tape will wait, Jerry,” said Maggie, voice dripping with exasperation.
“I know it’ll wait, Mags. I’m not addicted to the thing.”
Like you are, by the freaking way, to your phone.
“Sure, sure. Whatever, Jerry. Well?”
“I’m going!”
Gerald pushed away from his desk, climbed the stairs. As he did, he heard his mate running water downstairs in the kitchen.
“Hot here, too!” she yelled.
Gerald grunted and headed for the bathroom. There, he turned on the cold taps at both sinks without paying much attention to what he was doing, then ambled out to the adjoining bedroom to kill two minutes while snooping through his wife’s nightstand trappings. When he turned around, steam was billowing from the bathroom like a miniature Old Faithful. With alarm, Jerry dove into the roiling cloud to turn off both faucets.
That is so bizarre!
He next tried the shower, attentive to the result this time. Rotating the lever all the way toward “C” again converted the bathroom into a steam bath. Gerald shut off the water and waited for the diaphoretic fog to dissipate. Finally, as an ultimate test, he tried the hot water, alone, at his own sink.
Steam jetted down from the spout in a thick ring surrounding a narrow, central stream of scorching liquid. That inner column of scalding water glistened yellow and smelled rotten. Gerald shut it off instantly.
“Ow!”
That quickly, the faucet handle itself had turned hot as a branding iron.
Shaking his hand and blowing on it fiercely, he flew down the steps and ran to the freezer for an ice pack. His wife still stood by the kitchen sink, leaning against the counter and holding her chin. She made no move to help. Gerald turned to face her, left hand clasping the ice pack to his right.
“Call the plumber,” he said.
“What happened to your hand?”
“The faucet handle.”
Gerald examined the strawberry red palm of his hand.
There’ll be blisters for sure. How in the bloody hell?
“Wow,” said Maggie. “The handle, huh? But…don’t you think you should take a look at the tank before we call?” asked Maggie.
The nearby kitchen faucet continued to drip, each drop issuing a puff of steam upon striking the metal basin.
“What for? Whatever’s going on, we need a pro.”
“Geez, Gerald, how about making sure there isn’t an emergency going on in the basement, like with the water tank? Like a leak, maybe? Or something weird with the pipes, where they come into the damn house?”
“It’s not as if the water stopped, Mags!” But before Maggie could open her mouth, Gerald changed tack.
Not worth explaining. And she’s not exactly wrong.
“Sure, sure. Never mind. You’re right,” answered Gerald reluctantly. “Coming?”
His wife didn’t respond, so he grabbed a flashlight from the drawer and trudged down to the basement alone. He turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs, switched on the light, and scanned their expansive, unfinished cellar. Washing machine and dryer sat at one end, boiler and hot water tank at the other. A bulkhead loomed near the boiler, and an air handler for the air conditioning stood beside the water tank. Despite a bright white incandescent light bulb overhead, shadows obscured the details between, behind, and within the crevices of the appliances. Nothing at first glance appeared amiss, but Gerald flicked on the flashlight for a closer look.
Panel lights all green. Settings correct. The subtle whine of machinery — par for the course. No leaks.
I should touch it maybe? The stupid hot water tank? See how hot it is? Umm, maybe not. Like, not again. No touch-ee.
Having decided tactile testing was inadvisable, Gerald snapped a few photos to text to the plumber, and clambered back up to the kitchen.
“Looks fine,” he said. “Temperature dial on the tank’s where it’s supposed to be.”
“How hot did it feel, though?” asked Maggie.
“Well, I didn’t touch the tank, Mags! Want me to burn my hand clean off?” Gerald drew a breath. “Obviously, it’s gonna be hot, isn’t it?”
“Maybe there’s something else going on.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Gerald said, pointing at the kitchen sink. “Where do you think water at that temperature could possibly come from?”
“Don’t assume.”
“Assume? You mean assume that hot water originates in the hot water tank?”
“There you go again.”
“Just being logical. Now, may I call the freaking plumber?”
“If you can’t fix it yourself, I guess we don’t have much choice, now do we?”
Gerald ignored Maggie’s sarcasm and texted the plumber, sending along the photos. After a short back and forth by SMS that invoked outright begging on Gerald’s part, the plumber promised a same day visit. Jerry and Maggie decided she’d head out to work, since she had patients scheduled. Gerald let his shop know he’d be working from home and signed in on his computer.
The team can get by without my physical presence for a day — that’s the beauty of retrenchment. Lower stakes, less hassle. ‘Stop trying to win every war!’ everyone told me. They were right! Anyway, let the new folks familiarize themselves with the workshop without me glaring over their shoulders today.
Gerald left his work VPN running in the background and opened his browser. Then he resumed his hockey video and played around on YouTube until lunch.
* * *
The plumber showed as soon as Gerald had dropped his dishes, unwashed, in the sink.
Zeke Helderston didn’t look the part. He was a thin, middle-aged, bespectacled fellow with an age-inappropriate spiked hairstyle. Animated to a fault, he rolled his eyes as Gerald reprised the hot water saga.
“Hot water will cool off if you run it a while, you know. I don’t want to bill you a visit for nothin’.”
Now I remember this guy. Two minutes after he gave me that whole rigamarole two summers ago that there was nothing wrong with the damn toilet, he scratched his head and replaced it. Jerk.
“Like I said, we did that already. Really, I’m okay with the visit charge. Please.”
Gerald invited Helderston in from the foyer and the plumber beelined straight to the kitchen. Gerald observed expectantly as the plumber hunched over the sink and cranked the faucet handle all the way to “cold.”
The resulting torrent of boiling hot liquid fogged up Helderston’s glasses. He murmured something Gerald couldn’t make out, wiped his eyeglasses with a shirttail, glanced over his shoulder at his customer, and then turned the handle in the other direction.
No sooner had Helderston done so than he released the faucet handle with a yelp and scrambled for a towel to shut it off. He let loose a whistle of incredulity as he rubbed his sore hand and then turned toward Gerald.
“That is something, Mr. Baker. Can you bear with me for a bit?”
“My home is yours. I’ll be over there,” said Gerald, pointing to his comfy chair in the living room. He then followed his own guidance, dropping his butt in his favorite spot and grabbing a magazine. Meanwhile, the plumber began testing various spouts around the dwelling, including the chilled water fountain in the fridge and the remaining two bathrooms.
“Your hot water tank in the basement?” Helderston yelled from upstairs.
Where the hell else would it be?
Gerald shouted back in the affirmative, and Helderston clomped down to the cellar.
A few minutes later, Gerald’s eyelids were already drooping when a whoop arose from the basement stairwell. He sat up and swiveled his woozy head.
Eh. Nothing.
Silence. Figuring he was hearing things, he sifted through his mag for something not coma-inducing. He squirmed back into his overstuffed chair.
Only to leap to his feet a second later.
Now, Helderston was screaming. Gerald stumbled from behind the ottoman, not quite face-planting as he did so. Regaining his balance, he raced down to the cellar and burst around the bottom of the staircase toward the recess where he had sent his plumber, shouting,
“What the hell? Mr. Helderston! My God! Are you okay?”
Helderston, whose shrieks had faded to a low moan, fixed his eyes on Gerald, who stood frozen ten meters away, petrified. The pipeman’s right leg was knee deep in a sizable crack in the concrete, which had opened within a bowl-like depression just beside the hot water tank. The plumber’s hands were bloody wrecks, presumably from grabbing superheated machinery to pull himself free. As Gerald studied the scene in horror, the poor fellow tumbled backward onto his buttocks and howled in agony. Clearly, the floor itself was scorching hot as well. But the workman’s refreshed cries quickly petered out yet again to a pathetic whimper.
Sonofabitch could die! I’ve got to…
Gerald hesitantly approached, stopped, approached…until Helderston suddenly reached for him. Abruptly, Gerald found himself locked arm in arm with the poor soul — at the very same moment that the floor beneath Gerald’s feet warped and yielded. His left foot slipped. He teetered. Straining to maintain his footing and simultaneously uncouple himself from Helderston, Gerald was forced to do so roughly. There was a struggle.
“It’s a damn sinkhole, man!” he yelled. “I’ll get help — I promise! Hold on!”
To his own surprise, Gerald managed the deed and retreated. He abandoned Helderston and dashed upstairs for his phone. Then he dialed 911, blubbered his name, address, and something something sinkhole, hung up, texted Maggie a freaked-out dire summons, grabbed the flashlight, and darted back downstairs to Helderston.
But the plumber was gone. Vanished.
In his place was a yawning chasm. What had been a mere crack in the cement had expanded to encompass half the width of the cellar. The boiler had, it seemed, disappeared into the hole, the hot water tank had fallen to its side, and the connecting pipes had all broken. An ocean of yellow water poured from one of the shattered pipe ends into the new canyon in the floor. Rising above this deluge were horizontal waves of hot air-induced distortion, synchronized to an orange glow pulsating from below, which strobed the entire basement. Amazonian temperature and humidity suffused the space, soaking Gerald in sweat in a matter of seconds. And behind it all was a piercing hiss — one that attested to a prodigious gas leak from where the boiler had been. But Gerald didn’t quite register this acute peril immediately.
So instead of fleeing, Gerald braved a few more minutes of the scorching heat to point his flashlight into the cavity beneath his house and ponder his one-in-a-million, abysmally poor fortune.
An earthquake? In New England? And I’m at ground-freaking-zero?
His eyes adjusted to the off-kilter lighting, and details revealed themselves. First, Gerald detected a texture to the miniature canyon’s inner walls, which were sharply angled and composed of tar-like rock. Ever closer inspection of these cliffs revealed an oily-black, foul substance oozing and dripping from the various ledges, the hideous tableau disappearing into the crater’s depths. Fruitlessly, Gerald strained to peer deeper into the pit for another minute or two, before the frightful hiss of the gas leak finally broke through his outer rim of consciousness. He sniffed.
Right. I’m outta here!
But his by now broiling feet refused escape. Why?
Something bid Gerald to stay. Guilt? Curiosity? An inner voice?
Or one from without?
Either way, the risk of a gas explosion or of what remained of the floor vanishing beneath him receded in Gerald’s mind. Instead, once again, he ever so tentatively leaned toward the edge of the crevice, from which a low frequency rumble now emanated. Gerald’s skull jangled so badly from the vibration that he doubted his ability to see anything straight. But this time when he directed the beam of the flashlight and his wobbly vision down into the rift, the blackness surrendered its secret. Motion. Slithering. Clattering.
Oh, shit! It’s broken open some kind of nest! We’re gonna end up infested with God-knows-what on top of everything else! And act of God, right? The homeowner’s will never cover it! We’re fucked. I mean, poor Mr. Helderston, but damn! We’re ruined!
As Gerald blinked the sweat out of his eyes and labored with his moral priorities, the writhing below grew more ferocious, and rose as a mass out of the ragged breach in the foundation. A squirming accretion of beasts soon towered over him, all somehow glued together yet independent: snakes and monstrous centipedes a foot long, crabs and massive spiders, enormous slugs and eel-like mutations. Gerald stepped back, each footfall a torture, the horrid energy under the floor continuing to radiate through the soles of his shoes, threatening to cook their contents.
The mountainous abomination swiveled. And stared directly at him.
I’m dead. This is the hallucination of an oxygen-starved, dying brain. Was it carbon monoxide poisoning? Poor Maggie will freak out when she finds my body, won’t she? Sorry, Mags!
No eyes. But…two depressions where there should have been eyes. And a cleavage where there should have been a mouth. The “lips” didn’t budge at all, but even so, words assaulted Gerald’s ears, and their source was the thing’s head. The voice shook the walls.
Here I am, Baker. Are you not pleased?
“What?”
Another fool! Is it so hard to comprehend your own destiny?
“Destiny?”
I can’t believe I’m conversing with a hallucination! I’ve lost my mind!
It is plain! You fumbled it away! Damnation, Baker! Don’t you realize half-measures spell doom? Imbecile!
The head rose still further. Its crown pushed against the unfinished ceiling, and supporting beams cracked. The beast’s neck and shoulders appeared.
“Stop! I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’m just…an engineer! A contractor! A…a freaking suburbanite! I don’t need you here! Go back where you came from!”
Oh, Baker. Too late. Ahhhh! I. Am. Arrived!
Gerald had been playing for time with his gabbing. But now, for a moment, he seriously entertained the possibility that this insane vision really was the infernal incarnation it appeared to be.
Wrong address buster! I’m one of the good guys! Alright, I am a defense contractor, but one of thousands! And my project is a triviality compared to what’s out there — why, it isn’t even strategic! No, no, no! No way!
The monster pushed up through the ceiling, which collapsed around Gerald, magically sparing him. The creature’s torso burst the sides of the cavity in the floor. Swinging its fists, it swept away the walls like Legos. Piles of earth surrounding the foundation exploded in a filthy plume. And the thing wasn’t just emerging — it was growing. Even as slimy creatures of every shape and size dropped from its hide and scampered off, it swelled to balaenidean dimensions.
It was not until the humongous fiend had nearly freed itself of the ruins of the house altogether, that a particle of the mundane reintroduced itself into Gerald’s morbid despond. Still dreadful, certainly — but by comparison, reassuringly banal. Because when the roar of the crashing timber and shattering concrete subsided — the monster having paused to free its spreading hips from the chasm — once again, the hiss became audible.
The gas!
Indeed, the broken gas line that had mysteriously failed to chase Gerald from the basement, seemingly ages ago, had gone nowhere. It continued to disgorge its endless, noxious aerosol into the broken environs of Gerald’s stifling basement. He glanced to his left and beheld the sky peeking through a hole in the wall — with the house decomposing, Gerald and the beast would soon no longer find themselves in an enclosed space at all. An opportunity would be lost.
The monster continued to bud like an octopus from the earth, ten feet in front of him.
This is…real?
Gerald struggled to comprehend a situation both tangible and impossible. And worse — somehow, on him.
Me? How?
Gerald didn’t feel guilty about his work or his life or his beliefs or anything else. But the thing had said that its emergence was Gerald’s doing. Or, somehow, his failure to do — something. As impossible as that was for Gerald to understand, in an instant, he positively knew something else — that what was incepting from the earth right before his eyes was a threat immeasurably worse than Zeke Helderston’s departure from the world or the destruction of Gerald’s house or even Gerald’s own demise. He reached for a fist-sized piece of concrete and banged it with all his might against the rocks and broken cement at his feet. Again and again an…
A spark. The resulting explosion blew away half the block. Three houses beyond Gerald’s were pulverized, and half a dozen people killed. The resulting five-alarm fire raged for an hour, leaving a blackened, coagulated mess where the Bakers’ home used to be — and nothing recognizable above ground, even forensically. For all that, there was no sign of any debris beyond that of the house itself — timber and concrete and steel and synthetics of various kinds. And an observer would have found it strange, had he been aware of Gerald’s frantic call, that no emergency services had received any notice of events amiss until the methane detonation alerted households for over a mile around. His text had gone nowhere as well — Maggie’s first inkling of the calamity was in the lunchtime doctor’s lounge, when it was already all over the news.
The six-week investigation that followed uncovered a single unusual feature — a sink hole beneath the site, an oddity that ultimately won official culpability for the gas leak and blast. Even more freakishly, the hole led to an extensive cave system. Though the caverns were ruled off limits soon after discovery — authorities having immediately declared them unstable — they drew onlookers of all stripes, including not a few who ventured past the signs. When two of these wayward spelunkers got themselves killed — their bodies lost — the state finally buried the area under fifty feet of sand, seeded it with wild grasses, fenced it all around with razor wire, and posted criminal penalties for trespassing.
Gerald’s little AI-guided drone start-up languished and eventually failed without him. The breakdown in DOD acquisition left certain troops unequipped in a particular standoff on the other side of the world. As a result, a conflict erupted. A nasty one. For want of a nail, and all that.
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