This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ctmacnamara on 2023-06-27 15:45:00+00:00.
There is a town at the bottom of our reservoir. If you dive down, as I sometimes do when things go wrong, you will find a crumbling village of blue and green. A valley without grass, bones without meat, the past eroded, and eroding.
A town like any other, but with streets paved by sediment. You can find structures there, proof of life: half-standing apothecaries, jaundiced schools, homes all designed to be the same. Yes, a town like any other.
Yet not…
A bloated church swamps the sand, cracked as a plated crab leg, its bronzed bell the last element withstanding the elements. The chapel will soon collapse. After all, it’s only made of wood and it’s fully submerged.
Made of water as we are. I always try to remember, if I stay here too long, I will join them. If indeed I have a soul to risk, it will soon flee this body, and what’s left behind will rot away like something made of timber. My body would be perhaps the twenty-seventh to baptize these cool waters.
Folks are always dying down here, messing with the dead.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. We die in the sun, too. We die plenty while we’re living.
Monday, another classmate passed. My seat-mate in orchestra class. Now the school’s urinals are stained orange. The principal insists it’ll stop the spread, so we take the pills they tell us to and pretend we’re not shattered. Adults must know better, right? —look how great everything’s going on their watch.
Maybe someday every village will be like this one. Desolate and desecrated. Maybe they already are, and we’re just the last to grasp it.
I enter the submerged church through its fissured roof and float down, headfirst. Down to the corpse of a girl no older than I, her body snagged in a snail-infested cross. I don’t know the church’s denomination, nor how she came to rest here. Should I loosen her dress of seaweed and set her free?
Damned if I know, and maybe damned if I do.
The water’s so heavy here, nothing wants to float. All the pressure pushes you down, down, down. Is she jealous of my life? Would she take me if she could, hold me until we’re the same temperature? Her body dances with the current.
In this abyss, the other spirts keep to themselves. Many are originals, are now entombed in the same homes they lived in before the town sold out and flooded the valley to provide potable water to the closest city. The old sect couldn’t be bought out, and outright refused to recognize eminent domain. Brave beyond all reason.
They too rest here, and together we steep the city’s drinking water. So, raise a glass, to us…
It’s dark at this depth, almost too dark to see despite the persistent LED of my dive light. My vision focuses solely on Her. My eyes find nothing of interest in the floating pews, the downed chandeliers, the rusted tabernacle preserving the Host.
But what preserves Her? The beach is thickened with the shells of freshwater muscles and fingernail clams. There are crayfish in these waters.
Yet some flesh remains.
My father doesn’t believe any of this. Or rather, he admits there are bodies in the Reservoir, even acknowledges an underwater village, but doubts the existence of a Girl preserved in an underwater church. Mother just shakes her head when I mention it, regrets buying me the scuba equipment, and books me another appointment at Dr. O’Neil’s.
As to the Girl, she’s wearing a tattered picnic dress. Greenish-brown hair floats above her, covering her soft head like a crown of tendrils. If I could speak under water, I would tell her that I’m sorry. She rests on that cross and I wonder what it could mean…
We are the fish that swim, mouths open, gasping. We are the pollen, scattered across the wilting forest. We are the water, dehydrated from our purest purpose.
I should be home. Mother will be worried. She doesn’t like my exploring, sets all kinds of rules she hasn’t the time to enforce. She regrets buying me the scuba gear, but I regret having been born, so I think we’re more than even.
The body before me seems to shake of its own power. As though she’s trying to communicate. A skeletal hand seems to reach toward me, the color of sand.
I wonder what her deal was? Her regrets, her loves, the people she lost along the way. Maybe it’s best to go young, before you can do any real damage. I can’t imagine it gets any easier, this shuffling of feet.
What do you say, Zombie Mermaid? Want to trade places, your fins for my legs?
Or should I join you? —it’s so quiet here. My SPG tells me I’m getting low on air, it would be easy to drift away…
I shudder, it strikes me that I shouldn’t be here. I’m not one to trample across graves, so why would it be any different in this tomb of brine?
I’m a voyeur, a tourist, a fool. And yet that hand reaches toward my own, as if it contains within it the knowledge of all worlds.
How clichéd, the death-obsessed teenager. Why are we so terrified of the one thing we’ve all yet to experience? If only we could fall as acorns do, mating gravity with purpose.
I’m not infatuated with death itself, I’m just tired of living.
I wonder who this Girl was, how she came to be so forgotten here. It’s proven hard to research, this reservoir stores so many.
(I am not superstitious. I don’t believe in miracles.)
If only every grave was like this one, a personal church on a floor of sandy bedrock. Snails, not worms. Water, not clay.
My gauge turns red, and the Girl takes my hand…
The carp dance through her ribcage, her body moves with the water, a bit of extra sun sneaks its way to the depths and kisses me like a million summers.
It’s time to return to the surface.