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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/nomass39 on 2024-10-07 12:30:28+00:00.

Dad was drunk again.

Rain swept over my windshield like waves over a beach as I drove him home from yet another bar where he’d made a fool of himself. He wasn’t the drunken brawler type, no. He was a crier. He’d sit at the bar with his head on the table and just start sobbing, wailing, bringing down the whole mood of the place.

Even now, he shifted between crying and sniffling while staring out the passenger window, and half-conscious states where he couldn’t muster the mental coherence to even register such complex emotions. At one point, he even leaned over the center console and tried to hug me, almost making me jerk the steering wheel. “Dad, no. Christ, I’m trying to drive, here,” I snapped at him. “Keep on your half of the car or I’m pulling over.” Like a loyal dog, he recognized the tone of my words even if not their meaning, and shrunk back sheepishly.

Since I was in elementary school, people told me I was remarkably mature for my age. But you kind of have to be, when you’re forced to act like the parent of the family.

The road traveled parallel to our sole local river, the one the schoolkids all called the Devil’s gutter. It snaked in and out of sight behind the treeline, as if it liked to taunt every driver that passed. The damned thing was evil, I knew, but I couldn’t help but feel a certain nostalgic fondness for it. It was the only thing offering any sense of danger and mystique to what would have otherwise been the least interesting small town in the country.

From a glance, it seemed mild, shallow and narrow enough to make it across with a leap. There was no way of telling that it was actually hundreds of feet deep, that the undercurrent was stronger than an Olympic swimmer could withstand, that the banks were undercut and impossible to climb back up once you were in, that the carbonated water had intricately carved networks of hundreds of channels and caves deep into the limestone. Misjudge your leap, and you’d be seized by the undercurrent, dashed against the rocks, plunged deep into some dark cave within which your body would be preserved forever, pinned to a wall or ceiling of stone like some macabre decoration.

The gutter features in our every folktale and ghost story. When I was a kid, we liked to tell the tale of ol’ Bart O’Neill, a 19th century prospector whose cat was apparently very popular with the neighborhood toms. Every time she’d get knocked up, it was said, he’d gather up the kittens into a burlap sack and toss them all into the Devil’s gutter.

At least — and this was when whoever was telling the story would lower their voice to a whisper — until they found his body in his bed, shredded by hundreds of small claws. His eyes had been clawed out, his fingers bitten off like carrots, his ribcage torn open. And within his chest, the police found… dozens of tiny poops. That’s right. According to legend, the spectral kittens had used his chest cavity as a litter box.

That was all made up, of course. The crude invention of imaginative schoolboys. But I have looked through old newspapers, and found that someone named Bart O’Neill really did disappear from town a long while ago. No gorey details, just up and vanished. The only oddity I noticed was that, when his cat was found still locked up in a cage in his shed a week after his disappearance, it was well-fed, as if somebody had been sneaking in and caring for it.

See, this is why I hate taking this road. With every glimpse of that river, my mind always wanders. Back to old memories, terrible memories, ones that would have been better left forgotten. It ignites a fire in me, a sort of morbid curiosity I’ve come to dread.

But then dad broke my line of thought with a long, obnoxiously loud groan. And then I was thinking of the first time I had him in my passenger seat, when I was some anxiety-ridden kid, no older than 15, didn’t even have my drivers license yet, my hands shaking late that New Year’s night as I struggled to dodge all the other drunk morons swerving all over the road. New Year’s was always the worst night for him. “This would’ve been our anniversary,” he was groaning. “It would have been our fifteenth.”

I got over what happened to mom over a decade ago. Why couldn’t he?

We aren’t the only people who’ve experienced loss, anyway. When I was growing up, the whole town mourned the death of Annabelle, captain of our high school cheerleading squad. She had tried to jump the gutter, and even cleared it… but there’d just been rain, and the muddy opposite bank gave way beneath her feet, and she went right in. Crazy thing was, fifteen minutes later, they got a ping from some SOS beacon her mother had made her wear. They took this as proof she’d made it out alive but injured, and triggered a frantic search of the surrounding area — with no luck.

There were rumors, however improbable, that she’d found her way into an air pocket somewhere in that limestone cave system, just close enough to the surface that just one of her desperate calls for help managed to make it through. Sometimes I picture her down there, in a kind of darkness I cannot fathom, struggling to keep her head above the water.

I wonder if she knew that surrounding her, somewhere in the dark, were the corpses of those who had been pulled into those caves before her. I picture a gaunt, bleached hand brushing her ankle as those currents carry one by. I imagine her crowded on all sides by the gaunt, empty eyes of the people who’d found their way into that air pocket before her, and never found their way out.

Maybe it was for the best that she would’ve been in complete darkness.

There my mind went, again. I’d gotten another glimpse of the river, and couldn’t help but imagine Anna down there, as if her eyes were looking up at me from beneath those blackened waters.

I tried to turn up the radio, to take my mind off it and to drown out dad’s moaning and sobbing. But he grunted as if the very sound offended him, and drunkenly pawed at the dashboard until he’d turned it back off. I already knew what he’ll say tomorrow. “I’ve let you down,” he’d say, head down like a dog caught peeing on the carpet. “I’ve never been the father I should have been.” And it’ll all be very genuine, and very sincere, and very, very temporary.

I’ve even helped pay for his rehab, once. He’d been found choked half to death on his own vomit. “This is a wake-up call,” he’d said. “I’m finally ready to be the dad you’ve always needed me to be.” A few grand seemed like a small price to pay to have my dad back. And indeed, for a few months of sobriety, he was the best dad on Earth, the best I ever could’ve asked for. And then came New Year’s again, and it was suddenly like none of it ever happened.

My eyes glimpsed a cross set up along the gutter, a bouquet left at its base. I knew exactly who it was for.

When I was in fourth grade, Bethany, a little girl who went to the same school as me, was swallowed up by the gutter. Her father was the only one who witnessed the accident, and there’d been some suspicious circumstances — I don’t really remember, something about marital issues, custody, that sort of thing. Point was, everybody suspected him. But what proof did we have? The gutter never parts with its secrets.

Three years or so later, her dad just up and vanished, too. Nobody thought much of it, at first. Everyone assumed he got tired of the side-eyes and just skipped town. But then, months after everyone had forgotten the whole business, someone started sending around a voicemail he’d apparently sent out at three in the morning, the night he disappeared.

It’d apparently been sent to some random coworker from his contacts list. An accident, clearly. The first minute or two just consisted of the sort of rustling you’d expect from a pocket dial, so they hadn’t thought much of it. It hadn’t been until their curiosity drove them to investigate deeper that they realized they could hear the dad’s heavy, belabored breathing, and the sounds of twigs and leaves crackling beneath his feet, as if he were wandering through the middle of the woods.

Moreover, off in the distance, they could hear another voice. The faint voice of a little girl, bubbly and giggling, like they were playing a game. “Daddy?” The voice kept crying out into the night. “Daddy, where are you?” They noticed, too, that you couldn’t hear any crickets or birds or anything else you’d expect out in the forest at night. Everything was dead silent, like all the creatures of the woods sensed the presence of a predator.

The dad’s breathing grew heavier and more panicked whenever the voice grew louder, nearer, but it remained stifled, as if he was desperately trying to keep quiet, remain unnoticed. Eventually, she was so close that you could hear her little footsteps in the leaves, and the dad didn’t even dare to breathe. And then… the sound of branches being parted, the father’s gasp, and that little voice laughing and declaring in a sing-song tone, “Daaaddy, I fooound you!” And at that exact moment, the voicemail reached its time limit.

The cops’ official line was that it was a fake, just some audio doctored up by bored teenagers to feed into the sensationalized mythology of the Devil’s gutter. But Bethany’s remaining relatives swore up and down that they recognized that giggly little voice, that it was unmistakable.

Lost in thought, I blinked, and somehow, in that instant, a woman appeared in the middle of the road.

I ca…

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