The Drain Man
A nightmare, dreamed June 27th, 2025, 5:55 AM. With obvious subconscious homage to The X-Files, Junji Ito, and uh slendermans.
June 28th, 2025
Our basement is flooded again. It’s the fourth time. I head down the two, three or four flights of stairs to check on it, and some others from the neighborhood follow. Soon enough, ten people are with me in my dingy, gray, unfinished basement, standing in dirty water up past our knees under the dim light of a single bare bulb.
Someone finds the drain cover in the floor, reaches down and pulls it. We all wait as the floating debris and oily film drifting in patches on the surface of the water slowly begins to move toward where the drain must be. The water starts to spin around, and the drain appears as a small vortex.
One of my neighbors, let’s call him J, steps forward curiously.
“Whoa! Is this like a whirlpool situation?”
I’m not sure what he means. “Haha... uh, no, I don’t think so,” I say. The drain hole in the floor doesn’t seem large enough to present any danger. But the water around the drain is moving faster and faster, and the hole in the floor becomes visible in the form of a quavering black circle with a rapidly fluctuating, spiraling torrent of water flowing into it.
J steps a bit closer, excitedly commenting on how impressive the whirlpool is becoming, and others warn him to be careful. The hole, which is normally no larger than the palm of your hand, is suddenly much wider. It’s about the diameter of a manhole cover. The water quickens and quickens, and J loses his footing and falls in.
He’s laughing, grabbing at the edges of the drain and scrambling playfully as if he’s in a tickle-fight or getting splashed at the pool. He loves it. It’s even better than he’d hoped. Others in the basement with us are laughing in surprise and relief, but I am of course worried for his safety. The suction of the drain seems to be pulling at him forcefully, and he struggles increasingly to reach the rim of the drain hole, limbs and fingers thrashing around and stretching to their limits. The moment of danger lengthens intolerably as he somehow sinks lower and lower into the drain without going anywhere. Then he goes down and disappears.
The water has all drained away. There’s no sign of J in the hole. We have to do something. We have to call the city and get them to start searching the sewers. He’s probably trapped down there. I go upstairs to make the call while everyone else starts looking for a rope or something to send down the drain. Upstairs, I can’t find my phone, and I start to panic.
After just a minute, however, the others call me down to the basement. J is back.
I walk over to the drain and look in. He’s there, wet and nude and pale, as if he’d been gone for days. He didn’t need a rope or anything at all to get back to the top of the drain. He’s sitting just below the level of the floor with his arms wrapped cozily around his legs and his chin between his knees. His limbs seem very long and thin.
He looks up at me, and his upturned gaze breaks the foreshortening of my perspective looking down at him, and I see, face-to-face, that his head has become elongated to twice the height of a normal human’s. The skin around his eye sockets is stretched vertically like bags under the eyes of the old on a world with 10x our gravity, sagging open to reveal long, open saddles of exposed pink eye-socket flesh. His pupils, dilated wide, reflect the dim orange light of the incandescent bulb behind me.
J does not want to come out of the drain hole. He likes it in there. The others, my neighbors, are either uncomfortable with this or satisfied that he isn’t lost in the sewers, and they start trickling back up the stairs to leave. They seem a bit sorry to be leaving me alone with the ongoing thing with the drain guy and perhaps ashamed to be walking away from him at a time when he needs some kind of serious help. But I understand.
So, after seeing out my guests, I walk back to the drain and squat down. This guy is not supposed to be in my basement. He needs to go. I extend a hand down to him.
“Come on out, man. You gotta leave.”
He grabs hold of my hand. His fingers fold not around my hand but my entire forearm, spiraling up to my elbow. He doesn’t make a move. I adjust my feet on the floor and give a tug as if to help him up, but he doesn’t rise at all; instead, he pulls me down slightly. He says he wants to stay in the drain.
I manage to wrestle my arm free from his grasp and, in a huff, step back toward a tall pipe in the middle of the basement. The others had found some ropes after all, and I tie one to the pipe and start knotting them end to end, making a line that will reach the drain. I’m a little angry at J by now, and I’m hurrying.
“What are you doing up there?” asks J, unseen, from the drain.
“I’m getting you a rope so you can help yourself out.”
“I don’t want to leave,” says J. “I have everything I need right here.” I grumble something about how he doesn’t have a normal life in the hole. J disagrees. He says that I’ve been very kind to him, that he appreciates my caring and that I even graced him with the feeling of human touch, from my hand, even down there, in the hole.
“It seemed more like your touch,” I say, thinking of his long fingers refusing to let go of my arm. A bit of anger shows in my voice.
A moment passes. Silently, like a lunging snake, a single, long, long arm whips up from the drain hole and lassos around in the air, writhing fingers grasping wildly in search of me. I flee and fall, scrambling backward on the damp concrete floor. I make it to the stairs and ascend.
I don’t go back down to the basement. Some time passes. This is my life now. I can’t afford to move, and I’d feel bad about selling the house to someone with this still happening. But how am I going to sleep? I sit in bed thinking. I don’t know what to do.
[At this point, I woke up with a start. My partner had moved in her sleep, and I flinched away as if someone was coming for me. Trying to go back to sleep, I couldn’t help but muse sweatily about what a horrible dream it was, and instead of sleeping got stuck considering what my options would be in that scenario. It seemed like the only thing to do, if I couldn’t move away, would be to permanently cover the drain or fill in the whole basement. But what would happen when he realized my intentions? When he heard the clink of the drain cover being picked up, or the cement truck chute coming in through the window well? Would he come out, then, after all? Maybe it was better to leave him alone. Maybe all he really wanted was to sit there, down in the drain.]