The Dark Somnium - "The Showers" Classic Creepypasta

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

The Showers is a classic creepypasta story was posted years ago by Dylan SindelarCheckout the Authors new Horror Short: "Twigs": https://vimeo.com/479353834Instagram: @HalfwayHappyDylanTwitter: @dylansindelar Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every area in all parts of the world has those area-specific urban legends that just refuse to die. Whether the stories are about a haunted asylum on the outskirts of the city, a creature that lives in the nearby woods, or a ghost that haunts a lonely stretch of road outside of town, there's always a common thread within these tales. No one has ever been to these places, seen the creatures, or witnessed any hauntings with their own eyes. There are members of every generation who will proclaim that they know someone whose brother's best friend's sister went to that haunted house with 13 floors that uses real blood and snakes and spiders and it's so scary that no one has ever made it all the way through.

Those same people will swear by these stories without ever being able to provide a shred of evidence or a name of someone who could provide proof of the claim simply because everyone around here knows that it's a true story. The storytellers eventually pass the tales onto their children, who modify them just enough to keep up with the changing times, and the cycle continues. I'm as skeptical as anyone when it comes to these stories, seeing as I was like a junkie when I was younger, constantly searching for more terrifying stories about whatever area of the country I was living in at the time.

I made up and spread stories about haunted pizza parlors in New York, my cousins encounter with the Jersey Devil, or how my grandfather encountered. encountered a feral, human-like demon creature in the woods of Colorado. I even broke the rule with these stories by putting myself in them. This took guts in hindsight, because I had to make sure I always told them the same way. Surprisingly, no one ever called my bluff. I like to think that I've had some wonderful contributions to various urban legends around the Midwest and Northeastern states. I moved around a lot.

There was always a surge of joy whenever I would wander the halls at school and hear one of my classmates retelling my stories to another one of their friends, adding little bits here and there like a massive game of telephone. I knew, of course, that the stories were complete fiction, but I stood my ground whenever someone asked me about them. I would even manage to act a little bit, speaking with a shaky voice or looking scared when I would recount a situation that I supposedly experienced myself. I suppose this aspect of my childhood has led me to my current predicament, which I will recount

in full for the internet to take from it what they will. I have laid this little introduction out as sort of a disclaimer, aimed particularly at those who will call my story into question. I have been like the boy who cried wolf for years, but I assure you with every ounce of honesty and integrity that I have that this time the wolf is real. From my introduction, it's probably apparent that I moved around the country quite a bit in my middle and high school years. Neither of my parents had anything to do with any branch of the armed forces.

They simply didn't tend to hang around any given place too long. I suppose it had some sort of effect on me, but I wasn't hurt by it or anything of the sort. Growing up, I was a complete ham. I made friends very easily and was often the class clown, and because of that, was often disliked by my teachers. Again, this was never an issue, as I was usually in another state by the time the next semester rolled around. My friendships were often fleeting, as were any positive relationships that I ever had with my teachers.

Because of the events that followed, my memory of one teacher in particular is probably slightly skewed, but I will attempt to give the least biased version of our friendship that I can. Mr. Mays was one of my social study teachers in the early years of my high school experience. Being older now, I can understand how horrible children are to deal with around that age, and I respect him to no ends for the way that he was able to connect with his students. He seemed like one of us, he talked like us, made pop culture references that were current, listened to cool music, and sometimes he would even say hell or damn while he was giving a passionate lecture about Native American history or something like that.

A teacher that swore, even a little bit, was the epitome of cool to a freshman in high school. My memories of Mr. Mays mostly stemmed from the way that he really got into anything that he was doing. The instance that is still very vivid in my mind was, of course, around Halloween of my sophomore year. Mr. Mays had the typical teacher decorations around the classroom, smiling jackal lanterns and black cat cartoons, typical and boring in the minds of egotistical high school students. However, on the 31st of October, when most other teachers were rolling their eyes at the

fact that teenagers still took dressing up in costumes on Halloween seriously, Mr. Mays took the whole cool teacher thing to a new level. We walked into the classroom and were surprised to find. Find the blinds drawn, sheets over the smaller windows, candles lighting the room, and a single frowning jackal lantern sitting on a stool in front of the desks. Mr. Mays sat at his desk, just watching the students come into the class and take their seats. He didn't have to ask anyone to be quiet, because the moment everyone walked into the room, they were either too excited to care about petty conversations or too confused to bother with them. The students took their seats as Mr. Mays began his lecture.

He spoke quietly to set the mood and took a seat on a chair right next to the jackal-lantern in the center of the room. Today is probably my favorite day of the year, class. He said in a monotone voice. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I want to share with you exactly why I love it so much. One girl raised her hand with a concerned look on her face. I'm pushing the due date of your papers to next Tuesday, said Mr. Mays, without bothering to look at the girl who slowly put her hand down. Looking around at the other students with a hint of embarrassment. The class erupted in quiet cheers as Mr. Mays waited for the inevitable silence.

He began his story immediately after the class had calmed down. I will attempt to recreate the amazing story that Mr. Mays told the class that day. The way in which he told his stories rendered the horror junkies speechless and the rest of the class terrified. The same girl that had raised her hand to ask about the papers was holding her knees to her chest by the end of it, a look of terror on her face. The important thing to know was what the story was about. The specifics slip my mind now and aren't too relevant. I'll try to recount the parts of the story that matter most, but don't hold me to it.

Basically, Mr. Mays and his friends set out on a road trip across the country after graduating from college. They took a truck, loaded with camping gear, and set out to sightsee for the entire summer. The group went from the Poconos in New Jersey, down to the coast of Florida. Florida, New Orleans to California, and up to Washington. From there they went to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and back home to New York. This concept of the freedom to travel anywhere had the entire class hooked in an instant. Mr. Mays was the coolest teacher ever in my eyes. Being adventurous college kids, the group didn't bring a map.

There were no time constraints, so they just kind of drove in the general direction that they wanted to go and eventually found a town to stay in or someplace that looked interesting. He told us that after spending a week in Colorado, he and his friends had to travel through miles and miles of corn, plains, and more corn. He assumed that they were either in Nebraska or Kansas when they decided to pool their extra cash to stay in a hotel for the night. They settled into a motel in some town that Mr. Mays could barely remember the name of when one of his friends realized that they were somewhere near his grandfather's farm.

He wasn't entirely sure where it was, but being adventurous college kids, they decided to get a quick refund from the motel and try to contact the friend's grandpa. They were unable to get a hold of the grandpa on the phone, so the group figured it would be fun to just show up. Mr. Mazes' friend was adamant that his grandparents would take them in and feed them without a moment of hesitation. So the group set out with an hour of sunlight, seeking the salvation of a comfortable house to stay in. In Kansas or Nebraska, wherever it may have been, there aren't a whole lot of natural markers, could guide lost travelers. Any directions given to someone who didn't live around the area basically amounted to,

go up a couple of miles to the corn, take a right, and go down a dirt road to the other corn. There should be some wheat on your right. So as is the case with most scary stories, the group got lost. Never wanting to admit defeat, they drove into the night, making wrong turns every five minutes until they found themselves on a wooded road that Mr. Mays's friend was certain that his grandparents lived off of. Mr. Mays described the road as basically a dark path to hell. I wasn't entirely sure how true this was, because he got very excited and a bit ridiculous

with his explanation of the trees that almost tried to grab the car, and the red eyes of countless animals looking at them from the darkness. Regardless, the typical horror tropes worked on most of the class. Everyone was terrified. So, the group of guys drove on this dark road for about 15 minutes before they came to a clearing and a small building with lights in it, and what seemed to be a silo. They figured that, at the very least, the people who lived there would be able to help them find where the guy's grandparents lived.

The whole idea of everyone knows everyone in these hick parts of the country fueled this hope. They pulled the car up near the building, realizing when they were out of the car, that it appeared to be like the kind of places where one would store a whole bunch of chickens, not a home. Still, the lights were on, so they figured. they would give it a try. They approached the building as a group, looking in the semi-open sliding door to find a big, empty room, hanging fluorescent lights lit up the room like it was daytime, and they couldn't see a soul. There were no cars, but one of Mr. Mays's friends was convinced

he had seen someone as they pulled up, so they decided to go inside and see if there was an office or something where someone might still be working. Why else would they have this huge place fled up like that. There were no doors on the inside of the building. Again, it was just a giant empty hall. So the group roamed around the property and over towards the silo. As they got closer, they noticed what appeared to be a cellar door. At this point, I remember Mr. Mays telling the entire class to learn from his idiocy.

He told us that he hadn't seen many horror movies before that time and didn't think twice about approaching a creepy cellar door in the middle of a dark, scary foreign place. He said that approaching that door was one of his biggest regrets. Mr. Mays let the whole class know that he was going to tell us as much as he deemed appropriate about the experience. He felt that we were mature enough to handle it, but advised anyone that was squeamish to leave the class early. Several students quietly gathered their things and walked out of the door, a couple of them

being stoners who saw this as an opportunity to smoke behind the school before the next class. I didn't give the announcement a second thought. Like I said, I was and am a sucker for this kind of stuff, and Mr. Mays was telling a story better than anything I could have conjured up. I wanted to learn from this guy, even though I didn't believe much of the story. After the class had thinned a bit, Mr. Mays continued with the story. He told the remaining few that he and his friends opened that cellar door, releasing a smell that he only described as the most putrid thing my senses have ever experienced.

The group was no longer concerned with finding the owners of the property, but was now set on finding the source of that smell. They went down the steps into the cellar, which was lit by single bulbs spaced sporadically along the ceiling of a long hallway. No one spoke. Things had gotten too strange. The walls were lined with metal sheeting similar to the roofing of farms. The hallway itself was crooked, and the ceiling constantly lowered and rose, like a tunnel that was hastily dug and never touched up. There were sections where the boys had to almost crouch in order to pass. The worst part, Mr. Mays told us, was that the light bulbs constantly flickered,

sometimes acting like a strobe light and making it very difficult to move through the winding and unstable hallways. In hindsight, he was certain that his mind was playing tricks on him, but he remembered seeing flashes of things that couldn't be there. He said that when you are focused on something, or if you are that nervous, your mind can do that to you. It can simply revolt, showing you. you things or people that aren't there.

He continued to describe the hallway, and I was on the edge of my seat. The halls were windy and seemed to go on forever. Mr. Mays guessed that they were somewhere under the creepy forest that they had driven through when they found a door, but he couldn't be sure. He said that they came upon a door after walking for what felt like a mile. It was simple and wooden, but it looked like it belonged outside a suburban home. It had a nice design, seemed to be freshly painted red. head and had a very nice knob and knocker on it.

It was a door that belongs at the entrance of a nice house, not one that would be sitting in a dirt tunnel in the middle of nowhere. His friend walked towards the door, moving carefully because of the flashing light bulb and increasing uncertainty about the stability of the surrounding walls. He turned to the group, the rest of which were nervous at the very least, and attempted to lighten the mood with a laugh before he said, I should probably knock first. Mr. Mays' friend grabbed the steel knocker and hit it against the door several times, mockingly,

but quietly uttering, is anyone home? The group waited about 30 seconds before their tension broke. The guy next to the door shrugged his shoulders and went to walk back to his friends, but as he did, the light ball between them surged and exploded. The boys shielded their eyes and looked back to their lone friend by the door as he lowered his hands. One of the metal sheets of the makeshift roof dropped. The edge of the sheet fell directly on the boy's front. forehead, slicing it open and sending a wave of blood down his face. The impact apparently knocked him

out, and he fell back against the door, knocking it open in the process. The entirety of the group rushed through the dim light to their friend, barely noticing the seemingly pitch-black room that now lay before them. Mr. Mays was the first to make it to his friend's side. He lifted the guy's head into his arms, immediately taking off his jacket and putting it over his forehead in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Once the group had calmed down, Mr. Mays noticed that the arm that had been bracing his friend's head was soaking wet. He was confused about this and was attempting to sort it out when one of his friends started talking.

He said something along the lines of, The lights. We have to go. When Mr. Mays took notice. You know when you turn off a light? He told the class, and everything is almost pitch black, except the light of the bulb dying out or cooling down. It was like that. But there were so many of them. At least 20 light bulbs had lit the room seconds ago and now only looked like stars in the darkness.

That was definitely terrifying, but that wasn't the scariest thing. There was still a very dim light coming from the hallway behind them, and though it was weak, it lit the room up just enough to see the shapes of tens of people standing less than 10 feet from them. Mr. Mays's friend went to say something as one of the bulbs to their right flickered to life. Let me interrupt at this point and say that Mr. Mays was a generally playful guy. He had that tone of voice that makes you want to respond. Basically, he could say, let's go jump off a cliff, guys, and you would want to respond with, all right, Mr. Mays, show us the way.

That is a ridiculous statement, but it gets the point across. He was a charismatic guy. The whole story up to this point has been told like a campfire story. He had the voice inflections of someone attempting to be mysterious and scary, which worked, but was noticeable. At this point in his tale, I recall that changing completely. He was no longer attempting to spook anyone. I could tell that this section was difficult for him.

Either he was a very good actor, or it really was a terrifying memory for him to relive. He told us that the light bulb came to life and illuminated the group of people in front of him. In the dim light, he could see children, at least 20 of them, in just the visible light. They were all dressed in nightgowns that looked to be tattered and torn, stained dark with something. Their hair was long. Every single one of them looked like they had not had a haircut since birth. Some of the children were almost completely obscured by the length of it. Every single one of them didn't appear to have seen a shower or a nice bath in their entire life.

Mr. Mays told us that the most terrifying part of the whole thing was that none of the children were moving. They were all standing, staring. Most of them only visible from the faint light reflecting off their eyes. His whole group was paralyzed with fear for several seconds when they heard what sounded like an animal in the distance yelping. The way it was described was like the sound of a dog crying multiplied by ten. This spurred the group to life, just as the children began to step forward. His friends grabbed the injured one and lifted him out of the room and into the hallway

in an instant. Mr. Mays took another second to move and had difficulty finding his bearings. He reached to his left in an attempt to find a wall to lean against and ended up finding a handle, then pulled it, never losing his vision on the children. He bolted for the door and then noticed what he had grabbed onto. A showerhead protruded from a cement wall, reaching maybe a foot into the room. There was something leaking from it, but it was too dim to tell what it was. He realized that it had been leaking onto him, but he didn't care.

There were now children stammering towards him as an animal cried in the distance and his friend was seriously injured. As he left the room, he made a point to emphasize that he could make out several more showerheads on the wall near the single dim-lit bulb. That's why I call them the showers. Mr. Mays told the class, I was transfixed, sitting as far forward as my desk would allow, bracing for more. I slammed the red door behind me and ran through that hallway faster than I have ever run before or since. I made it back to the car and we drove out of there like a bad out of hell." A couple of students snickered at his use of the word hell. So when you're out trick-or-treating tonight, make sure that you know exactly where you're headed,

and don't go out to any abandoned farmhouses. I mean, there aren't many around here, but you're all smart kids. Except Jerry. The class laughed and the mood lightened as the bell rang for passing period. Mr. Mays turned the light on and thanked everyone for listening, reminded them about the paper due next week and told us to have a safe and happy Halloween. Students all around were a buzz with theories about the story they had just heard. I bet it was some sort of crazy Nazi-eyed out, said one girl.

I think they were all ghost babies that were killed by a dog, said someone else. I couldn't theorize in the slightest. I was still caught up in the moment. The way that Mr. Mays had told the story and the detail that he included in it left me feeling like we didn't get the whole story. A couple of days later, I stayed after class. and asked him about how it really ended and what happened to his friend. He laughed and said that his friend was fine, and that it was honestly, he whispered this part,

probably due to some of the drugs they were on at the time. Mr. Mays winked at me as if to say, don't tell anyone about the drugs bit, kid. And I smiled and left. I lived in that town for another couple months, and then we rapidly moved halfway across the country to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I twisted the story around and told it around campfires as I got old. and it was always a hit, but I always changed the ending, letting the friend die of blood loss or from being dragged away by the children. It wasn't until college that I got a chance to talk to Mr. Mays again.

I went to college in northern New York, not for any reason associated with the story. College was a fun time for me. I continued being the same ham that I always had been. It wasn't until sometime around my junior year that I ran into Mr. Mays at a bar that I frequented. Initially, I couldn't be sure that the person I saw laying with his head buried in his arms at the bar was Mr. Mays. The only trait that grabbed my attention was a sweater that he used to wear on his birthday during class.

The shirt simply read, I'm the birthday boy. I told my group of friends to grab a table and that I would join them in a second, then walked over to the man at the table. Mr. Mays? I said, and the man looked up. The man took a second to look at my face before he smiled, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, Hey there, son, how you been?

I could smell some strong whiskey on his breath, and his cheeks were flushed. The look in his eyes told me that he was three sheets to the wind and probably had no idea who I was. Mr. Mays, it's Jack. I was a student of yours for a couple semesters about six or seven years ago. His face changed, and a genuine look of recognition set in. He took a calmer tone, smiled, and said, How you been, Jack?

We talked for a solid 20 minutes. I told him what I'd been doing for the last several years, and he told me. Apparently, he was still teaching at the same school, doing the same old schick, as he called it. I asked if everything was all right, and he said that they were as good as they have ever been, or were ever going to get. It took me to realize that I was an adult that was having a conversation with another adult. Every time I had spoken to Mr. May's previously, I had been in the student-teacher relationship. But now, I was just a guy having a drink with a friend at the bar. My friends eventually left, and I continued to drink with Mr. Mays.

He told me all about his divorce and his kids, things that I never would have asked or cared about previously, but now I cared. He was a real person to me, not just an idol anymore. This was a guy who had real problems, not the infallible teacher that I once thought he was. It had been several hours before I even brought up his story about the showers. I told him all about my history with urban legends and scary stories, and he just laughed. When I mentioned the story that he had told us years ago, he almost seemed uncomfortable. He finished his whiskey and signaled for another, and then turned to me and got very serious.

Listen, Jack, I don't know why I kept telling that story year after year. His words were slurred, or my hearing was messed up, We were both sufficiently blitzed at this point. That's what the therapist told me to do when I was younger. I had to tell people to come to grips with it or some shit. He took a big swig of his drink. Wait, you're therapist. Mr. Mays laughed heartily and looked at me.

Of course, Jack. You think something like that wouldn't fuck a person up? I was confused, but smiled nonetheless. Things had just gotten very strange. But, I mean, you said you were all. on drugs or something, right? No one was too terribly hurt. You were all okay, right? He almost got cartoonish with his sadness in the next several seconds. Of course we didn't, Jack. Why do you think I'm here right now? I was puzzled, and quickly filled with the thousand questions that I wanted to ask him,

but I let him carry on. Tim, he fucking, he didn't make it, Jack. He laughed. His laugh turned suddenly to tears. I fucking took him, they did. I don't even know. Cops told us we were just drunk, but he wandered off and got taken by the wildlife. He didn't know. He didn't see it, Jack. I was absolutely stone-faced at this point.

Mr. Mays was carrying along like I knew the actual story. I didn't. His friend disappeared. I didn't know. I wish they had found the body, though. Then we could have shown him. He sighed. That's a bad place, Jack.

I don't know anything else to say. It's a bad place. He carried on for a couple minutes more about his friend and the fun they had back before they went on that trip, and I let him talk. It was only a few minutes later that his phone rang. Hello, sweetheart. He whispered into his phone.

I'll be out in a second. I love you, baby. The person on the other end hung up the phone, and Mr. Mays got up to leave. It's been nice seeing you, Jackie. You got a good head on your shoulders, boy. Make sure to use it. He began to walk out the bar.

Mr. Mays! I yelled after him. Yeah, Jack. Where'd you say all that shower business took place? Where? Hell, I didn't mention it. Somewhere outside Broken Bow, Nebraska. Fucking hell on earth, if you ask me.

Mr. Mayers walked out of the bar after waving to me, running into the wall before eventually finding it. the door. That was the last time I would see him. I'd never be able to tell him the impact that he had on my life, or rather, the impact that his story had on me. He'd never know about the trip we took after graduation, almost mimicking the one he and his friends had made. He would never know that the things he saw at that place were real. Why? Well, because he died about a month later. His liver failed on him. It's all right, though, because his family was with him in the hospital room. He got to die around people that cared about him, and that is all I can

ask for a man like that. I experienced that place, too, several years later. That is where my story turns. The following is the story of how I came to find the showers, and why I will never, ever go anywhere near Nebraska again. I'll finish this story when I'm sober. The memory is clear enough. I'm awake now, semi-sober, and ready to finish this for you all. The internet and whoever cares to hear it. I didn't find out that Mr. Mays had passed away until a couple of months after the funeral service. Initially, I was going to seek out his family in order to send my condolences, but it wasn't as if Mr. Mays and I were best friends or anything like that, so I refrained.

I continued through my college career and graduated a year or so after our bar meeting. Graduating with English as my major wasn't a mistake, but it wasn't exactly something that landed me any sort of immediate jobs after college. Now, I had saved a pretty solid amount of money while I was in school and decided that I deserved a bit of a vacation, if you will. I took my spare cash, got together with my college buddy Steve, packed up and hit the road, aiming for somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. I'd lived near Littleton, Colorado when I was younger, and remembered loving the area,

so this destination was as good as any. The trip was a success. We made it somewhere around Estes Park, Colorado, and found a cheap cabin that we rented for about a month. The days were filled with lounging, hiking, and generally things that involved little to no work on our parts. After our rental was through, we packed up again and headed on our way back east. Sometime during this trip, we had met up with a couple Estes Park natives in one of the local bars. I never typically hung out with them or anything like that. We just had conversations now and then over drinks and food. One night, these guys were paying their tab and packing up to leave

awfully early. They were usually there until the wee hours of the morning. When we questioned them about it, they told us that they were headed to a little get-together with some friends of theirs, and they invited us. Having nothing else to do, we hopped in the car and followed them to the party. The party itself was very low-key and ultimately inconsequential to the story. However, the important thing is that at some point in the night, we were all sitting around the fire and swapping ghost stories. At this point in my life, I wasn't as much of a ham as I was in my younger years, but, with a little encouragement, I started on a couple of stories that I remembered telling in my youth. Eventually, I made it to Mr. Mays' story about the showers. Every time that I had told

it after hearing it from Mr. Mays, I had spiced it up a little bit, but out of some sort of subconscious respect for my former teacher, I went straight into the version that he told my class in my sophomore year in high school. The group enjoyed the stories. for the most part, the shower being the mutual favorite among the partygoers. Steve and I left for the cabin around five in the morning, and he asked me about that story on the drive home. I told him all about Mr. Mays, that class, my love for everything horror-related and whatnot, and he suggested that we try to find that place on our return trip to New York. Initially, I was reluctant, simply because I didn't feel like aimlessly wandering through Nebraska for days,

looking for some old farm building that was probably demolished at this point. But a couple of days before we left Colorado, I told Steve that it sounded like fun. We weren't going to be able to do another trip like this for a long time, so I figured that we might as well make the best of it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought of it as a little tribute to Mr. Mays, a guy that, in retrospect, helped me realize that I wanted to be a writer. Anyway, we left Colorado and made the long, boring, and busy. Barron Drive to Broken Bow Nebraska, or Hell on Earth, as Mr. Mays had put it.

We found a motel in town and hung around for a couple of days, venturing out a hundred miles or so in any given direction each day after that. I had remembered Mr. Mays telling us that it was somewhere outside of Broken Bow, but I don't think he got any more specific than that. We tried asking the townsfolk if they had any information about the showers, but we were usually met with blank stairs or eye-rolls when we told them what exactly this place was. was, the only person who seemed to know anything about it was an older lady that worked at a gas station on the outskirts of town.

I don't recall her name, but this woman was just one of those cheerful old people, very helpful and generally interested in what anyone had to say to her. Steve had started talking to her at the checkout, and she asked about our license plate, commenting on the fact that we were very far from home. We had nowhere in particular to be, so Steve and I ended up talking to this woman for about 15 minutes, at which point we brought up our hunt for the place known as the showers. Initially, the name didn't ring any bells with the woman, which made sense, seeing as Mr. Mays had just given it that name after his experience there.

But when I began to describe the details that I remembered from his story, the friendly old lady interrupted. Her tone was not scornful or mean in any way, but she became very terse and deliberate with her words from that point on. Following her statements, she attempted to be cheerful again, excusing her. herself to the restroom and wishing us the best on our return trip to New York. Steve and I returned to the car without a word. Both of us were thinking about what the lady had said.

Again, she didn't seem to be angry at all. She just didn't want to hear another word about it. We were driving back to the hotel before Steve said something. Well, I mean, if I had to live in a place associated with an urban legend or something like that, I would totally mess with anyone who asked about it. He said. I mean, eventually you'd just get tired of people asking about it, and so you'd just try to scare them to get them to shut up, wouldn't you? I agreed with Steve and kept driving, but the whole

experience wasn't sitting right with me. If this was some sort of well-known legend in the area, why did no one else in town seem to know anything about it? But I managed to shrug it off. Mind you, neither of us was scared of finding the showers. This little excursion on our road trip was more of a scavenger hunt, a cap off to an overall relaxing vacation. Steve and I were basically like tourists, hunting for the site at which a famous movie was filmed or something like that. We went into the whole situation with little to no expectations and a fleeting hope that we would be able to find this place.

We spent another day in Broken Bow before we took our next trip out to try to find the showers. Nebraska isn't as terrible of a place as people make it out to be, but it really isn't all that exciting. We found a bar and spent some time there, and that was just about the experience. stent of our activity on our day off. When we did get back on the road, we decided that we would attempt to stay off the main road for as much of the day as we could. I knew that there was no way that this place was going to be off the highway, and I remembered some detail about a dirt road in Mr. Mays' story, so we went looking for those. This was a fairly futile effort, most of Nebraska

is dirt roads. It was seven in the evening when we came upon a small but thick forest. I used the term lightly, but for Nebraska, this place was like an oasis. The trees were full and thick, shrouding most of the insides in darkness. The sun was setting, and even though we had run into a few of these random crops of trees, we agreed that this one showed more promise than any of the others. There wasn't really a road, but there looked to be a path where a dirt road might have been at some point, so we drove along that. If the car was able to handle the rocky mountains, a dirt path in Nebraska would give us no trouble. We moved slowly and carefully along the trail, making sure to clear any fallen trees in the

road or rocks that would render the car useless when the sun finished setting. It was pretty dark in this place during the day, but when night came, it was something else entirely. I had an inkling at this point that we had found the right place, but I didn't want to jinx it, so we continued onward. I didn't realize it at the time, but the little bits of light that managed to penetrate the canopy in this miniature forest actually made it look as if the tree branches were trying to grab the car, just like Mr. Mays had mentioned in the story.

I'm still convinced that he had made up the part about animal eyes, though. The most aggressive creature we saw in the woods was a dead rabbit on the side of the road. It didn't have any obvious signs of death. It just looked like it had simply lied down and never bothered to get up. We drove around in the darkness for quite a while before we found a clearing. We had to move several clusters of branches out of the way before, but right in front of our exit was a giant, dead monster of a tree. There was no way we were moving this one, so we got out and turned on the bright headlights

in hopes that it would illuminate the area in front of us. There was a feeling of excitement mixed strangely with fear when I saw what lay 50 feet beyond the clearing. There, lit partially by the headlights of the car and a little bit from the light of the crescent moon was what appeared to be an old barn house. This wasn't a typical farmhouse. It was larger than the barns I had seen in films and didn't have any sort of crest. It basically looked like a small warehouse. I wasn't entirely sure at this point if this was the place we were looking for, but it was definitely the closest we had come. I moved through the brush until I was roughly

20 feet from the entrance, at which point all the growth seemed to stop. I didn't know if the owners had done something to the soil, but the whole structure had a border around it, which was clear of any sort of plant life. I approached the entrance to the building, a large sliding door as Steve came up behind me with two flashlights in hand. So you were just going to run off into that place in the dark? He laughed. I gave a half-hearted chuckle and grabbed one of the lights from his hand.

Mine was a little but pretty bright flashlight. It was the kind that hikers would most likely fasten to their backpacks, just in case they were stranded at night. It worked well enough. I grabbed the metal door with both hands, holding the flashlight in my mouth, and gave it a tug. It moved slightly, creaked a bit, but there was no way I was doing it by myself. Steve came up from behind, set his flashlight on the ground, grabbed the door, and said, One, two, three!

We pulled at the door with all we could muster. Once we had managed to move it a couple of inches, it must have latched back onto its track, because it slid very easily, stopping hard with a loud and echoing thud when it was completely open. Steve picked up his flashlight and walked behind me. I had already moved inside. The inside of the structure was exceptionally bare, almost troublingly so. I wasn't entirely sure how far we were from the nearest home or small town, but there wasn't even the slightest bit of evidence that anyone had been inside this building for years. There were no broken beer bottles or empty bags of chips. There wasn't even any animal

droppings or eager plants that managed to grow here. The room was expansive, larger than your average farm, but not the warehouse-sized monstrosity that I believed Mr. Mays had described in his story. I was sure it was simply a holding area for farming equipment or something similar at some point. Disappointed, I wandered near the entrance while Steve ventured into the expanse of darkness. As I was running over the details of the story in my mind, something struck me like a sack of bricks. In Mr. Mays' story, there was a silo near the barn.

I ran outside, my eyes adjusting easily, because at the very least, it was brighter outside. I looked in all directions, running around the perimeter of the building. Surely, if there was ever a silo near this place, there would be some evidence of it somewhere. But despite my hopes, there was nothing but a cluster of thick bushes on one side, brush and dirt everywhere, and the forest that we had come from. I walked back into the building, frustrated and tired. Steve was still excited, eagerly running around the inside of the building. Even if we could just find a showerhead or a pipe, he said. Then we'd know it was true.

Just keep looking with me. I didn't want to ruin his excitement. I had told Steve the story several times, but obviously he didn't realize that this just wasn't the place. The building was weird, yes. It was out of place and oddly pristine, but it wasn't the last. location of the showers. I let him explore for a little bit longer before I called him over. This is probably as close as we're going to get, man. I said. But this isn't it? Remember the silo? His face went from excitement to disappointment in an instant, much like a younger child who didn't

get the present they wanted for his birthday. I patted him on the shoulder. This is still pretty cool, though. I mean, we could still tell people we found it. I was reverting back to my old habits quickly. Steve laughed. Yeah, man. I guess we could. It is definitely creepy enough. We should get some pictures as proof, you know? I agreed with him. I'm going to go grab the camera real quick. He said as he bolted out of the entrance of the building. I was left alone in the building. It was very quiet when I was alone in there. I could hear the faint sound of Steve running through the brush to the car. But once he was far enough away, everything was quiet. I remember not hearing wind or the

chirping of crickets as I walked deeper into the dark, flashlight in hand. I was convinced that there had to be something. As I approached the far corner of the room, the sound of my feet scraping against the dirt was interrupted by a soft, hollow thud. I stopped, trying to figure out what it was. I put my foot down hard against the ground and heard it again. I stopped one more time, realizing that the floor I was standing on was covering something hollow. I walked to the wall of the room, looking carefully at the floor to try to spot any holes or gaps. As far as I had known, it was solid ground that this thing sat upon, so I was convinced that I had found a hatch or a basement or something.

I heard Steve coming back through the brush as I shouted, Steve, come over here. As I went to say the word hollow, I hopped a little bit, hoping to recreate the sounds so that he could hear it upon entering the door. The second that my feet made contact with the floor, I felt it give out beneath me. The memory of falling is fuzzy, but I do recall hearing wood splinter. I remember seeing the light from Steve's flashlight falling away into complete darkness. It wasn't a long fall, but I must have fallen in a terrible position because I know that

I lost consciousness for several seconds at least. When I woke up, I was staring at a bright light. For an instant, I had thoughts about approaching the fabled light at the end of the tunnel. I was angry at myself. You died in Nebraska, Jack? Wow, you do know how to fuck up. My self-depreciation in the afterlife was interrupted by what sounded like Steve's voice. Jack! Jack! Can you hear me? Dude, wake up! Please wake up!

He yelled. I managed to lift my head up off the floor, just enough for him to celebrate. The pain in my head was immense, but it was outweighed by the pain shooting through my knee. I knew I had a concussion, but the pain in my knee was just so much more pressing. I looked around until I found my tiny flashlight, then sat up and reassured Steve. I'm okay. I just hurt my knee. I bumped my head, too, really hard. Thank fuck, man.

I thought you were dead. Imagine that, huh? Dying in Nebraska. It'd be awful. His words made me laugh a bit, but I stopped myself. The slightest shaking hurt my head and made me incredibly dizzy. I guess a rope? Said Steve.

What? I asked quietly. Should I get a rope to get you out, or do you see a ladder? I looked around the walls that sat in front of me. They were smooth cement. There was no way I was climbing out of here. Yeah, get a rope. I told him.

It's buried under all of our stuff. I think it might be in my red climbing bag, but I'm not sure. Steve nodded, telling me to hang in there and that he would be back in a little bit and then ran off. The silence that followed was uncomfortable. After the sound of Steve's feet scraping the floor above me faded away, I was only able to hear that buzzing that occurs in total silence, intertwined with the pulsing in my head. I pushed myself over to the nearest cement wall and braced myself against it, resting and breathing deep in an attempt to calm myself.

The cement was unnaturally cold against my back. It was summer, so I only had a t-shirt on, but it felt like ice even through that. Again, this observation was primarily made after the fact. In the moment, it just felt good to lean against something. I sat there, waiting for Steve in this underground basement, and I began to feel uneasy. I felt like an idiot for falling down here. I felt pain from my injuries as well. That all seemed to fade into one emotion in an instant when I heard what I could only identify

as breathing somewhere to my left. I convinced myself that it was my injured mind playing tricks on me for a few moments. until my mind decided to rapidly replay Mr. Mays' story. When I had first heard it in that classroom years before, I was more impressed than I was scared. But now, sitting in a dark basement in the middle of Nebraska, I felt something that I hadn't felt in a long time. It couldn't even be summed up in the word fear. As I sat there, I felt an all-encompassing dread.

I pointed my flashlight to my left, the direction from which I thought I heard the sound. The light didn't reach the other wall. It was too far away, but I was comforted to see absolutely nothing there. I breathed deeply for a couple more seconds before I heard another noise in the dark. It was very quick, and I cannot be sure that it wasn't my own body moving around without me noticing. But I thought that I had heard a scraping sound, not ten feet in front of me. It sounded like the noise your feet make when you're walking across a dirt-covered floor.

Before I could react, I heard the breathing to my left again. Closer this time. There was no way this was real. I hadn't seen so much as a spider web in this building, and now I was convincing myself that something next to me was breathing. I was angry at myself for getting so worked up. I told myself that the human brain is constantly hallucinating. I told myself that while in silence or darkness, the brain will make up sounds to fill the gaps

or make you think you see things that aren't there. I channeled my inner skeptic in order to calm myself. It worked. It worked until I saw a flash of something in front of me. I can't be entirely sure what it was, but I heard the accompanying sounds of feet scraping against the floor, and I began to swell with dread. I decided that the best course of action at this point was to turn off my flashlight, assuming that if they couldn't see me, they couldn't get to me, whatever they might be.

I turned off my flashlight and was left in complete and total darkness. The bulb of the flashlight faded as it cooled. and I put it in my pocket, simultaneously pushing back against the cold cement wall in an attempt to stand. I managed to get up on my feet, well, foot, and found that I couldn't stand to put any pressure on my injured knee. I limped to the corner, humming to myself, trying to break the deafening silence. I called for Steve as loud as I could manage, but heard no response.

He was probably in the back of the car, still hunting for the rope. There had to be a ladder or something somewhere. I continued to hum, and my heartbeat, which had been beating almost out of my chest, slowed to a manageable rate. I moved along the cement wall, keeping my whole body against it, and the weight off my injured knee. I had traveled what I guessed to be about ten feet when my head made contact with something in front of me.

I tumbled to the ground. My concussion must have amplified the pain because it was blinding. I reached both hands to my forehead when I felt something warm and wet with my fingers. I searched for a cut anywhere on my forehead, but I couldn't find one. I desperately searched for the flashlight as I sat up and tried to get back against the wall. I grabbed the light in my right hand, bracing against the wall with the other. I turned it on and pointed it into the darkness where I was just lying. The floor was wet, but the dirt had muddled the color of whatever the liquid was.

I tried to get my eyes to focus on the puddle, tried to convince myself that it was my blood, when I saw another drop fall into the puddle. Words lack the ability to describe the way I felt when I heard that drip noise again, and saw yet another tiny ball of liquid fall into the puddle. I think I knew, even then, exactly what the source was, but I was endlessly trying to convince myself that I was wrong. I lifted the flashlight up and pointed it at the source of the liquid. What stared back at me was a pipe that protruded at least ten feet from the cement wall.

The metal was rusted and cracked. Little bits of liquid began to seep from it. At the end of the pipe was a simple shower head, aimed downwards at the ground. You know that feeling when your stomach drops? In this case, I think mine literally did, because I vomited immediately. It got all over my shoes, but that wasn't the least bit important to me at the time. I ignored the pain in my knees and shuffled along the wall as fast as I possibly could. I heard noises, but I can't be sure if it was just the sounds of my own movement or something else.

I managed to duck under the next showerhead. This one was higher up on the wall and seemed to be leaking the same liquid as the other one. I felt like I was moving along something infinite. Every now and then I would have to duck or move under another metal bar, another showerhead. They began to pour more profusely, but the liquid was too thick to come out easily. The room began to smell. I remembered immediately the way that Mr. Mays had described it. I grabbed my shirt and put it over my nose.

nose, trucking onward. But it didn't stop the smell for an instant. It smelled like vomit. It smelled like shit. It smelled like burnt hair. It smelled like rot. I was still moving against the wall when I fell into some sort of outlet. I hit the dirt ground hard, adrenaline coursing through my veins.

The pain still managed to break through, though. My flashlight was still in my hand. I aimed it and examined my surroundings. Sitting in front of me was a doorway. There was a door there, though it looked aged now. It had a nice little design on it, a doorknob and a knocker that looked like a snarling demon. The red paint was peeling from it, flaking off and falling to the ground in front of me. I clumsily rose and busted through the door, narrowly missing a piece of hanging sheet metal

in front of me. I was crawling now. There was no way that I could run. The walls and ceilings were lined with metal. The kind that you would see on the roof of a farm. pieces of wood seemed to brace the sheets, holding this makeshift tunnel together. I couldn't risk sliding against that and possibly cutting myself on the metal, or hitting the wood and causing a cave in, so I crawled.

I pulled myself for what felt like miles, running into walls every now and then because the path seemed to curve like a snake. I had no idea where I was in relation to the hole that I had fallen through, but I told myself that there was an exit at the end of this. Had I not been crawling, I would have surely hurt myself. far worse. There were parts of the tunnel in which the ceiling dipped down to maybe three feet above the ground. It hadn't caved in because the ceiling still lined it. Someone had built it like this. This, again, is in hindsight. I didn't care at the time. I kept telling myself

that there was nothing behind me, but I swore that I heard feet scraping only a few inches behind mine. My jeans would brush against my legs every now and then, making it feel like someone was touching me, and even now, I still can't completely convince myself that someone wasn't. I crawled and crawled until I reached an upslope. With joy, I looked ahead of me. There was a cellar door. The door was made of wood. I knew this because I could see light through them. I couldn't be sure, but I thought it might be the light from the car's headlights. Besides all of that, I was just so immensely happy to find an exit. I crawled all the way to the door and threw my shoulder into it.

It budged, but it didn't open. I began to scream, but my throat seared with pain. The most I could manage was a harsh crying noise. It sounded like a dying animal. I collapsed in exhaustion and pain, my eyes staring up at the slits of light before me. I was so close to being out of here I could taste it. It was in that moment of silent defeat that I heard a noise that was, without question, something moving in the tunnel.

It sounded like something was being dragged across the floor. It would move, pause for a second, then move again. I had nothing left in my stomach to throw up, but I began to gag. I gathered myself silently and tried to steady my hand enough to focus the flashlight into the tunnel. What I saw, I still cannot rationalize. I know what I saw, but I cannot convince myself that it was actually there. I can't stop telling myself that I was hallucinating. I saw a child in a dirty sleeping gown.

The gown was stained with something dark and brown, with occasional splashes of deep red. The child was extremely frail, like the pictures that people might see of a Holocaust victim. I could only make out one eye, brightly reflecting the light of my flashlight, in between huge tufts of long, dirty hair. It reached down beyond the fingertips of the child, which were caked with dirt. The boy or girl, I'm not entirely sure which, moved towards me with difficulty. It wasn't breathing hard, but it seemed that every movement of every muscle took every ounce of strength the child had. The thing that froze me, though, was the eye.

It was only visible because it was reflecting my flashlight, but even in that glint, I could feel the anger or deep hatred or something like that. This is the point in which the English language really lacks the right word. to explain the situation. I could tell that this child meant me harm. Whether it was a hallucination or not, the thing was getting closer. I started to cry. It was getting closer and closer when I heard a voice from behind me.

Hey, Jack. It was Steve. I was certain. I tried to talk back, fully intending to say, open this up and get me out of here. However, given my current state, I'm sure it sounded like garbled nonsense. I clawed at the door, pushing against it with everything I had, and finally breaking eye contact with the child. As I did, the flashlight rolled down the slope, coming to rest somewhere near the child's feet.

What do you see? What are you talking about? I closed my eyes. Just look at it. Tell me what you see. I was mumbling like a maniac when the voice told me, calmly. Rest for a second. I'll get it.

The statement took a second to settle in, at which, point I closed my eyes tight. Steve, just do it. Please. Please, just open it, please. I whimpered. Just get me out of here. My voice was beginning to get louder.

Steve, God damn it, open the fucking wooden door. I opened my eyes for a split second to see nothing but black hair, dangling in front of my face, a small glint of light hidden in the mess of tangles. I slammed my eyes shut and screamed with every ounce of energy I had. Open the door! The door behind me. gave way and I fell onto the dirt, taking a breath of fresh air. My eyes were still closed, but the first thing I did was scrambled to find the cellar

door and close it. Once I had done that, I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I saw the barn in front of me, illuminated by the headlights of the car. My head was pulsing with pain. I was covered in dirt and liquids that I didn't even care to know the origin of. My knee was, at the very least, dislocated, but despite all of that, I was in the out of the tunnel. I took a deep breath, buried my head in my hands, and said, Steve, why didn't you open the door? I waited for a response, but none came.

Steve, seriously, I was clawing, screaming for my life. I said as I looked behind me, my stomach must have been on the verge of falling out of me at this point because it shifted again. The only thing behind me was the large mass of bushes that I had seen while examining the perimeter of the building. I was angry. Steve, this is not the time! Come out of the bushes! I was getting ready to stand up when I heard a yell from in front of the building. A flashlight bobbed up and down in semi-darkness.

Steve was running into the open door of the structure, yelling my name and telling me not to worry. I must have lost consciousness at this point because when I woke up, Steve was standing over me, desperately trying to wake me up. His words were almost incoherent, at least to my ears. He helped me to my feet and began to walk me to. to the car. As we walked away, I saw my flashlight sitting just outside the cellar door. The light was fading. Steve brought me back to the car and then drove to the nearest hospital. I fell asleep, but he told me that he drove around for an hour before he found a main road. I don't think I ever

told him the whole story. I believe he thinks I was just injured from the fall. He never really asked about it, and we didn't stay in contact for much longer. It's not like we deliberately parted ways, we just sort of stopped hanging out after that trip and went our separate ways. I have never been able to fully understand what happened that night. There are many things that I can explain away as being hallucinations, but there are still many things that don't make sense. The shower heads were there, and they were leaking something. The door was real.

The tunnel was real. Most everything else can be semi-rationalized if I can convince myself that I had a very bad concussion, a very, very bad concussion. But the one thing that I couldn't have imagined was that cellar door was locked, and then it suddenly wasn't. I'm still as skeptical as I've ever been, but I believe in what happened to me at the showers. I'm not a hermit or socially awkward because of this. I drink a lot, but I'm still functional. But I will never return to Nebraska.

No one will ever be able to convince me otherwise. I don't watch horror movies either. There is absolutely nothing entertaining about being so too. desperately scared. That's it, really. There's no typical ending for my story. I was changed by my experience, yeah, but there was no way to change anything about it or fight back against it. I can't even convince myself that I wasn't just seeing things. Believe me, I've been trying for years. Prior to this, there was really no way of finding any information on the showers. The legend didn't extend outside the classroom of Mr. Mays. No one told stories like this.

to keep children away from a certain place or to scare them. It just wasn't known. I guess that's really the point of this whole story. I want people to know firsthand what this place is like. Maybe it's the drunk's rationale or the kid inside me wanting to spread these kind of stories again. I don't know. I don't care. But it's out there now for people to mold and warp to their needs.

Most importantly, it's finally out of my head. It's getting late, and I'm getting another drink. Cheers. Hey, everyone. It's been a while. I'm writing this from the same shitty laptop that I used to drunkenly post the showers online a little over five years ago. It has spent the better part of two years at the bottom of a box in my bedroom closet.

I haven't had much use for it recently, and it honestly isn't in the best shape. The damn thing takes about 20 minutes to start up properly, and dies the instant it unplugs from the charger. Some of the keys are missing. Some of them stick. I've spent a good amount of time carefully cleaning soft drinks and whiskey out of every nook and cranny, but a thing can only take so much abuse before it dies. Tonight, I got lucky.

She managed to boot just for me. I think she has one more decent story left in her, for better or worse. I don't really remember writing the first part of the showers. I do, however, remember what my life was like around that period of time. I was simultaneously listless and restless most days. I wasn't working in my chosen field and had too much free time to spend thinking about that fact. I told my story to some friends at a bar one random night, which shook loose some memories and led to that post.

One evening, I woke up and hopped on my laptop to find the story posted in a thread that I had left open. I had typed it directly into the submission box. I didn't even leave myself any time to edit. I just forced it out of me over a couple of long nights and threw it up on the internet for everyone to see. Despite the fact that I didn't necessarily want to relive the whole story in excruciating detail, the post was a real task to get through.

Each spelling and grammatical air made me want to shoot whiskey or chug bleach. I went with the former, and as far as I can remember, I have never made it through the whole story as it was written. It seems pointless to go back and read it even now. I've lived through the events enough times in my head. There's no need for me to subject myself to that again. I did read the comments on the story, however. I wasn't exactly overflowing with self-esteem at the time,

so seeing a bit of interest in my work gave my confidence a boost, if only for a moment. Now and then I would go back and check on them, but for the most part, I was forced to continue on with my stagnant life while the stories spread quickly around the web. I was working as a bartender in those days. I mostly split my free time between sleeping and drinking. These activities often overlapped with work.

I had carved a vicious little loop in a very short period of time. I wasn't a writer like I had hoped to be at that point in my life, so getting to play one on the internet helped to break up the monotony of my reality. Over the course of the several months following my post, I received several emails and friend requests from old classmates, or strangers who had taken an interest in the showers. My former classmates' messages generally consisted of their memories of Mr. Mays and his story, and asked nothing in return.

I guessed that most of them were either married or just needed a dose of nostalgia as a pick-me-up, so I often indulge them. Some of them actually wanted to meet in person, grab drinks, and really dive into the past. I lived half a continent away from the town where I attended Mr. May's class at this point, but that didn't stop me from making empty offers of company to several different people if our paths were ever to cross. One time, I wound up getting beer with a guy who was just passing through on a summer night in Denver. The meetup wasn't quite what I was expecting.

I'm 99% sure he had never had Mr. Mays as a teacher, or had even met me before that night. He dodged specifics when I asked him questions, and mostly just repeated my statements back to me in agreement. He nodded his head and said, Yeah, that's right, over and over again. But he was picking up the tab, so I didn't think about the strangeness of it all until the following afternoon. That was the first and last time that I met up with anyone from the Internet.

I received a surprising number of requests for the specific coordinates of the showers from a wide variety of personalities. There were people offering money, transport, and even what was essentially militia support if I were to take them there, like it was some sort of guided tour. I turned them down, but I would be lying if I said I didn't consider accepting some cash in exchange for the coordinates of any random barn I could pull up on Google Maps. As foreign and surreal as the whole thing was, I took pretty immediate notice to the pull that the story gave me over people.

After the post, I felt a lot more confident bringing it up in person. Every subsequent retelling made me feel like I was back around a campfire with a group of friends who hung on my every word. It felt good to have such a command over people's attention. I often found myself out with friends, searching for some decent conversation or a one-night stand, and would whip the story out like a party trick. Once we had an audience, a friend of mine would inevitably bring up the showers and beg me to tell the story. I would half-heartedly fight them on it for a while before giving in, ordering another round and launching into some variation of my bit.

It worked almost too well. Every time that I went out, I seemed to end up with either a new friend or another notch on my belt. I hardly had to try. For me, it was just stumbling down memory lane. After a while, I narrowed my sights, only bringing out the story for certain people for very specific ends. In short, I used it to get laid.

I'd chat with a girl for a little while, get to know her enough to take a guess at some of her fears, and work them into the climax of my story. I faced down ghosts, encountered demons, and even had spiders rained down on me from the shower heads. You name a fear, and I've likely used it in one iteration of the ending or another. But I managed to make it out of the showers intact every time, if only ever so slightly worse for wear. I appeared just as damaged enough by the experience that a pretty girl might feel some sympathy for me. I would thank her for her kindness while reaching out for her hands or maybe

her leg. This series of events always eventually led to the same place, hers. I'd stumble back to my barren apartment every afternoon, throw on some different clothes, and head back out to the bar for work, play, or both. It's unclear to me how long I spent living one. like the sleazy piece of shit that I just described, but I know that Karen broke me out of that pattern. Initially, she was just the next in a long line of women I had yet to sleep with. We met at a bar, I told her my story. We wound up at her place, but instead of passing out after sex like I normally tried

to do in order to avoid further conversation, we actually stayed up and talked. To my surprise, the conversations we had didn't feel like needless silence-filling bullshit. I felt like she understood me, and I her. She was an intensely empathetic person, a trait that I really latched onto. She wanted to talk through the emotions involved in what had happened to me instead of just listening to the story. I don't think I was particularly honest about any of that, but I hadn't experienced a reaction like hers after any of the countless times I ran through the showers, so I was caught

off guard and almost instantly smitten with her. In hindsight, I think our initial connections centered mostly on our mutual interest in getting really messed up and swapping stories about our shitty lives and mental alignments with another person so that we didn't have to make excuses for being alone, but it didn't feel like that at the time. Funny enough, we actually do have the mental stuff in common. Two different kinds of bipolar disorder. We are imperfectly complimentary, as Karen always puts it.

We thought that in some way it meant that we were perfect. for each other. I don't need to be told how stupid that sounds. But I get ahead of myself. Let me say this. Karen had a degree in political science from Rutgers, a wicked right hook, and one of the most persuasive and charismatic personalities that I've ever encountered. It worries me that truths like this, the little things that made up who she was as a person, aren't going to come across here because of what all this is ultimately leading to. I just don't want to do her a disservice. She's a flesh and blood real person, and any number of words I type about her won't paint her as she actually was.

You're getting my skewed version of who she was to me at that point in my life. It's nowhere near enough for you to understand who she actually was to judge her. Suffice it to say, we didn't end up together for two years because we were awful for each other. We had a genuine, intense connection that just wore down with time. and probably burned out too quickly as those things tend to do. At that point in my life, I was both lost and an asshole. Karen fit into a mold or archetype in my head. The Nancy to my Sid, the Bonnie to my Clyde,

and at the time I didn't consider the possibility that we might end up heading down the same path as both of those famously, toxicly codependent couples. She was my manic pixie dream girl, as awful as that was. I was just a lonely guy looking for a girl, with hair the color of a mootering who'd listen to the same shitty music that I listened to, and who could also solve the complex problem that was me. On any given day, she was the love of my life and my partner in crime.

The next she could be my antagonist, an obstacle in my search for happiness. It was all part of the story that I had seen play out in movies and books countless times before. It was a story I tried to force myself into. In the end, it was me trying to fit a square peg in a non-es, and a non-one. existent whole. She made me feel good about myself for a little while, for what it's worth. No one person had managed to do that before Karen.

I'm pretty sure I loved her. It's just that I was simultaneously loving her and using her without actually realizing what I was doing. That's not to say that she didn't get use out of me too. She started coming over to my place after we spent a couple of nights together, and she never really left. of her clothing and her toiletries started showing up around the apartment, and I just kind of rolled with it.

There was one night where I brought up how we never actually discussed living together before it already happened. That night ended with both of us yelling and blacking out in tears. But by the time Happy Hour rolled around the next evening, we were as good as new and in the same place that we were before the unpleasantness. The fighting and passive aggression fit the tone of my previously mentioned vicious loop, so it It didn't feel unhealthy at the time. We just sort of fell into a jagged groove with each other and accepted it as our life together.

I might have gotten a little off track. Karen took a great interest in my stories. The showers particularly interested her because she had come across reading of it on a podcast or YouTube channel and knew about it before she had even met me. She initially thought I was messing with her at the bar, trying to take credit for a story someone else had lived, but I was able to convince her of the truth and she didn't really. Let it go after that. After long nights out, we would lie in bed together, and she would ask me to tell it again,

like some sort of morbid bedtime story. With each retelling, I would embellish a little more, or shake loose a new memory, pulled from deep within my imagination to keep her on her toes and keep the story fresh. I don't know if she actually believed any of it after a while, or if she just wanted to, but it became our thing. Eventually, the story wasn't enough. She wanted to live it. Can we go there?

She asked constantly. Let's go to the showers. Karen wanted us to face down the showers, like some sort of boss fight in a video game. She constantly reiterated that it would be good for me to go back there and get perspective. She was also convinced that it might help me pick up riding again, something that I had neglected or made excuses to avoid throughout our relationship. She often told me that I had such good ideas, but something inside of me kept me from letting them loose. She genuinely wanted to help, but I wasn't willing to hear her out. I was steadfast in my

resolve to never return to Nebraska. I was certain that I had moved on from that horrific night entirely, that all I had brought back with me was a scary story. Everything seemed so obvious in hindsight. I think another aspect of her interest in the showers was an honest fixation. We both had a tendency to key in on a particular subject that interested us and dig deep into it, until there was nothing left to uncover. This means that Karen's attention towards a subject generally burned intensely before quickly fizzling out. My refusal to indulge her one last wish and take her to the showers kept that fire going.

She would strategically pick moments where I was drunk enough to loosen my lips, but not so drunk that I was lost on the shores of oblivion to ask me questions about the story. Occasionally, she brought up pieces of information I had told her while blacked out that would resonate with me enough to put me on edge for days on end. Even if I couldn't conjure the complete memories while sober, my body recognized them on some subconscious level. I knew that she was constantly treading closer to something in me that I didn't want to address, but I never stopped her outright.

I don't know if I even believed my own story by that point. I just knew that I started to feel a bit sick to my stomach every time that it came up. She persisted, using every method in the book to try to convince me to take her to broken bow. Every new detail that I revealed, real or otherwise, would motivate her to push me harder on the subject. It was the middle of winter when I finally caved. We were living in Fort Collins, Colorado at the time, which was only a relatively short drive from Broken Bow. I had held my ground in regards to returning to the showers for so long that my responses were almost reflexive at that point. I claimed that we didn't have time, and that I had forgotten exactly

how to get there. Both of which were partially true. But like I said, she knew when she could get to me. We were resting on the couch following a long night of bar hopping and friend drama. Fortunately, we had found ourselves on the same side of that particular dramatic situation, which meant that the night would likely end on a quiet note for us. We snuggled together under a blanket and watched the Coen's brothers' 2013 flick inside Lewin Davis. While Karen watched intently, I spent my time between nodding off and attempting to read a screenplay that a friend of mine had sent over. I had seen the film half a dozen times at that point, so I wasn't paying it my full attention. In it, um, spoilers, by the way, a struggling folk singer loses his way after his partner commits suicide.

Karen and I shared a mutual, morbid fascination with the subject of suicide, so it was only a matter of time before one of us said something about it. I would hate to jump off of a bridge, I think. She said. There's a chance you'd live after hitting the water and you'd wind up, what, paralyzed or something? I guess I'd feel like an even bigger waste of space if I couldn't even manage to kill myself. I wasn't sure if she actually wanted to get into that conversation or not, but I bit anyway. I couldn't jump.

I said, pulling her close, setting the script on the coffee table and shutting my eyes. There's way too much build-up and pressure. Then once you get the balls to finally do it, there's a whole lot of time to regret as your falling. It might seem unusual to some, but suicide wasn't a taboo subject between the two of us. It's difficult to explain to the unfamiliar with lifelong suicidal adiation, but discussing it in blunt and honest terms is comforting in a strange way. When faced with the struggle every day of your life, familiarizing yourself with something

often considered macabre was its own sort of victory. It felt like discussing it shined a bright light on it, know your enemy, and whatnot. if it were concrete or lava below me, I couldn't do it. I said. I don't want anything flashy, honestly. Give me a bottle of benzos and a couple of pints of Chivas, and I'll go gentle. Maybe I would jump. Karen thought out loud.

But I would do it from a plane. I just want that one last rush of adrenaline. You could stay alive and get a lot more of that. Not with those kinds of stakes. She had a point. I just want mine to be quiet. I want the background noise to fade slowly into silence. Let me drink myself to death with a book and some relaxing music to play me out before that.

I sighed. I'd probably put on some bright eyes or Elliot Smith. I don't know. Karen was quiet for a while after that. A character in the film had just overdosed in a bathroom stall when she woke up. I just don't want to go like that. At the very least, I'd want to be around friends or even family, if no one else is available. I had begun nodding off.

Kind of like your teacher. I stirred. She hadn't brought up the story in a while. Whenever she did, she never led into it with Mr. Mays. I guess. I slumped down onto a pillow and closed my eyes. I figured that if I fell asleep, she would have to leave the subject alone for the night. Let's go.

Go where? You know. I did. Liquor stores closed. No. Nebraska. It's a bit late. Next week, I'll take it off work.

Karen suggested. I'll get someone to drive. us. Why would anyone want to drive us to Nebraska? Brian seems interested. In Nebraska? Interested in your story, dummy. You could write about it. Karen was looking for anything she could use to get me on board. It's been a while since you've written. I could bring my camera. From the way you described it, I'm sure I could get some good pictures. I was growing more uncomfortable with each passing second, but the anxiety was offset by my exhaustion. I don't want to go. I moaned. I didn't put up much of a fight.

Please. For me? She begged. We never go anywhere and the apartment gets stuffy and it's my birthday next month. Okay, all right. I said, trying to appease her so that I could drift off. But what about the cat? The next thing I knew, our bags were packed and we were leaving the comforts of my apartment

for Nebraska. After I agreed to the trip, I had fallen asleep. By the time I woke up the following morning, Karen had already secured one of our friends as our chauffeur. was requesting time off of work that matched my schedule. She was happier than I had seen her in ages, and I was on quite a bit of Xanax, so I was looking for anything that might keep the good times rolling. With our schedules and switching moods, happy was sometimes hard to come by.

I kept that on the forefront of my mind as we loaded up the car. I fell asleep before we made it out of town and woke up in what felt like another dimension. my window, I saw only icy tundra that burned my eyes to look at. I hadn't seen that much sun in months. The reflection of the sun from the snow only amplified it. Our mutual friend Brian sat behind the wheel of my crummy 2005-4 to escape as we flew down the interstate towards Broken Bow Nebraska. Everyone called him the responsible one of our group of friends because he refused to get behind the wheel after drinking any booze at all. What only Karen and I knew was that he would often be high as a kite while driving us home and lecturing us on how he was the

only one of us not destined for a DUI. But he had never been in an accident and never received so much as a parking ticket, so we didn't say a word. Karen sat shotgun with a large styrofoam cup from Sonic resting in her lap. Knowing her, I assume she had poured out three quarters of the drink and filled the rest of the cup with vodka. After a minute, she noticed that I was awake. Hey, sleep well? She said, turning around in her seat to face me. A whiff of vodka with a hint of cherry lime made flooded my nostrils and burned my eyes. My guess was right.

Karen refused to travel long distances without what she affectionately called a roadie. She had adopted the term from her late father, Randy, who had killed himself when she was 14. He had opened his wrists over the sink in the bathroom while Karen was doing homework in her upstairs bedroom, and her mom was fucking a co-worker in her office at work. Her preoccupation with suicide at least came from somewhere logical. She had always idolized her dad and hadn't spoken to her mother in a decade. She told me the story often, reinforcing the idea that any of her idiosyncrasies related to Randy were exempt from criticism.

I made my only sensible move in that situation. Did she get me one? Extra cup is for you, my dear. Half and half. She winked and handed me the styrofoam cup of Cural. It was much needed. My jaw throbbed incessantly. I'd always had a problem grinding my teeth in my sleep.

It was so bad growing up that my canines actually grew outwards and resembled vampire fangs by the time I entered high school. The grinding hadn't been an issue in some time, though I figured that the previous night of partying, alongside the anxiety about the trip, had taken a toll. The first sip of the drink made me wince. It was about one-quarter lime-aid to three-quarters cheap vodka. Burnettes?

I groaned and took another sip. I guess it fits the scenery. Karen laughed. Nothing except the frost-covered remains of the fall harvest and frozen dirt surrounded us for miles. I looked out over the repetitive backdrop for several hours. Barren Earth occasionally gave way to tufts of shorn trees that reached futilely upwards towards the gray heavens. They resembled petrified roots that had aggressively snuffed out any hint of life that had once inhabited their numbers.

Every now and then I was able to spot rusting remains of a vehicle or a crumbling shed hidden among the branches, waiting patiently to be overtaken by the vindictive woodland. The three of us passed the time by fiddling with the frayed taped-to-auxiliary cord converter so that we could play music off our phones. Unfortunately, even when we had gotten that to work, it was still a crapshoot thanks to the spotty-forgy connection in the plains. Karen and I chain-smoked camel-crushed cigarettes, much to Brian's chagrin. He smoked, too, but he would only touch the baby blue packs of American spirits, which were all natural and burned for an eternity. Smoking anything else, he believed, was just asking for cancer, and had me wandering through foggy memories of the last trip to Broken Bow.

The haze left me frustrated and increasingly uncomfortable. Brian and Karen, despite having heard the story of the showers, tens of times by this point, prodded me for new details once we had crossed the state line into Nebraska. I dodged their inquisition by telling them how it was a violation of tradition to listen to a band while they were on their way to their concert. That shut them up and eased the pressure somewhat, but my teeth still ground against each other and my jaw ached. Simply driving through Nebraska was awakening something in me. I was anxious and reflexively defensive. Brian had grown up in New Jersey, and despite the relative emptiness of the two-lane highway we found ourselves on that morning,

he was driving like he was still there. I had no problems with sweeping across lanes without a signal, speeding, or jerking left and right to exit the interstate on any regular day. Uncomfortable as it might be to avoid the eye contact of an angry truck driver that Brian had cut off, we always reached our destination much faster than the GPS estimated. But that day, his highway practices made me queasy. The honks from several angry passerbyes got to be too much. So I threw in my headphones and pulled.

my beanie over my eyes in an attempt at sensory deprivation. It allowed me to drift off after a bit. I hadn't remembered my dreams in years, but I sure as hell remembered the nightmares I had in the back seat of my car that day. I was back at the bar near Cayuga Heights in New York, the same place where I had last met Mr. Mays almost a decade prior to that point. The muted voices of the faceless patrons around us hummed in the air, and the neon beer signs buzzed around us.

I sat next to my deceased former teacher. He was sporting the sweater that read, I'm the birthday boy. Mr. Mays looked up at me from the depths of a drink. His eyes were bloodshot from holding his booze and holding back tears. He didn't say anything, but the conversation between the two of us from years ago rang through my head, growing loud enough to fill the quiet space as the memory sharpened. I remembered his friend, the one he had lost at the showers. Mr. Mays looked away from me and into his drink.

He didn't look back up. The sound of dripping water echoed around the bar. Looking in front of me, I found a highball glass filled to the brim with whiskey. Without a second thought, I threw it back. I felt the familiar calming burn in my gut. I pursed my lips and sat it back on the table as the lights around the bar dimmed from the outside in. I rubbed my eyes and breathed deep to quell the burn, but it started to get it. get worse. The room continued to dim as the dripping noise rang around me, growing louder with each

subsequent drop. Looking up at the glass before me, I saw that it had filled again. The liquid still rippling from a recent pore. Another drop fell from above and broke the surface tension, spilling the drink all over the bar top. I looked up to see a showerhead hanging just beyond the light, the source of the liquid. The sound of trembling pipes echoed around me, and the showerhead began to shake violently. It erupted as I jolted back to reality, panicking and thrashing about for a moment. My knee and arm cracked loudly as I moved about and adjusted to the real world. Whoa. Easy now. Karen said with a chuckle. We were parked at a rest stop. Brian had pulled in with excess haste and hit the curb hard, which was what had woken me up. I tasted cherry limeate

crawling up the back of my throat and felt my stomach rumble. We're outside of Hastings. Don't know how far. Use the restroom now or forever hold your peas. Said Karen. I opened the car door and the icy wind pushed it back against me, slamming my foot in the door. Anoyed, I pushed harder and slipped out. I quickly jogged across the lot and into the unexpected bustle of the rest area. I tried to ignore the sounds of the showers and the stalls at the back of the room as I did my business and washed my hands.

It was difficult to dismiss the feeling of every drop in my chest. I couldn't tell if I was hallucinating, experiencing remnants from my nightmares, or if the sounds were really that loud. Anxiety like that hadn't gotten to me that bad in ages. The residual nausea that followed me from the dream caused me to gag as I approached the sink to wash my hands. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths as I pulled a flask from my jacket pocket. I looked around me to gauge the level of judgment I was about to receive.

The truckers didn't seem to take a second glance. a father in the middle, changing his infant at the station near the door, shot me a dirty look. Maybe he didn't. I'm not sure why I cared. It wasn't going to stop me. One of the showers in the back turned on full blast. My chest tightened. I took a pull from the flask and my stomach relaxed, causing the gagging to cease.

I cleared my throat of whatever had built up before the nip of whiskey and spit it into the sink. What came out was a bright shade of red. I didn't panic. A little blood just meant that I had forgotten to eat for a day or two. It wasn't anything major. After pushing back through the line of people that had gathered at the restroom door, I jogged back to the car. Karen was sitting inside with the window cracked,

holding a dying cigarette halfway out the window. When she saw me, she flicked it out and rolled the window up, gesturing for me to hurry. I hopped inside and we were back on the interstate within seconds. Don't fall asleep on us again. We're going to need you to steer us from here. Just get us to broken bow. I said, staring out over some of the harvested fields that looked like they had been burnt,

I'll guide us from there. I had become something of a tour guide, I suppose. We continued down the interstate for quite some time, while Brian and Karen sung songs. I sat in the back seat, working on grounding myself. My anxiety was manifesting an intense aching pain in my gut, coupled with heartburn that moved all the way up my esophagus. I attempted to drown the acidic taste out of my mouth with fire. vodka, tums, and a couple of Xanics I had stashed in my bag.

The combination helped me to forget about the pain, at least. We're going to need some gas if we're planning on hunting this thing in the boonies all night, said Brian. Well, there's only about ten gas stations in the entire state, so exit where you can. I said, I caught the tail end of a sign that read Broken Bow, but didn't catch the other information. Within minutes, Brian was exiting the highway and pulling into what appeared to be a gas station. It had pumps out front and a small convenience store. Behind it was a rickety single-story house.

Its Victorian design faded and chipped to all hell. Some of the windows looked busted in. The holes stuffed with assorted cloths and rags. I felt a sense of recognition as I stepped out of the car into the increasingly frigid wind and began to pump gas. Karen ran inside to get some snacks as Brian shouted after her. Give me some sunflower seeds. He yelled. She was a little.

already indoors. Brian looked at me. Jack, sunflower seeds? Please and thanks, man. He closed the door behind him before I was able to say that I wasn't planning on going inside. I grumbled as I walked into the old station. I figured that he was our designated driver, so I couldn't get too upset with him barking orders. I was just irritable and all over the place. The building had a familiar musty smell to it, which, to my surprise, helped to clear away some of the haze that I was stuck in. I I was pretty sure that it was a gas station I'd visited before. It wasn't unlikely, considering where we were at and the aforementioned sparsity of the stops in the area.

It was a neat coincidence. That's what I told myself at least. Karen stood up at the counter, making pleasant conversation about something or other with a girl who couldn't have been much older than twenty. She was pretty in the country bumpkin sort of way. Her dirty blonde hair was haphazily thrown up in a ponytail, and her clothes were faded. She wore a faded yellow t-shirt and torn denim jeans, both items lacked any identifiable brand name. She stood in stark contrast with Karen, whose every item of clothing and accessory popped

with so many different colors that she looked like a paint set. Everything about the girl at the counter seemed almost intentionally and distinct, washed out, vague. If I saw her face today, I don't even think I would know her from Eve. She blended right in with the browns and grays of her surroundings. If I had to guess, I would have said she was likely born and raised in the house behind the gas station and had no intentions of ever leaving Broken Bow Nebraska. I must have stared at her for a moment too long, because as the two carried on their conversation, the girl's eyes darted directly toward me. I was taken aback of how completely unsubtle she was about it.

She somehow didn't miss a beat in her conversation. Karen carried on without pause and only glanced my way for a split second. I'm sure that I looked anxious and sweaty from the booze, pills, and stress, so I didn't blame her for keeping an eye on me. But it was the unflinching nature of her gaze that threw me off. The sunlight poured through the window and bounced off her eyes in such a way that, when I would briefly look up at her, all that stood out were two tiny glints of light, pointed like daggers in my direction.

I attempted to work the pain out of my jaw muscles with my knuckles as I wandered the aisles. I had just about given into the discomfort and headed towards the exit when I heard Karen ask the young lady at the counter, point blank. What do you know about the showers? Again, the girl didn't miss a single beat. People don't deal with anything relating to that sort of business around here anymore. She spoke softly. My legs froze up and I turned my head towards her. She seemed to be speaking directly to me.

That was all a long time ago. Her eyes remained locked on mine. The pain in my jaw pulsed and my stomach. lurched. Consciously and unconsciously, I was rejecting the overwhelming feeling of deja vu. I raced for the small hallway in the back of the store. I held my stomach and refused to look up at the girl. I could still feel her gaze on me. Karen continued to press her unsuccessfully for information. I managed to get through the door and locked it behind me before falling to my knees in front of the toilet. My stomach clenched over and over again. Nothing came out as I dry heaved

and struggled to catch a breath. With the pressure behind my eyes and skull building, I drove my finger down my throat. I was convinced that if I could purge anything, I would feel better. I choked on my finger until I saw stars and finally gave up. I didn't need to pass out in a gas station bathroom. That sounded too close to rock bottom for comfort. My body was glazed with sweat as I sat back on the restroom floor and concentrated on deep breathing exercises to get my vision to stabilize and my heartbeat to slow. I had picked the exercises

up while Googling anxiety symptoms late one stressful night. They were a grounding technique for panic attacks and had never worked for me in the past, but I was desperate, and to my surprise, they worked. The pressure in my head slowly released as I wiped away the torrent of tears that had wet my face. My eyes aimlessly wandered the room, eventually landing on a green picture frame next to the mirror above the sink. It read, You can't choose them, you just got to love them, and housed a photo of what appeared to be

three generations of women laughing while posing outside a large green farmhouse. The youngest of the three, I recognized as the girl at the counter outside. Standing next to the girl was a woman that I believed to be her mother. Behind those two stood a sweet-looking older woman in a sundress.

The same dress that she had been wearing when I ventured into the gas station with my friend Steve many years. ago. The three of us had a nice conversation about the town and our post-college trip until our motives for staying and broken bow were made clear. When she found out that we were in search of the showers, her demeanor had changed drastically. She had given us a stern and very measured answer that stuck with me throughout my years.

It had sounded distinctly rehearsed to me at the time. It had sounded scripted. People don't deal with anything relating to that sort of business around here anymore. That was all a long time ago. I rose to my feet, head spinning, and splashed several handfuls of water on my face. A capillary had burst in my right eye, and it was blood red, dilated, and raining tears. I was a mess and couldn't bring myself care. After I spit it up a bit of blood into the sink, I shuffled out of the restroom and back into the hallway.

Before walking away, I shot one last glance back at the photo to confirm that I wasn't just imagining things. It was the same old woman standing outside the same green farmhouse. I rushed towards the front door with shaking legs, knocking bags of sunflower seeds and sticks of beef jerky on the floor along the way. Karen was still talking to the girl on the counter. I don't think the girl was staring at me anymore, but I didn't look up to confirm it. Was she ever really staring at me, or was I just losing it? I was a few steps from the door before Karen noticed me. She looked me up and down with a concerned look and put a reassuring hand on my back.

The comfort of her touch sent goosebumps across my body, and I shivered. You feeling okay? She asked. The girl at the counter stared at her with a suddenly vacant look on her face. Did you get sick? I looked at Karen, then at the girl, at Karen again, out towards the car, and back at Karen once more. Must have eaten something bad. I said, looking up at the girl without making eye contact.

A sensitive stomach. I watched her chin bob up and down as she nodded. I couldn't tell if the look in her eyes was one of understanding or one of suspicion. Thanks. Have a good day. I said, bolting out the door, the bell above me rang. I could feel it resonate in my jaw. Karen quickly followed me after giving the girl some sort of excuse for my behavior. Hey!

Karen caught up with me before I got to the car. What's up with you? I'm just tired. I told her. She saw it through the lie instantly and raised night. eyebrow, waiting for a more honest response. I took a nip that went down the wrong pipe and got a little sick. It happens. Just wanted to avoid her chudgy eyes. I gestured back towards the door. The girl no longer stood behind the counter. This is Jesus country, and I feel like she would try to walk me through a

12-step pamphlet or something. Karen seemed content with my answer. I'm not looking to get saved right now. She laughed. We continued towards the car, and I took a few more deep. breaths. My lungs burned. The temperature felt like it had dropped while we were in the gas station. The layer of sweat on my skin felt like it was starting to freeze. Karen stole my attention from the cold. Who needs Jesus when you have me as your guardian angel? Karen asked with a cartoonish smile and exaggerated wink. I faked a gagging sound. You're going to make me sick again. I said. She kissed me on the cheek and hopped into the passenger seat. Brian had put on a a dandy Warhol album and was jamming by himself. He sang along to the lyrics, poorly. He reached

his hand back towards me, expecting something in return. He stopped himself the instant that he caught side of my face. Uh, never mind then. All right, are we good to go, team? Karen took control of the phone and switched the song. She threw on her sunglasses and lit a cigarette. I tried my best not to look back as we drove away from the gas station and deeper into the Nebraska Highlands. The three of us I spent another hour and a half aimlessly driving around the outskirts of Broken Bow. I was giving directions to nowhere in particular, while still lost and thought about the girl from the gas station. It felt entirely possible that the whole coincidence was my imagination getting away from me. My mind could have been filling gaps in my memory with the strange, fictitious ideas.

Even if it was the same gas station owned by the same family, what did that matter? There were only a handful of gas stations around the area. I had said to myself earlier in the day. I remembered something that Steve had mentioned long ago about locals messing with people who invade their towns in search of urban legends. Maybe that canned, scripted phrase was how the family dealt with it. I was trying to push the other oddities from that encounter out of my mind with another drink when I spotted a familiar oasis on the horizon.

Karen and Brian had yet to notice. My stomach sank, my blood ran cold, and my vision became. a tunnel. I had somehow steered us there without realizing it. That was the only explanation I could muster. I had absolutely no clue where we were, but we still wound up there. Maybe you had to get lost to find them. Maybe they sought me out.

I kept my eyes down and stayed quiet. My thoughts raced and I began to feel lightheaded. Another anxiety attack slowly crept up on me, one symptom at a time. I hoped that if I said nothing, we would just drive right there. past that patch of forest, eventually call it a day, and let the showers fade from our lives forever. Brian turned the wheel towards the trees without a word of guidance from me. It was in that moment that I began to realize how desperately I had wanted to avoid that place. I didn't want to go back at all. I vowed to never go back there. I could feel myself saturating my two t-shirts and

hoodie with sweat while I attempted to keep my composure. Maybe we can call it a night and try again some other time? I stuttered. The words fell out of my mouth. They were slurred and almost robotic sounding. I'm going to try that ominous-looking patch of trees over there first, said Brian. But after that, I'm down for whatever you guys want to do. I'm getting a little tired anyway. I fixated on the tree line, as we gradually worked our way across the bumpy terrain of the previously undisturbed field. I could feel the pull of the farmhouse and the tunnels at the heart of that little forest. The naked trees shimmered in the setting sun's light.

The sight was more foreboding than comforting. The branches extended outward as if they were reaching for the car, beckoning us. Shit, this is looking pretty evil dead. Karen said. Ringing any bells? This is the place, I said. The words went through my mind and out of my mouth in less than a second. I hardly even tried to stop them.

Karen and Brian both celebrated, and I tore at my fingernails with my teeth. I made a promise to myself that I would never again step foot near broken bow, but I would be lying if I said that I had never imagined that homecoming. I thought a lot about some imaginary, brave version of myself returning to the scene of my personal horror show in search of answers. I'd come out of it with an actual ending for the saga of the showers, actual explanations for the things that I saw there. I could possibly even break a story about the nefarious nature of whatever the hell went down

in that place. I spent a long time thinking about these hypotheticals, informing my own theories about what the showers were over the years. But eventually, the efforts seemed pointless. A part of them existed only within the confines of my story, what I posted on the internet and had chosen to tell the world. With only my account to go on, the showers were a hundred different different story. different things to a hundred different people.

It was a meeting place of a violent, ritualistic cult to some. It was a site of experiments by the KKK or deeply rooted Nazis post-World War II for others. To many, mine was just another ghost story about a haunted farmhouse in Bum-Fuck Nebraska, and that was enough. I'm not dense. I know that the real draw of my story lies in the fear of the unknown. ambiguous horror was my bread and butter for a long time. That was why the story resonated heavily with some people and left others disappointed.

Some people needed those answers, and others would rather the mystery remain. At the time, I don't even know what I wanted from the place. For me, the showers were far more complex. They existed outside a rational thought and comprehension because my experience with them partially robbed me of those attributes. As the car rolled slowly through the thickening brush on that winter evening, I sat silently in my seat. Despite my previous experiences with the showers, the story I had recounted versions of hundreds

of times, I had no idea where exactly we were moving towards. Tree branches reached out and scraped against the car's exterior, forging new grooves and playing the metal like a warped record. The sharp grinding sounds felt like they were splitting my skull in two. I put in my noise-canceling earbuds and tried to focus on anything else. Brian winced as the branches dug into the car, looking back at me apologetically. Karen stared out at our surroundings, like a kid who had just stepped foot in an amusement park for the first time.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. As we drew near to the clearing, several troubling thoughts flooded my mind at once. I never really had a choice in making that trip. I was always going to end up back there. one way or another. I began to feel that the entire series of events was predetermined. Every time I told my story, Mr. Mays' story, I inched a little further along the path that would eventually pull me back to the showers.

Every drink I took to forget those tunnels, every girl I slept with to distract from the ceaseless nightmares, and every addition to the story I conjured up in order to distance myself from the reality of what happened to me there just further sealed my fate. I was free to leave broken bow, return home, and have all the booze and non-committal sex my body could handle, but every action I took was another futile attempt at prolonging the inevitable. I had accomplished exactly what I tried to do with urban legends as a kid. I put myself into the story.

In doing so, I had forever bound myself to that place, and it to me. The showers and I were inextricably linked, and I had forged that link willingly. The simple truth was this. I was always going to return to that clearing, that farmhouse, and those tunnels, because they were sitting there, waiting for me, and they were patient. Brian stopped the car abruptly, just short of the large clearing that hit at the center of the small forest. In front of us sat the monstrous, rotting carcass of a tree that was far too large to have grown

out of the middle of Nebraska. It had decomposed considerably since my last visit, but I recognized it all the same. I took a deep breath. One last chance to back out. The point of no return. I could probably get us over this, but I've already scratched the shit out of your car, and this might do a number on the undercarriage. Brian said.

We can walk. Karen said, pulling her coat from the back seat. You guys can walk, said Brian. I have some smoking to do. He smiled and brandished a small bag of weed that he had pulled suddenly out of thin air. I looked at Karen confused. She stared at Brian with a similar expression. We came all this way and you're going to stay in the car?

It's the journey, not the destination, Karen. He said, grinning. Besides, somebody has to keep the car warm. Just yell for me if you find anything spooky. Karen looked pissed. Brian didn't seem to care. Neither of them moved for a few silent seconds. Brian grabbed his grinder from the center console slowly and without breaking eye contact.

His smile widened as Karen's face reddened. He was egging her on, but Karen had been more upset with him about less before. He knew it would pass. Make good decisions, he whispered. With a giggle, he turned up the music and turned on the headlights, high beams. Karen exited the car without another word. I followed, shooting and annoyed, but understanding looked to Brian as I closed the door. Karen was already circling around the fallen tree.

I had pushed back my bubbling anxiety and ran forward to catch the door. up with her. So what do you think? I asked. I wanted to get her talking instead of dwelling on Brian. Karen put one hand on the mountain of crumbling timber and pulled a small plastic bottle of vodka from her jacket. We're not even on the ride yet. She said, grinning sarcastically. She took a long pull from the bottle. The setting sun caught the plastic just right and a ray of sunlight momentarily blinded me. My head throbbed and I winced. When I looked back up, she had moved to out away and I was able to see into the clearing. There it was, or rather, wasn't. The massive farmhouse that had once occupied the space was nowhere to be found. There was nothing in the clearing,

but the same undisturbed dirt that made up every other empty field in the state. Karen took notice as we stepped out into the barren expanse. Seems a bit empty. She said, obviously disappointed. Are you sure this is it? I was sure, though it took me a moment to respond. My brain was still trying to tackle the impossible emptiness that stood before me. It's, uh, uh, definitely, I stuttered. I pulled my flask from my jacket and sipped from it while I walked the perimeter of the clearing.

My eyes were constantly drawn back to the spot where I was certain that a massive farmhouse had once stood. I ran through the numerous explanations in my head. The situation wasn't impossible. Old buildings are torn down all the time, but I had questions. Who had done it? When? Did this mean it wasn't abandoned when I had been there before? I couldn't wrap my mind around the situation.

At the very least, there should have been remnants of the farmhouse or evidence that the tunnels had been filled at some point. There should have been a path in the trees carved for the equipment they would have undoubtedly needed to clear the structure out, but the clearing and the surrounding forest was undisturbed. It was thick as it had been when I had last visited it in the middle of summer. Still, I was sure that we were in the right place. I could feel it. The peaceful quiet of the trees and the calming glow of the frosted ground was just part of a front. It had put on a nice face to hide itself from me. I took a longer sip from my flask. It was then the real barrenness

of that place dawned on me. Brian was in the car. Karen wandered the clearing in a circle. spiraling towards the center. I continued to stay along the tree line. We were the only occupants in that space, like germs sucked into a vast vacuum. There were no deer, no birds, no rodents, and no bugs to be found. There were no tracks or scat. I hadn't seen so much as a spider web in the trees as we had moved through them. It was winter, but surely something had to have been living in that place. The clearing had been completely desolate. A landscape frozen into the time and entirely devoid of life. It might have been picturesque if I had been able to escape the feeling of impending calamity. So where's the giant axe? She stumbled around the open space,

looking bored and frustrated. Her nose had turned bright from the cold. Her cheeks began to match, turning a darker shade of scarlet with every pull she took from her bottle of vodka. We had only been there for 20 minutes. The sun had almost disappeared behind the trees. Her bottle was almost empty. Not here, I guess. I responded with a fake sigh of disappointment. I began to indirectly move towards the car, trying my best to be subtle. I wanted to get out of there before that place could reveal its true self. The pressure in the clearing built, and a mosquito-like buzzing sound rang in my ear.

I felt as if I were standing helplessly in front of a massive jack-in-the-box and watching the handle slowly turning. I don't know. It's been here for over a decade after all. There has to be something here. If the place was as big as you said it was, there would have to be something left. I'm not sure how big it actually was, thinking back on it. It's like visiting your old elementary school after a few years and being able to touch the ceiling. I was closing in on the car by this point, directly across the clearing from Karen.

She circled me broadly, running around and kicking at the ground with her eyes peeled wide. The tunnels, though. The cellar door. It's a big space. I shrugged my shoulders. Trees could have overtaken it. The tunnels could have been filled or collapsed. They weren't the most stable things in the first place. I said, rambling on in an attempt to explain my way out of the situation. Maybe someone found out that Steve and I had come out here and didn't want anyone else trespassing afterwards.

Those tunnels could have been death traps for stupid kids looking to go urban exploring. Karen stopped moving when she noticed where I was headed. What are you doing? Where are you going? She held the now empty bottle of vodka at her side. I could see the top of another one peeking out of her breast pocket. Gonna go get warm. I explained as casually and calmly as possible. If it's gone, it's gone.

It's probably for the best anyway. I hurt myself pretty bad last- Come on. She said, frustration showing in her voice. We didn't drive hours and hours just to leave after ten minutes. She stared at me. Her gaze was piercing, and I avoided contact with her bloodshot eyes as best as I could. It was a nice road trip, but I don't feel well.

it's cold as shit and it's getting dark babe i put my hand on my coat and continued towards the car i could see brian's silhouette with a bong in his hand amidst a cloud of smoke that had filled the entire vehicle what's some bullshit karen grumbled from behind me i turned around to face her giving in and making eye contact she had opened the second bottle of vodka with a flourish she took the empty bottle and whipped it over my head into the trees i didn't make eye contact as i heard it smack against a tree with a distant and hollow clunk. Her every breath poured from her nostrils like smoke. It couldn't have been more than 10 degrees outside. The sun was out of view. A deep orange glow filled the sky at the moment, but it would soon disappear. I felt my heart rate began to speed up.

My hands began to shake with anxiety in addition to the chill. The pain that had been growing in my gut throughout the entire trip flared up once again. I knew it was just because of the stress, but it's difficult to breathe your way through an ulcer. I fell down to one knee. I felt like I was going to vomit fire. The ice on the ground had thinned beneath me. Only frost and hardened earth remained. My chest tightened.

I think we should just go. I told Karen, the feeling of impending doom had built to a point where my nerves felt like they were about to explode. The ringing in my ears grew louder. I was on my way to a full-blown panic attack. I needed to get out of that clearing. I think I need to go to an urgent care, Karen. I said, bringing one arm across.

cross my stomach and holding it tight in a futile attempt to quell the burning. Fucking convenient. I froze. Even at our worst, she'd never gone after me when she knew I was having a panic attack. We both knew how bad things could get and how quickly our mental state could turn. She had never egged it on before. You're not getting your way and so suddenly you pull the Trump card. She said from across the field, I could hear the vitriol in her voice.

Okay, Jack, I'll take you to an urgent care in the middle of Kansas. She was mocking me. It had to be the influence of that place. Nebraska, I corrected. She shot me a look like a bullet. Her body language shifted dramatically. Oh, I'm sorry. She said sarcastically, stepping towards me.

Nebraska, it's just that your story changes so fucking often that I don't know which parts of it are true and which parts are bullshit. She picked up a rock and whipped it into the trees. It wasn't thrown at me, but it was close enough that I considered it a warning shot. I heard it bounce off several trees, shattering ice along its path. My jaw popped. She had never been violent with me before. But even with that in mind, I knew that if she got to it, her next throw wouldn't miss.

Let's go to urgent care, Jack. She said. Her switch had flipped. They can give you some out of hand and tell you that it's just a fucking panic attack again. But then we are coming right back here. Karen and I had been together through enough of each of our respective rapid. mood fluctuations, but we knew how to handle one another when that sort of thing happened. I certainly knew how to respond to her in a way that would make the whole situation easier

for the both of us. I also knew exactly which buttons to push to set her off. In that moment, I wasn't feeling particularly diplomatic. Stop being a fucking dick, Karen! I yelled back at her. The pain in my head and stomach was getting to me. That place was getting to both of us. She stepped towards me with purpose.

What the fuck did you just... She began before a dull and hollow thud rang out from beneath her boot. It was her turn to freeze. I didn't bother to look up. I knew exactly what the noise was. It was familiar. Karen looked down to find a large set of wooden cellar doors buried in the dirt, debris, and ice. She dropped down and quickly brushed them off with her boots and bare hands.

I stayed on the ground and kept my head down as she worked. Let's just go, Karen. I begged. Please, let's just go. What's down? She said, trailing off as she scraped at the ice. After a couple of minutes, she stopped. I heard the loud crackle of ice in wood accompanied by Karen's strained groans.

I looked up, just as the cellar door, the size of a pallet fell to the ground with a resonant thud. The ice below it splintered outwards, creating a web of deep, dark cracks in the ground. Karen stood triumphant above the massive hole. She stared into the darkness with intense curiosity and determination in her eyes. The orange glow in the sky had turned to black. We sat in silence for several moments under the pale light of a half-moon. The dim emanation was swallowed by the assailing darkness of the pit. We have to leave.

I pleaded. Please, Karen. What's down there? She asked. Her eyes were still fixed on the hole. No. I said. I struggled to breathe.

A rush of memories flooded back, but the pieces were mixed up and disjointed. I couldn't make sense of them. My thoughts ran through my head so rapid. that I could hardly form more than a word at a time. Please, no. What's down there? She repeated again. Her gaze began to jump between me and the pit.

Her voice rose against my silence. Come on, Jack. Tell me a story. We came all this way for this. So if you expect me to walk away from it right now, then you better weave a slick story. I looked up at her, hoping that she could see the desperation in my eyes.

I wanted her to understand what that place had done to my head and why I wanted to turn around and go home. I hoped that she could see how badly I did not want to face that place. She either couldn't see it or she didn't care. I didn't know which was worse. Make something up, Hemingway? What do you call a writer that doesn't write, Jack? I was depressed and panicking and drunk and stuck in a tornado of disjointed thoughts,

and Karen was actively trying to hurt me. I planted my hand on the ground and pushed myself to my feet. I realized that my fingers had gone numb. She was baiting me at that point. And I bit hard. Oh, fuck you. I said. Karen raised an eyebrow.

I think she might have even smirked as I began to yell. You made me do this. I never wanted to come back here. You made me come back. And now you're going to chastise me because it doesn't live up to your expectations? I felt tears began to fall down my cheek. It's just a fucking story, Karen. A horror story.

A horror as in afraid. I'm afraid. I cried, looking for any hint of empathy in her eyes and found none. In that moment, she was not the Karen that I knew. You went there, so you don't know. You don't know what happened. She crossed her arms. I think she thought I was spinning another story.

I made some shit up. I did, for you and every other girl I told it to. She didn't react to that like I wanted. I felt angry. I wanted to hurt her back, and she was denying me the satisfaction. I would never... I said, taking a deep breath. I paused and locked eyes with her.

I wanted to make sure that my next statement landed. I would never, in a million fucking years, drag you back to your dad's house. Karen's shoulders dropped, and her gaze shifted to the dirt at her feet. The guilt washed over me instantaneously. I had drawn a line and crossed it in a single slurred sentence. The momentum that she had built up in the preceding several minutes stopped completely. The energy visibly drained from her body. We stood in that clearing in silence for several more minutes.

I was afraid to move. After a deep breath, Karen stepped toward me. She filled the large gap between us quickly. In one swift motion, she planted her foot in front of me and punched me in the face. I felt very little. Tell me what you're so afraid of, Jack. Big bad hero in your stories facing down anything that comes in your way, right? Well, I'm standing right here.

So tell me, what are you so afraid of that you would pull that out of the bag? What is so fucking scary that you would end us to avoid? I don't know. I uttered under my breath. I could feel myself begin to wobble and sway. It wasn't the booze. It felt like my body was confused, like my brain was playing ketchup and had left everything else on standby. I don't know. I repeated. It was the honest truth. I had no idea what exactly waited in that tunnel. I couldn't even muster a vague description. I couldn't remember. I had spent so much time embellishing and lying about my experience at the shower. to entertain or reach certain ends that I had never really processed what had happened to me there. I never thought about how it changed my perspective of myself or my perception of reality. I never wanted to think about it, so I never had to think about it. I just turned it into a story while it ate away at me for years unchecked. I took that story and I spread it to entertain people.

Maybe I wanted to let it out so that I could feel better. Maybe I wanted other people to feel what I felt, the fear. Either way, I did the same thing as Mr. Mays, just on a larger scale thanks to the internet. I lied. I distanced myself enough from the reality of the situation with the lies because it made the reality of what had happened to me at the showers easier to cope with. I thought I had everything under control. But there I stood, forced to face reality. I never had control.

I was running. It's a dark pit in the middle of Nebraska, Jack. Karen yelled, taunting me. When I didn't respond, she walked back towards the cellar door. She looked back at me once more before taking a single step into the darkness. I'm going in without you. Please, don't! I yelled.

I was in the midst of a full-on panic attack. Fear, guilt, and shame were among the storm of emotions that were overwhelming my brain. I couldn't articulate it. What do you see, Jack? I remembered the voice that had taunted me as I sat helpless in the dark so many years ago. I remembered the horror. But the details weren't all there yet. Karen took two more steps into the darkness.

She was swallowed up to her hips. She grabbed the heavy wooden door and lifted it once more with a grunt. Don't wait up! She said with a grin, in the blink of an eye, she disappeared into the pit. The door fell behind her with the resounding thump and puff of dust. The clearing fell silent. I heard bits of the frost-covered ground crackling quietly around me as my body heat escaped, Standing allowed me a view of my car's headlights glowing bright in the distance.

I was sure that Brian had passed out in the back by that point, wrapped in his sleeping bag. I didn't bother disturbing him. It wouldn't have done any good bringing him down there with me. It wasn't his struggle to face. I looked back towards the sealed cellar door. I couldn't hear anything from below. I tried to convince myself that there wasn't a pressing need to go down there. If I stood quietly in the clearing, I had little doubt the camera.

Karen would emerge after a few minutes of roaming around in the dark, no worse for where. She would have given me shit about being a coward. We would sleep it off in the car and then return to our regular, chaotic life. Maybe that was close enough. I had returned to the showers, despite my fears, and maybe, I thought, I would finally be able to let it go. Karen got to see the birthplace of that story she obsessed over, and I had believed that I had confronted whatever it was that I needed to confront.

Nothing more needed to be done. After all, the farmhouse was gone. The land was frozen over, and the property looked to be completely abandoned. It would never take anyone again. It would never hurt anyone again. It could never hurt anyone again. All that I had to do was stand right in the front of those cellar doors and wait. But I couldn't resist.

I felt compelled to walk over and pry open the doors. I felt a mighty need, an itch that needed to be scratched. Despite the fact that the skin was already broken and bleeding, I couldn't help myself. Within seconds, I was staring into the beckoning darkness. The dim moonlight struggled to pierce the black veil as I took my first careful step down, then another. The wooden door was heavier than I remembered. I braced it against my shoulder as I inched my way down the icy ramp.

I watched as my feet disappeared before my eyes, swallowed by the inky black of the tunnel. It took my legs next, but I was helping it along. Even through thick pants and boots, the darkness felt a greater deal colder than the clearing. My legs tense like they had been submerged in ice water. The cold had crept up to my knees when I felt a familiar shooting pain in my right leg, one that I hadn't felt in years. I knew it was psychosomatic because it had to be. It ran down my legs so quickly that I grabbed at it on reflex alone.

I shifted my weight onto my left. left leg, which tried to root itself on a patch of black ice. I tumbled downward into the abyss. The wooden door fell behind me with a crash, snuffing out the last traces of light as the darkness consumed me. The fall felt like it lasted for an eternity. When I finally landed, my shoulder took the brunt of the impact. My head hit second. My neck whipped and my skull bounced hard against the ground. I think that I lost consciousness, but it was too difficult to tell. The tunnels were silent, black and freezing cold, so the line between conscious and unconscious blurred. I don't know how long I lay there on the dirt floor, but I knew that I didn't want to move.

I knew that I had to keep going. I rolled onto my back and felt the frozen ground through my coat. An involuntary groan escaped my mouth, but it sounded muted, as if I were underwater. My fingers were completely numb and struggled as I reached my bare hand into my pocket to grab my phone. I don't know what I was doing trying to walk down there without a light ready in the first place. I brought the phone to my face and pressed the home button. The display wasn't bright, but it hurt my eyes.

The screen was shattered, a web of broken glass covering a picture of Karen and I, my phone's wallpaper. It was a selfie that she had taken of the two of us, at what could have been any of the numerous local breweries that we frequented. Her eyes were closed, and she was smirking while kissing me on the cheek. I was half smiling, my hair a greasy mess. My eyes were glazed and red. I wasn't a subtle drunk. I didn't remember the night. The screen flashed a message about a corrupt SD card,

followed by another about a low battery. The fall had done a number on it, more than I would have thought. I swiped my finger across the display, and the phone's flashlight came to life. Tiny pieces of fractured glass pushed their way into my thumb. Just get me through this. I'll buy a new screen. I whispered to the dying device. I felt like I needed to fill the silence with something.

My voice sounded distant and muted to my own ears. I opened my jaw wide, causing it to pop four times in quick succession. It did little to alleviate the throbbing in my temples. I turned my light to the tunnel. My phone was either dying or those tunnels were eating the light, keeping it from showing me more than I wanted to see. Little bits of memory rushed back into my head. head. Gaps in my memory began filling at such a rapid pace that it made my mind dizzy. Were they really

gaps, though? No, they were just memories pushed aside, overlooked, ignored, covered up. My leg began to throb again, just like it had when I fell through the floor of the farmhouse so many years ago. I wondered if that hole was still there, holding on to the piece of denim that it stole from my jeans. I began to move deeper into the tunnel. I heard shuffling, behind me, in front of me, and then all around me. Every movement I made was slow, careful, and deliberate. With each step, there was a brief silence followed by the echo of another step. The tunnels were too small. They had no echo. I tried my best not to let myself get more worked up than I already was. I might as well have been yelling at a fire to put it out.

As I began to find a groove in my cautious movement through the cavern, the light from my phone flickered twice. I held my breath onto hope. With the final flash of the low battery symbol, it died. Feeling set back, but not defeated, I chucked my phone into the pitch black. I didn't hear it hit a thing. I pressed onward. My hand glided along the ceiling to keep me from running into the walls or wooden crossbeams in the darkness.

A putrid stench like death and rot slowly crawled its way into my nostrils. It burned my eyes and made my stomach clench in an involuntary attempt. to purge itself. Much to my dismay, I gagged. The smell instantly ignited large parts of my memory. It was like the smell of your mother's home cooked dinner, causing a rush of associated childhood memories to flood your head. But instead of feeling comfort at the familiarity, I felt confusion.

I hadn't thought about that awful smell in years, but it had always been right there. How had I let it get away from me? How had I let any of the reality of that place get away from me? With that thought, I looked up and saw another person with me in the tunnel. It was the child in the stained robe with the black hair. It twitched, slowly moving towards me in the distance. It danced on the border of my peripheral vision. Its skin was pale, and its hair ran like black vines down to its atrophied legs.

The child's legs looked to be shaking under the weight of its amaciated frame. This gown was just as tattered and filthy as the last time I had encountered it. It was terrified, but I forced myself to face it. It was only a child. As I turned to look at it straight on, it disappeared before my eyes. I paused. The child had invaded my nightmares for years. I dreamt constantly about the terror I felt that night in the tunnel when it had approached

me. I often awoke covered in sweat. I'm sure I'd even wet the bed a time or two. And each morning, I had pushed it out of my thoughts and moved on with my day. How was I able to ignore it? I blinked, I think. The child was standing directly in front of me. The glint of light in my eye conveyed a familiar hatred that caused my chest to lock up

and cut short my breath. I tried so hard, for so long, to burn its image out of my memory with anything I could get my hands on, but there was no forgetting that night. Not really. In reality, I had only locked it away in my subconscious for a long time. The child was patient, just like the showers. It waited in the back of my mind for my inevitable return. I felt its breath against my face.

It smelled like death, long, stringy hair covered my eyes. I saw only the deep yellow of its eye. I shut my eyes tight and quickly opened them again. I saw nothing. There was no light down there. My phone was gone. I couldn't have seen the child. It couldn't have been there.

There was only darkness. My heart beat slowed once again. It was only in my head. I felt around desperately for a wall. My hand brushed against cold sheet metal. It was brittle and rusted, but it was something solid, something tangible and real. I tried my best to work through my breathing exercises. I did everything I could to ground myself, to tether myself to reality.

I felt like I was slipping away. My mind began aimlessly wandering down an existentially terrifying train of thought. I considered the idea that the showers may not have existed before me. Had I called it into existence? Was Mr. Mays just a cook who had inevitably put me on a path towards manifesting that place? Was it a prison that I had constructed for myself? A tomb I was always meant to die in? My grip slipped from the wall.

I stood in the darkness, swaying, swimming in it. I was overcome with a strange sense of relief. It felt like a blanket had wrapped itself around me. I felt warm. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. All of my lies, half-truths and made-up details about the showers faded. I didn't need to hide from reality any longer. I was back in the place that had shattered the grasp I thought I had on how the world worked,

but it felt good. I laughed. I couldn't control myself. I'm sure I sounded like I was losing it. The situation seemed hilarious to me. After graduating from college and visiting the showers for the first time, I spent several years sleeping on couches and subletting rooms when I could find them. In that entire time, I never once found an ounce of comfort. I never felt at ease. I was always restless, itching to be somewhere else, but I had no idea where that was. Somehow, I found a sense of familiarity in a hole in the ground in Nebraska. It felt like comfort enough.

That comfort came with a sense of freedom. I didn't have to lie to anyone, at least to myself. I didn't have to put on a mask for anyone. I felt like I didn't have to hold on so tightly anymore. The showers had become part of me, as much distance as I had put between the two of us and as much as I had tried to push them away, to burn them out of my memory with force, they stuck with me. It felt like a homecoming. I could lose myself in peace there. I breathed normally for the first time in an eternity and let myself fall back into the warmth of the darkness.

My head caught the edge of a piece of sheet metal, tearing a hole in my scalp as I awkwardly smacked against the wall behind me. I was back in my body and quickly tried to reel my thoughts back in. I couldn't grasp what had just happened to me. It was like the void called out for me to fill it, and my mind attempted to do just that, but it let everything fly forth at once. There was too much space to fill. I spread so quickly across the empty mental plane that I came dangerously close to getting lost. I was shaking uncontrollably. I tried my best to feel around for something solid. There were bits of sheet metal, old wooden columns holding up the tunnel, and dirt. The goddamn ground was enough for me to keep myself there. In that moment, and out of wherever

my head had just taken me. I made a promise to myself that I would go to get back on medication if I made it out of there. I had never felt so close to falling over the hedge of insanity. I began to move forward once again, making sure to keep a tight hold on something at all times. My hands were numb, but knowing that the walls were there, that the space around me was finite, was vital.

The tunnels were physical. They were in the realm of the known. Anything outside of that is where the real horror waited. A flash of bright red appeared in my peripheral vision. How could I have forgotten that? I turned to face the red door. It wouldn't have looked out of place on a model home in white suburbia, yet here it was, out of its element, just like me.

Its floral pattern was as intricate as it had been those years ago. A skull-like face in the wood stared back at me with eyes like black pits. I breathed deeply and kept my hand on the wall. I knew that I was imagining the door, but that didn't make it less real in the moment. Rationality didn't make it instantly disappear. I felt the warm liquid run down the back of my head. It was blood from where the sheet metal had sliced open my scalp. I reached my hand back and ran my fingers along the wound, wincing from the pain.

I pulled my hand away instinctively. Shit! I cried out. I looked up and the door was gone. I shut my eyes tightly once more. I needed to make sure it was in my head. I told myself over and over when the brain is deprived of sight or sound it will hallucinate in order to fill the gaps.

I was just under a lot of stress. None of it was real. It was a hole in the ground in the middle of Nebraska and I wasn't going to lose myself there. My eyes snapped open and I saw only darkness. I breathed the sigh of relief. As momentarily motivated as I might have been, the cold was getting to me. I tucked my hands under my arms and leaned against the wall. The blood on the back of my head had begun to freeze.

My hair crackled as I leaned my head against the wall. I slowly began to slide down to the ground. I just need to rest a moment. My eyelids gently lowered. It felt nice to rest. After several seconds, I heard a faint voice in my ears. I wasn't quite sure if I had drifted off to sleep or if I was hallucinating again. It was Mr. Maze's voice.

But it wasn't comforting. It was not the joyful and calming voice that he used in the classroom, but the dejected and drunken one from the night I had seen him at the bar, the night when I learned the truth about the showers. That's a bad place, Jack. I heard him say. The liquor clung to his breath so heavily that night. I could almost smell it down in those tunnels, like he was sitting in front of me once again.

Cops, drunk, to take him by wildlife. He slurred his words. Why would you want to go there? I perked up. Mr. Mays had never asked me that question. It's a scary story. It's what I do. I responded out loud.

I sat there in a comfortable silence, unsure whether or not I should expect a response. It was my story, Jack. My own story. Spoke Mr. Mays from within my head. It was my goddamn tragedy, Jack. You wanted to see it for yourself. You wanted to have a story. a story to impress your friends, did you really want to live it?

I wasn't sure how to respond, or if I even should. Or did you just want to put yourself in the center of it? He asked. Always had to be the center of the story, didn't you? Well, here you are, Jackie. Dead center. How does it feel? You're wrong, I said.

I slammed my fist into the wall next to me. There was a muffled crack as the brittle metal siding fractured. I had shaved the skin off my knuckles. I felt the momentary warmth of blood running down my fingers. The showers were taunting me. I yelled out in anger. I needed a drink so badly I could taste it. But through the blood and the cold, I couldn't get my hand into my jacket to grab my flask.

I got so much blood on the zipper simply from trying to grip it. I got so much blood on the zipper from simply trying to grip it that it froze up. I probably wouldn't have been able to open the flask anyway. So I gave up. My memories, or some corrupted version of my memories, filled the seemingly endless darkness around me, and the only thing that I wanted in that moment was for them to quiet down so that I could hear myself think. I pushed back against the wall and up to my feet.

I took one step forward and hit my shoulder on a wooden beam, which sent me right back on my ass. I slumped down on my side and defeat. That was what it wanted, that place, even though it couldn't want. I did this to myself, I thought, unsure if I was speaking out loud. I wrote this ending for myself when I went chasing the showers from my own gain and posted about it on the internet. I built this extension of myself, this monster. My head rested in the dirt.

Now it's consuming me, slowly digesting me. The showers was just a hole in the ground in Nebraska that I used to dump my fears into. I made them into what they became. I had let them grow into my personal hell. I let this happen. I said. I did this to myself. The room began to quiet.

I felt the space shrinking around me. Fucking hell on earth, if you ask me. The voice rang in my ears. It was Mr. Mays again, but it wasn't taunting me. It was something he had actually told me about Broken Bow, way back when. I could never say that the guy didn't warn me. When I heard that quote in my head in those tunnels, head on the dirt in a slowly freezing pool of my own blood, I became acutely aware of a hint of sadness and fear in Mr. Mays' voice

that I had never noticed before. I let my eyes close again, not that it mattered much in the dark. I walked myself slowly through the tunnel I had likely always known, but never addressed. Mr. Mays was just a tired old man. He had a traumatic experience in his younger years, and he lost to his. friend. The situation was as simple as that. Maybe the cops found his friend's body, maybe they didn't. The details didn't really matter. His friend was dead, and Mr. Mays didn't have the tool to cope with that kind of trauma. He drank himself to death in an effort to shrink his agony down

to a manageable size. It just needed to be small enough to hide away and check in on during really bad nights every now and then. Maybe he succeeded for a little while, but that trauma was still a silent driving force behind every last action that he took. It didn't even matter whether or not he was conscious of the fact. He just woke up with it every single morning. He dragged it through each and every day. Then he drank until he forgot about it for a few precious hours. But it would always be there when he woke up the next morning, ready to go another round.

Over time, that weight warped him. It turned his core black and tainted every aspect of his life in some way. One day he was gone. The only legacy he left behind was a scary story about the poison that slowly killed him. I heard a creaking sound above me and felt a drop of cold liquid hit my shoulder and splash lightly on my face. My attention was quickly stolen by another voice. Jack. Stuttered the voice, cutting through the silence.

My heartbeat raced. My brain was still reeling from everything I had encountered since entering the tunnel, so it took me a second to process who was speaking. It was Karen. I thought to myself. Karen is a person. Karen is my girlfriend. Karen went into the tunnel.

I went after her. We were both in the tunnel now. Karen just spoke. Karen? I said out loud, carefully pushing myself off the ground. You were talking to yourself. She continued. Her voice was soft.

You were talking to yourself like you do in your sleep. She sounded scared. I ignored her comment. Just come to me, please. This place, I should have believed you. What the hell is down here, Jack? I don't know. Bullshit! You do know, so just tell me.

I could hear her begin to cry. I'm scared, Jack. I'm sorry, Karen. I said struggling. I can't explain this place. Just please come over here. She didn't respond. I sighed and opened my mouth wide to crack my jaw.

Each pop rippled through my skull. There was a dull shot of pain. in my temples, but it felt like relief. I had nothing to lose anymore. I had to be honest with Karen about the showers. All it took was for us to get stuck in an underground waking nightmare for me to get to that point. I don't know what this place is or what it did to me. I said, trying to find the words.

But I wasn't the same after I came here. It messed me up. I'm messed up. I don't know why, and I don't know how to fix it, but I never wanted you to go through what I did. I was afraid. I mean, look at this place. I gestured all around me.

Neither of us saw it. I could have helped you. She said quietly. Her use of past tense stung. I heard her either moved towards me or rest against the nearest wall. How? I asked. Silence filled the space between us for a few drawn-out seconds.

We could have shared it. I could hear the tears in her voice. We could have shared the weight, Jack. I was almost speechless. Well, we're sharing it now. The walls groaned around us. The noise moved quickly around the room, settling right above me. I looked up and into darkness.

What's that? It sounds like. Ice cold water rained down on me from above, instantly soaking me from head to toe. I gasped hard, taking in a deep breath and some of the liquid along with it, while my every muscle tensed up from the shock and the cold. The taste of rust filled my mouth. Before I could think about it for too long, my body ached without me, coughing and sputtering to rid my lungs of the tainted water. I fell back to my knees.

I knew exactly what hung a couple of feet above my head, despite the complete lack of light. I wanted nothing more than to be out of that place, but didn't move from underneath the shower head. I looked up and let the freezing rain pour directly onto my face. I let it swallow me. deep rumble emanated from within the walls around me, and Karen screamed. The water splashed onto the ground to my left, then to my right, then in front of me, then behind. Still, I sat there while my hands pruned and my arms lost feeling.

I felt my breath turned to ice as it left my lungs. Despite the extremity of this situation, I felt a warm calmness from within. I slowly spread my arms out at my sides. If ice water was all the showers held for me, then I thought I might. might be okay. The showerheads rained down around me, a symphony of crystal clear noise from the creaking pipes to the dull splatter of each droplet of liquid as it hit the ground. Every sound was clear and full. The noise almost illuminated the room. I took it all in. I accepted it. If the showers wanted me, I was ready to go. I made a pilgrimage to the place that birthed the thing I had become over the previous several years, and I was ready to give it up. If it

Wanted me back, I wasn't going to fight. I could hear Karen scream my name from only ten feet away, but she was drowned out by the noise. Most of my body was numb, yet I could still feel a stinging under my skin with every last drop of water. A sense of instability, vertigo-like, began to overtake me. I opened my eyes, and to my surprise, my eyes were filled with bright light. I was back in Mr. Mays's classroom. It looked the same as it had so many years ago. complete with Halloween decorations and drawn shades.

I stood in front of the class, looking down over the 30 teenage faces that stared back at me. The faces were blurred as if out of focus. It was my classroom. They were my students. How did you get out of the tunnel? A distorted voice asked me from somewhere in the crowd. I don't know. I responded. I blinked and my environment changed. I was now in the dimly lit tunnels. I was helping carry me.

my friend Steve, the man who had ventured to this place with me years ago, away from the approaching darkness behind us. He was bleeding from head to toe. The event seemed wrong. This isn't how it happened. I cried between breaths. This isn't my story. I passed an open red door on my right. My faceless students sat in the classroom beyond the doorway. I jumped past the threshold, pulling Steve with me. I landed on a bed in a dark room. I sat up immediately, sweat soaked my sheets and tears soaked my face. I sunk my face into my hands and shook my head.

I knew that what I was seeing couldn't be real. I thought I might have slipped beyond, and that what I was seeing was what I would spend eternity reliving. I was going to spend my time in purgatory trapped in the showers. I pulled my hands away from my face and found myself at a bar. Next to me sat Mr. Mays. He was smiling. One more for the road, please.

He said to the bartender. One for Jackie here, too. Within seconds, we each had a triple shot of some kind of brown liquor sitting before us. I looked up at Mr. Mays. I went to speak, but my voice froze in my throat. I wanted to say something, but a cloud of visible breath was all that came out of my mouth. Mr. Mays downed his drink in a single gulp and looked at me. You need to get out of there, Jack.

He said. So, how are you going to do it? I gave him a desperate, unsure look. There's no sense in both of us going down because of this place. Mr. Mace placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder. So, go on. Tell me how the hell you're planning on escaping. He looked me in the eyes and grabbed my drink. I tried to speak once more, but my chest locked up.

I reached towards him. My hand dripped with water. My fingers had turned purple. Ah, playing it close to the same. the chest. He said. I get it and I get it. He winked at me and threw the shot back. Just make it a good story, eh?

He nodded and grinned. Cheers to you, Jack. The bar went dark. A dull, wet thump rang out a few feet to my left, snapping me back to my body. Karen had fallen and screamed my name, which rang out loudly above the noise of the water. Jack! She screamed as I heard her body drag across the muddy floor away from me. I could hardly feel my first.

chosen extremities, so I threw myself on the ground in the direction of her voice and began to crawl forward as fast as I could. I wasn't going to let that place have her. I wasn't going to let it have me. We were going to get out of the darkness. I reached my arm out as far as I could towards Karen's screams, despite being unable to feel much of it. In a rare stroke of good fortune, my arm fell across her shoulder.

She immediately grabbed for it. I closed my hand as tightly as I could around part of her denim jacket. I pulled her close and wrapped my legs around her. She wrapped her arms around me and buried her face in my chest. Her screams were only slightly muffled. I let her have that moment of release. I didn't know what else to do. I just held her tightly and looked into the darkness that surrounded us.

I don't exactly know what I was looking for. Her screams turned to quiet sobs as the water pressure from the showerheads audibly died down, eventually stopping. We lay there together in the freezing months. for a few minutes. Eventually, Karen's sobs quieted. We need to stand up, okay? I stuttered, frozen. I loosened the vice-like grip I had on her and stumbled to my feet. I didn't let myself lose contact with her for a moment. She rose to meet me. We stayed as

close together as possible. I had no idea where we were in relation to anything else in the tunnels. We got to find a wall. We locked arms and moved to the right. After about ten long, Long, careful steps, I hit a wall. I couldn't tell if it was covered in ice or if I was just so numb that I couldn't feel the coarse cement. Karen kept her head against my shoulder. I started to feel emotional, angry that she had forced me to come back to this place. The anger turned quickly to sadness when I realized that she was going to have to carry the

weight of this place with her for the rest of her life. I felt guilty for letting it happen. I knew that I could have stopped the trip if I had tried harder. I could have stopped mentioning the showers long before it even got to that point, but I didn't. The whole situation was my fault. The pipes groaned inside the wall next to it. With each subsequent sound, I felt my stomach clench in preparation for another blast of icy water. I didn't think I could stand anymore at that point.

I figured that I would be lucky to make it out of that place with only light frostbite. In contrast with the numbness throughout my body, my jaw throbbed in pain. I couldn't unclench my teeth. They felt like they were going to crack like little ice cubes. I wanted to give up right there. I was so tired and so afraid. I wasn't the kind of person who was going to save his girlfriend and come out of those tunnels a changed man.

I didn't even think we were going to get out at all, but I pushed on for Karen. I was lost enough in thought and putting most of my weight against the wall as I slid along it. I wasn't expecting any sharp corners until my shoulder pushed into an abrupt, empty space. I managed to catch one hand on the corner of the wall as I fell, but that did very little when my feet gave way in the mud beneath me. I fell face down into the wet slop. My free hand landed under my hip.

It let out a crack and pop. I screamed into the mud. Karen screamed back. I rolled over and brought my hand carefully up to my face. The angles of my fingers seemed completely wrong. I rubbed them against my cheek. They were undoubtedly broken. After a time, we became too exhausted and out of breath to continue screaming.

I focused on my breathing and tried to ignore my mangled hand. I sat up, pushing my good hand through the icy mud and eased myself onto my feet. Something grazed my fingers while it was planted in the mud. It was smooth, but not like cement, like metal. It was small. I grabbed it in my hand as best I could as I stood up. My legs wobbled. I was getting the spins, but couldn't tell if it was from the booze, the concussion.

or the disorienting darkness. Karen got to my side quick enough and stabilized me. She pulled herself close. I'm sorry. I didn't want an apology. I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to be anywhere else fighting with her about something stupid and irrelevant. The space around us filled with a mess of conflicting emotions amidst my silence.

Karen eventually broke the tension. I managed to keep hold of the object I had discovered in the mud. We both felt around it, desperately trying to get a sense for what it was. It could have just been a piece of one of the showerheads for all we knew, but for a second there was hope that it was a solution. It was sort of cylindrical. It was mostly metal. It had a little clip on it.

I rolled it around in my hand, careful not to drop it. It was a button. I recognized it before I could turn it on. It was a small flashlight. The kind hikers fastened to their backpacks. Flashlight! I stuttered. My fingers could feel the button, but couldn't quite press it hard enough.

Help me push the switch. Karen traced along my finger with her own and found it. She pressed it in. The light was hardly blinding. We were prepared to shield our eyes, but were surprised by the weakness of it. It did a little to help our situation, but it did a little. Once our eyes had adjusted, we could see the showerheads in our immediate area. I could see the muddy floor and filthy walls around us.

It looked and smelled like a pig's die. We couldn't see an exit. The loud wailing of a dying animal came from nowhere and quickly enveloped us. It felt like we had accidentally stood in front of a mass of speakers at once. My head pulsated and I felt my ribs vibrate. Karen covered her ears with her frozen hands. The tips of her fingers were bright red, maybe even purple. It was hard to tell from the weak light of the flashlight.

The noise it sang rang out without letting up. It started as a high-pitched organic wine, but over the course of 30 seconds, it distorted into something that better resembled a foghorn. Karen wrapped her arms around me. I held her against my chest. Close your eyes. Keep them closed. I told her.

I kept the beam centered on us as much as I could. It didn't bother me that whatever was out there could see us. The light provided some sort of warmth, or at the very least, a sense of solidity. The noise slowly died down until we were left once again in silence. We have to move back to the tunnel. You have to help me find it." I said, trying to get us back on track. Karen nodded, tearing her face away from my chest.

Her tears had frozen her cheek to my sweater. I could see a rim of ice around the red mark on her cheek. Back that way, I think. She said, pointing to a wall on our left. I couldn't tell where exactly we had come from. The light didn't do much to penetrate the darkness, and even then, we had to be moving in the dark, so we had no visual markers to go by. But I trusted her.

We began to shuffle through the mud, which had frozen to the consistency of a slushy. It seeped into my boots. Every inch of my body was covered in water and frost. A little more cold wouldn't hurt. Every few steps, the flashlight would dim or flicker. I could feel Karen tense up every time I gave it a shake. I was rolling the dice on how long it would continue to help us, but I did my best to keep calm and on track.

Inevitably, it went out completely. Karen dug her fingers into my side. I shook the light. The battery inside rattled around. Nothing happened. I hit it against the palm of my injured hand several times. Nothing happened. Please work, please. I muttered to myself as I hit the switch off and on several times in rapid succession. I couldn't let it go. It was all that we had down in those tunnels. The only thing that was keeping us going from the all-consuming darkness. I didn't want to go back to that. After a few more attempts, there was light. However, it was coming from all the way across the room. An exposed bulb, maybe 40 feet across the room from us, came to life. It was dim,

but it was enough to light up a significant portion of the space in front of it. About 10 feet in front of the bulb, and 30 feet from us, stood the silhouette of a massive buck. Its head bent down towards the ground. It had a large set of antlers, 12 points if I had to guess, but But Karen's breathing quickened, and I felt her hot breath against my neck. I struggled to grasp what I was seeing, and let the dead flashlight fall from my hands to the ground. We both jumped as it hit the ground with one last flash of the bulb. The metal slapped against the cement, and the small bit of glass cracked like a stick snapping

under a foot in the woods. The buck tensed up and rose to attention. Its antlers scraped hard against the low ceiling, but some of the points were only grinding against it, while others cracked and broke off entirely. By all accounts, the animal should have been an immense pain, but it didn't even seem to notice. At the very least, it didn't seem to care. As it turned its attention towards us, Karen tugged hard on my sweater. We have to get out.

She cried quietly. We continued down the path before us, while the buck let out a cry like the noise we had heard before. A jolt of pain shot through my temples. The noise went on continuing. One long whine that should have been interrupted by a breath at some point, but just kept going. By the end, it had once again become something more reminiscent of a foghorn.

I looked behind us as we shuffled through the dark. A hint of yellow light reflected off the eye of the beast. It was looking directly at me. It was tracking me. I turned my head and heard several other bulbs click and come to life on the far side of the room. I didn't look back. A door came into view in front of us. The paint was stripped, the wood was aged and cracked from years of weathering.

Even still, I was able to get a sense of the brilliant shade of red that used to cover it. The floral pattern had withered away, leaving only the deeply etched tree and the outline of a skeletal face at its base. The dark pit still looked like eyes to me. Crudely carved into its forehead was a single word. Twigs. I didn't take any time to think about what it meant. The door's knocker was missing a screw and it hung limply.

off center. The knob still had some shine to it. I could see the reflection of the lights behind us in it as we moved closer. I went to reach my hand out to grasp the knob, but Karen had already beaten me to it. She grabbed it and twisted. The internal metal mechanisms shifted loudly, quietly bleeding off the buck in the distance. The door cracked and creaked even after Karen peeled her hand from the metal frame. Deep cracks moved rapidly outward from the knob, crawling across the wood until they reached the hinges. The door shifted and began to tip downward. I didn't think I had the strength to stop it. It began to tilt. I raised my arm up to shield Karen's head while trying to pull us out of the way. It caught abruptly on the old screws in the middle,

and the lower hinges then swung to the left, right in front of us. I felt the rush of cold air as it brushed within an inch of my face and slammed into the wall. It fell to the ground and sunk into the mud. Through the doorway, I could make out the beginning of a familiar tunnel. The ceiling rose and sank abrupt like the hills of a roller coaster. Some spots had no more than three feet of clearance from top to bottom when I had been there last, but at that moment, when we needed the tunnel most, there was no clearance at all. The metal sheet that held the earth at bay had given way. The tunnel had collapsed. I realized then that the property could have had tens of tunnels all around it for all I knew.

We didn't need a maze, or the hope of another exit at that point. We were at our wits' end and needed that tunnel to be our exit. Hope drained from my body. I screamed, exhausted. My lungs burned, my mind was on fire. Every motion I made was out of instinct. I couldn't properly process what was happening around me. Neither of us turned around.

We stood in front of the doorway and stared at the caved-in tunnel that had sealed our fate. I grabbed Karen's hand and held on to it tightly as much. more lights flickered to life behind us. I'm sure that there were other exits in that room, but the uncertainty of what we might see stopped us from moving. We just looked forward and stayed frozen in place. I heard the hard clapping of a set of hooves against the ground somewhere in the room, then another.

I saw shadows of what were unmistakably humans shrinking as they moved towards us. It was the children. I was sure of it. Even amidst the already overwhelming stench I could smell them. pennies and vinegar. Their robes dragged across the mud, and their hair covered their bodies, skewing the proportions in their shadows. Karen gripped my hand tighter.

Two shadows moved along the walls, then five, ten, and after that I lost count. The bulbs near us came to life and caused the frost that had built up on the cement walls to melt. Each new light source caused the shadows to fade more. Each new light left us increasingly unsure of what exactly approached us. A few of the children appeared to have antlers mounted atop their heads. A bulb mounted only a couple of feet to my right flickered on. On my left, Karen's head turned upward.

There, protruding several feet from the wall was a shower head. It was old, rusty, and caked with glistening frost. It looked fragile. With her free hand, she reached up, grabbed a hold of the pipe, and pulled it down, squeezing on my hand as if she was using me for leverage. It broke off with surprising ease. Karen pulled back as water sprayed into the room behind us from the broken pipe. I could hear feet skitter through the mud and away from the torrent of ice.

Karen turned towards me, eyes closed, and buried her face in my arms. She presented the shower head to me like a weapon. I carefully took the rusted metal in my injured hand. It had a surprising weight to it. I gripped it as tightly as I could, despite the pain in my fingers. For the first time in those tunnels, I felt like I had a little bit of control. The footsteps around us grew closer, picking up speed. I looked towards the bulb on my right.

I hate this place. I said as I swung the pipe through the air. It smashed through the bulb with ease. The pain in my hand caused me to loosen my grip, and the pipe flew through the air just along the wall, breaking two more bulbs as it went. Shattering glass rained onto the mud. As to my surprise, the other lights in the room began to examine. extinguish. One by one, the room fell back into darkness. I heard the animalistic scream,

the foghorn, once more. The footsteps behind us had grown very close. They couldn't have been more than a few feet from us. I hugged Karen as tightly as I could as the bulb went out. There we stood in the darkness again, surrounded by the unknown. I hadn't considered until then whether it would be better to die in the dark or the light. I kissed Karen on the head. I kept a tighthold as I turned to face the room. The bulbs had died, but the filaments still had a slight glow to them, like the aftermath of a camera flash. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out silhouettes of the children.

Some were no more than arm's length away. There were tiny dots of lights in their eyes, which all pointed directly at me. The air was filled with the familiar, tangible anger. I could feel their hatred. They seemed to hate me as much as I feared them. I couldn't even guess what was going to happen once they got a hold of us. I just prayed that it would be over quickly, and that at the very least, the fear would cease. The filaments and the bulbs dimmed and died.

The darkness settled. I closed my eyes. I'm sorry. I spoke into the top of Karen's head. The children were right on us. I felt a cold breath on the back of my neck. I gripped Karen tighter, fingernails lightly grazed my cheeks. I clinched up in anticipation.

The thought of jumping from a bridge came to mind. It sounded peaceful compared to the end I was facing. I let out the last breaths as I felt the hands tightened their grip around my wrists and ankles. Without warning, it stopped. The hands loosened their grip and pulled away. The breath on the back of my neck ceased. Feet flew through the mud away from us. The children were fleeing.

The foghorn noise stopped abruptly in seconds. The room had settled into a peaceful silence. It felt like a trick. After the goosebumps on my neck faded, I gathered the courage to open my eyes. I looked upward. About ten feet in front of us was a ray of bright light. It was powerful, cutting through the dark like a beacon. Even at a distance, it made the frost on Karen's bright red hair sparkle.

I had no idea where the light was coming from. Briefly, I considered that I was entirely wrong about religion and that it was some sort of divine intervention. Then I heard the familiar growl of my car engine. My eyes adjusted. I could see the light was coming from the hole in the ceiling where the wooden beams had collapsed long ago. I couldn't believe it. I didn't say a word as the car door slammed and Brian stepped towards the hole. Hello down there?

His voice rang out like music to my ears. Karen looked up and immediately broke away from me. There was a sense of relief in her eyes, but her face was frozen in shock. She moved quickly. You get us out of this hole right now, and I will buy you your own grow house. I'm going to hold you that, care bear. I assumed they could see each other at that point. Karen glared toward the hole.

She was bathed in light. I slowly began to move towards her. My knee popped and my joints ached. I was dizzy and confused, but pretty certain that I wasn't hallucinating. It felt unlikely, but it felt real. Okay, but it's not going to be easy. I found a rope. It's kind of icy, but I don't really have another option.

And I'm still a little high, so it's going to have to work. How the hell did you guys get down there? Karen didn't answer as Brian dropped down an old purple climbers rope. She grabbed it and began to ascend like her life depended on it. Brian was grunting from above and jokingly commenting on how she had gained weight. She was up and out of the hole within seconds, and I was left alone in the room. I looked around me. The space was smaller than it had seemed just minutes ago.

The walls were cracked. The mud was turning back to solid ice. There wasn't a single sign of life. The showers were still and empty. You coming, Jack? Asked Brian as I finally made it under the hole. I grabbed the rope tightly and looked behind me towards the decrepit red door, though only barely stuck out of the mud.

In the tunnel behind it, I could make out the dark silhouette of someone standing just beyond the reach of the light. A quick jolt of fear shot through me, but, after staring directly at the figure for several seconds, the figure subsided. I turned away from it and didn't look back. With some help from Brian, I pulled myself out of the hole and onto the frozen ground outside. It had started to snow. I took deep breaths of fresh air in like water in the desert. It had never felt so refreshing.

I was free of the stench of that place. My stomach was still in knots. The moon reflected off the snow and ice, lighting up the clearing around us. I could see Karen pacing behind the car. She was staying close to the taillights. She stopped suddenly and fixed her vision on the edge of the trees with a terrified look on her face. Reality began to sink in.

Karen was going to have to live with that experience for the rest of her life. I was on the verge of tears when Brian helped me to my feet. I still hadn't quite decompressed. My jaw still clenched tightly shut. I could feel the remnants of one of my chipped front teeth embedded in my gum. I didn't remember breaking it. Every part of my body felt numb. My clothes were frozen in my skin, but I couldn't rest until we'd gotten out of there.

All the way out. Karen began to scream. She yelled. As she screamed, she pointed towards the trees. Brian dropped everything and ran to her. I slumped down and stared at the ground. I felt there was nothing that I could do for Karen. I was as much a mess as she was.

Her cries blended into the background as my mind wandered back to Mr. Mays. I wondered what he would have done in this situation. I knew exactly what his solution was, and it didn't seem like a bad idea for the time. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the flask, opened it, and took a sniff. To my surprise, it burned my nostrils like gasoline. It made me nauseous. I looked down at the flask. Karen had engraved it for me on Valentine's Day the year back.

The engraving read, May love and liquor light your life. Always yours, Karen. I closed it and looked behind me at the hole in the ground. I tossed the flask down into the dark. I didn't hear it hit the bottom. Cheers, I sat under my breath. I stood up and walked towards Karen,

whose cries were becoming more sporadic. She was jumping at her own shadow as a confused, in stone, Brian tried to help her. Man, what the hell's going on with her? He asked. Make sure the car is ready to go. I told him. I passed him by without making eye contact.

Karen saw me coming and froze. I took her hands and held them in my own. Jack, how was it like that? She rambled, unsure of what she had seen and what she wanted to ask. Eventually, she broke down completely. She bawled, and I held her there. It was all that I could do. at the time. She slammed her fists against my chest out of frustration a few times. I let her get it out.

I didn't know how to help her, but I could be a punching bag. I could take it. After she had calmed down, I eased her over to the car and sat her in the back seat. I wrapped her in as many blankets as I could find and buckled her in. As I walked around the other side of the car, I looked back at the hole in the ground one last time. Snow had already started to cover the tracks that we made while climbing out. I turned away and got into the car. Brian drove through the trees as quickly as he could. He had managed to get the car around the massive dead tree to get us out, no doubt tearing up my paint job in the process, but I was thankful. We retraced his path in order to get out of there. A few times, Brian seemed to begin a question, but stopped himself. He told us that he had been in the

car when he saw a light coming out from the ground and what he thought was one of us waving for him. Neither Karen nor I reacted to a story. A weight hung over the two of us. Brian quickly picked up on that fact and stayed quiet. Questions could wait. I'm not sure if he ever actually got around to them. Karen wasn't asleep in the back seat, but her eyes were closed tightly. I was buzzing as we drove home.

It wasn't until we crossed the threshold of the tree line and found ourselves back on the real rural road, that I was able to loosen the vice grip that I had held on the door hand. The electricity shooting through my nerves faded as the top of the trees that surround the showers were overtaken by the stars. Only then did my insides begin to relax. The dam that had been holding my emotions during the trip began to finally burst. I asked Brian to pull over, he obliged almost immediately and without a word. I stumbled out of the car and began throwing up on the side of the road.

Thick yellowish bile hung in the back of my throat before slowly dripping down and out of my body. It felt like what I deserved. I gagged and felt my eyes bulge as I purged. I clawed at my stomach, sore from the continuous heaving over the previous day or more. I clenched my fist and hit the ground, causing the wounds on my knuckles to open. Only then did I take a look at my injured hand. My middle and ring fingers were broken. It looked like someone had taken a bottle opener to my nail and first knuckle.

I shouldn't have just left him that way, but I didn't get much of a reprieve before I had to bow and purge again. It was the tail end of an exorcism. What felt like years' worth of stress, lies, and fears violently erupted from within me until my lips numbed. My stomach slowly relaxed and my ears loudly popped. The pop instantly relieved most of the pressure inside of my head. I felt like I was floating. I was crying and I knew why, but I couldn't quite isolate the thoughts.

The world around me felt foreign. Everything in my brain was misfiring. It was rebooting. My only coherent thought was, I made it out. That my vomit turned to slush on the ground in front of me. Brian stayed in the car and looked in the other direction. I think I felt Karen's hand on my back at one point, but when I finished, she was in the car staring anywhere else but at me.

I collapsed into the vehicle, shaking and soaking wet. Brian started to drive off before I had even shut the door. I saw Karen's lip tremble several times, but she didn't say a word. I don't know how she managed that. It felt like we needed to talk about what had happened, but communication was never our strong suit. I caught her looking at me only once on the drive back as we passed by the exit for Broken Bow. We forgave each other for the things that happened that night, though neither of us actually said it out loud.

We didn't talk about the showers much at all. We filled that place with exactly what we brought there, and the truths about ourselves that we were using each other to hide from. The horror that we experienced in there was a dose of, as Karen put it so many times before, perspective. It woke us up to the fever dream that our lives had become. I think we both realized, painfully sobering up over the six-hour car ride back home and staring straight out of the windshield without actually seeing that we were better off apart.

Similar to the way she moved into my apartment, we never really discussed her moving out. Her things just started disappearing over the course of the following two weeks. We repeated the old mantra about staying friends for another week or so, but you could practically hear it echo every time one of us said it. We knew that we were just parading an empty sentiment at each other. With a soft kiss on my cheek on a Thursday afternoon, she was out of my life. Karen and I couldn't work because we fit too well together. We were two uniquely messed up individuals with a penchant for flipping on a dime and a need

for a partner to share in our mutual misery. It's easy to look back and long for those nights cuddling and watching movies together on the couch. It's a lot harder to remember reality. There were nights spent cuddling on the couch and going out with friends that I occasionally miss, but with a little bit of effort, I can push through the facade and remember how many of those nights ended in shouting matches, broken dishes, and tears. That was almost every night for us. A perfect couple and a perpetual potential domestic dispute rolled into one.

The solution was to rinse the bad parts down and repeat. We were our own perfect enablers, and we were always heading towards the ending we got. Broken Bow did nothing but illuminate what was already in front of us, the reality of our codependence and the inevitability of our end. I think I really did love her, and for what that's worth, I genuinely hope she's doing better now. As for me, I couldn't continue to live how I was living after Nebraska. I was completely covered in dirt and blood when we left the showers, when we finally made it to a gas station, I had a literal hard look at myself in the mirror and realized how far I had let myself spiral downward.

I didn't drink or get high for kicks. I did both of those things because I was broken and needed something to fill the cracks. I realized that I couldn't use the showers as an excuse forever. I couldn't keep lying to myself. If that sounds like it came from the mouth of a therapist, it's because it did. I started going to therapy once every week, initially for the drinking, but eventually for everything else. I'm not a religious convert or a friend of Bill, but I respect the journey and anyone willing to take

it, no matter the method needed to make it through. I wish Mr. Mays had found a way to fight his demons before he left. I guess there are demons, really. Hopefully I can rid us both of them. I'm always going to carry the showers with me. They are a part of who I am, but I don't. I don't have to let them kill me anymore. The most important concept that I have learned in these therapy sessions is that you can't

get better if you just keep covering up symptoms while ignoring the real source of your unhappiness. Blowing your brain out every night with substances just puts off the inevitable confrontation. You have to treat it like a wart. You have to cut all the way down to the root and tear it out to get rid of it. You have to get every last piece. That's why I came back to this. This account, this story. There are so many others out there who listened to Mr. Mesa's Campfire story throughout the years and then moved on like normal people.

I fixated and spread it and put myself into the story because I just couldn't resist. I did so without considering the potential fallout that comes with trying to emulate someone's trauma just for a fucking story. I was careless. I was stupid. After a lot of work, I have found a way to navigate that path that I set myself on so many years ago. And now I'm able to live on my own, separate from the showers. I can't unwrite my original story. I can never put this genie back in the bottle.

I can, however, try to control the narrative, or at least confuse it. I also understand that writing this seems to defeat the purpose of separating myself from that place. But this isn't what you might think it is. This is my last self-indulgent venture into the past. This is my farewell letter to Broken Bow, Nebraska, and whatever secrets the showers might keep. There is a point to all of this. The story is yours now. I don't need it anymore. Either the showers die right here with this post and eventually fade with time, or I let them go,

and they survive on their own merits as an urban legend. Either way, they will do without me. So take the showers and mold them to your needs. Tell the story around a campfire and embellish whatever you'd like. Put yourself in the story, or a friend of a friend, and then use it to get laid. Take your wildest theories about the place and create a story all of your own. Make a movie or a book about it. Turn it into a local urban legend in your own town. Be careful or careless. It doesn't matter to me.

Just drown my story out with your own. In fact, go there if you want. Go find them. Ask every citizen in Broken Bone, Nebraska about them until they run you out of town. Get lost on dirt roads a few miles east of the city until you stumble upon a place resembling the one I have described. and then tear it apart. Bring your friends and take pictures, explore the tunnels, light a bonfire, get drunk and throw a party, and then post it on the internet.

Cover the walls in graffiti and the floors with cigarette butts, broken bottles, condom wrappers, tell everyone you know about it. Flood the internet with so much speculation and rampant bullshit about that place that no one will ever point back to me as the source. Drown me in the noise or let me fade away in peace. Go there yourself and burn it all if you want. Just don't forget to tell everyone how you did it afterwards. Well, shit, I let that go on for so long. That wasn't my intention.

Old habits die hard. I've been pulling from a dusty flask of whiskey that was next to the laptop in the box. I guess it counts as aged now. I'm not really on any wagon, and after the three years of bullshit I put my body through, I figure a few more nips aren't going to hurt a thing. This is just one more for the road. I didn't mean what I said. If you go there, please be careful.

Take a second and think about what you might be getting into. As a child, I found it exciting to insert myself into the scary stories I told kids at school. I gave my stories an extra dose of reality, but it was risky. If I didn't tell the exact same story every time, someone might call my bluff. I didn't realize at the time how dangerous it was to put yourself in someone else's story, to attempt to live another person's trauma like I did with Mr. Mays. I didn't realize how easy it was to get caught up in these tales, to use them as a shield in order to hide from the horrors of your past.

When you put yourself into a story, whatever your reason for it may be, you blind yourself to it. It becomes a part of you. Truth and fiction blurs, ultimately becoming inconsequential. If you aren't paying very close attention, it's easy to lose track of the narrative, and with that, lose track of yourself. Disconnect is the key. Spend whatever narrative you want, but remember to keep your distance, keep grounded.

Separating yourself from a story, if you're lucky enough to catch on to the damage before it consumes you, takes a heavy toll. I didn't come out as the same person I was before all of this. I sure as hell hurt some people I cared for by dragging them into my personal horror show. I'm sorry for whatever it's worth, this late in the game. I suppose that's enough of my ramblings for one sittings. I'm going to post this, blog out of my own. account, tear up the sticky note I saved with my password written on it, shut down this laptop for what I hope is the last time, and bury it back under all the junk in my closet

alongside this flask. Tomorrow I'm going into my classroom at the community college, where I teach a creative writing course. I'm going to walk through those doors with a renewed sense of purpose and weight off my shoulders. I'm going to sit down and tell my students one of the many variations of the showers that I have told over the years. The version I tell the students isn't going to be my story, however. Now I'll tell them a version about my best friend's brother's ex-girlfriend and set it in

some rural part of Pennsylvania a few years back. I'll make up new characters, new places, and new details as I see fit, because I'm in control of the narrative now. Not the other way around. It isn't Halloween yet, but maybe I'll dim the lights and burn a candle or two for atmosphere like Mr. Mays did from my class so many years ago. I'll take back what I did when I posted this story years ago for the world to see. I'm not exactly sure I would want to.

So instead, I'll take a page from my younger self and spread this like I'm playing a large-scale game of telephone, one that I intentionally wish to distort. Hell, might even be fun. I gave you a story on some dark night five years ago, and the only thing I'm asking in return is for you to take it from me. Make it into something scarier and more violent, more cerebral, or more personal. Give it a twist ending. Make it yours.

My hope is that one day someone will tell me their version of the story, with new faces, details, and scares that... And that I won't recognize it until I hear the name that will forever haunt others' dreams instead of my own. The Showers.