Sludge

by Jack Potchen

Ben Downs took a long drag of his cigarette.  A young woman named Amy Moore sat across from him at the table.  She was a stranger to him.  She was no more than twenty-five but Ben could see the age in her eyes. The eyes of a woman whose seen too much, he thought.  She carried a notepad, of course, who else besides a reporter would want anything to do with him.  Still, she was the first person to express interest in talking to him in at least ten years, and, unlike any outsider who wanted to talk to him, she requested to see him in private.  Those things alone persuaded him to agree to another interview.

He took another drag and started: “It’s been a part of the world for countless generations.  I mean, what kid doesn’t have a monster under the bed or in the closet?  Here in America we have The Boogeyman, in Spain El Coco, in Germany Der Schwarze Mann, but they are all one in the same.  They are the unknown, the evil who hide in the shadows and prey on children.  For most it’s a foolish childhood myth, just something to laugh about when they grow up. But sometimes there really is something there, lurking in the darkest corner of their rooms, somewhere just beyond their thin boundaries of reality.  For me and my brother all those years ago, ours was The Sludge Man, and unlike The Boogeyman or El Coco, Der Schwarze Mann or le croque-mitaine, Babay or Bavbav, I swear to you, ours was real.”

“When did it all start?” Amy asked. Ben tried to read her tired eyes, but he couldn’t deduce anything. He suspected she was sizing him up. Obviously he lost weight in here, became sickly and emaciated and gray. He guessed a pretty young girl like her would make that face if she came across a wreck like him.

“Well, it started back when I was in the fifth grade and Billy—my brother—was in second.  We shared the same bedroom in the basement.  It was a finished basement, well, at least partly, but it was still a basement, you know.  A basement in a very old, shitty house.  You hear strange things down there sometimes.  We were just kids, and we were scared of the noises down there at night long before anything actually happened.  The night when we finally saw the thing, that came later, but it was around long before that, making noises on the other side of our bedroom door, just to make sure that we knew there was something there.  It . . . I think the fear was more satisfying to it than, you know, the kill . . . it fed off our fear, it had to . . .”

Ben broke off.  He ground the cigarette in the ashtray and looked at Amy.  “It’s been a while since I talked about it all.  Why should I tell you anyway?  Who do you work for?”

Amy looked from her notebook. “It’s complicated,” she replied.  “I’m not here to exploit you, Mr. Downs, if that’s what you’re thinking.  I’ve read too many articles about you and the media has squeezed as much as they could out of you already.  I know you’ve told this story before and it’s very hard to keep telling it, but I need to hear it straight from you.”

She’s not like any reporter I ever met, Ben thought.  She even sounds sincere. “Can I have another cigarette?” he asked.

“Sure.” Amy reached into her handbag and produced one for each of them.

“Thanks.”

“Mr. Downs,” she said, her voice anxious, “please go on.”

“Alright.  I found out about The Sludge Man during fall of the fifth grade.  I remember because that was when Mrs. Shannon was my teacher.  She was an old bat, a miserable old bitch who loved to make my life miserable.  She used to send me home with notes for my father to sign, how I was failing math or I was making jokes in the back of the classroom.  That’s when my father started to hit me.  Minor at first, but the notes kept coming.  It was all little stuff, like throwing a pencil or coming back from recess late, but my father didn’t take those things lightly.  And after my father would ‘set me straight,’ as he would say, he would send me to my room in the basement while Billy was free to do whatever he wanted upstairs or outside.  That’s when The Sludge Man started making noises, or at least when I started noticing them.”

“So you were the one who first found out about The Sludge Man.  Did Billy hear the noises too?”

“He did that night . . . and many other nights.  But when it was just me in that room, crying my eyes out because of Mrs. Shannon and my father . . . that’s when it found me . . . found its new home, I guess.

“It started with a gurgling noise, almost inaudible in my room.  It was outside the door, somewhere else in the basement, behind damp boxes and loose pieces of old furniture and my father’s old work clothes, a place in our home long ignored, taken over by the stuff we don’t want but won’t throw away.  Everything coated in dust.  There was no light back there.  There was no need for one.  The flashlights were upstairs, but I definitely wasn’t going up there, where my father sat in front of the TV in his boxers and stained work shirt, drinking too much.”

“Did you go back there?”

“Yes, in the dark.  Well, there was still a little bit of moonlight coming in through the basement window.  I remember that.  It made the basement look so strange.  I saw that heap of mess every day but that night it looked so different.  It looked . . . it looked like it was hiding something.  I know it sounds crazy and I know a lot of people think it’s crazy, but that’s what I thought.”

Once again Amy, that mysterious creature from civilized society, gave Ben a look he couldn’t decipher. Maybe my people skills have gone down the shitter, he thought.

“I was scared but I didn’t know why.  I went anyway.  The noise was louder, it sounded wet, like water going down a drain.  You know that sound?  That’s what it was like.  Before I could process what I was doing I was climbing over heaps of dusty trash, struggling over boxes of BETA tapes and magazines.  An old bike that was once mine, then Billy’s.  An old filing cabinet my father swiped from a job.  Behind all this stuff, almost hidden in the shadows, was a drain, a drain in the concrete floor.”

“A drain?”

“Yeah.  It was a drainage pipe, in case the basement ever flooded.  I never even knew it existed.  I bent down to look closer, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw . . . stuff, thick gray pulpy stuff.  I know what you are thinking.  It wasn’t sewage.  I know what sewage smells like, but this smelled like . . . like garbage on fire.  The smell was overpowering, I could feel it in my nose.  In my brain.  You may think I am disgusting, but I was a kid, you know.  Wanna know what I did?  I actually touched the sludge, rubbed it in between my fingers.  It felt hot and made my skin sting.

“I wanted to run and hide, but I was frozen in place.  The gurgling stopped, and I heard something else. The sound I heard was The Sludge Man.”

“Did it talk to you?”

“Yeah, I think so, if I can even call it that.  To me it was a low rumbling and clicking noise, but I think it was talking.  It was just on the other side of the drain, inches away from me but out of sight, its body compressed in that pipe beyond understanding.  And it was talking!  Maybe it was the language of the sewer, maybe a language from much lower than the sewer.  But it was talking, and for the life of me I didn’t know what the fuck to do.  All I heard was the click click growl click click click . . .”

Amy was making notes.  She didn’t look up.

“I have no idea how long I stayed there, but there was a point when that basement got really dark, like the moon all of a sudden went out completely.  And when I was blinded, that’s when it reached up and grabbed me.

“It managed to reach a mucky hand through the drain and grab my arm.  The stench was unbearable.  I’m not sure if I screamed, I was probably even too scared to manage a cry.  It grabbed my arm and it stung where it held me, like it’s hand was coated with barbed wire, but I knew it was just the feel of the sludge.  I pulled with everything in me but it didn’t budge.

“Then, it let me go.  The moon came back, and the hand was gone.  Now that the attack was over, that’s when I know I screamed.  I bolted upright and fell backwards into a pile of junk, knocking over the filing cabinet, boxes of old toys, dozens of loose papers.  I looked up and my father was there, standing over me with his swelled beer belly between me and his face.

“The beating I got for the mess was bad, but my father did save my life.  If he wasn’t there, The Sludge Man would’ve ripped my arm off, maybe it would have even found a way to pull all of me through that small drain . . .”

Amy looked up sympathetically.  “Mr. Downs?”

“I’m okay.”

“Another cigarette?”

“Please.”

She lit his cigarette for him. “Please go on, Mr. Downs.”

“Okay . . . my father was a very angry man.  He didn’t look at my blackened and bruised arm, he didn’t listen to what I had to say.  And after the beating, he told me if I came upstairs for any reason besides the bathroom he would hit me harder.  So that night, Sludge Man and all, I stayed in the basement.  It’s kinda sick when I think about it today, how much power my father had over me, to make me stay downstairs with a monster.  I think now that I wouldn’t even have run upstairs if The Sludge Man was completely out of the drain and chasing me.  I made a lot of bathroom trips though.”

“What about your brother?  Did you tell him?”

“Yeah.  I told him that night.  He cared about me a lot, you know?  After I got hit he came down to talk to me.  We were close, even for brothers.  But even he had a hard time believing what I told him.  I showed him my arm and he knew it wasn’t a joke.  I took him back to the drain and showed him the gray matter still stuck in the rim of the drain and he started to believe me.  By bedtime, we were working together to push our bureau in front of our door.  He was only seven and I felt terrible about scaring him.  But I’m not stupid, you know?  I had to tell him.  To be honest, after I told him that story I think he was just as scared as me.

“So we spent the night that way, barricaded in our room.  My father upstairs in his room.  I’ll never forget what Billy said to me that night.  The lights were on, I was lying on my back with my eyes wide open, scared out of my mind but unable to show it in front of my brother.  Billy was in his bed on the other side of the room.  I told him to get some sleep, but he was just as awake as me.  Do you wanna know what he said?  He said ‘Will anything happen to us?’ I sat up, looked at him and told him no.  ‘Promise?’ he said.  ‘I promise,’ I said.

“And you wanna know what?  Of all the things that have happened, the promise I made to him, that’s what haunts me the most.”

“I’m sorry.”

Amy put down her notepad and didn’t pick it up again.  Ben glanced at it and noticed that there were barely any notes at all. “Did anything happen that night?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sometime around midnight, the gurgling sound started up again.  Both of us were still awake, lying in our beds, listening for the faintest sound of the monster.  The sound was so sudden, so not faint, that we practically fell out of our beds.  My father didn’t hear it.  He was still snoring upstairs.  Hell, he never heard anything until the end.  That was what it wanted.

“We huddled together at the far wall of our room, as far away from the door as we could.  Again came the click growl click click growl.  It was out.  It was walking around.  It was beckoning us to push the bureau aside and walk through that door . . .

“And all we could do was cry.”

Amy was silent, but her weary eyes pleaded Ben to continue.

“It stood on the other side of our door all night.  The next morning I fell asleep in class, and I cried and pleaded to Mrs. Shannon not to write a note.  Please not this time.  She had to spend at least ten minutes trying to calm me down.  She didn’t send me home with a note after all.  That time I won.  I tried to tell my friends about what happened, but all of them thought I was putting them on.  I was the kidder, you know?  The class clown.  The guy who got in trouble every day even though the things he did weren’t always that funny and who would be grounded and sometimes beaten for it.  Who were they to believe me?  My best friend Henry Sutter, he looked at me with a thin little smile, as if waiting to hear the joke at the end of it all.  But no joke ever came.  No one ever came any closer to believing me.  My brother had some success with his more immature peers, but his teacher, threatening to send him to the counselor, quickly silenced his story.

“Talking more just made it harder for people to believe.”

“I know.”

“I knew even then that it was just me and my brother, alone against the monster. And that was the way we lived.  The Sludge Man would ooze back into the sewers during the day, keeping quiet, invisible.  Somewhere dark where it lay among the waste and the rats, biding its time.  When night came it was free to roam the basement, and me and my brother would listen.  It didn’t come into our room, didn’t even try the doorknob, at least during that time.  Like I said, the fear was more satisfying than anything else.  At least that’s what I think.  Some nights we wouldn’t hear anything at all, but that was bad too.  When things get really quiet in the movies, something big and bad attacks.  Those nights, the weeks of torture, the unknowing, the suspense, that was all the calm before the storm.  I guess I always knew that, too.

“My brother slept for a couple hours at a time.  He had to, he was just a child, but he never slept well.  To be honest, by the end it looked like he was wasting away.  I don’t think I slept more than an hour every night myself, and I haven’t slept a full night since.  It was during those long weeks that I realized it was trying to wear us down mentally and physically.  Just like a lion running its young prey til exhaustion.  It could kill us whenever it wanted, but if it wears us down, there is less resistance.  Maybe it thinks we would even be compliant, almost relieved that it was finally willing to put us out of our misery.  The very thought made me sit straight up in bed and clutch my head in bitter frustration.  I started crying.  Over my sobbing, I could hear it clicking away, sounding closer than it had been that whole night.

“It knew we were getting weak.

“It waited . . .

“It waited . . . how long had it been down that drain?  A month?  More?  It’s hard to remember.  When you don’t sleep, the day never ends.  I got more tired.  My teacher sent more notes.  I got hit more.  I tried telling my father but he told me to cut the shit.  After a while I didn’t care about getting hit, I didn’t care about failing tests.  All I cared about was our Boogeyman, our l’uomo nero, our Goni Billa, and how it was getting more restless with each passing night.

“And I cared about sleep.  I cared about sleep a lot.

“I think it was a month.  That was how long it lasted.  One night, the last night, it decided to show itself.”

Amy sat up straight. She made a reach for her notepad but at the last second pulled her hand back. Ben eyed her curiously before delving back into his memories.

“That night . . . it happened so fast.  It was like a nightmare, but it was too real.  I try to forget it, I try to put it behind me, but there are some things one can never forget.  Strange enough, as the years go by it gets even harder.  That night, stuff like that poisons your head, you know?  And poison spreads.  It’s why I look like I do.”

“Mr. Downs, please, what happened?”

Ben was taken aback by the pleading sound of her voice, but he continued, “It snowed that whole day.  There had to have been at least three feet of snow on the ground.  The school was closed—hell, the whole town was closed.  We were completely snowed in.  But inside, the night was like any other—me and my brother would push the bureau in front of our door and Billy would try to get some sleep while I played guard.  I was reading comic books, I remember that, they always helped me keep busy.  I couldn’t believe when I looked at the clock that it was already midnight.  I could imagine my father getting ready for bed upstairs.  Soon enough, something would happen just like usual.

“Looking back, even then I felt that that night was different.  Maybe it was the snow.  The feeling of being trapped never felt more real.

“Anyway, soon enough, The Sludge Man came out of the drain.  I heard the usual gurgling noise, as if it was pushing with all its strength to squeeze itself out.  I heard it walking around—that usual squishy sound of its footsteps.  It was right up against the door.

“And our bedroom . . . it looked dimmer.  I tried to convince myself that it was just in my head . . . or maybe the storm was doing weird things to the electricity.  I don’t know, I was just a kid, I was just trying to calm myself down.

“Then I thought about the moon, how during my attack it seemed to just disappear.

“I stood up, walked to the door.  I don’t know why, it was almost as if The Sludge Man was in some way calling to me.  Yeah, in some sick way it was calling to me, it’s that same feeling I got when I bent down over that putrid drain the first night.  I knelt down and stared into the dark space between the bureau and the door.  There was sludge, just like the first night.  It was slowly seeping underneath the door.  The smell, I could smell it again.  It made me want to puke, it stung my eyes, my throat.

“That smell made me conscious again.  I bolted upright and shook Billy awake.  I could barely utter a word to him when The Sludge Man tried the doorknob.  Then, the whole door was shaking, as if a giant was leaning against it.

“‘Oh God,’ I yelled.  ‘Oh God oh God oh God.’ It was the best thing I could think of.  Billy clutched onto me, his arms wrapped tight around my neck.  ‘Benny, do something!’ he yelled.

“And then it started: click click click click—louder and louder and louder—click click click click click—the door was starting to bend, it was pushing—growl click click growl—the doorframe was cracking. . . .

“Billy screamed.  I screamed.  Then came the crash.  It was inside, and it took the whole fucking door with it, like it was nothing.”

Ben paused.  He looked down at his shaking hands.  The cigarette he had been holding was burnt to the filter.  He put it out and looked at the far wall, trying not to make eye contact with Amy.

“After that,” he said.  “After that . . . it’s a little hard to describe.”

“Please.  Mr. Downs,” Amy said.

The sound of her voice made Ben look at her again.  She was on the verge of tears and Ben suddenly knew why.

“Ben, what did it look like?”

He spoke slowly, never taking his eyes off of her: “It looked human, but in a really fucked up sorta way.  It was sorta hunched over, and its arms were too long.  They dragged on the carpet.  Its head was just a bulb on the end of its monstrous torso.  But the shape of it, it wasn’t a solid shape.  When it moved toward us, its body shifted back and forth, sunk in on itself, stretched back out—I don’t think there was any skeleton under there.  It was made of the sludge.  That’s the best way I can explain it.”

“Did it have eyes?”

“I don’t know.  I didn’t see any, but it happened so fast I probably didn’t notice.”

Ben could see Amy turn pale, and as hard as it was, he kept talking: “It was too big and awkward to run.  When it was in the room it more or less lunged at us, one of its long heavy arms coming within an inch of my face.  Fortunately, when it reached to grab us, the weight of itself made it collapse on the floor.  I’ll never forget the sound it made when it hit the floor.  It was a wet popping sound, kinda like a cork popping from a bottle.

“We were backed up all the way against the wall, standing on my brother’s bed.  The thing was too big, there was no way to get around it and out the door.  I could imagine it getting a hold of us and squeezing until our guts gushed out.  That thought, combined with the smell and the look of the fucking thing, almost made me pass out.  Almost.  My brother, seeing the state I was in, I guess, clutched me tighter, sinking his nails into my neck.  ‘The window!’ he yelled.  Right, I thought. It was our escape, our lifeline that I was prepared to use since the beginning.  The window was only several feet to the left of the bed, at the far wall of the room.  The window was at ground level outside, five feet high for us.  One of us would have to hoist the other up, and I always knew that Billy was going to be the one saved, if it came down to it.

“That’s when my father came in.

“He brought his rifle, his prize hunting rifle that hung over the mantle upstairs that we were absolutely forbidden to touch.  He was in boxers and nothing else.  We were at the far corner, away from the door.  The Sludge Man between him and us.

“‘Help!’ I remember calling, even though I knew it was useless.

“‘What the FUCK!’ I heard him yell, but by then I already turned away towards the window.  ‘Come on, Billy,’ I said, and I hoisted him up.  As tired as I was after all that time, I managed to lift my brother to safety.  ‘What about Dad?’ he yelled.  ‘Just go,’ I said, ‘Just go!’”

“My brother was out the window, standing in three feet of snow.  I heard three gunshots.  Then a scream.  Then a thick THUD.  I didn’t look back, but Billy saw it through the window.  Maybe if he didn’t look back he would still be alive today.

“At one point in between, the light went out in the room completely.  There was only the pale light of the stars, reflected on the fresh snow.

“I climbed through the window, pulling myself up with sheer adrenaline.  Billy tried to crawl back through the window.  Before I could process what was going on he was halfway through the window again.  ‘Are you insane!’ I yelled.

“Then the scream.  A higher, louder scream.  I had Billy by the legs and The Sludge Man had him by the arms . . .”

Tears started to roll down Ben’s face.  “I was no match for it.  In one final yank Billy was back in the room, and it was too dark inside to see what happened to him.  But I didn’t want to know anyway.  I knew he was gone.”

“Ben, I’m so sorry—”

“I ran through the snow, probably for a good half-mile.  When someone found me, I had been passed out in the snow for a while.  I was nearly frozen to death.  Nobody saw The Sludge Man in the house.  They just saw the corpses of Billy and my father, and the mess it left behind.  I never asked in what condition they found my family.”

Ben was silent for a while.  Amy didn’t ask any more questions.

Ben calmed himself down and finished the last sentences of his story. “No rational person believed me, and no rational person could come up with an explanation for what happened.  Nevertheless they put me here and this is where I’ve been since.”

“I’m sorry.” Amy said, and Ben knew that’s all she could say. Her eyes, Ben’s gateway to the truth, started to water.

Ben stared at her.  The story was over and he needed to know.  “I don’t get many visitors.”

“I know.”

“Reporters come, but look at what they did to me.  They tried to blame me!  Can you believe that?  They made my life even more miserable.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“So you believe me then,” Ben said.

“Stranger things have happened.”

“To you?”

Amy looked away.  “Yes.”

Finally, the truth. She’s definitely no reporter, Ben thought. “The Sludge Man?” he asked. “Did you see it too?”

Amy was shaking all over. Still, she managed to look at Ben straight in the face. “We . . . we just called it The Monster.  It came from the pipes.  It crawled up from the sewers, but I think there are some passageways that lead to places much darker than that.  And it did have eyes.  Small, red eyes that would drive you insane if you stare at them too long.  Barely any life in them, but enough to kill you and everyone you care about.”

“How long has it been?”

“Twelve years.”

There was silence. In that silence, they understood each other.  They were normal to each other.  They were friends.

Ben took a deep breath. “Listen,” he said.  “There’s something else.”

“What is it?”

It’s time, he thought. He finally had someone who believes in him, and he knew, although he hated to think it, that she came just in time. He had to say one last thing.

“I’m sorry I have to tell you this, but at this point it is more important that you know this than me.  I’ve been in this fucking loonybin for most of my life.  I’ve been in one place too long. And you know what?  I think, after all these years, it’s finally tracked me down—”

Amy’s tired eyes flared with life, with fear, but Ben knew he must continue, “—it’s somewhere in the pipes in this asylum, waiting for nightfall.  I heard it gurgling.  I saw a ring of sludge in my sink drain.  My door’s locked on the outside this time.  I’m a goner, believe me.  There’s nothing either of us can do.  You’re the first person to believe me since my brother, and that’s only because you saw it yourself.  It’s only a matter of time before it attacks.  And I’m plenty tired and weak already.”

Ben’s face was solemn, he looked like he was ready to accept the death he cheated years ago.  He was dignified in defeat.  He spoke clearly, calmly: “Listen, leave this place.  And drive fast.  Go far away.  If our Boogeyman can sense me it can sense you, and if it has crawled through a maze of pipes to find me it will find you too.  Go, please . . .

“Run.”

Against her conscience, Amy did as she was told. Her notebook lay on the table where she left it, and she jogged down those white halls less free than the lumbering shells of men behind those steel doors. For a brief second, she wanted to look back at the room in which a sane man awaited his death. But Amy knew she couldn’t turn around. Unlike Lot’s wife, or Ben’s brother, she knew she couldn’t look back.

About the Author

Jack Potchen lives in South Jersey and is currently studying at Rowan University.

©2010 Jack Potchen