“Right,” she muttered, channeling her aunt’s can-do spirit. “Easy.”
The real trouble began when she decided to clear the blockage from the bottom. She crouched by the splash block, unscrewed the first joint of the pipe, and peered into the darkness. A single, fat woodlouse scuttled out. She pushed her phone camera into the gap and took a picture. downpipe blocked
She tugged on her wellingtons, the rubber stiff from disuse, and marched outside. The downpipe, a slender, white PVC column running from the gutter to a cracked concrete splash block, looked innocent enough. But when she peered up at the gutter, she saw it: a dark, wet dam of decomposing leaves, moss, and a single, inexplicably shiny tennis ball. A single, fat woodlouse scuttled out
Her smile vanished. She read on. The journal wasn’t a diary. It was a logbook of obsession. A previous owner of the house, a man named Tobias Crane, had become convinced that the water in the drains was not just water. He called it “the grey.” It was a sentient, malevolent seepage, a slow intelligence that moved through the pipes of the town, pooling under floorboards and weeping from faucets. He wrote of hearing whispers in the toilet cistern, of finding fish bones in the shower drain, of a low, rhythmic knocking that travelled through the waste pipes, like a heart beating in the walls. The downpipe, a slender, white PVC column running
She looked out the window at the downpipe. It was no longer silent. It was humming a low, gurgling song. And she understood, with a cold, certain horror, that she hadn't unblocked the pipe. She had opened a door.
Her first thought was vandalism . Her second was evidence . Her third, as she wrestled the pipe apart with a wrench, was a rising tide of irrational dread.
It was the silence that finally drove her outside.