I remember when I first saw the truck weaving in front of me. It was one of those old and battered white work trucks that you see government crews and old handimen driving. My first thought was that it was a drunk, and that I needed to slow down in case he slammed on the brakes suddenly. Then I was watching as the truck lurched violently to the right and tumbled down the embankment to the creek fifteen feet below.
I stopped and got out, and while my brain was still buzzing with adrenaline and surprise, I slid down the hill and yanked open the driver’s side door. The man inside was in his fifties, and from the angle of his head, I thought his neck was probably broken. I couldn’t tell if he was alive, and I knew better than to move him, but I was also starting to realize I needed to call 911. There was a colored piece of paper laying on the man’s leg, and thinking it might have information I could give the hospital or the police, I plucked it out while hitting dialing the number.
It was a work order. It said that Salivador Petty, I guessed this guy, had serviced the pool filter at some house out in the county. I told the 911 dispatcher where we were and what I thought the guy’s name might be. He told me to go wait up by my car until emergency services arrived.
Ending the call, I glanced up to find the man staring at me, his lips working soundlessly as he tried to say something or maybe cry out in pain. I told him to stay still and quiet, that help was on the way. This just made him more animated, his eyes rolling and his lips twitching as he tried to force something out. Finally I heard him speak, though it sounded more like a gasp of trapped air than a human voice.
“It…won’t stop…growing...”
The man’s eyes fluttered back closed, and I decided to take 911’s advice and wait by my car for the authorities to arrive. When they did, the EMT thanked me for waiting but said they’d take it from there.
So I left.
By the next day, I rarely thought about the accident, and it wasn’t until I was cleaning out my car the following weekend that I found the work order tucked between my seat and the console. Holding that pink slip of paper brought it all back to me, and I found myself wanting to find out what had happened to the poor guy. I called the local hospital, but they said they couldn’t disclose any information about patients. I even talked to my brother-in-law at the sheriff’s department, but he hadn’t heard about the accident at all. Finally, feeling a bit foolish, I called the work number on the paper.
After the fourth ring, a voice mail message picked up and an older-sounding man said to leave a message at the beep with your name, number and address, as well as what work you needed done. I tried to picture that voice coming from the gasping man trapped in the truck, and I found it wasn’t hard. So I left a message, asking for him or someone to call me back. That I was the guy who saw his accident a few days earlier, and I wanted to see how he was doing.
Two more weeks passed with no word. Not only hadn’t I forgotten about it again, but it had become a preoccupation—it got to the point that I would check my phone a couple of times an hour to see if I had missed a call. I didn’t understand my need to know what had happened to him, but that didn’t change how compelling it had become. By the end of the second week, I was searching for a phone number connected to the address where the guy had worked on the pool filter. It was a long shot, but if the people there used him regularly, maybe they had heard something about what had happened.
There was no number, but I still had the address, and that Saturday I found myself driving across the county to a massive house tucked deep into the woods. I almost stopped and went back home several times, but it never quite happened. Every time I went to turn around, I kept telling myself that it was a fun random adventure on a boring Saturday, it was me being a good Samaritan, or at the very least, it would put the final nail in the coffin of my bizarre curiosity.
There were no signs of people outside the house, and when I knocked on the door, no one answered. I felt a flutter of nervousness as I went around looking for a side or back door to knock at. It was getting dark and I was a stranger, lurking around in the back yard like I wanted to get shot. But just one last try and…
There was the pool.
I hadn’t thought about the pool when I first arrived, and even when I went around to the back of the property, it hadn’t occurred to me right away. That was because it wasn’t out in the back yard, but rather in a large building of brick and glass set away from the main house. The windows seemed to be partially grown over with some kind of vines or ivy, but I could still see the shimmer of the water reflected in the windows. Maybe I’d have better luck finding someone in there.
I knocked at the door to the pool house and then opened it. Looking inside, at first I saw a young woman floating naked and facedown in the hazy water of a large, well-lit swimming pool. I had the panicked thought that she must be drowning and I stepped forward. That was when I realized my mistake. The pool wasn’t well-lit at all, but instead thick with a murky sludge that had more of those black vines pouring out of it like a fountain. I looked around in horror as I realized those vines were all around me and growing closer all the time. I tried to run away, but I was already trapped.
But then again, maybe I had been trapped for a while.
I live in a white room now. Most of the time I can see it as a white room, and things are better then. I can see my bed and table, my television and bookshelves, my computer and desk. They are clean and tidy and not at all tainted. They are all just right.
I try to ignore the red line painted on the far line of the room. Anything that gets past that line gets burned up. When I first got here, I used to toss pencils across the line just to watch them pop like firecrackers. But then they stopped giving me pencils and I learned to behave. Life has been better since then.
Now the only time it’s really bad is when I don’t see the clean white room. Sometimes I see the twisted snarl of those black vines, running in every direction, wrapping around me, digging through me, always trying to grow and grow and grow. That’s when I feel how angry and hungry it is, how much it wants to tear me apart but doesn’t quite dare until it manages to get past that damned red line.
I have visitors occasionally. They come in strange suits and talk to me as though nothing is wrong. They give me books and let me access the internet and watch movies and play games. They seem nice, but they won’t let me leave, or tell me why they brought me here or what’s wrong with me. When I ask them about the vines, they act like I’m making it up. Like there isn’t any such thing.
For a minute, they had me thinking I was crazy. For a minute, they had me wondering if I was just seeing things. If maybe it was all just in my head.
But then, last…well, I don’t know time like I did, but a little while ago…one of those doctors or whatever they are, they came in to talk to me. I was seeing the vines then, curling and uncurling against the walls like a thousand angry clenched fists. I was trying to ignore them and talk to the lady in the strange suit when one of the tendrils suddenly shot out toward her face. It stopped just short of the burn line, like it always does, because it knows. But I wasn’t watching it. I was watching the woman.
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