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Riley

IT HAD GRAY

SKIN.

Riley only caught a glimpse of what might have been its back before whatever was in her cereal bowl vanished again in the milky water. She watched for bubbles, signs of something breathing, but there were none. Whatever it was didn’t come up for air.

“Okay, that didn’t happen.”

It did, though. Even as she said the words, the tiny ripples in the milky water worked their way out to the edge of the bowl, bounced back, and slowly faded to nothing. Riley stared until the water went still, unwilling to blink or breathe, forcing every ounce of her being to not move and betray the fact that she was there because her gut told her if she did, that tiny gray thing would leap up and attack. It would go for her mouth or her eye and burrow deep. That’s what things like that did. The same horror movies that taught her about garbage disposals taught her that, too. It would get inside her, eat its way to her brain, and take over like in that book by Jack Finney; she’d read that one last summer.

No way she’d become an alien zombie—she’d kill it.

Riley tightened her grip on the spoon, eased it toward the bowl, and tapped the side.

Nothing.

She swallowed and tapped again, hit the bowl hard; jostled it.

Nothing moved.

It’s all in your head, Riley.

Then she saw it again, just a glimpse, but there it was—maybe an inch long, gray, just below the water’s surface. It quickly circled the outer rim of the bowl and vanished again in the murk. Whatever that was, it wasn’t alone—the scratching from the drain returned, frantic and fast, like something desperately wanted out, took a running start, and didn’t make it all the way up.

Riley was trying to wrap her head around all that when her phone dinged with an incoming text—she yelped, honest-to-God yelped. Her stomach jumped and she fell to the floor, twisting away from the sink and counter when her body decided it was time to go without clearing the motion with the rest of her. On her way down, her fingers caught the edge of her phone, not enough to grip it, but enough to send it spinning over the side of the counter to the tile floor. It hit facedown with a nasty crunching noise Riley had heard before, and when she managed to scoop it up, the message appeared behind a web of cracks: ARE YOU ALONE?

All caps from a number she didn’t recognize.

Riley barely had time to process that when her bowl clattered in the sink above her, like it jumped. Like something hit it from below.

She’d left the cabinet door beneath the sink open when she unplugged the garbage disposal, and her eyes landed on a tiny red nub at the base of the machine. Riley knew exactly what that was, because her mom complained about it all the time—some kind of safety circuit breaker or something. It tripped whenever her mom tried to put too much down the drain. It was sticking out now, and that was the reason the disposal hadn’t worked the second time she hit the switch.

Riley moved fast, because she knew if she didn’t, she’d think about what she was about to do and whatever courage she managed to muster would vanish as quickly as it appeared.

Reaching under the sink, she fumbled the plug back into the outlet, then she pressed the reset button on the bottom of the disposal. She expected it to pop back out (sometimes it did that), but when it didn’t, she got back to her feet and leaned over the sink.

The milky water in the bowl was a wild frenzy, the gray—monster, fish, alien, whatever-the-hell—swimming in quick circles, following the outer rim.

Riley reached in and flipped the bowl—spun it hard enough to crack it in half on the side of the sink—milk, water, and that thing splashed out, circled the drain, and vanished, but not before she got a quick look at it—its skin glistened, like it was covered in oil. Worm-like. It was gone fast, but she didn’t see any eyes, feet, flippers, nothing like that. It did look like it had gills on the sides and this ugly little mouth she knew was probably full of sharp teeth, although she saw nothing like that.

Riley slammed the back of her fist into the garbage disposal switch hard enough to crack the plastic plate.

The motor ground to life with a sickening chew, the crunch of small bones, and Riley didn’t know if that was the gray thing, whatever was scratching in the pipes, or something else, and she didn’t much care. She turned the water on full, as hot as it would go, watched the steam rise. She let it all run for nearly a minute before finally turning everything back off.

She couldn’t bring herself to look in the sink.

No way.

Her back against the cabinet, Riley dropped to the floor again and waited for the tears to come, but she didn’t even get a chance to do that—her busted phone dinged with another message. WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE—ARE YOU ALONE?!?