The MagusZine Archives

While The Waters Nearer Roll by James S. Dorr

The water was different. In a way, Adam Restler had expected that, that here in the mountains it would be fresher, less laced with pollution, even though a part of his mind told him that there was nothing completely pure anymore. The city water, in fact, might be safer for all the treatment it had to go through before reaching people’s taps.

But that was life, he thought. Nothing pure anymore–not even marriages, his having shattered, he realized now, years before the final break-up. Not even his children, who cared nothing for him. Not even his job now, betrayed from above, though he had been lucky in some ways there, having other investments that he could fall back on.

This cabin for one.

But the water was funny. He’d suspected it for a couple of weeks now, a sort of subtle thing, creeping up on him.

It wasn’t the taste but the feel that was odd to him. Not gritty, as the thought first had occurred to him, as if the pump that drew it from the spring–even his “roughing it” wasn’t so pure that he’d done way with electricity and the needed conveniences that supplied him–were picking up sand. But the water felt somehow heavy. Heavy and thick, perhaps, but a strange kind of thick.

Viscous, the thought came–a stickiness, maybe. And yet, when he drank it–or had the day before–he recalled that it had gone down his throat okay.

It was now, though, as he brushed his teeth that the strangeness came to him. An oozing of sorts–a feeling of oozing–as his brush’s bristles pushed in between his teeth.

When he spat in the sink, he saw the liquid, bubbly and white from the paste that was mixed with it, bunched in a heap like a watery amoeba. The thought came back to him of highschool biology, as he watched the small mass slowly clearing, becoming spit-colored, then, still slowly, flattening, spreading down toward the drain.

He thought perhaps he should have analyzed it. But then it had been. And not that long ago. He’d had it checked out, that it was safe for drinking–one couldn’t be too cautious these days with chemical spills and congressional wrangles on nuclear waste–even here in the Tennessee Appalachians.

Mine tailings. Oak Ridge.

You couldn’t escape it. But then that was life too.

The mail was delivered, granted to a post office box down by Sweetwater–the name had tickled his sense of the ironic–that he visited only once a week, but there was e-mail. He’d finally thrown his laptop away. But there was still snail mail, his ex-wife’s dunning letters, despite the account he’d finally set up that she could draw from.

And there was the TV.

He’d made a decision. He would keep the TV, though he rarely watched it. He spent evenings mostly outside in summer, enjoying the mountain view west of the Smokies. On clear nights he could see as far as Loudon, the Holston River downstream from Knoxville, before it joined the Clinch, and on its other side, Lenoir City, the latter a small town really.

He had no telephone.

But now the water. It didn’t taste bad, mind you–only that texture seemed a little queer. And he’d been drinking it and felt no worse for it. That evening he did check the news from Knoxville on the TV to see if there were any pollution alerts. The weather report said to expect more dryness along with continuing above-average temperatures for July, and later that night, the eleven o’ clock news reported the same from Chattanooga.

Maybe some part of the water was drying and that made the rest thick–he dreamed about that that night. Like in a desert, but even worse, where the sky was turning, slowly, to solid sand, and yet gradually enough that people could still breathe it.

That morning, when he woke, he went to the bathroom. The water in the toilet was thick as well, as thick as Jell-O. When he urinated, his stream bounced off it.

But then, falling back, it was as if the liquid now not so much sank in the water of the bowl as it was absorbed by it. As if the whole were, amoeba-like, eating it.

He heard gurgling. He saw in the washbasin the water rise from the drain–only a little, to be sure. A tendril.

He leaned to take a closer look at it but then it went down again.

The toilet flushed okay. New water rose in the bowl like it should, perhaps a bit sluggishly, but how would he know? Who bothers to time toilets’ filling anyway? And as for whether the water itself was liquid or solid–his dream came back to him–he wasn’t about to stick his hand in the bowl.

When he boiled the water from the kitchen for coffee, it seemed to thin out okay, although, again, the pot had filled sluggishly.

That’s when he noticed another odd thing. He went outside, slowly–even his own body seemed sluggish to him now, as if the whole world were moving slowly–and listened to the rustling of morning leaves in the morning breeze. It seemed far away, as if muffled by distance. But more than that he was struck by the smell, a good smell, loamy, more spring-like than summery. A moist, spring-rain kind of smell even though there had been scarcely a cloud in the sky since the end of June.

And another thing, then, he noticed as well. He heard no birds singing or insects humming.

He felt an electric tingling on his skin as if before a storm.

He went back inside, though the sky was still clear–but once inside the feeling was stronger.

It seemed later than he’d thought, as if the sun were already in the west, when, once again, he heard a gurgling. This time it was accompanied by a rush of water.

He ran to the bathroom–the sink was flooding. Water was oozing over its rim in great lobbed masses, splashing down to the floor. Joining similar pools from the toilet and from the shower drain to form not a sheet but a lump of water. A heaping liquid thing.

Fascinated, he watched as it rose higher, starting to form a tiny crest while he heard from behind him, as if from far away, similar sounds from the cabin’s kitchen.

Finally he moved. It seemed twilight dark outside. He turned on the TV to the Knoxville news station and saw an empty set, shifting as if he were watching through some sort of transluscent screen. Like an undersea movie, yet somehow in the air. The cameras still worked. There was electricity. There was still electricity. People still breathed–though he saw no people, at least not directly.

He did see a shadow, manlike, for a moment. He tried other channels but slowly, lethargically. As if he were beneath the ocean. Eyes scarcely focusing on a series of similar scenes from Chattanooga, Huntsville, Nashville, and back to Knoxville. He saw other shadows.

Behind him, he heard a new splashing, a water noise. Turning again with molasses-like slowness, he watched the room around him fill, not with flowing water–or even a coagulation of semi-solids–but rather a more tenuous oozing within the air. A fog-like thing. A creeping-up kind of thing as if the Earth itself were drowned in listlessness.

Over the centuries a kind of not-caringness.

Adam did not know–perhaps he dreamed that too. On the TV he saw new kinds of shadows. Armored, indifferent shapes clawing through desks and chairs, lobster-like, filling the TV sound stage.

He saw, in his mind, lobsters tearing at corpses, their claws rending rotted flesh.

He felt he must act somehow. Straining, he rose up. Moistened air. Thickened air. Water-air clingling. Glue-like to his arms and legs, pressing him back one step for every two he took. He fought his way to the cabin’s door, fought his way to the front porch.

And there to the air again!

Looking back he saw not fog but water–or not water but a gelatinous mass as solid as sand, as solid as packed mud, confined at least for now by the cabin’s walls. Bulging out at its windows and open door.

He saw in the dark, north toward the river, the lights of Loudin, gleaming and bright in the night’s crystal stillness. But the lights themselves were shifting, shimmering, as if the whole valley were submerged in water.

Then, as he still watched, the first huge drops of rain crashed down.