The Thing in the Drain by Katie Gray

Harriet was going slowly along the road, avoiding putting her feet on any cracks in the pavement, when she heard the man screaming.

It was a long, loud scream – the kind of scream you might call blood-curdling – and she stumbled to a halt. Setting her foot down just before a crack she looked up and saw the man. He was down the road, standing in the gutter, flailing his arms around like an inflatable tube man and screaming that wordless scream.

Once when Harriet was little, she’d seen a man screaming in public. He’d been pacing back and forth outside the supermarket, shouting and swearing at thin air. Mum had taken her hand and urged her on. “Don’t look at him,” she’d hissed. “He’s nuts.”

Gripping the straps of her schoolbag tight, Harriet stepped over the next crack and walked towards the man. Since starting at the big school she was allowed to walk home by herself. She could handle this.

A couple of older girls from her school were standing close by the man, staring and giggling. She resolved to keep her eyes straight ahead. But the man’s flailing movements kept drawing her gaze. He was dressed in a dark suit with a red tie. In one hand he held a laptop bag by its handle, the strap swinging with his flails. The really weird thing was, Harriet could swear he was shrinking; inch by inch, he was getting shorter. It must have been something about the way he was moving.

Drawing closer to the man, she dropped her head down and hunched her shoulders. There was blood in the gutter.

A thick, dark pool of blood, oozing down the gutter. Harriet followed it back, eyes wide, to its source. The man was standing on a drain; she couldn’t see his feet. His legs ended halfway down his calves. Blood bubbled and sprayed, soaking his trousers, as he sank down into the drain. He drew breath to go on screaming and Harriet became aware of another noise. A low, grinding gurgle coming from the drain

Sometimes when Harriet was visiting her granny they’d go to the old-fashioned bakery where they had a machine that sliced the bread. This was like that, she thought. The drain was slicing him up. Down he went.

Tearing her eyes away from his vanishing knees, she saw that one of the giggling girls had got out her phone and started filming. Across the street the man who ran the corner shop had come out to smoke a cigarette and was watching the scene play out. A woman passed leading a little boy by the hand. The boy pointed at the man and said some half-voiced, curious statement. His mum yanked on his arm, hurrying him away. “Don’t stare.”

The man was in the drain almost up to his waist; and Harriet thought, why doesn’t anyone do something?

As the drain began to swallow up his midsection the smell of blood in the air turned dank and the man’s screams became wet and choked. The gutter began to fill with bits of him, the drain no longer able to contain the mess, and Harriet made the mistake of looking at his face.

His eyes were wide, his pupils tiny dots rolling against the whites. A mix of blood and spit was running down his chin. He didn’t look much older than the sixth form boys at her school. The top button of his shirt was undone. He was holding onto the handle of the laptop bag with a death grip.

For a second, his eyes locked with hers and she stood rooted to the spot, gripping her bag almost as tight as he was holding his. Then he let out another scream.

A detached part of Harriet wondered why she wasn’t more frightened. Her brother was always teasing her for being such a scaredy-cat. Once she’d walked in on him watching a horror film and lain awake all night staring at shadows in her bedroom. That had felt worse than this, even though it hadn’t been real. This was real but although her heart was hammering and her palms were sweating she found herself captivated.

The man stopped screaming after a bit. In the gasping quiet that followed the wet grinding of the drain was loud. It must have been chewing up his lungs. The older girls had stopped giggling, watching with rapt fascination. The girl filming had a hand pressed to her mouth. Her eyes were bright.

The laptop bag hit the ground and in a final protracted wet scrunching, the last of the man disappeared. She saw his face for a moment, slack, atop the drain. His arms slithered in. The hand that had held the bag caught on the edge and fell backwards with a slap into the pooling blood.

The grinding noise slowed and came to a stop.

Harriet let out a breath. The straps of her schoolbag were cutting into her palms. Losing interest, the older girls wandered away. One of them said something that must have been a joke because the giggles started again. Across the road the man from the corner shop ground out his cigarette on the pavement and went inside.

She stepped forward, inching closer to the drain. Crouching on the curb, she stared down at it. The blood was draining away. There weren’t a lot of bits other than the hand, which lay palm-up, pale fingers curled like a dead spider.

The drain was scarlet with blood. Droplets fell into the darkness below with a plink, plink. She studied its bars. They didn’t look sharp. Other than the blood, it was an ordinary drain cover. If not for the blood it might not have happened.

Harriet wrinkled her nose. She stretched out a hand, tentative, towards the drain. Her fingers hovered over a bar, insides squirming. Did she dare, she wondered? Did she.

Chickening out, she straightened up and bolted along the road towards home.