Every year some of my buds and I enter a local newspaper’s scary story contest (750 words, must be set in Athens!) This year’s story wasn’t a winner, but I’m still pleased with it, so I’m sharing it with all of you!
(I’ll link to the winning entries at the bottom of the post so you can cheer on the victors too!)

Cistern

It was a basement full of sewage that killed the Starbucks downtown. People brought up the smell, management blamed it on The Place, and the sewage kept dribbling in. When the leak was finally found, they boarded up the building and tried to forget so thoroughly that no one else could remember.

But I know what’s down there under the fresh coat of landlord-white paint, because they paid me half what I’m worth to scrape out the drying mess.

In the upper stories of the really old downtown buildings there are doors leading from one space to another, like a spider’s web. Take the right path from over Dynamite and you’ll end up looking at the arches from College Station’s second story. The same is true of the basements, tunneling under streets, beneath campus, built over by unknowing student housing and ignored by public works.

When I went down, the basement reeked. The plumbers had already come through, but there was still a film of wet brown sludge across the concrete. It took me a minute of gagging to realize the shit was still moving. Not my job, but I thought I’d do the next plumber a favor and find the source, since my shoes were already fucked. I followed the trickling water to a door in the basement’s back wall. Old, warped, and not locked, I popped it open, stepped through, and boom–another basement. Probably the one under Walkers this time. There was a trail of piss water, but it was only a thin stream across the grey floor, under old shelves heavy with crumbling cardboard boxes.

I followed the trickle to another ragged door. It opened too.

And yeah, I know what you’re thinking, the basements should’ve been locked. They probably were, from upstairs. No one wants to go down there unless they have to. The rooms are all the same; damp, dark, unfinished. No one keeps anything down there that they have any other place for. No wonder no one had found the sewage river.

I kept walking, through door after door. There was no signal down there, so no way to open up my phone’s map and see where I was. Maybe in a movie I’d have gotten all resourceful, laminated a map and gotten an expo marker or some shit, but I didn’t. I just walked, building to building, mess to mess, on and on.

Then there it was. Not a leak. Not a broken pipe. Not an underground encampment.

A Cistern.

I think it might have been under the Classic Center. That’s how far it felt like I’d gone, at least. And yeah, it reeked like piss and shit. How could it not? People are full of piss and shit, and The Cistern was full of people. The bodies that Athens was built on, overflowing. I’d followed one stream but there were so many. There were so many, their white eyes rolling, their mouths open in smiles they didn’t mean.

Down there, on my knees in the overflowing filth, I finally started to think about it from the right direction. None of the doors between the basements are locked against each other, but all of them are sealed off from above. I’d thought that no one wanted to go down, but that’s only part of it.

People don’t want what’s down there to claw its way back up.

I don’t remember leaving, but I know I sprinted from how bad my legs hurt after. The next thing I knew I was sitting in my truck, trying to breathe. I caught sight of my face in the rearview mirror. I was smiling, empty-eyed, like the cistern bodies Athens was built on.

I ghosted the guy who hired me. I hope like hell the next damn fool to go down there didn’t try to do more than he’d gotten paid to.

You won’t believe me about any of this, but I need you to know. The Cistern is down there. You can smell it everywhere. It’s still pooling where Starbucks used to be, overflowing into god knows where else. The campus, the dawg shops, the apartments, who knows.

One day, when my generation of smiling, shit-scraping folks join The Cistern, we’ll have all the choice in the world of where to spill and stink.

There are more places to drown in Athens every day.