By Erik McHatton
The Lifeguard hears screaming at the shallow end of the pool. He comes down from his tower to attend to it.
A car crash; a bad one by the looks of it. The new sidemen have really mucked it up. Incomings are supposed to be handled delicately, especially when it comes to groups, and most especially families. It is a mother that is screaming, screaming because she has seen the state of her youngest child, who had clearly been pinned beneath the flaming car, and took the worst of it. The family was supposed to have been separated before being pulled from the dark and led to the pool. What’s left of the child should have been deposited into the water separately, and allowed to join with the others later, once the pool had worked on everyone a bit.
Now, things will be . . . messy.
As the Lifeguard approaches, the mother is being held back by two sidemen, a third has scooped up the poor child, and is taking it away. The mother’s eyes are wild, bulging. Her husband stands behind her, his head too caved in to understand. Two other children cling to his pants, stricken, searching his ruined face for answers. Tears are seared into their purplish cheeks.
The Lifeguard points at the two sidemen holding their mother.
“Take her in. Now! Don’t let go until she stops screaming. I’ll manage the rest myself,” he says.
The sidemen do as they’re told: they wade into the pool, dragging the thrashing mother. She’s just out of the shallows when the water takes hold, and only then does she become still enough to be released. She bobs there, inertly bouncing between other people in the pool, and slowly rolls her newly glazed eyes to the last place she saw her poor, flattened baby. She will be calm now.
The Lifeguard turns away, satisfied.
He leads the father and the remaining two children himself. They move down the stairs and into the shallows without incident. Once this is done, the Lifeguard steps out of the pool and fixes the sidemen with a stern glare.
“Don’t let that happen again. This is already hard on them, no need to make it harder.”
The sidemen nod, grave looks plastered across their faces, then return to the dark, to bring in new bodies. The Lifeguard returns to his post.
He surveys the pool, scanning for things that might require his attention, but the mother’s screaming still lingers in his ears. There was something about the way she sounded, something particular about her anguish. His eyes continually return to her. He watches her lazily drift between the people around her and tries to force the ghostly echo of her wailing out from between his ears.
He fails.
Then suddenly, an idea.
He descends again from his perch and makes his way to the edge of the pool, where she now floats. He reaches down into the water, searching for her memories among the swirling miasma of all the others’ until he isolates her unique vibration. He finds what he is looking for, wraps his hand around it, and pulls at the thrumming thread until the memory of the accident is firmly in his grasp. At once, he sees:
Fog. Wet Cement. Burning rubber. Smoke. Heat. Flames licking. The smell of scorched flesh. Ringing into a low whine. Coughing. Blood, thick in the air and thick on the ground, sizzling under her fingertips.
He could never drive at night. I know that. Why did I let him? This is my fault. Alan. Alan’s gone. His head. Oh no, his head. Oh no! Andrew. Christine. Backseat. They look like they’re sleeping. Can’t hear me screaming. The baby. Where is the baby? Oh god. OH GOD! Is that the baby’s leg?
The Lifeguard starts to bring his arm out of the pool. There is nothing more to learn from this intrusion, but something calls from behind the mother’s litany just as he is about to draw his hand away. A name. Not the mother’s name, not the baby’s name, but a name familiar all the same.
A name from somewhere distant.
A name forgotten. Not by the mother, but by…
Something electric and wild flows up his arm and into his head.
He rips his arm from the pool, severs the connection. The mother looks up at him, placidly. He pushes her away with his foot, and she drifts toward her family, who have come closer, eventually joining with them in a clump. She strokes the baby’s remains with her fingers as they bump and sway together and continue their languid float toward the deep end.
The Lifeguard turns to see several sidemen standing and staring at him, surprised by this lapse in protocol. He glares at them, points toward the deep end of the pool and barks, “Don’t stand there and gawk. Get down there and break up those clots.”
The sidemen move along, grabbing several long, flat oar-like paddles resting against the fence as they go; instruments of efficiency and versatility. They begin poking and prying at several bodies that have managed to tangle themselves up at the end of the pool. He watches the arms of these newly dislodged bodies fly into the air as they are pulled below the surface. He follows them down with his eyes to the bottom of the pool, and into the mouth of the vortex waiting for them there.
He nods, then, and returns to his tower. He is satisfied.
* * *
For a while, the Lifeguard observes the sidemen leading in more bodies from the dark portals near the shallows, blowing his whistle and signaling them when necessary. He turns his attention to the middle of the pool and waves his hands at those working the churning station when the water is too calm and needs further agitation. He looks for clumping, unnecessary groupings, clogs, clots, or anything else that might restrict the flow of bodies from the shallows to the deeps. He calls for samples to be analyzed and recorded, watches the sidemen stationed by the deeps, freeing clots and making sure the bodies that reach the deep end are properly swallowed by the vortex.
The Lifeguard does all this not just because it is his job, but also to stay busy, to keep his mind occupied, because the name that hid behind the mother’s screams wriggles in his mind, calling for him to abandon his work.
He looks for the family again. They have just passed the middle, are being buffeted by the churning station’s flow. The mother’s arms are wrapped around the baby’s ruined body. The children still grip the father, one on each arm. The mother is looking up at the guard station, staring at the Lifeguard.
Dennis.
The name reverberates like distant thunder suddenly come near. The force of it nearly knocks him from his seat, seeming to come from the dark beyond the pool area. It vibrates through the chain-link fence; rumbles from the ever-present clouds that obscure the sky.
Remember.
The Lifeguard grips the arms of his chair. His head snaps forward, chin digging into his chest. His eyes roll backward, lost in his skull.
Spring time. A green hillock with a patch of checkered blanket. Wine and wicker. Cheese and bread. Flowers in his hand. Flowers everywhere. A white shirt spinning in the dew sprinkled morning. Laughter. Joy unbridled. Blue eyes staring down at him. Tumbling down together. Rolling over the green.
Bliss.
Then, a shadow.
“Dennis!” the Lifeguard yells. Several sidemen look up from their duties, staring.
His heart is practically exploding. His face is slick with perspiration. He is terrified, but of what, he cannot say. As far as he remembers, there was no life before this, before the pool and his work. But then where had he gone just now? What about that green hill and its grass?
Who was that man?
Why this fear?
He comes down from his perch and locates the mother and her family. They are nearly to the end of the pool. He wrestles a paddle out of the hands of a sideman, then reaches out, placing the flat end under the father’s arm. Slowly, he drags the family unit to him. When they reach the edge, he drops the paddle and grabs the mother by her shoulders, lifting her body half out of the pool.
“What did you do to me? What did you do?” he cries, shaking her. Her eyes loll. The baby’s remains jiggle. Droplets of memory fly from her hair, spray him in the face. The smell of burning skin and gasoline peppers the air.
She has no answers for him.
He lets go of her, beginning to feel ridiculous. What could she possibly tell him anyway, in the state she is in? He stands and turns toward his perch.
Remember.
The word splits the sky again. The air crackles with its power. The Lifeguard drops to the ground, convulsing. Two sidemen rush over, only to stand by uselessly as he flails.
Aseptic air. Beeping. Hissing. A hospital bed. White coats with grim faces. An older woman, tear streaked and surprised. Smiles, now. Tears transformed. Dull throbbing. Throat so dry. Words coming haltingly.
Dennis. Where?
The woman sobbing again. Eyes all around unsure, looking to one another for answers.
Dennis. Where? More forcefully this time.
Coughing. Chest tight. One word. Devastating.
Gone.
Sidemen pull the Lifeguard to his feet. He shakes them off, pushes them away. “Get away from me! Go…do your jobs.” They comply, though not without hesitation, glancing at one another.
He turns in a circle, holding his hand to his chest, his eyes filling with hot tears. He’s looking for someone, he knows this, but he doesn’t know who. He knows the name, but it means nothing to him. Dennis. A series of letters and sounds that should have no effect, but hearing them laid out in order in his mind now breaks his heart. But why? A maddening question.
And also, what else?
For there is something else. Something more, just out of reach. Something…terrible.
He returns to the edge of the pool and kneels, staring into the miasma, the churn.
The mother is the key to it, he thinks. He studies her. Concentrates.
She holds her baby even closer now, clutching it so tightly, almost as if to protect it from further harm. She shouldn’t even be able to conceive of such a thing, the Lifeguard knows, not this close to the deep end, at least. The water should have taken almost everything from her by this point. But still, she holds her baby tight. Still, the family stays together, their bond so strong it seems even the pool cannot dissolve it.
It was her screaming over the baby that started all this.
But why?
Remember.
He wakes, but doesn’t immediately open his eyes. His mother is talking to the doctor.
“But why doesn’t he remember everything? He asked for Dennis, but not…”
“It’s likely his full memory will not return until after the swelling in his brain is completely reduced. We must be patient.”
“I understand, Doctor, but it’s going to devastate him. You saw what happened when we told him about Dennis. He was inconsolable. I worry that finding out the rest of it all at once may destroy him. Isn’t there some way of jogging his memory just a little, so that he can come to it gradually?”
“I suppose we can try, of course, but I’m not optimistic, at least not right now.”
He wants to open his eyes. He wants to ask what they are talking about. But he is afraid.
So he keeps his eyes shut.
“We have to make him remember just a little. I have one of her toys in my purse, I can show it to him once he wakes up, maybe that will help.”
“We’ll see.”
Her. His mother had said her.
Her who?
On the ground again. Sidemen gathered round again. This time he doesn’t send them away. He points to the mother. “The one with the baby. Get her out of the pool. Bring her to me.”
The Sidemen hesitate. This is against the rules.
“Now!” he bellows.
They do as they are told, pulling the mother back to the edge once again with their long paddles. They lift her out of the water, and set her body down in a heap on the tile.
He stands, picks up his discarded paddle.
He knows what to do.
The Lifeguard straddles the mother, with one leg on either side of her torso, and raises his paddle high above his head. She looks up at him. He hesitates as her eyes slowly unglass. She looks confused, swings her head from side to side before finally looking down at the baby in her arms. Her face contorts. Confusion and grief mingle together, grotesquely warping her features. She holds the baby’s remains before her, shaking its tiny body violently.
The Lifeguard nearly feels sorry for her. The pool would have, by now, robbed her of most of her memories. He can only imagine how utterly alien this entire episode must feel. She returns the baby to her chest and looks back up at the Lifeguard. Her lip quivers. Her eyes beseech. Her confusion is so palpable it is almost sticky. She begins to sob, the baby bouncing on her spasming chest.
The Lifeguard brings the paddle down and splits her skull.
At first, the mother doesn’t react, then screams, bringing her hands up to her cloven head and letting go of her baby. It’s not pain that causes this reaction—the Lifeguard knows this, for there is no pain in this place. Her actions are simply instinct. She clutches the edges of the wound, running her fingers in and out of it, before bringing her hands in front of her face to look at them.
The Lifeguard swings again. And again. And again. And again, until the mother’s brain matter has turned into a corona around her head. Forgetting the baby, the mother tries to wiggle out from under the Lifeguard, crab-walking forward, attempting to make her way back to the pool, away from him.
He signals to the two nearest sidemen—all of which have stopped their duties to stare at the spectacle. “Hold her down,” he yells.
They don’t move. They look back and forth between one another.
“NOW!”
Finally, they oblige, moving over and grabbing each of the mother’s arms, pinning her to the ground. She struggles. Her sobs return in force.
The Lifeguard reaches down with one hand, plucking the baby up from the ground by its leg, and tosses it back into the pool. It splashes down in front of the father, who lethargically retrieves it.
“Please,” says the mother, weakly. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” says the Lifeguard, dropping to his knees beside her and plunging his hands into the cavity of her destroyed skull. He digs around inside, ultimately pulling out two handfuls of bloody mess. “But I will.”
He motions with one arm to the sidemen holding the mother. “Put her back in,” he orders, and then crams what’s in his fists into his mouth.
He chews on the bitter, irony mess. He swallows, feels it slide down his throat like mucus.
A voice cries out from somewhere in the dark beyond the fencing. His voice, screaming a single name over and over:
Dennis.
The world falls away.
* * *
Dennis has already spread out the blanket and unpacked the basket by the time he comes back.
“Where’s Kaitlin?” he asks.
“On the swingset. She’ll be alright for a bit.”
“Any other kids over there?”
“Nah. But you know she doesn’t mind that. I think she hates other kids anyway.”
Dennis laughs. “Don’t be mean,” he says, covering his mouth to hide his grin.
“I’ll show you mean,” says Kevin.
He tackles Dennis, and the two of them roll around together in the grass, each trying to best the other, searching hands looking for tender, vulnerable spaces, then settle on their backs, breathing heavily and staring at the clear sky above.
“I don’t hear the swing,” says Dennis.
“She’s probably on the monkey bars or something. If she were hurt, she’d let us know “
“I don’t know…”
“Alright, I’ll go check on her,” Kevin says, getting up. “But, you owe me.”
“I owe you a hundred,” says Dennis, fluttering his eyelashes.
“Watch out or you’ll get it again.”
They both laugh. He turns to start back up the hill, but stops.
There is a shape standing there, obscured by the long shadows of the surrounding trees.
The shape makes no sense. It has too many limbs, too many angles. Part of it is still, and part of it is flailing about. It is dark, and hulking, but also bright and thin, part of it twinkling. A complete anomaly.
“Dennis,” he whispers over his shoulder without taking his eyes off the thing. And when Dennis doesn’t respond, he calls out, “Dennis, what…”
The thing slides out from the coverage of the canopy, and then he doesn’t need Dennis to tell him what.
It is a man. A man with Kaitlin. A man with Kaitlin, and a knife. A man holding his knife against Kaitlin’s neck.
Her eyes are so wide. Her lip is quivering. Tears are falling off the tip of her nose.
Dennis is up and next to him.
“Let her go,” Dennis says, with considerable force.
“No,” says the man. His voice is like a needle; thin and sharp at the end.
Dennis takes a step forward, hands balled into fists.
“Ah, ah,” says the man, pressing the knife harder. Kaitlin whimpers.
“Please,” Kevin says, placing a hand on Dennis’s forearm. “Tell us what you want.”
“I want to watch you see.”
And then many things seem to happen at once.
The man draws the knife across Kaitlin’s throat, and then lets her fall out of his arm.
Kaitlin’s eyes go wide, and her lips are parted by a small explosion of air.
Dennis rushes toward the two of them, his arms out, trying to catch their little girl before she hits the ground, obviously forgetting about the knife.
The man’s arm swings through the air, the knife swinging with it, right into Dennis’s neck, then cheek, then shoulder, and then, and then, and then…
The man steps over Dennis and advances on Kevin.
The pool again. Sidemen gathered all around, their dull faces absent understanding. The Lifeguard wipes the cold remnants of the mother’s brains from his chin. He’s lying down. He stands up. He finally understands.
The hospital. His mother still holding his hand. He finally opens his eyes, looks at her. His chest constricts like a starving python. He ekes it out, the thing he couldn’t remember before.
“Kaitlin…”
His mother weeps. The toy falls from her hand.
They weep together.
He pushes his way through the crowd of useless drones that cannot help him, and moves to the deep end. This pool and its environs now feel wrong, wrong in a way that seemed so normal so short a time ago.
He begins to notice things.
He notices how kaleidoscopically injured the sidemen are, so like the floaters overseen.
He notices how perpetual the black storm clouds are, how heavy, dark, and pendulous they never aren’t.
He notices the water’s surface, murky with oily phantasms, roiling chaotically with smeary meaning before being sucked into a churning station and digested, spat back out by the pumps, clean of its memories and ready to siphon more.
He notices the black maw of the vortex waiting at the bottom of the deep end, directly below him now.
He notices the slackened faces of the empty dead disappear below the surface, and into that hungry Void.
This was all so ordinary to him before the mother and her family. But now…
Home too early, they said, but he couldn’t stay at the hospital any longer. He couldn’t stand them watching anymore. This is his pain, his grief, and should not be a shared experience. It should be singularly suffered.
He sits on the end of their bed, holding one of her toys in his hands. A plastic duck with a little pink hat, doffed to the side. He runs his finger over its exaggerated grin. He shakes it and listens to it quack its little song. He hears Kaitlin laughing from down the hall, he hears Dennis singing along with the duck in that silly voice she loved so much; all of it faint and issuing from inside his own head, echoes of a better past.
He was the one that left her there, on those swings. Not Dennis. Dennis wasn’t sure about it, but he’d said it would be fine. But it wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine again.
He places the duck onto the bedspread.
He goes down to the garage.
He’s made a decision.
He is surrounded by sidemen again. They’re looking at him with blank expressions, some of them with their eyes aimed down at the pool along with him, as if the answer to the riddle he is posing them lies within.
The Lifeguard looks at it all one last time. He takes in the enormous pool, and all of the dead floating in it. He gazes up to the sky, taking in the roiling, purple-black clouds. He looks to the oblivious sidemen at the far end, still dutifully bringing in the dead and leading them into the shallows.
He recalls his own inauguration into the Lifeguard position. The circumstances were very similar to what he is experiencing now, he realizes, only he couldn’t have known that then.
He knows what he must do.
He’s made a decision.
His father had forced him into scouting. “It’ll make a man out of you,” he’d said, beer in hand. He’d always resented his father for it. Until now. Now, his scout training would finally be useful. It certainly hadn’t made much of a “man” out of him, at least not the kind his father had hoped it would. All it had taught him were simplistic moral codes and a smattering of woodland survival skills: fire making, tent erecting.
Knot tying.
Once in the garage, he pulls down a box of camping equipment his parents had given to them a few Christmases after Kaitlin was born. He thinks of how excited they seemed at the prospect of him and Dennis teaching Kaitlin about the “great outdoors.” He’d packed the stuff away as soon as they’d returned to West Virginia after New Years.
Dennis had not approved. His heart was so big.
He finds the utility rope at the bottom of the box, beneath the unopened tent, and first aid kit.
He tears it out, makes a large loop, and ties a perfect noose knot from memory.
His father would have been proud.
Finally.
He reaches down and grabs his whistle, brings it over the top of his head. He places it around the neck of the sideman standing directly beside him. The effect is immediate.
“Alright people, break it up, break it up. Let’s get moving, back to your positions,” says the new Lifeguard, walking away and paying him no more attention.
The mother and her family have made their way to the deep end, finally. He is not surprised to see them directly below his feet. She is cradling her baby again, proving once and for all that even this place can not take that instinct away.
He squats down and strokes her chin. She meets his gaze with the one eye he left her.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Then, she and the baby, along with her husband and other children, are gone, pulled below the surface.
He surprises himself with a smile.
He follows their descent to the bottom, to the vortex waiting there. He watches them disappear into its hungry jaws.
He takes a deep breath.
He places the loop at the end of the rope over his head. He cinches it tight against the back of his neck.
He climbs onto the hood of the Jeep. He throws the end of the rope over the garage door opener’s support, and ties another knot. He jerks the rope to test its strength. Solid. Stable. It will
hold.
He places a hand on his chest, and feels his heart hammering, but fear will not dissuade him.
He measures the distance to the floor of the garage, and then measures the rope one more time.
He takes a deep breath.
He jumps.
He jumps.
And the dark…
…devours him.
* * *
Erik McHatton’s passion for horror literature began in grade school and can be credited to an early fascination with the “Terrific Triples” horror collections of Helen Hoke. He began writing fiction seriously in 2019, and has since been published several times in print and online publications such as CHM Magazine, Vastarien, Tales to Terrify, and Lovecraftiana. His first fiction collection, “Straw World and Other Echoes from the Void,” was published in September 2025 by Undertaker Books. He currently lives in Kentucky with his beautiful wife and kids, along with dear friends and family; surrounded on all sides.
* * *