Day 991

I knew there had once been a river where my house was but I didn't know we had a basement with thick iron grates for flooring. It was in my great aunt's journal, the one she'd kept on her person since a week after she moved into the house that I'd inherited upon her presumed death (though technically as her body hadn't been found, she was just missing). She spent most of the pages describing the way the water reflected about the basement ceiling, pondering her own insignificance when compared to a seemingly bottomless river.

It took me a while to figure out where she'd hidden the entranced, having used her remaining few years to conceal it perfectly. It was about the time when she began to deteriorate in every way, slowly progressing from a relatively healthy 87 year old to a decrepit skeletal banshee who bit the postman so violently he had to get stitches all up his arm.

The last few pages of her journal were hard to decipher, her writing went down with the rest of her it seemed. I never knew her well enough to even know about this journal but she'd left it and the house to me for reasons I wouldn't know until I finally got into the basement and saw what had kept her obsessed all these years before it drove her out of her mind.

She was sane enough in her last few days to write down a clue as to where she'd hidden the basement door, after finding the house's blueprints at the library, stealing them and having them burned in the back garden. There was absolutely nothing left to even remotely piece together into a functional plan of the house which left me with her clue.

What had hands but cannot hold, a face but cannot smile and the longer it goes, the less you have.

So I looked at the grandfather clock by the kitchen door, finding a small door hidden behind it. The remnant of the basement door. Sure enough, just as she'd written, there was a small light switch halfway up the left hand side that illuminated the stairs all the way down to the basement where small yellowish lights hung evenly spaced along the walls.

The room itself was fairly standard, flooring aside of course. Plain plasterboard walls, no other entrance or exit and the sound of dripping water coming from the far corner where the outline of a human-ish shaped bundle of rags stood quaking, just between two lights and obscured by their shadows.

I'd only ever seen her as a a healthy old woman, smiling with her journal in one hand and her cane in the other. Now she was only recognisable by birthmark on her face, shaped something like Ireland and now just as sunken as the rusty grating along the floor. It was as if all the water had been drained from her body, though I only saw her from an odd angle at first.

As I got closer I saw the water beneath me flickering, quick silver movements like a hundred fish or one man-sized fish. Just as I got within arms reach of her she was yanked down into the water by what I can only describe as a thirty foot albino arm, webbed and encrusted with barnacles. It handled her so gently, turning her from side-to-side as if it was pondering what she was.