Day 788

There are three large drains at the back of my garden where the waste water from the flats runs down. It's always made the garden sound like there's a water feature nearby which was quite nice. You could spend hours sitting outside listening to it and pretending there was some large fountain beside you or an exotic waterfall.

It got clogged during the storms we had all last week, by my reckoning it's either that somebody flushed something they shouldn't have or somewhere along the line something's fallen in like a cat. I know I heard something scratching about down there and those damned things are always causing mischief in the area. It wouldn't be at all surprising that one of them had somehow managed to drown itself by falling down an open drain.

The council took almost three weeks to send their people down to have a look but by then the drains had flooded most of the garden with brown water that stank to high heavens. They went wading through it, ruining my plants even more than the putrid water had, and set about trying to remove the metal lid.

It took all four of them trying to pry it open before they managed to, bringing a half rotten human arm alongside it, fingers still clutching the handle inside the lid. The police took over from there as they dragged her out and the paramedics on scene pronounced her alive but barely, though her skin was mostly falling off and the flesh underneath was greying and bloated.

The news reported it the next day and over the week the full story emerged. She'd slipped and fallen into the river, getting washed downstream with the flood-tide. A current pulled her under and she'd eventually gotten caught up under the drain. The arm the workmen pulled off had been broken as she'd tumbled about under the water, she didn't feel a thing when they tore it off. She said she didn't feel much any more, not since everything had gone dark a few days ago.