Day 1,639

There's an old water park behind the town hall, half-hidden among the newly built hotels and office blocks but you can still see the slides if you're high up enough. People like to say it's been closed for thirty-ish years but you remember going there as a child so it can't have been closed for more than ten at least.

You'd go there in the summer holidays, usually at weird times when they had special offers on and your family could get in for next to nothing. There were never too many kids around at those times but you still managed to find a friend who you'd meet nearly every time you went.

When you mentioned this to your parents, they grew very quiet. They'd hoped you wouldn't remember any of it, much less the friend you made there. You wonder aloud where they might be and if they're still in the area which only makes your parents frown and glance at each other in silent debate.

Your mum walks away and comes back with her album of important local news clippings - articles she'd been collecting since she was a child that ranged rom weird cloud sightings to mentions of your school to whatever held her interest that day.

She offers you a slightly crumpled article that reads "Missing Children Found In Fatal Filter Accident" with a little row of smiling children- all found dead and tangled together when the staff finally cleaned out the main pool filter after countless complaints of weird smelling water.

You recognised one of them as your friend. The article said they'd been down there for several months judging by the state of their decomposition but the two of you had played together almost every day. They seemed like just another unsupervised kid - alive and carefree and always soaking wet.

At the time you thought it was normal for them to be constantly drenched and that they were just taking a while to dry off. They did seem to spend as much of their time by or in water which you played off as them being too hot.

Now you remember how scared they looked when the two of you went too far from the water and how they never ate and how cold their skin was and how their parents were never around and how thin they were and how the water just poured and poured and poured from their skin like it was coming from inside them.

Now you remember the stories from people who'd broken into the old water park - children's laughter and garbled voices from the water, the sickly-sweet smell of something rotten coming from the main pool... little figures running in the corners of their eyes.