Chapter 8: The Hydrophobic

Chapter 8: The Hydrophobic

Leo dropped the shard of glass. It clattered to the grimy carpet, the hundred fractured eyes of Father Renwick now staring up at the water-stained ceiling. He scrambled back until he was pressed into the corner of the room, making himself as small as possible. His own reflection had started to smile at him. The enemy wasn't just in the world; it was waiting inside his own image.

A single, unifying thread stitched together every moment of his terror. The trail of wet footprints in his locked apartment. The name the priest had screamed—The Drowned Mark. The way Father Renwick’s solid form had dissolved into a spreading, dark puddle. The Collector’s damp shopping bag on the train. The rain-slicked platform at Blackwood Creek. The coroner's report mentioning brackish, subterranean water in the lungs of a man found in a shallow stream.

It was the water.

It had always been the water.

It wasn't just a symbol or a byproduct of the haunting. It was the conduit. The roadway. The very substance through which this ancient, thirsty thing moved and watched and acted. Every drop was a potential doorway, every puddle an observation post.

The realization crashed over him not as a theory, but as a suffocating, physical certainty. Suddenly, the room was no longer just a room. It was a deathtrap of terrifying potential. The condensation beading on the cold windowpane wasn't just moisture; it was a thousand tiny eyes. The damp patch on the wall near the leaky air conditioner was a listening ear. The very humidity in the air he was breathing felt like a violation, a thin, wet film coating his lungs, marking him from the inside out.

He had to get out. He had to find somewhere dry.

He threw himself at the door, his hands shaking so violently it took him three tries to work the lock. He kicked the chair out of the way and burst out into the pre-dawn gloom. And stopped dead.

It was raining.

A soft, persistent drizzle fell from a sky the color of a bruise. Each drop landed on the asphalt with a soft hiss, creating an infinite, overlapping pattern of dark circles. The air was thick with the smell of wet pavement and ozone. To his newly terrified mind, it was as if the sky itself was weeping the Patron’s influence down upon the world. He saw the street not as a path to safety, but as a river of tiny, individual threats. Each droplet that landed on his skin felt like a touch, a cold, alien caress. He imagined them seeping through his clothes, through his pores, carrying the Drowned Mark deeper into his very cells.

A primal revulsion, stronger than any fear he had yet felt, seized him. He let out a choked gasp and retreated back under the flimsy awning of the motel walkway, pressing himself against the brick wall. He couldn't go out there. He couldn't let it touch him.

But he couldn't stay here, in this room of shattered mirrors and reflected ghosts. He was trapped between two different versions of the same hell.

He waited, shivering, as the sky began to lighten from bruised purple to a sickly grey. The rain, mercifully, lessened to a fine mist. It was now or never. Tugging his thin jacket over his head as a makeshift hood, Leo took a deep breath that felt like inhaling needles of ice and ran.

He ran without a destination, his only goal to stay under awnings, to dash between overhangs, to avoid the open sky. He flinched away from sewer grates, from which a cold, damp breath seemed to rise. He gave puddles a wide berth, his eyes darting to their dark surfaces, half-expecting to see Father Renwick’s face gurgling up at him. The city, which had always been a thing of concrete and steel, had revealed its true nature: a complex, living circulatory system of pipes, drains, and gutters, all pulsing with the one thing he now feared more than death.

Hours later, desperate and parched, he found a fragile sanctuary in a 24-hour convenience store. The air inside was dry, recycled, and smelled of coffee and cleaning fluid. The relentless fluorescent lights banished the shadows. It felt sterile. Safe. His throat was a desert. The constant fear had left his mouth dry and tasting of copper. He needed to drink. The irony was a cruel, twisted joke. His body, seventy percent of the very element that was hunting him, was crying out for more of it.

He stood before the refrigerated section, a wall of glass doors showcasing rows of drinks. Every bottle, every can, was beaded with condensation. They looked like caged specimens, each containing a small, potent dose of his personal poison. His hand hovered, trembling. He couldn't drink from a tap. He couldn't trust a water fountain. But a sealed bottle… surely a sealed bottle was safe? It was manufactured, purified, untouched.

He grabbed a bottle of generic spring water, the plastic crinkling in his white-knuckled grip. It felt impossibly cold. He paid for it with trembling hands, avoiding the cashier’s gaze, and fled back into the city.

He found another temporary haven: an all-night laundromat. It was empty, warm, and filled with the rhythmic, mechanical tumbling of other people’s clothes. The air was hot and dry. He sank onto a hard plastic chair under the unforgiving lights, the sealed bottle of water sitting on the floor beside him like an unexploded bomb.

For a long time, he just stared at it. He had to know. He couldn’t live the rest of his short life—two days, the Collector had said—in terror of his own thirst. He had to face it. Reclaim some small piece of his sanity.

With deliberate, measured movements, he unscrewed the cap. He found an old, discarded paper cup near a trash can and poured a small amount of the clear, clean water into it. He set the cup on the floor in front of him and stared down into it.

His own face stared back, pale and distorted by the curve of the water’s surface. He saw the tired, haunted eyes, the unshaven jaw, the ragged desperation. He watched it for a full minute, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. Nothing. It was just water. Just a reflection. A wave of giddy relief washed over him. It was his mind. The stress, the terror, it was making him see things. He wasn't losing his grip on reality; he was just traumatized.

He leaned closer, a shaky smile touching his lips for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. He was okay. It was just water.

And then his reflection winked.

It was not a twitch. It was not a trick of the light. The reflection’s left eye closed in a slow, deliberate, impossibly intimate gesture, while his own real eyes remained wide open in horror. The reflection held the wink for a second, a moment of horrifying, conspiratorial camaraderie, before opening its eye again. The tiny, distorted face in the cup then smiled, a slow, knowing curl of the lips that was not his own. It was the detached, amused expression of the Collector.

Leo screamed, a thin, raw sound that was swallowed by the drone of the dryers. He kicked out, sending the cup flying. The water arced through the air, and the little bit that was left in the bottle sloshed onto the linoleum floor. The spilled water began to drip from the edge of the overturned bottle onto the floor.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The sound was unbearably loud in the sudden silence of his mind. It was the same patient, maddening rhythm as the faucet in his apartment. The same cadence as the tap in the stone sacristy where a man had been unmade. It was the sound of a clock ticking.

He stared at the spilled water, his body shaking uncontrollably. He hadn't just bought a drink. He had invited it in. The enemy wasn't just a conduit. It was a parasite. It lived inside the water. It could animate it. It could wear his own face.

He was desperately thirsty. But to drink now would be to swallow the ghost, to welcome the monster into the deepest parts of himself. He was a man made of water, being stalked by a god of water. He wasn't just being hunted. He was being colonized.