Chapter 6: What the River Reveals

Dawn came pale and sickly, filtered through a canopy that seemed thicker than it had been the night before. Alex sat hunched beside the dying embers of his fire, every muscle in his body aching from a night spent in rigid vigilance. He hadn't slept—couldn't sleep—not with the constant sound of movement in the water and the occasional glimpse of pale shapes drifting just beneath the surface.

His water bottles were nearly empty. His food supplies, originally planned for four people over three days, wouldn't last much longer for one person. The rational part of his mind—the part trained in literature and critical thinking—told him to pack up and hike out immediately. Follow the trail back to civilization, call for help, let professionals deal with whatever supernatural horror had claimed his friends.

But the rational part of his mind was losing ground to something deeper and more desperate. Three nights ago, he'd arrived here with his three best friends. Now he was alone, and somewhere in that dark water were the only people in the world who truly mattered to him.

The murmuring from the river had changed again. Where before it had been wordless and hypnotic, now it carried an almost conversational quality—rises and falls that suggested questions being asked, statements being made, discussions being held in voices too low and too alien for his ears to parse.

Alex stood on unsteady legs and walked to the tree line, stopping just short of the riverbank. In daylight, the water looked deceptively normal—just a mountain stream running clear over smooth stones, catching the morning light in ordinary sparkles. If he didn't know better, he might have knelt down to fill his water bottles, might have splashed his face to wake himself up fully.

But he did know better. He'd watched three people disappear into this water or because of it, had heard their voices calling from its depths. Whatever flowed in this riverbed wasn't just water anymore.

"I know you can hear me," he said aloud, feeling foolish but unable to stop himself. "I know you took them. Callie, Blake, Sam. I know they're in there somewhere."

The murmuring stopped entirely, as if the river were holding its breath. Then, so softly he almost missed it, came a sound like laughter—not malevolent, but genuinely amused, the way someone might chuckle at a child's naïve question.

"Show me," Alex whispered. "Show me what you are."

For a long moment, nothing happened. The water continued its normal flow, looking innocent and inviting in the dappled sunlight. Birds sang in the trees behind him. A squirrel chattered somewhere overhead. The world felt almost normal, as if the horrors of the past three nights had been nothing but fever dreams.

Then the surface began to change.

It started as ripples—concentric circles spreading outward from various points along the riverbed, as if large objects were rising from the depths. The clear mountain water grew murky, taking on a dark greenish tint that reminded Alex uncomfortably of stagnant pond scum.

The smell hit him next—not the clean scent of running water, but something organic and fetid, like rotting vegetation mixed with something else. Something that might have once been alive.

Alex took a step backward, but found he couldn't look away. The ripples were growing larger, more agitated, and the dark patches in the water were beginning to resolve into shapes. Pale shapes that moved with purposeful intelligence beneath the surface.

"Oh God," Alex breathed.

The first shape broke the surface with barely a splash, rising from the water like something being born. At first glance, it might have been human—the rough size and proportions were right, and Alex's desperate mind tried to interpret it as one of his friends finally emerging from whatever underwater prison they'd been trapped in.

But as more of the thing became visible, Alex's hope curdled into horror so pure it made his knees weak.

It was human, in the same way that a sculpture made from melted wax might be human. The basic components were there—head, torso, limbs—but they were wrong, distorted, as if they'd been dissolved and reformed without quite remembering how they were supposed to fit together.

The skin was pale and bloated, with a translucent quality that revealed dark shapes moving beneath. The face... Alex's mind recoiled from trying to process the face. It wore features he recognized—Callie's nose, Blake's jawline, Sam's gentle eyes—but they were arranged incorrectly, overlapping and blending in ways that made his vision blur.

More shapes were rising now, breaking the surface with wet, sucking sounds. Each one was a grotesque collage of familiar features, as if someone had taken photographs of his friends and cut them into pieces before reassembling them into new, impossible configurations.

But it was worse than that, Alex realized with growing horror. These weren't just random reassemblages. They were attempts. The thing in the river was trying to rebuild his friends from memory, but it didn't quite understand how human bodies were supposed to work. It was like watching a child's drawing come to life—recognizable but fundamentally wrong.

The largest shape that emerged wore what might have been Blake's face, if Blake's face could be stretched like taffy and studded with too many eyes. It opened its mouth—mouths—and spoke in a voice that was almost his friend's voice but harmonized with itself in impossible ways.

"Alex," it said, and the name echoed from multiple throats simultaneously. "We've been waiting for you."

More voices joined in, creating a chorus of familiar tones twisted into alien harmonies. Alex heard Callie's laugh bubbling up from something that wore her hair but had too many arms. He heard Sam's gentle voice calling his name from a shape that might have been two people merged together at the spine.

"We're so happy here," the Blake-thing continued, wading closer to shore with movements that sent ripples across the corrupted water. "So complete. But we're missing something important. We're missing you."

Alex stumbled backward, his mind struggling to process what he was seeing. This wasn't possession or mind control—this was something far worse. The thing in the river hadn't just taken his friends; it had absorbed them, incorporated their bodies and memories and voices into itself, turning them into components of some vast, collective organism.

"You don't understand," he gasped. "They're not... they're not your friends anymore. They're part of you."

The chorus of voices laughed, a sound like water gurgling down a drain. "We are them," they said in unison. "They are us. We are complete together. Almost complete."

More shapes were emerging from the deeper parts of the river, and Alex realized with sick horror that his friends weren't the only ones who had been claimed. The water disgorged dozens of malformed figures, each one a grotesque amalgamation of human features that might have belonged to hikers, campers, fishermen—anyone unlucky enough to have encountered this thing over the years or decades or centuries it had been feeding.

The collective mass of absorbed humanity moved through the water with disturbing coordination, all of them focused on Alex with expressions of terrible longing. They reached out with hands that had too many fingers or not enough, their voices blending into a hypnotic harmony that seemed to resonate in his bones.

"Join us," they sang. "Complete us. Make us whole."

Alex felt the familiar tug of compulsion, the same force that had claimed his friends one by one. But seeing the truth—seeing what they had become—gave him strength to resist. This wasn't reunion; it was obliteration with the illusion of continuity.

The Blake-thing waded closer, water streaming from its distorted form. Up close, Alex could see that its skin wasn't just pale but translucent, revealing a dark network of veins that pulsed with alien rhythm. When it smiled with too many mouths, he saw teeth that belonged to different people, arranged in patterns that followed no human dental structure.

"Don't be afraid," it said in Blake's voice layered with harmonics from dozens of others. "It doesn't hurt. We promise it doesn't hurt."

Behind it, the Callie-shape and the Sam-shape were also approaching, their movements synchronized in a way that suggested they were all limbs of the same vast organism. The water around them churned with more emerging figures, centuries of accumulated victims all focused on the same goal.

Alex turned and ran.

Behind him, the chorus of voices rose in what might have been disappointment or might have been anticipation. They knew he couldn't run forever. They knew this forest better than he did, knew every trail and stream and hidden path. They had all the time in the world, and he was just one exhausted, terrified human with nowhere to go.

But as Alex crashed through the underbrush, one thought burned clear in his mind: he had seen the truth. He knew what had happened to his friends, knew what was waiting for anyone else who might stumble across this cursed stretch of river.

Now he just had to survive long enough to warn them.

The sound of pursuit followed him into the forest—not the splashing of feet through water, but something worse. The wet, sucking sound of things that weren't quite solid pulling themselves across solid ground, accompanied by that harmonious chorus of familiar voices all calling his name.