I Can Hear Something Behind The Bathtub, But Everyone Thinks I’m Imagining Things

I woke up to a series of thumps rattling the couch. I saw that my laptop was out of batteries and believed for a second that it was vibrating to tell me so, but that didn’t make sense. I quickly realized the sounds were coming from the guest room. A sickening groan that sounded like someone struggling to scream echoed from the guest bedroom. I found myself flying off the couch and running towards the sound. I swung the door open to see nothing but the dark. My eyes still adjusted to the lights that were still on in the living room, tried to focus on the dim light illuminating the bookshelves. In my peripherals, I noticed the corner of the bed in tatters. My eyes moved to the mattress. The blankets were torn to shreds and I saw red, too much red. Blood.

There was a flash of white and in surprise, I took a step back. When I did, the light I had been blocking with my body revealed a snarling, hissing form as it launched itself off the bed. It was covered in short, white fur and landed on all fours. It scurried against the floor. The claws it was equipped with were longer than each of my digits and this figure was the height of a German Shepherd with the length of a full grown man. Its jaws were stained red and its pale pink nose had protrusions that looked like several finger-length tentacles with countless thick, long whiskers sprouting from either side of its muzzle. But the one feature I can’t seem to forget is its large eyes. It seemed too shiny, too dead. They looked like eyes that had never seen the light of the sun.

The creature slammed its full weight against the door, sending me flying back against a nearby wall as I heard it start clawing against the wood. I ran to the living room and grabbed my cellphone. I dialed the police. I kept looking in the direction the guest room, my body tensing up with every scratch the creature left on the door. The operator picked up and I frantically asked for officers to come to the house as quick as they could. I told her about the creature that had attacked my aunt. The voice on the other end of the line kept calm and told me to stay where I was, that officers were on the way.

By the time help had arrived, my aunt was gone. Officers found no sign of her apart from the bloody mess that was the bed. They searched the nearby streets for clues, but there was no sign of her or the creature.

When I described the creature to them, they put it down to shock. They excused it as a coyote attack. They said it had clawed its way into the room from under the bathtub, following the water pipes to the valves hidden behind a small panel found along the side of the tub. From there they said the coyote had dragged my aunt back under the house and then out into the streets and beyond. They admitted that it was out of the ordinary, but that coyotes behaved strangely when hungry enough. Even when I insisted they search underneath the house, they found nothing, just the same two holes on either side of the building and a large, caved-in hole not far from where the bathtub was.

They say the coyote had been trying to dig a hole to keep warm, that it had probably been under the house for several days. They even found pieces of coyote fur around the hole that seemed to back it all up, but I know it was something else, something that came up from beneath the ground and killed Ornie. If it hadn’t been for the coyotes on the second night, it probably would have killed me too. And because I couldn’t get my aunt to listen to me, it killed her too. If I’d only been able to convince her, she would still be alive. She’s gone and I still know nothing about what killed her. To this day, the closest animal I’ve ever found that looked remotely like the thing I saw that night is the star-nosed mole, but the creature I saw that night had longer fur, its head was more canine, the eyes too big. And it was big, almost impossibly so.

I don’t know what to do, where to look or who to turn to. My aunt is gone and I can’t sleep at night. I keep thinking I hear that scratching but nothing comes. I’ve moved to a top-floor apartment, even homes with a concrete base don’t feel safe anymore. Whatever it was, whatever depths it clawed its way up from, I pray I never see it again.