Short Horror: Just Add Water (NSFW)

WARNING: The following post contains horror themes and material that certain readers may find upsetting. Reader discretion is advised.  

I was seven when Sea Dragons first became a "thing".

It was Christmas, and I'd done the usual seven-year-old thing of running downstairs too early in anticipation of what was under the tree. My parents, of course, made me sit down and eat breakfast first - thankfully, it was early enough that the single piece of toast wouldn't ruin the massive dinner they always had planned. But the wait was like torture to my young mind, the orange juice and peanut butter a physical barrier between me and the brightly-coloured gifts. And once I'd eaten, I dived upon them like a peregrine falcon swooping on an unsuspecting pigeon.

The Sea Dragons were the first thing I opened. My fitness fanatic Aunt had discovered them whilst browsing the internet for healthier alternatives to soya milk, stumbling upon the website of their owner, the Ursa Foundation, by accident. The logo of a bear's roaring head was prominent in the corner of the packaging, but I was more fascinated by the pictures of strange, arrow-headed creatures on the steel-grey box. For someone who had always wanted a pet, but knew the family could never own something like a dog, this was the best present ever.

As hackeneyed as the phrase is, if I knew anything that I did now, I would have thrown the things away as soon as possible.

Setting up the little, plastic egg-shaped tank was more complicated than it sould have been. The type of water didn't really matter, but first one had to break these little tablets called "purification pellets" into the water, to create the right conditions. After twenty-four hours, the eggs were added to the water, where they were supposed to hatch an hour or so after touching the watter - mine took a little longer, about two hours. Then the creatures that hatched had to be first fed with a powdery substance twice a week, five days after hatching, followed by strange pink pellets after the first five weeks...

What I'm saying is that it was a lot to throw at a small boy of seven. But it was worth it - with the tank in my window so that the Dragons could get enough sunlight, I soon had a small horde of strange animals swimming about in the egg. They weren't like anything I'd ever seen before, almost like tadpoles crossed with lizards, and it was fascinating to just watch the things swim around in the tank, chasing each other and doing loop-the-loops. It was almost surreal, like staring into an alien world.

According to the instructions, one sent off for more food and other items by signing the enclosed order form, stamping the logo of the Ursa Corporation onto the letter to ensure it reached the right place. On top of this, there were three major rules that simply had to be followed. These were spelled out in block capitals in the back of the booklet, giving something of a sense of desperate urgency.

1. NEVER CHANGE THE WATER IN THE TANK.
2. NEVER FEED THE DRAGONS ANY OTHER FOOD.
3. NEVER TOUCH THE DRAGONS WITH YOUR BARE HANDS.

Simple enough rules, right? Even when I was seven, I could rattle them off by heart - that's the sort of person I was. But as I was also a stupid kid, I often wondered; why would it be so bad if I broke one of those three rules? Would it be so bad to slip them a bit of pizza or hot dog, just to see what it would do? What harm would giving them fresh water do? What would it be like to hold one in the palm of my hand, to see it wiggle and writhe like a worm from the back garden?

I would later learn just how bad it was.

-------

I was eight when the first Outbreak began.

When the holidays ended, Sea Dragons were all that was talked about in school. Everyone was exchanging stories about the ones they'd grown - how big they got, how many they were, the strange things they did in the tank. The great arguments of wherever having more or bigger Dragons was better raged across the playground, arguments that I wisely kept well out of. Advice on about how to get the best results came from the smarter kids; things like how much sunlight they needed, or how often you had to feed them. The adults didn't truly understand, but I think they appreciated the kids getting fascinated by something like this.

There were disappointments, of course. Some kids out there, and even parents, didn't quite understand or care about the block capitals of the three rules. There were parents who saw the water turning grimy and poured away some of the tank to add fresh liquid - this, inevitably, killed the Dragons. There were kids who had slipped some snack food into the tank, either as a joke or a well-meaning bid to add variety to their monotonous diet. And there were those didn't understand what the order form was for, so they inevitably ran out of food, and thus had to tip their dead pets down the toilet.

I knew one kid who did more than that. His name was Jimmy, and he was kind of a weirdo. We didn't talk much, since we hung out with different groups and were in different classes, but I remember clearly what he'd said to me. He'd been so fascinated by the alien apperance of the Dragons that, like the weirdo he was, he'd stuck his finger in the water, just to get a reaction out of them.

"I was just wonderin' what they'd do, y'know? Like, wonderin' if they wuz friendly or whatever. So there I was, wigglin' me finger, right, like a wiggly worm, when one of them whips round and nips me! Right on the tip of me finger! Cor, didn't 'alf 'urt, I can tell you! Funny thing wuz, I didn't see no mouth on them - so 'ow it managed, I don't really know. Funny things, isn't they?"

He even showed me the place where the thing had bitten him - a rough, oval abrasion, like someone had stamped a tiny biscuit cutter into his skin. We all marvelled at it at the time, but looking back on it makes me feel a little sick. Knowing what that mark meant, as I do now, turns that whole scene into the kind of looming tragedy that is the only thing Lemony Snickett is capable of writing.

I shouldn't have been surprised when he was absent from school the next day, with his mother explaining he'd gone down ill. But since I knew nothing, I just assumed he'd had a cold.

When I got home that day, a special report was on the news that delayed CITV by about ten minutes. A bunch of Sea Dragons had turned up in a sewage treatment facility in Loughborough - workers had been having trouble with the machines, and investigating had found the workings jammed with their bodies. When they looked in the tanks, they found whole shoals of the things, swimming about in the sewage as though they were perfectly at home in there. Nobody could figure out how they'd got there, let alone survived.

It was at that moment that I understood Rule One - or, at the very least, part of it. The Dragons had been laying eggs, or some hadn't hatched right away, and parents and kids who didn't know better had changed the water when it got dirty, or tipped their dead pets down a drain. It had sent the unhatched eggs down through the sewer systems, where the warmth of decaying sludge had given them the perfect place to hatch. In the end, the workers had to use fishing hooks and gaffs to get the things out of the tanks so they could get the plant working again.

At the time, I just thought it was an odd happenstance, and nothing to worry about. Though I did notice something strange about the Dragons that, later on, would have more significance as the Outbreaks worsened. In the tanks, the creatures didn't get very large - at the most, the length of a grown man's thumb, if one was lucky.

But the ones they fished out of the sewage tanks were as big as terriers.

-------

I was ten when the first Purge started.

Reports weren't just confined to water treatment plants anymore. The Dragons started turning up in all sorts of places, from lakes to rivers and even swimming pools. Nothing seemed to faze them - the quality of the water, the size of the body, none of it mattered as long as there was water. Miss Oakley, my English teacher, even brought me round to show the shoal that was thriving in her goldfish pond - she'd tipped out her tank when the eggs faied to hatch. The whole media was latching onto this, describing it as a "plague" that was ravishing the British countryside in their usual sensationalist fashion.

They were more accurate than they realized.

The Dragons were voracious. Nothing could satisfy their hunger once their adult jaws had grown. A swarm of them in a lake or river would clear the whole thing out - fish, insects, frogs, anything they could catch and rip apart. And once they'd exhausted the native wildlife in their reach, they turned upon each other - no wonder so few every grew to adulthood in the tank. All too often, I've been the unpleasant witness of seeing one of them set upon by two or three of his siblings, who would take chunks out of his body and leave him to writhe and choke his last in a cloud of greenish-grey blood.

So the Dragons ate everything. But nothing ate the Dragons - that was the worrying part. Fish wouldn't touch them, and those who tried ended up reduced to skeletons. Frogs and toads big enough to swallow little Dragons whole vacated the water rather than try. And herons, huge birds that could have easily feasted upon the writhing horrors, kept their distance at ponds and lakes where they were once frequent and bold. There was some awful quality about the Dragons that made all wildlife keep away from them.

It was only when a child paddling in the River Kent was bitten and lost two toes that the government had no choice but to step in. The news showed the footage again and again of strong men in rubber suits wading knee-deep into estuaries and rivers and ponds, risking bites as they jabbed with gaffs and electric prods. The things they hauled out of the water once the job was done were as big as small crocodiles, and unnatural-looking with their arrow-shaped heads and flat tails. I wasn't sorry to see them go.

Almost a day later, all the men who had taken part in the Purge were admitted to hospital, along with the little girl. They'd contracted something off the Dragons - some disease not found on anything else. It started as sores that blossomed into cracked boils, followed by a constant fiery itching, dehydration and shortness of breath. There was no cure, and all of them died within two days.

I understood the Rules a lot better now. There must have been some agent in the tablets that kept the Dragons from surviving outside the tank, and the food made sure they didn't grow too big. Without either, the Dragons would grow as big as they could in whatever body of water they ended up in. And that growth only got more rapid when they started eating actual meat - bodies used to processing the equivalent of stale cake taking in actual protien and iron. Everything was food to the Dragons, because it was all the food of the Gods.

As for not touching them... well.

I hope poor Jimmy didn't suffer much.

-------

Not long after, my Aunt died.

As I said, she was a fitness freak. She was obsessed with the latest health trends, and did everything she could to keep energetic in defiance of the years. It was a little odd, but you couldn't deny the results - she looked amazingly youthful, to the point where my classmates would tease me with parodies of Stacy's Mom whenever they came around. And one of her odd stipulations was never to drink tap water due to all those scare stories about bacteria and adverse minerals and whatnot.

On one occasion, however, she caved. She was about to go on a jog, and her customary water bottle was empty. Rather than fill up with the lemon water we stocked from the supermarket, citing high sugar content, she filled it up from the sink and drank that instead before setting off. She returned an hour or so later, seemingly normal, but made a complaint about odd stomach pains that, at the time, we put down to overexertion. There was only so much running you could do before your body complained, after all.

Two days later, she was leaving the house for another jog when she suddenly screamed and collapsed.

By the time the ambulance got there, she was twitching and juddering in the middle of the drive, blood tricking from her nose and mouth. She was rushed to hospital, the whole family tagging along, and immediately thrown into an X-Ray machine to try and determine the cause of the trouble. All sorts of mad ideas where going through our heads at that moment. Did she have a stomach ulcer? Some kind of malignant tumor that was eating away inside her?

It was neither of those. It was those wretched Sea Dragons. The eggs had gotten into the water. They'd hatched insider her stomach and... I'm sorry, I can't go on. Suffice to say, there wasn't much room in there, which is why they only found one when they cut her open, shrieking and writhing and covered in all manner of awful fluids. They killed it where it was and disposed of the body, but it was too late - my Aunt had already caught the sickness from having it inside her to begin with.

I couldn't stop crying at the funeral. Nor could anyone.

Her death had been sudden, traumatic and the fault of those evil, evil creatures. When the media found out about it, all it did was use it as ammunition for the hysteria that had gripped the nation, which as far as we were concerned was a huge disrepect to her memory. The smiling, happy, athletic woman who'd given me pocket money and made me do laps after Christmas Dinner had been taken from us by this invasive, ravenous menace, and there was noting we could have done. Something died that day inside me that never came back.

Even to this day, I've never drunken tap water.

Ever.

-------

I was thirteen when the first one came ashore.

The Outbreaks hadn't stopped. The Purges weren't working. They tried everything - chemicals, nets, sound repellant, starvation. But there would always be one or two of the tiny eggs that they would fail to find, and one or two was usually all it took to get a new population going again. The Dragons had successfully driven several species to extincion already - kingfishers, water voles, the edible frog. And the government, tied up with political turmoil that I didn't understand, kept cutting funds so that, over time, the efforts of the Purging team became more and more futile.

Part of the problem was in trying to contact the Ursa Foundation, who'd supplied the kits to begin with. They only responded to the order forms for more kits or toys, and no address had been supplied other than the weird stamp one had to put onto the letter. There were no telephone numbers or even an email address that could provide any answers. The UN even reached out to Russia, asking if they knew anything about it - in typical irreverant fashion, Putin denied the existance of the Foundation and blamed a capitalist plot by the US to defame the Kremlin. That went down as well as you could imagine.

Then came the London Incident.

The breaking news came up just as the family was sitting down to dinner. Word had gotten around that a huge Dragon had come out of the River Thames, and the BBC had their live teams on the scene almost immediately. We all watched, idly munching pizza, as the cameras wobbled and focused on a huge, oily black thing the size of a semi truck, heaving and spitting fluids from its gills and making the most awful screeching noises. The usual crowd was there, and police were having trouble keeping the selfie-obsessed idiots among them away from the monster.

Whilst we watched, barely comprehending the significance of this, the Sea Dragon did the impossible.

It stood up.

It actually stood up.

It pushed its blunt, shovel-shaped nose into the tarmac, tucked its back legs beneath itself and hauled itself upright. Admittedly it was no graceful ascent, as it stalled occasionally and wobbled uncertainly, but even Mum was left speechless as it rose up into the air, almost as tall as Big Ben. The crowd, idiots that they were, cheered and applauded, forgetting for the moment that this was an animal that had ruined ecosystems and directly lead to people dying. Even I briefly let the memory of my screaming, blood-spitting Aunt leave me as I marvelled at this almost prehistoric display.

We all soon got a grim reminder.

The thing's feet were paddle-shaped, more like the flippers of a seal than a frog's foot, and were designed for swimming and little else. Hence, they immediately proved to be useless when their owner tried to walk. It immediately stood on it's own foot, lost balance and tripped over itself, and the sight of a giant monster falling over with a screech of surprise should have been hilarious. Except that it was plummeting towards the London Eye, where thousands of people had gathered to get a good view of the creature.

I closed my eyes and covered my ears too late.

Mum immediately switched the TV off, but the damage was done. Everyone was in shock, and nobody said a word for a long, long time. What had happened was a startling wake-up call for a nation that had become complacent in it's battle against this invasive foe. If measures were not taken now, then more of them would be crawling out of rivers and trying to walk. And if they started learning to walk, then there would be nothing stopping them from looking at us as yet another prey item.

It took a week to cordon off the place and clear the wreckage. I don't know what they did with the creature. I only know it had died upon impact, it's own weight accelerating the fall and causing it to crack it's own skull upon the concrete. Perhaps, considering the state it was in when it dragged itself out of the water, it was for the best.

The next day, the Prime Minister declared a state of national emergency. The Sea Dragons had to be destroyed, before they got any bigger. And the military would do all in it's power to ensure it.

Sometimes, when my mood is low, I can hear the crashing and screaming again.

-------

It's been two years since then.

The military action was relentless. They swept the country from top to bottom, from the northenmost point of the Shetland Isles down to Land's End in Cornwall. They used everything from guns to chemicals to actual tanks in their efforts to kill every single Sea Dragon they found. And in the meantime, the government passed a mandate that made the posession of the creatures illegal, and the maximum penalty was five years of jail time. I was lucky in that regard, for I knew something that many others did not.

See, supplied with the kids was a sachet of something called "cleansing solution". It was a powder that, when one was finished with the product, was poured into the water and allowed to stand in the same manner as the purification tablets. The powder was lethal to the Dragons and their eggs, the idea being that you had to disinfect the whole tank before you started over. When my aunt died, I wasted no time in dumping the entire contents of the packet into my tank, and in twenty-four hours I tipped the corpses down the toilet without a shred of remourse.

They didn't get all of them, though - you still get the odd Sea Dragon sighting now and again. The last one was in August of last year, on the Isle of Whight. They showed a man in heavy duty hazmat gear holding the body up on the end of a long fishing spear. The thing was as big as a crocodile, had lost the gills and had been starting to grow arms, tipped with nasty-looking claws. I shudder to think of how long it had practiced walking, and what it would have done once it got the hang of it.

Life has mostly stabilized since then. Russia has gone quiet and relations between Parliament and the Kremlin are tense, but other than that you wouldn't even know there'd been a crisis. There was a mass recall of the Sea Dragon kits, and now you never see them on shelves anymore. Strangely enough, the Ursa Foundation website has gone dark as well, completely offline save for a blank page with the familiar, roaring bear head logo. And that raises too many questions.

Who were the Ursa Foundation? Where did they get these creatures from? How did they manage to ship them out without anyone realizing what they were? And, most importantly, what if any eggs had, by some miracle, gone unnoticed by the purge and washed out with the currents and pipes all the way down to the sea?

How big would they get?