Burble From Beyond

We recently moved into our new house.

It's perfect, just the right size for our family, but it has a strange problem with the drains. I noticed it while I was unpacking the bathroom things. I turned to find that my husband had forgotten to flush and pushed the lever to flush it down. When I did, I discovered that the sink burbles when you flush the toilet. Nothing too jarring, but it scared me a little when I first heard it. The sink burbles and bubbles, making a noise deep in the drain as it clears the water.

My husband laughed it off when I mentioned it to him, "It's an old house, dear. The pipes are on a central line that feeds into the septic tank. No one has used them in a while, so it's probably just getting used to people being in the house again."

I blew it off as a weird thing the house did and just went about my business.

A week later, the drain started burbling when I took a shower too. I overlooked it, though, not wanting to dwell on something I ultimately couldn't do anything about. This was the first place I'd lived with a septic tank, I'd always used city water, and I figured it was just something that happened with septic tanks. My husband barely seemed to notice it, so I assumed it was nothing out of the ordinary. After a few weeks, I had almost come to ignore it.

Until the whispering started.

I was brushing my teeth one night, running the water as I always did, when I heard the burbling coming from the drain again. I had bent my mouth to the stream to get a mouthful of water when I could have sworn I heard a burbling kind of whisper from the drain. It was barely audible, more like a gurgle from the drain, but as I listened, it almost sounded like words.

"Beck, Bank, Bees. Beck, Bank, Bees."

I turned off the water, spitting my mouthful of paste and water down the drain, and closed the door behind me.

The bubbling got worse from there on out. It didn't just bubble when the water was on. It always bubbled, loud and jarring, and I was still certain I could hear the whispers. My husband shrugged it off as normal. He was busy with work and didn't have time to indulge his flighty wife. I put up with it as best I could, but it had honestly started to grate on me a bit. I heard it in the kitchen, the living room, and especially whenever I had to go to the bathroom. The bathroom seemed to be the epicenter, and as the days progressed, I became more and more confident I could hear words in the gurgles.

I lost my cool one night when my husband was working late.

As I lay in bed, my son sleeping soundly next to me, I could hear the sink burbling and whispering from the hall bathroom. The bubbles were visible now when it burbled, deep green bubbles that sloshed up the drain and filled the sink with stagnant water sometimes. Never when my husband was home, of course, and the bastard didn't believe me when I showed him the thin film that hung on the bowl. As I lay there listening, the gurgling seemed to mock me. It seemed like only I could hear it, and the continued surge of tidal forces had frazzled me.

I was up before I really knew what I was doing. I stomped down the hall in my pajamas, heading for the bathroom on bare feet. I was mad, I had had enough, and as I slammed the door open, I saw the towel rack shake ominously. I flipped on the light like I intended to catch the sink doing something wrong and shouted loud enough to make my son stir and cry out in his sleep.

"Shut up! Shut up right now!" I screamed at the burbling sink.

And for a wonder, it did.

The drain stopped burbling, and for a few seconds, there was peace.

Then a geyser erupted from the drain and splashed high enough to splatter the ceiling in a green fountain. It splattered the walls, pattered against the shower curtain, and caused the ceiling to rain drops of thick sludge. I'd fallen to my backside in the hallway, watching the geyser with wide eyes, when I saw something gloop out of the drain that made me scream. I scuttled across the floor, my back hitting the bedroom door, hearing my son cry out from the bedroom. I had seen the last thing I would have ever expected from the narrow bathroom drain, and I was certain now that I could hear something else joining it as it gurgled onto the bathroom floor.

A hand.

A hand of sludgy green liquid that had punched from the drain like an angry hurricane.

I reached with numb fingers for the nob, the fingers refusing to find purchase as I slapped at it uselessly. I heard a gurgly thunk then, the sound of water trying to maintain a shape it was unaccustomed to, and something cast a shadow against the door. The best way I can describe it is the shadow appeared to be cast by a living jello mold. It was solid, but it was transparent. It cast a watery shadow, its form undulating as it came towards the door.

A single green, watery hand gripped the door frame.

I screamed again as it lumbered into the hallway, and my grasping hand felt like a dead fish. It was six feet tall, bulbous, and amorphous, with a shuddering bald head. Its eyes were murky green coals, and its form was a wiggling mass of barely contained fluid. The fluid was...it was awful. It had clearly drawn its matter from the septic tank, and things floated within the water that doesn't bear thinking about. It took a single unsure step, the unstable golem shaking as it took another tottering step. My son was screaming now, unsure where I was, and his terror only amplified my fear. As it wobbled towards me, leaving puddles of oozing liquid in the hall, I heard the burbling voice again as it whisper wailed its words.

"Beck, Bank, Bees. Beck, Bank, Bees."

I tried again to open the door, my eyes locked in terror on the watery monstrosity.

"Beck, Bank, Bees. Beck, Bank, Bees."

I felt my own water puddle on the floor as my bladder let go, the creature towering over me.

"BECK, BANK, BEES!" I yelled.

It leaned down over me, and I could feel the stagnant drops fall onto my face. I wanted to cover my nose. It smelled like raw sewage, but I was too afraid to move. I was sure, at that moment, that I would never see my husband again. He would return to find me dead and our son dead in our bed. He would see the water and always wonder what had happened to us. As this creature crouched over me, I was certain that the last thing I saw would be this terrible sewage creature.

It bent its watery lips to my face then, and when it whispered this time, I could hear something different.

"Check, Tank, Please."

The words were spoken as though they might break the creature, and they were spoken with the utmost emphasis. His speech was slushy, slurry, as though his tongue was missing. He was approximating speech, but it was still difficult to make out.

I looked up into those green orbs and repeated back what he had said.

"Check Tank, Please."

It nodded its liquid head, its featureless face almost looking relieved.

Then it melted into a deluge of stagnant water, and I was covered in buckets of disgusting sewage.

My husband did not believe me. I was still cleaning up sewage when he came home, and he was utterly flabbergasted. I told him about the creature, about its final message, but he refused to believe it. It had been a dream, he said. The septic tank had back flowed into the house, and I had dreamed this watery creature. We went back and forth for hours until I finally had the solution.

"Open the septic tank. If there's nothing there, then I'll never say another word about it. I'll deal with the gurgles and the bubbles, and I'll never say another word about it."

After another hour of arguing, he finally relented.

We called a service, and they breached the lid. It wasn't too hard, the earth was removed, and the lid was removed with a small backhoe. The smell was atrocious, but the men didn't seem to mind. My husband told them we had a problem with the tank, it had flowed into the house, and they figured a valve had become stuck. I saw the pumper hose descend, and the tank was emptied. My husband said I didn't need to be here for this, but I wanted to see.

As the sewage went down, I saw the operator's eyes grow large. He called his partner over, and a flashlight was found. The flashlight nearly fell into the tank when it fell across the sewage-covered lump. His partner told us that there appeared to be something in the tank, but we shouldn't worry. "The house has been empty for a while, so it's probably just a concealed mass or something." The operator continued to pump the tank, and as the water level fell, we saw that the lump was more than congealed waste.

It was a body.

The police were called. Our front yard was soon playing host to three squad cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance. The techs were shunted aside as rescue members retrieved the body from the septic tank and loaded the remains into a body bag for identification. The police asked us some questions but had already cleared us for the most part since the body appeared to have been there for months. The inspector who had done the initial inspection had likely not breached the tank all during his initial inspection. So the body could have been there for years if it had been sealed properly.

As the bag was zipped, I got a momentary glance at it.

It was large, the head bald and lumpy.

It looked a little like the sewage form that had towered over me in the hallway.

Before they zipped it up, the desiccated creature's mouth lolled open, and I felt a chill run down my spine.

His tongue was mangled.

Since the incident, we have heard no more burbling. The septic tank hasn't sputtered, and the house has been quiet since that night, other than the sounds of our family. My husband still can't explain how I knew there was a body in the tank, but I'm just glad that there was ultimately a happy ending to this story. So next time you hear a burbling in your pipes, don't discount it as simple plumbing issues.

Your house may be hearing burbles from beyond.