The Showers - Reddit Scary Story

4.1

We spent another hour and a half aimlessly driving around the outskirts of Broken Bow. I was giving directions to nowhere in particular, lost in thought about the girl from the gas station. It was entirely possible that the whole thing was my imagination getting away from me. My mind was filling in gaps in my memory with the worst possible reality. Deep down I knew it was the truth.

I saw the little oasis on the horizon before Karen and Brian. My stomach went into freefall and my vision became a tunnel. I must have steered us there without knowing it; that had to be it. Maybe you had to get lost to find the place. Maybe it sought me out. It didn't really matter. I kept quiet, feeling lightheaded. If I said nothing, we could just drive right by it and let it fade from our lives forever. Brian turned the wheel toward the trees without a word of guidance from me.

This was the first point where I realized how desperately I didn't want to return to that place. I was sweating through layers of clothing and trying to keep my composure.

"Maybe we can call it a night and try again some other time," I managed to say. The words fell out of my mouth, slurred and robotic sounding. It was the best I could do.

"I'm gonna try that ominous looking patch of trees over there, but then I am down for whatever you guys want to do," said Brian.

I fixed in on the treeline as we slowly worked our way across the undisturbed field. I could feel the pull of the farmhouse and the tunnels, their weight dragging us toward them. The trees appeared to shimmer in the setting sun's light. The branches extended outward as if they were reaching for the car, beckoning us. "Shit, bub, that is pretty awful looking," Karen said. "Ringing any bells?"

"That's the place." The words went through my mind and out of my mouth in less than a second. I hardly even tried to stop them. Karen and Brian celebrated; I chewed at my fingernails. I had told myself countless times that I would never again step foot near Broken Bow, but here I was. I would be lying if I said I had never imagined it though, returning to the scene of my personal horror show to somehow get some answers or cast a light on what exactly the showers were. I spent a long time forming my own personal theories about the place, but eventually the effort seemed pointless. The truth behind them didn't matter in the end, anyway.

A part of them existed only within the confines of my story, what I posted on the internet and chose to show the world. They could be anything to anyone with just that account, from a meeting place for a violent ritualistic cult to a site for experiments performed by the KKK or deeply rooted Nazis post-World War II. I'm not dense. I know that the real fear lies in the unknown; horror was my bread and butter. I believe that was why the story connected with some people and left others disappointed. The showers in my story are filled mostly with whatever you bring to them. For me, the showers were more complex. They existed outside of rational thought and comprehension because my experience with them robbed me of those attributes, in part. As we slowly rolled through the brush, tree branches reached out and scraped against the car's exterior, forging new grooves and playing the metal like a warped record. The sharp, grinding noises split my already aching head in two. I put in my ear buds to mute the noise, no music; I think Brian apologized about the car while Karen looked at our surroundings like a kid who just stepped foot into an amusement park.

That place meant something to me that I hadn't considered prior to that moment and still hadn't pieced together in its entirety. I just knew that as we began to near the clearing I felt that I had never had a choice in making this trip. I was always going to end up back here, one way or another. Every time I told my story -- Mr. Mays' story -- I dug the hole a little deeper. Every drink I took to forget them, every girl I slept with to distract from them, and every fake fact I made up to distance myself from the real story just further solidified the fact that one day I would return. I was free to leave, go home, and have all of the booze and noncommittal sex my body could handle. I could do these things because the showers are patient; they have time. All of my actions were simply futile attempts at prolonging the inevitable. I know how it sounds but I'm looking back on it now and telling you the simple truth: I was always going to return to the showers because they were waiting for me.