November 1979

When I first checked into this hotel everyone was telling me about the swimming pool, the swimming pool, like it was the very best thing, something I should see right away. Well I didn't get around to it for several weeks. I was looking for work most of the time, out on the streets most of the day. When I got home I didn't feel like exercise. So I stayed in my room a lot, watching TV, drinking; the kind of things bachelors in hotel rooms usually do. But what I really have to say concerns this swimming pool.

It was odd, you know, when I finally got down there: there wasn't another soul there. I mean, it was 6 o'clock at night, people were off work, and I was in New York, where all advantages are exploited. The pool was clean enough, there wasn't any obvious crud. Where were the people? The water was clear and absolutely still, a sheet of glass. Nobody was around at all. Nobody had been around for a while. From the way the other guests had talked to me I thought they lived down there. Where was everybody?

A pool attendant walked in. I asked him and he didn't know either. A half hour before, he said, there were five people in the pool. He went to the lobby for cigarettes, he's back five minutes later, they're all gone. Everybody. They leave their towels, their robes, their room keys, everything they brought in little piles on the benches around the pool. The attendant waits about 20 minutes for somebody to come back, and then picks up all the keys and takes them back to the front desk. When he gets back, I'm there. Wonder where they went, he says, without their keys.

So I'm taking off my robe and wrapping up my keys in it and another guest comes in, on the far side of the pool. He was an old guy, bent-backed, but still in pretty good shape. He takes off an oversized robe and lays it on the bench; he puts his towel on top and steps out of his slippers. Then he walks over to the pool and dives in. I'm standing by the side getting ready to dive in myself when I see one of the long black lines on the bottom of the pool—the kind they use for races and things—it actually moves under this guy! I wasn't sure I really saw it at first.

The old man doesn't see anything, swims right over it, keeps going. The water broke everything up into facets, all moving; it was hard to determine whether something was down there or not. Something long and black, lying on top of the race lines at the bottom of the pool. And then it moved again. It shifted over the blue tiles in the center and I got a good look at it. It was long, very long, with sections (like a tape worm’s sections). And flat like a tapeworm. One end sort of twitched toward the old man, under him. Suddenly his right leg was inside it, faster than I could see. His head came above the surface for a second, his hands thrashing; he sucked in a huge gulp of air. Then he was snapped underwater again, with another twitch from the big black worm.

I screamed at the attendant, who was standing there watching with his mouth open, and we ran around to the other side of the pool. The old man was only a couple feet from the edge, stretching out for it under the water. Then his hips sank into the creature, forcing his other leg up at an odd angle. The process stopped for a moment. The old man floated up to the top. His face broke the surface. His eyes were bulging from some internal pressure and the lack of air. He took another huge breath and began to scream, just floating in sort of a semicircle, his face just above the water, screaming and screaming.

Then the creature began to pull in again like a snake, and more of the guy’s torso disappeared (up to his chest), and one of his arms was caught in it, too, and his other leg was swallowed almost to the knee, even bent up like it was, like a dancer, with the toes almost touching his head.

He was whipped around closer to where we stood. The screaming and what we were witnessing had paralyzed me, but the attendant leaned over very suddenly and was able to grab one of the old man's arms around the wrist—the arm that was still free. He stopped the whipping motion for a moment, and for a while it looked as though he would be strong enough to make a difference. The old man's hand wrapped around the attendant’s wrist, clutched at it in panic. Then the black worm wriggled along the whole length, and the attendant was in the middle of the pool.

After that the old man rapidly disappeared. In a few seconds only the top of his head was visible, most of a foot, and the one free arm holding onto that attendant like a vice. This arm sank into the worm. The attendant screamed like the old man. Suddenly his hand was in the worm, too, and the old man was gone. This just took a few seconds. The attendants screams didn't last because his head came next, following the whole of the arm. It was like a tongue going back into a mouth.

When the attendant was in past his t-shirt, I had recovered enough of my senses to run out of the room screaming. I ran up the stairs into the hotel lobby in my trunks, incoherent, totally unable to make anybody realize what was going on below. I just looked crazy, and they're used to crazy people in New York. Finally I persuaded the desk clerk and a bellboy to go downstairs with me, down to the pool. They kept me between them on the stairs, and I’m pretty sure one of the other bellboys had been sent to find a cop.

Of course there was nothing there. The top of the water was still agitated, and there was a pile of towels at the side of the pool where the attendant had dropped them. But there were no people and no apparent big black worms. I approached the side of the pool very cautiously. The bellboy hung back by the stairs, and the desk clerk came up beside me. I couldn't see anything at the bottom of the pool, but I thought the thing might've crept back over the race lines, sensing natural camouflage. I was wrong. It wasn't in the pool at all. We heard a sound like someone slapping a wet towel on concrete and turned to see the bellboy’s Afro disappearing into a sectioned worm that had dropped from the pipes overhead.

This time I was a little more together, not so totally blown away by what I was seeing, so I took the desk clerk’s arm and yelled at him, “Grab the legs!” We ran over and grabbed them, we pulled as hard as we could, but it didn't do anything. The power of that suction mouth was unbelievable, it was like we weren't even there. We watched from inches away as the bellboy sank in up to his waist without any kind of pause, just slipped in without resistance.

We dropped the legs when the knees went in, and backed towards the stairs. One of the poor guy’s Adidas popped off as the feet slid in. The gaping hole in the end of the worm closed up, though there was a thin line of foam and brackish dribble along the slit. We were on the first step when the worm started to move again, fast. It humped itself up in the middle and slid towards the stairs at incredible speed. I don't know how it knew where things were, there were no eyes or antenna or anything, but I knew it knew we were on those stairs. We set speed records getting to the top and slammed the fire door behind us. I thought the desk clerk was having a heart attack: his face turned a purplish color, he clutched at his chest; then he threw up. After that he was OK.

When the cops opened the fire door half an hour later they didn't find anything. Nothing in the pool, nothing in the pipes overhead or in any of the downstairs corridors. Just those piles of towels and slippers on the benches. Nobody believed what we had to say about the disappearances; how could they? I wouldn't have believed. Still, they knew something had happened down by the pool. There were those tracks of slime by the waters edge, up one of the walls, coding some pipes. And a whole puddle of it around that single Adidas near the bottom of the stairs. The room smelled like a sewer. Personally I think the black worm went out through the drain in the middle of the deep end; I think that's where it came from, too. The big grate that covered it was bent in half and lying right next to where it should have been. I think it's alive and down in those pipes somewhere.