Have you ever searched for employment for so long that pretty much any offer looked like a dream job?
That was me a few summers ago. Fresh out of college, broke as shit, and desperate enough to answer a CraigsList ad.
Yes, people still use CraigsList.
Yes, it’s mostly sketchy as Hell.
The post was titled “WANTED: WATER SAFETY EXPERT. START IMMEDIATELY.”
It sounded like an official title, something important… but then again, so do “Sanitation Engineer” and “Sandwich Artist”.
When I showed up to the address, all I found was the old and unkempt parking lot of a bankrupt and abandoned business. A “Shoptimize Super-Store”, specifically.
Figuring I had been duped and was at risk of being robbed, murdered, or oh-so-much worse, I turned back to get in my car and never speak of this again. As I turned on my heels, however, I found myself face-to-face with a crusty, wrinkled old man in a rumpled business suit that was a size too large.
“Oh! Uh…” I paused in utter shock, “I… hello?”
The fossilized salary man silently studied a page on a clipboard, licked the tip of his pencil, and scribbled something out. In that moment, while he seemed to pay me absolutely no attention, I took the opportunity to study the horrible hair-dye job atop his head.
It looked like his three year old grandson had colored it in while he slept.
“Interesting choice.” The old man gestured to me, up and down, with his pencil. He still didn’t look up from his paperwork.
“What do you mean?” I asked, surveying my surroundings for any nearby ponds, water parks, or pools I had missed.
“Not exactly dressed for the job.” He checked something off on his page.
“I’m sorry, you might be thinking of someone else.” Almost instantly, I figured he had a lapse in memory and didn’t realize which job applicant he was talking to. “I haven’t interviewed yet.”
“Ad said ‘start immediately’.” He noted.
That’s when it hit me.
This was a fetish thing.
I wasn’t sure what kind of fetish thing, but it had to be a fetish thing.
As if sensing my apprehension, Hell I probably unconsciously took a few steps back, the old man spoke up again.
“The job is unusual, but nothing illegal or amoral. We simply need someone to monitor a specific body of water. We want a candidate for the second shift – Noon to Midnight. Long hours, but not strenuous. You would be relieving the morning specialist, and in turn you will be relieved by that same specialist when your shift ends.”
For whatever reason, all I could think of in that moment was how irresponsible the process was. Hiring what sounded to be a lifeguard, with so little interest in who the candidate was or how well-suited they were to the position… It instantly didn’t sit right.
“Don’t you even want to know if I can swim?” I chuckled.
The old man did not chuckle.
“Not necessary.”
“How is swimming not necessary for a ‘water safety expert’ in charge of an entire body of water?”
The old man pointed his pencil to a lone jeep sitting some distance away on the cracked blacktop.
“The morning specialist will fill you in.”
I studied the jeep, looking left and right of the vehicle, only to see nothing but more parking lot. No “morning specialist”, no water, nothing.
When I turned back to the old man, he was gone.
“What the fuck!” I mumbled to myself, before looking a short way down the sidewalk, where the old man was casually walking away. He was a bit quicker than he looked. “Oh.”
With few other prospects and nothing else to do with my afternoon, I figured “meh” and walked out to the jeep, past row after row of parking spots marked with barely-visible, sun-bleached yellow paint.
“Oh, hayy!” a voice called out as I rounded the jeep.
The first point of interest in this otherwise bleak post-consumerist wasteland was the blonde who vigorously waved “hello” with with the nervous energy of a small dog. Next, the red and white canvas folding chair she was seated on.
Last, I noticed the three orange cones situated around a pothole just in front of the chair.
A pothole filled with grimy, oily water.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked out loud, fully intending to have only said it in my head.
The blonde stood up from her seat and offered a fist bump. Only when she was standing in front of me did I notice the out-of-place red one-piece she was wearing. Seeing someone straight out of an episode of Baywatch watching over a dirty puddle outside the old Shoptomize felt like a surreal dream-like moment.
“I’m Courtney.” she remarked, still waiting to complete the fist bump.
“Uh, that’s great.” I shook my head in clichéd disbelief and knocked knuckles with her.
I glanced at the puddle and to the cones, one of which was knocked on its side.
“They pay you to do this?”
“Uh, yeah?” She looked incredulous, a wide smile still on her face.
“To sit by a puddle and pretend to be a lifeguard?”
“Well, it’s not a puddle. It’s a hole. Puddles are, like, on the surface of something or whatever, right? This goes, like, all the way down.”
I stepped up to the pothole, crouched down, and looked into the inky, dark water.
“Down to where?”
“Iunno.” Courtney shrugged.
I set the third cone upright before standing up again.
“interesting outfit.” She echoed the old man’s words, folding up her chair and carelessly tossing it in the back of the jeep. “Just cuz you’re second shift doesn’t mean you won’t get any sun. It gets pretty hot in the afternoon, like, I swear the pavement gets soft and gooey during the peak temps. My suggestion? Bring, like, a bathing suit and a buncha sunscreen, tomorrow.”
She had a body for that. I didn’t.
“Tomorrow. Right.” I chuckled again, looking to the pothole, then back to her as she sat in the driver’s seat, “How much does this even pay?”
She thought for a moment.
“Well, I dunno what they’re paying you, but I’m comfortable.” She nodded and smirked, eyes hooded as if I was supposed to be picking up on her meaning.
“How much do they pay you?” I asked more bluntly, having little actual patience for this scenario.
Courtney started the jeep, sat there for a moment, staring forward with a flat expression, then turned to me once more with another wide, pearly grin.
“My mom has leukemia. She was going to lose her house. Now she isn’t.”
Courtney winked and drove off, swerving around the parking lot and blowing out into the street without stopping or checking lanes.
I stood, alone, in the post-noon heat of the lot, staring down at what definitely looked like a puddle. I was so thrown for a loop that it was a few full moments before I could even form a coherent thought.
“Bitch took the chair.”
By six o’clock the heat finally broke and I could feel the breeze again. At that point, I was sitting shirtless by the puddle, seated on a rusty old shopping cart I had found and turned on its side.
Seeing the sun move behind a growing number of clouds just near the horizon brought me relief. Then, I realized the lights would not be coming on due to the location being closed and abandoned. Trading the stifling heat for absolute darkness didn’t seem like a fair deal.
I walked back to my car, confidant that the traffic cones would serve well enough in my place. If any homeless folks or urban explorers suddenly showed up to the completely desolate location, it’d be hard to miss the Day-Glo orange beacons.
After throwing my shirt on and hopping into the car, I drove to the nearest hardware store and picked up a battery-operated lantern. As I pulled the random light from the shelf and walked toward the check-out lane, something caught my eye.
A tape measure.
The drive back to the parking lot was pretty chill. Night had fallen and I had the radio on, feeling no real rush to get back to “work’, if you could call it that. It felt more like a scam or a prank – one that I had no intention of taking too seriously. If the people who hired me were watching, then I could easily complain about not being supplied with the items needed to do the job. If they weren’t watching, then I would know for sure when nobody chewed me out for leaving my post. From there, I could come and go while picking up some free cash if I played things rights.
The parking lot was as pitch black as I had expected when I returned. As I made the turn into the lot, my headlights were the only source of light. Taking a page from Courtney’s playbook, I continued on with the intention of parking right next to the puddle.
Since the sun was no longer beating down on the windshield, I could sit in the car not only for a nap, but to avoid getting stabbed while napping.
As my headlights cut across the pavement and illuminated the puddle, I jammed the brakes and screeched to a sudden stop.
There, face-down on the dirty blacktop, was a man dressed in a t-shirt and shorts.
He was lying prone with his face submerged straight into the puddle.
“Holy shit!” I shouted, jumping out of the car as it rolled to a stop and running over beside the man, who was gurgling, gasping, and thrashing his limbs as if he had forgotten how to get up.
Flailing weakly, he knocked the cone back over.
“Motherfucker, what the fuck?!” I continued yelling like a maniac as I rolled him over, gross, foul water spilling from his mouth with every choking gasp. His eyes were rolled back into his head, and though the headlights were no longer at a good enough angle to see clearly, I could tell his face was somewhere between red and purple.
Having no actual training in this area, I rolled the man onto his back, where he started drowning in spouts of water yet again. Quickly, I moved him on his side, having rolled him a fair distance at that point.
“Who the fuck are you?!” I demanded, slapping the guy’s face a few times and striking him on the back, going through a phase of trial and error on the way to hopefully saving his life.
He belched and bubbled a bit before spitting out a few words.
“Where am I? What happened?”
“You almost drowned in a puddle, jackass!” I shouted in his face, before sitting – falling back on to my ass, really – my hands pressed to my head in disbelief.
“Wha-” The guy rolled his eyes around a bit, obviously searching for some point of reference in the night.
I watched the guy vomit up a few more cups of iridescent, oily water for the next few minutes. By the time he was coherent, I had already sold him on several lies. Namely that I saw him sleepwalking from the road and turned back to check on him, finding that he had fallen when I came back around.
“Thank God you were driving by.” He wheezed, “If you hadn’t spotted me, I…”
“No worries.” I got to my feet and offered him a hand up. “I guess you have a guardian angel looking out for you, or whatever.”
“Where are we?”
“Remember the old Shoptomize? This is the parking lot out front.”
“Weird.”
“I know.”
He looked off into the night, then back to me.
“Can I get a ride home?”
“Uhh…” My attention was drawn back to the eerily calm circle of dark water, “No, sorry.”
He did a slight double-take, surprised at the response – or the quickness of it.
“Why not?”
“Well,” I shrugged and gestured to the water and tried to sound earnest, “Someone should probably stay with the puddle.”
He shot me a loaded, skeptical look, but there was little someone who nearly drowned in a puddle could say. He walked off toward the road.
Once he was gone, I set up the electric lantern and returned to my seat on the shopping cart.
“Now we have something interesting,” I said to no one – maybe to the puddle, “I really don’t believe that was just random chance…”
I don’t know what I expected, maybe for a bubble to come up in response or some other such nonsense. When nothing happened, that actually seemed more disquieting than if there had been some signal of otherworldly influence.
As strange as it sounds, the absolute lack of anything unusual brought about a chilling feeling of having no influence or control over the situation. It didn’t feel like there was no supernatural element at play, it felt like I wasn’t worth the reply.
“Oh! That’s right!” I snapped my fingers in realization, stood, and walked to my car.
Returning with the tape measure in hand, I began to unspool it a bit. Soon, I was standing over the puddle, feeding inch after inch of metallic tape down into the dingy, greasy opening.
When I had extended the full length of the tape measure, but still hadn’t felt it touch the bottom, I froze in place, bobbing it up and down repeatedly.
“Huh…” I mused to myself, “You called it, Courtney. The thing goes all the way down.”
Zip!
In an instant, the tape measure was gone from my hands, leaving behind twin slits on my skin, where the metal had run across my fingers. Before I could even register the sting of the slices, I was pressing the blood between my fingertips.
“God damn!” I yelled, disturbing the still of the night yet again.
The blood kept coming as I wound the bottom of my shirt over my hand, creating an awkward bandage that restrained my arm to my side. I nearly kicked over the lantern as my foot swept backward and I moved away from the water hole.
Something had snagged the measuring tape, or yanked on it.
It definitely felt like a yank.
With my pulse racing, now, and my breath coming in short, panicked bursts, I tried to calm my mind. Quickly, I reasoned that some underwater current, maybe a drainage pipe, connected with the hole. The moving water must’ve pulled the object down… but it would have to be moving pretty fast to pull that hard…
I pushed the shopping cart back, sat a good distance away, and studied my hand again. The cuts had closed up, but the pain and swelling were just starting.
Taking my phone out of my pocket, I searched back through the call history and looked for the number from the CraigsList ad. Despite the late hour, I had no qualms with getting the old man out of bed to answer a few questions.
Like how much I was being paid for this.
Before I could finish dialing, movement caught my eye.
Slowly, very slowly, I raised my eyes from the phone screen. Not a single cell in my body made a move, other than my eyes.
The surface of the water within the puddle to nowhere had broken, a glint of metal showing through. Soon, the silver wedge protruded upward, followed by a trail of shimmering yellow.
The measuring tape, seemed to feed itself back out of the hole, collapsing on the ground, but continuing to slowly push out to its full length.
Whatever was down there, whatever unknowable horror resided on the other side of that surface…
It wanted to know how far “down” the hole went, too.
So yeah, as I said, that was a few summers ago. To tell the truth, this is actually the easiest job I could imagine having, so while you may be surprised I didn’t quit immediately… all I can say is that I’m getting paid to sit by a hole and occasionally tackle a random idiot trying to drown themself.
If you were actually wondering – the pay is one thousand percent worth knowing things no human being should be aware of.
All for sitting in a parking lot and staring at… I don’t know, Satan’s asshole or whatever this is.
Let me guess – Are you looking for a down side?
Well, if I had to pick something, it’d be this…
I still have CraigsList notifications on, just because I never bothered getting around to switching them off.
Once in a while, I see a familiar ad pop up.
“WANTED: WATER SAFETY EXPERT. START IMMEDIATELY.”
I’m not giving up this job, and Courtney’s there at the start and end of every shift, to be her obnoxiously chipper self.
So where are they hiring? New locations?
Why are the listings getting more frequent over time?
