When Nikki died, she wasn’t the only one drowning.
I was there too, choking down the same murky water. Making the same floundering movements—but unlike my eight-year-old sister, I could swim. Those moments are some of the only things I remember about that day. Dark water filling my throat—then my lungs–a quick flash of something brushing past my foot, and breaking the surface of the water to smell the wretched scent of the river.
Nothing else from that night is left in my mind. Not anything from before, and not anything after those moments in the lake. The last thing I really remember, was getting out of a car, and hearing a woman sobbing.
That was seven years ago. After all that time, I thought that everything was over the day we put my sister’s ashes on the mantel. But over the past few weeks, I’ve started to wake up in the middle of the night. I’ve been waking up the smell of the river’s pollution. Dead fish and sewage work together to invade my nostrils, the same way it was that night on the river.
But we moved miles away from the river after Nikki died.
My first thought was that it was a type of hallucination, I mean I’ve been through the years of therapy, I know how powerful PTSD is, hell, I’ve had flashbacks before, but not like this. Because the next night—I woke up with my sheets sopping wet.
I didn’t even notice it, not at first, the thing that woke me up the second night wasn’t the wetness, it wasn’t even the smell (although it was still as strong as ever), but it was the sound. The sound of water dripping onto the carpeted floor, my bedspread crying out the moisture that had been left in it.
When I heard it, that dripping, crying, sound–I remembered. When Nikki died, she wasn’t the only one drowning—because there were three of us there.
Libby was the best babysitter I ever had. She always wore all black, and we were the only ones allowed to call her ‘Libby’. She explained to me once that she always went by her full name—Libertad—with ‘people in authority’ because she never wanted to ‘cave to the powers of white supremacy and assimilate to an oppressive culture.’ I’ll be honest, when I was 12, some of the stuff she said would go over my head. But she never made fun of me for drawing Metal Sonic fighting Sonic EXE, 9DE0 so she was cool. I also think she saved me from getting overly traumatized online at a young age by keeping my attention on Creepypasta and not LiveLeak.
“Libby! So, now that Nikki’s asleep, can I show you something?” I pulled up my Ipad and showed her the digital drawing I made.
She craned her head over and asked, “Is that the guy from the Zelda games?”
I quickly changed the layer so that the drawing’s eyes went black with bloody tears.
“It was! Now it’s BEN Drowned! Do you know who that is– I watched a video on him and I really shouldn’t be showing you this because he might have hacked my Ipad but–“
“I’ve heard of this guy before, he’s like a—Scary Spaghetti, right?” She tried to be a little vague about it back then, but in retrospect I’m pretty sure she was just fucking with me.
“No! He’s a creepyPASTA. It’s called that because they’re real.”
“Are you sure? Anyone can put anything down on the internet to get a quick scare. And besides, there’s not quality control at all. The best scary stories… are in books.”
I looked at her with all the vitriol of a kid in the 2010s being asked to actually read books. She’d do this sort of thing often, try to trick me and Nikki into playing outside instead of on the Wii, or say carrots gave you a ‘health buff’ to get us to eat better. Nikki was usually gullible enough to believe her, but not me.
“Sounds lame,” and since I was trying to be cool, I added, “the only really real ghost stories are the ones that are like. Firsthand counts, and books can be like– second and third hand accounts.”
“Okay okay fine. I won’t make you read. But if you care about firsthand accounts so much, why don’t I tell you about something that happened to me?”
“Hmmm… okay. But how do I know you’re telling the truth?”
She stood up and made the sign of the Cross, “Cross my heart and hope to die, may the devil take my mind.”
My face scrunched up, “How’s that supposed to your story more truthful?”
“Demons only get to you if you let them in. Soooo, therefore if I’m telling a lie, I just promised the devil he could hang out in my mind as punishment. So that’s how you know I’m telling the truth about this one.”
“...” I was hesitant to believe her, but I also didn’t know enough about demonology to dispute her.
“Okay, so just remember. All of this– 100% true.”
There was a woman, once, who had a family of four. Two children, and a husband whom she loved very much. And they lived alone in a shack near the river. But one day, her daughter got very very sick. And, so did her son.
With both their children sick in bed, with an illness no prayer could cure, her husband set out for a doctor. But the woman stayed with her kids, as they got sicker, and sicker, and sicker. Every day, she fed them broth and bread, and everyday they’d throw it up in their beds. Their fevers ran so hot that instead of drying the sheets, she’d wash them in the river and throw them over her children to cool them down.
But nothing worked, and it had become a week and her husband still wasn’t back. And every day her kids begged for water, and more blankets because they were freezing cold in the middle of july. But all the woman wanted was for her kids to be well again. But they couldn’t, not without a doctor. And if a doctor wasn’t coming, her children were just slowing dying in this shack.
So she decided to well, help them pass on, faster. She gave her kids stones to put in their pockets and dragged them, sickly and staggering, towards the river. And she pushed them under, until their cries for water couldn’t be heard anymore.
And she was, for a moment, at peace. Until–She saw two men on the other side of the river. Her husband, and a doctor. And then, she started to weep, and wail, and she threw herself into the river.
I found this story in a newspaper clipping while looking up the history of Mexican immigrants to this area in the 19th century. And that story appeared in our town’s newspaper in 1873. But the reason that I looked in those records was because I had starting hearing weird things when I was walking past the river, on the little sidewalk on the bank. But recently, something else happened.
Whenever I walked past the river on my way home from your house, I kept hearing these crying noises close by me. And it was so weird, because they sounded like someone was right behind me, but when I looked around, I couldn’t see anyone. Before it could happen again, I heard something else.
In that moment, it was like a woman was talking directly into my ear.
“Lo hice por ellos… por ellos…” I did it for them, for them, she said.
I wanted to run then, I really did. But I kept walking. My head was turning almost 360 degrees though, trying to see who was talking to me. I wish that I had kept my eyes forward, focused on sidewalk. But because I turned my head enough, I saw someone.
Someone in the distance, who I thought was standing on the opposite riverbank. But after a second, it looked more like she was walking on the water. And when she started coming towards me, the sound of crying got more and more distant. As the sounds of crying and pleading started to recede, I could make out her features in better detail. Her hair was long and black, streaming around her shoulders, she wore a light blue gown, and water streamed from her face and eyes.
In a weird way, I recognized her. I recognized her not because I knew about her story yet, but because I’d always heard the stories of her. She was La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, the Wailing Mother. Distantly, as she continued her gliding approach, I heard her say, “¿Eres mi hija?” Are you my daughter?
And it was then, then, that I did run. I ran away from the river and into the neighborhood of houses near it until I was a quarter of a mile away from it. I only stopped because I almost collided into a guy on a hoverboard.
That was a few months ago, but— It’s the reason I drive home now, instead of walking by the river.
When she had finished, I didn’t think about how she had always driven her car back home. I didn’t think about the logistics of a Mexican family immigrating to Ohio in the 19th century, or the fact that our shitty library didn’t have records that stretched back that far. I could only think about how the river was only two blocks away. Libby had scared the shit out of me with her story, and I was convinced of its truth. Even if it hadn’t been true before that moment, it was like she spoke the words into a reality of their own.
That fact became even more real to me, when I started to hear the muffled sounds of someone crying close by. I jumped off the couch and turned to Libby, who's shocked expression showed me she heard it too.
It was then that Nikki crawled out from behind crawlspace between the wall and the couch and threw herself at Libby, crying.
“Is it true? Is there a scary girl in the river?”
“Oh my god, Nikki! Hey, it’s supposed to be your bedtime, let’s get you to your room, okay?” She clutched my sister closer to her, and they made quite a pair. Libertad, in all black, looking guilty for scaring the child she hadn’t meant to, and Nikki, in her green Minecraft PJs, sobbing her eyes out.
In another hour, it was 10:30, we had gotten Nikki to go back to sleep, and I was in my room, listening to Libby talk to my mom in the living room. They were talking about Nikki, and while at first I thought it might be about her accidentally overhearing the story, I quickly got bored. My mom was just talking about talking Nikki to the doctor tomorrow.
My little sister had kept complaining about being sore, and napped a lot more these days, but I thought she was just being dramatic, because it coincided with the start of her ballet lessons (which she hated, and would do anything to get out of). I’d actually ‘helped’ her get out them one time by throwing a ball at her foot really hard. She hadn’t asked me to, and I did initially do it because she was annoying me, but she got to skip that day anyway.
All these years later, I recognize that Nikki’s fatigue and frailty were the result of the overabundance of white blood cells in her system. Her little body had started attacking itself, and she was entering the first stages of leukaemia. Even with the onset of her chemo treatments, she would just keep getting sicker, and sicker, and sicker. When we fell in the river together, I was the one that survived.
But the sickness in Nikki’s bones became the stones that weighed her down, until they were heavy enough to drag her into the water’s depths.
The water hasn’t stopped appearing. When I started writing this whole account, I thought that airing out a little of the past would be enough to get me through this weird mental break I’m having. But the water hasn’t stopped coming into my room at night. My parents are convinced that it’s an issue with the plumbing (how the hell can it be an issue with the plumbing, I’m on the second fucking floor)—so before I went to sleep last night, I crept into the basement and turned off all the water in the house.
I then proceeded to check all of the taps–nothing flowed when I turned them on. Satisfied, I went to bed—but woke up in the morning soaked to the bone—and when I checked the water main, the handle was still covered in a layer of dust.
I thought that I was working through my trauma. I had stopped needing to see my therapist a year ago, even though my CPTSD was identified, I had never needed to have been medicated for it. So why now?
Tonight, in my desperation, I’m going to drive to the river. It’ll be the first time I’ve been back since that night. I need to know that there is no Weeping Woman, because then I can truly forget about that night.
When I got to the river that night, I didn’t see Libby’s La Llorona. There was no Mexican pioneer woman that appeared on the river that night.
My Weeping Woman was worse.
I had to drive to the river, and when I got out of my car, the sun had just set on the horizon. I didn’t encounter any joggers or cyclists out on this stretch of the river, it was a little too precarious for that. The sidewalk here hadn’t been updated in decades, even after I was dragged out of it. But at least there were some of those shitty, solar-powered street lights alongside the crooked path. I thought it was funny, because instead of the lights making the jagged concrete look better, it just brought out the deformities.
I had walked about a quarter mile away from my car at that point, kicking loose stones as I went, until I heard it.
“I’m sorry…”
Someone was crying in the distance. It was so far in the distance that I couldn’t help but wonder if I heard it at all. I looked to the river, and desperately searched for a figure on the opposite bank. But the crying had gotten even quieter now, and I almost turned back to head to my car, when I heard the second noise.
It was a slow, deliberate drip. As it got louder, the sound of crying almost disappeared. In that moment, the smell of the river reached me again. That stench that had kept haunting me was almost unbearable now, but something had changed in it. It hadn’t just gotten stronger, but rather deeper as well. There was a strange undercurrent of rotting to it. Not just the regular rot of fish, but the rot of red meat. It was then that I turned around, to see a woman standing less than five feet away from me.
She was soaking wet, dressed in a light blue hospital gown. Her long black hair was soaking wet, and she looked slightly bloated, as if she was swelling out of her gown. Her body moved as if she was compressing in on hereslf, crying.
In mere seconds I could tell that was where the true source of the dripping was coming from. Water streamed from her eye-less sockets in rivulets, the color of it dark and murky. She smelled like what she was, a water-logged corpse.
And yet, none of this was what truly scared me about her. What shook me deep into my core, and had me tear my feet from the pavement and start running was one thing, more difficult by far to process than anything else.
I recognized her.
The woman that I ran away from on the riverfront that night was the one person who could always scare me.
It was Libby who sobbed that night. The further I ran from her, the louder and louder and louder her wails became, until I slammed my car into drive and hopped a meridian to get away from the river.
It was only then that it all stopped. The wailing in my ears had finally stopped, but the questions that crossed my mind kept streaming by. Everything had changed, and yet nothing had.
The final piece of the puzzle came in the form of a social media post. Even though I never used it, I ended up opening Facebook at 3am searched, ‘Libertad Herrera’ and after finding no results, simply typed in ‘Herrera’ and found someone that looked like she could be Libby’s mom. And after clicking on her page to be greeted immediately with Libby’s smiling face, it was confirmed.
The post that Libby’s mom had made was an ‘In Memoriam’ for her daughter. I had to translate the page from Spanish before I could read it properly, but I was only half surprised by what I saw next.
“After a long battle with her mental health, Libertad has joined the other saints in heaven—”
I stopped reading for a moment, the memory of a voice ringing out in my ears.
“You’ll go to heaven.” Oh my God.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll go to heaven.”
Libby had been acting strange. She had stopped trying to get me to build ‘healthier’ habits, and I could tell because my parents had her watch me more as they shuttled Nikki between appointments, sometimes in other cities. She would still smile, and talk to me if I asked her questions, but there was something… lacking in her eyes. I didn’t really notice though, because I had started to read my way through the Goosebumps series and was surprised how good they actually were.
But one day, she just. Didn’t watch me or Nikki anymore. I asked my mom about it, and she told me Libby wasn’t feeling well. I asked her if Libby was sick like Nikki was sick, and my mom got really quiet.
“No, it’s not my place to say. But, listen. I want you to know, that even though your dad and I are spending a lot of time with Nikki right now, it doesn’t mean we don’t still love you. And if you ever have bad— if you feel like you’re alone, tell us. Because… We love you and we want you too be safe, and to feel happy.”
I wasn’t happy, my sister had cancer and my cool babysitter was gone. But if I said that, it would make my mom upset. So, like a very mature twelve-year-old, I hugged my mom, and told her I’d always look out for Nikki, because that’s what she needed to hear.
There was a good day, a day when Nikki was out of the hospital and walking fine, that our parents took us to the river to walk. I joked with my sister about how bad it smelled. We were a while ahead of our parents, and made a game out of throwing stones into the river, but it devolved into Nikki collecting the pebbles she thought were cool.
But after a second, Nikki shrieked with joy and raced towards someone walking our way, leaping to hug them.
“Nikki! Leave them alone–” I said before I recognized who she had approached.
It was Libby.
She looked…well, she looked awful. There were bags under her eyes, and they kept shifting back and forth between us and the river. Her posture was slumped, and the way she held herself was completely different. I don’t even think she recognized us for a while.
“Hey Libby! How are you?” I asked, trying to keep my excitement down. Nikki was still clinging onto her like a burr, so I walked within arms reach of them.
“I forget…” her voice was a strange combination of absent-minded and keenly invested, “Trace. Nikki. You guys are baptized, right?”
“Um. What? No…” I took Nikki’s hand pulled her closer towards me. I knew Libby was weird, that was what had made her cool to me, but– this was different. It was like she was possessed.
“And just like that, the serpent slithers deeper,” She said, as if this was a totally normal conversation.
“Libby… Are you okay? My parents are just down the road, if you need to talk to them–”
She shook her head, “No. No. I’m okay. And you guys will be too, right? I’m glad to see that you’re doing better Nikki.”
My sister giggled in response, “Can you pick me up please?”
Libby smiled, picked Nikki up in her arms, and chucked her into the river.
In that moment, it was like I had been punched in the gut. My sister was so small, and weaker still from her sickness. She went into the water flailing about and screaming in a mixture of joy and fear.
I couldn’t even comprehend what had just happened. She had flown out of Libby’s arms with such force it didn’t seem real. But nonetheless, I hesitated at the edge of the river–
“I’m sorry. But you’ll go to heaven,” Libby rocked forward on the balls of her feet, “I can’t, the devil made a home in my head. You’ll go to heaven. Let’s go.” She took me by the arm, and I couldn’t resist the vice-like grip that forced me to the river with all the grace of John the Baptist.
My parents were running closer and closer, but all I could think about was Nikki in the water. And so I followed were I was led, and went to rescue my sister from heaven.
But when I fell, the current pushed me under, and I couldn’t see anything. Opening my eyes just leads to pain and darkness. Silt rushed under my eyelids and past my lips. I was vaguely aware of a thrashing shape near me, but as I was doubled over under the water again, my only desire to reach the surface. I struggled to shore, and not even the small hand that brushed past my foot could make my brain overpower my selfish instincts.
After all of that, it only made sense that she was hospitalized. In a moment of complete unreality, she had been responsible for my sister being taken to her grave, not by cancer, but by the river’s waters.
I remember all the details of the drowning now. My memory is whole again, but I’m still missing something.
Because the water hasn’t stopped.
Even now, it’s the middle of the night and I’m writing all of this down instead of sleeping, praying that it won’t happen again. I know that if I tell my parents, my mom will want to call a psychiatrist and my dad will call a priest.
But I don’t know if I can trust either of those options right now, because I can hear crying again. As if she’s right next to me—