Books Reading the Weird Lady, Tire, Earthquake, Giant: S.P. Miskowski’s “Water Main” When your fears literally catch up to you, is it better to run or turn and face them? By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on October 22, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover S.P. Miskowski’s “Water Main,” first published in Mike Davis’ Autumn Cthulhu collection in 2016. Spoilers ahead! Nancy’s father told the story frequently. He was a boy in a park overlooking Puget Sound when the brilliant autumn leaves began to shiver. From underground came a monstrous roar. Earth and asphalt cracked open, the hills themselves rippled. As adults ran in panic, abandoning him, the boy knew the giant beneath was waking up. The boy ran. Behind him came the giant’s crashing footsteps. Some tellings, the boy escaped by climbing a totem pole. Others, he jumped on a ship headed for Victoria. But these were tacked-on happy endings based on her father’s latest nightmare. The aftershocks of the earthquake haunted him his entire anxiety-ridden life. He constantly warned Nancy about everyday hazards from public toilets to predatory dates to all weather conditions. But his scariest warning was that if the giant ever found her, she mustn’t think. She must run, like hell, all the way home. Her home at the moment isn’t a welcoming place. Shortly before Halloween, Nancy returns from work to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend. Jim talked her into this building perched on the steepest hill in the Queen Anne neighborhood; it offered panoramic views of the city and Sound—on a clear day they could watch whales from their living room! The days have rarely been that clear. Worse, the apartment is plagued by plumbing problems. Faucet handles go loose. The dishwasher erupts. Their basement storage unit floods. The building manager blames the water main, which is outside his jurisdiction. The latest atrocity is the garbage disposal running in reverse and spewing forth a “sulfurous sludge.” Jim has amassed scores of tools to tackle these problems, which he does in sporadic and ineffective slow motion. Nancy has urged him to call a real plumber, to no avail. This morning, her shower stopped running, forcing her to go to work smelling half-washed. When she finds Jim playing video games and munching pizza, she has to walk out to avoid erupting like the dishwasher. She heads toward a more upscale part of the neighborhood, certain Jim won’t follow. Their relationship has deteriorated into ennui and negligence. She’s increasingly convinced he’s not the one for her, and she’s tired of managing their lives. Nancy’s drizzle-damp walk takes her past houses decorated for Halloween. A cat darts across her path, nearly tripping her. Farther on, she’s almost hit by a Mini Cooper whose costumed passengers shout something she can’t understand. Score: Two tricks, no treats. Then, in an area she thought was zoned strictly for one-family dwellings, she spots an apartment house with the cake-like tiers of an Old New Orleans bordello. No: with its round, brass-trimmed portholes of windows, it looks more like a docked cruise ship. A man with white hair and sea-green eyes sits under its awning. She’s not the woman who was supposed to look at a vacant apartment, but would Nancy have any interest in it? Small but comfortable for one person. He quotes a price far less than she’s paying for her current apartment. Maybe she’s not ready to leave Jim yet, but she might scare him by demonstrating that she has options. The man introduces himself as Felix, the building manager, and says the place was designed by “a man of great means. Not of this century.” They enter through a brass door, to be immediately confronted by a brass-railed circular stairway. The door closes with a whoosh that makes Nancy feel sealed in. Her father would have warned against following a stranger into a strange house, but wasn’t his “the ignorant advice of an older worldview”? They climb up past a hallway lined with open doors. From one door a figure shuffles sideways, then out of sight. The “halting, nervous quality” of its movement disturbs Nancy. On the next level, another figure scuttles between rooms. On the third level, Felix offers her a hand off the staircase. His “softly tapered, damp fingers” repulse Nancy. The hallway smells of “boiling cabbage and fried salmon” and rings, and there’s a baby crying. Felix knocks on a door, calling out that he’s “showing these premises now!” No answer. Good. They’re “here at the right time.” Nancy leans into a dim-lit room strewn with filthy rags and soiled clothing. In a half-curtained closet are boots, lampshades, vinyl records—and some sort of medical equipment all dials, tubes and funnels. Felix gestures for Nancy to follow. She almost does, but then notices a mattress on the floor, covered with sheets stained brown and oily black. She backs up and says she needs to ask her boyfriend if he even wants to move. He’s outside, waiting for her. But Felix persists: She’d be foolish not to take this chance. She mustn’t be childish. Speaking of children, Nancy suddenly notices three babies crawling toward her, diapers sodden, faces streaked with tears and snot. They wail. They leave slug-like trails. The stench of cabbage and fish returns. Nancy heads for the stairs, dizzy, sickened. In the first hallway she passes, the floor is crowded with screaming babies. A large figure, gender unidentifiable, appears. Perhaps a thick-torsoed something that shudders along without legs, on a long split tail, needs no gender. Nancy rattles down the stairs. There are naked babies in the ground floor hallway, crawling toward her on tapered bodies with split posteriors. Felix insists Nancy “belongs in [her] room.” She stumbles, bashing her tailbone on the final step. She gets up, wrestles the front door open, and jumps outside. Behind her she hears windows breaking, the wails of pursuing creatures; beneath her, the earth rumbles. “Don’t try to reason it out. Don’t stop,” her father warned. But Nancy does stop, and then, weeping and more afraid than ever before in her life, she turns around. The Degenerate Dutch: The strange apartment building appears in “one of the odd areas the early white settlers had failed to conquer by regrading.” Madness Takes Its Toll: Nancy father is overcome by a Lovecraftian laundry list of phobias, and eventually by the resulting alcoholism. Anne’s Commentary I hadn’t associated Seattle with particularly high earthquake activity. Wrong: The city lies in a seismic hotspot. The 2001 Nisqually quake achieved a magnitude of 6.8, making it one of the most damaging earthquakes in recent U.S. history. Deep quakes like that are predicted to occur every 30-50 years. I played with making Dad’s traumatic event the Nisqually, but assuming that the story takes place around its 2016 publication date, the numbers didn’t work out. Dad died after forty years of hard drinking. If he was ten-years-old or under when the “giant” awoke, his quake would have happened in the 1950s or 1960s. My journalist buddy, Carl Kolchak, dug up two major seismic events in the Seattle area for that date range: the 1949 Olympia quake (magnitude 6.7) and the 1965 Puget Sound quake (also magnitude 6.7). Both events happened in April. Carl points out that although Dad’s quake occurs in autumn, Miskowski could be exercising authorial license. Or she might not have any actual quake in mind. The point is that Dad could certainly have experienced a powerful earthquake in Seattle. Carl was more interested in Nancy’s plumbing problems, which the building manager blamed on the water main. Carl reminded me that he worked in Seattle in the early 1970s. It was the site of his investigation into the serial killer known as the Night Strangler, during which he explored the famous Seattle Underground. What didn’t come out in the documentary film linked above was how he also acquainted himself with the city’s extensive water mains, where he found evidence of—things—too unbelievably vile for even him to expose to the mercifully clueless public. Suffice it to say he can vouch for the possibility that the Seattle water mains harbor—beings—capable of producing sulfurous “ick” and of expelling it via garbage disposals. As for whether Dad could have been chased by a real monster, Carl reminded me of the Biblical verse (Genesis 6:4): “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Could “those days” be “these days”? At any rate, Dad’s earthquake occurred in autumn, possibly around Halloween time. Or Samhain time, one might more productively imagine. The ancient Celtic/Gaelic festival, celebrated on October 31 and November 1, marks the passage from harvest time to winter and the season of darkness. At this time, the boundary between the mortal and spirit realms thins, allowing spirits to cross over. If you’re into portents, Samhain is your holiday. Say Dad’s earthquake coincided with a transdimensional portal cracking open between realities, implanting in his young brain an unshakeable sense of doom? Dad grew up to see potential disaster in every aspect of modern human existence. Nancy inherited his forebodings. While Dad’s doom was self-inflicted via alcoholism, Nancy’s may be a doom less mundane, more worthy of spectral prognostication. When Nancy tells Jim about Dad’s “bedtime story,” he speculates that the “giant” might be real. Nancy pooh-poohs the idea. “Terrible things [like earthquakes] happen,” she says. “We have to go on living every day in the real world.” Jim counters that “Maybe everyone should be a little bit afraid of the things we can’t explain.” Nancy’s not afraid of “real things… only of her father’s nightmares,” the poisonous sequelae of his childhood trauma. Her plumbing problems result from faulty hydraulics and Jim’s refusal to call a plumber. They’re not a new portent of doom, unless her doom is to break up with Jim, which may actually be a blessing. Jim reminds her of the incompetent engineer who tried to fix Seattle’s sewage system while ignoring its geological foundations. She can’t deal with him anymore, and so she storms out of their increasingly noisome “dream” apartment. Trouble is, she’s ventured forth as darkness gathers—on a night too close to Halloween, to Samhain. Should the fault lines between realities shift enough, a giant may squirm out, or perhaps a vessel masked as an apartment building will obtrude itself between expensive single-family homes. Convenient for Nancy, who may soon be needing a new place. Never mind that she’s experienced two mini-portents on her way to this potential haven. A cat (black?) crosses her path, tripping her. Then she’s nearly hit by a car. The costumed passengers could just be shouting drunken imprecations. Or it could be a warning. What’s ahead is a building that’s a veritable warren of ick-ulence, of organic “plumbing” gone out of control. Are its occupants humans who’ve degenerated into sluglike monsters, or are they sluglike monsters that partially mimic human form? Clearly they’re the kind of things Dad told Nancy to run like hell from. They’re what human reason cannot handle. To try will doom the reasoner. Yet Nancy tries. Miskowski leaves the page blank for readers to fill in what happens next. But when even my mystery-hound friend Carl declines to “go there,” you might want to shut the book and celebrate Halloween indoors with nice safe video games or old cartoons featuring more amiable blobs than the ones in an apartment building that defies every zoning regulation not merely in Seattle, but in our mortal sphere entire. Ruthanna’s Commentary I’ve frequently shared my general theory of horror here: that it centers around the questions of what we should be afraid of, and what we should do about being afraid. “Water Main” is dead-center on the target for these questions; they all but appear in so many words on the page. It’s also doing something interesting with the trope of Ambiguous Reality of the Supernatural: it’s making that ambiguity part of those core questions: Should we be more afraid of mundane or supernatural horrors? And if given the choice, should we interpret horror as mundane or supernatural? The story starts not with protagonist Nancy herself, but with her father as a child, and the formative experience behind all his fears—and hers. He runs from an earthquake that, in his mind, is a waking giant. As an adult he ostensibly knows it was an earthquake—but he still tells Nancy to run from giants: don’t stop, reason, or ask questions. And he’s developed a rare Full Lovecraft of fears: candy, public toilets, dogs, convenience stores, weather, etc. The list is mundane; his fear of these items is not. Or at least, Nancy attributes his fear to too much imagination, and insists on clear-eyed practicality for herself. The only thing that frightens her, she insists, is “her father’s nightmares.” That is, other people will imagine horrors, and do terrible things that actually affect you because of it. Unfortunately, she’s ended up with an imaginative asshole whose imagination goes the other way. Jim imagines himself a handyman, imagines whale-watching from the living room window rather than worrying about plumbing problems. Practical Nancy considers dumping him, but isn’t quite ready yet. (Girl! Dump him today, and you could be having a nice clean shower tomorrow!) Jim thinks “everyone should be a little bit afraid of the things we can’t explain,” which seems more like romantic musing than actual fear. He doesn’t want to acknowledge problems of any sort, and it’s an earthquake in the making. Definitely not a giant. In this context, a fake apartment building full of slimy monsters is “someone else’s nightmare.” It’s certainly not supposed to be Nancy’s. It has no place in a world of practical problems and irresponsible boyfriends and terrible landlords. And those are the problems Nancy wants, the world that isn’t her father’s. Which is why she knows that if she runs home, she’ll “never escape.” She has a choice about what to be afraid of, and if she doesn’t turn around and face the problem, she’ll spend the rest of her maybe-short life in a world of giants. Now, mind you, science is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. And in an anthology with “Cthulhu” in the title, it’s quite possible that slimy fork-tailed monster babies are in that unfortunate category of empirically-verifiable phenomena. Then again, the building isn’t supposed to be there, and maybe if you summon enough reason, it will go back where it came from. You only get one chance to guess what genre story you’re in, and you’d better get it right. As ambiguous endings go, that’s a lot crunchier philosophically than the lady and the tiger. I’m rooting for Nancy’s reason, but I’m also kinda glad I don’t get to see what happens next. Next week, it’s brains all around in Chapters 12-14 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster.[end-mark] The post Lady, Tire, Earthquake, Giant: S.P. Miskowski’s “Water Main” appeared first on Reactor.