I'm going to tell you about a town called Halisborough. I'm going to tell you why they wiped it off the map. You may laugh, or you may puke – I don't really care that much. I'm going to tell you about it anyway. About what crawled out of the Halisborough Waterworks that summer evening.

About Michael Dimmler.

Halisborough was just like any other town out in cow country. It wasn't what you'd call sleepy, but it had a certain…depressing quality about it. Me, I didn't know much about it. I lived outside of town, and I worked outside of town. The living and the working were both about the same. Both involved scheit.

That's what it was. They called it the Halisborough Waterworks, where I worked; but then that makes it sound like some kind of water park, something with slides, and fountains, and little funny plastic squids shooting water into the air, where all the little kiddies like to play.

Maybe it was – there were pipes, and jets of water, and rusted old pumps that looked like squids. But you wouldn't want your kiddies swimming in it. Because what it really is is a lake full of scheit. A giant, stinking vat of human waste.

What, are you shocked? Where did you think your scheit goes? Does it just swim about merrily, like a fish in the bowl, and then evaporate into another dimension? No, my friends. It all ends up here. It all ends up at the waterworks. And there are people here who watch the scheit come in, and don't get to see the clean water go out. That all happens underground. We just see your waste.

It's gray-green at the end. Did you know that? Gray-green.

It smells musty. Musty, with a retch-inducing tang. It smells of stomach acid and rot and decay. There are green mats of bacteria floating around in it, feeding on it, producing this smell. Did you know this?

But why am I complaining? It doesn't really bother me anymore. My clothes, my home, and my bed are all saturated with the perfume I bring home from work.

Of course I did notice the smell once. It came from the depths, in noxious bubbles, and then the beast crawled out onto dry land…

Perhaps I smelled it, too, on that Monday afternoon, when Michael Dimmler sat across from me in the courtroom. Huge he was, corpulent. With a face like a cherub.

He smiled at me.

Do you know how much scheit people produce every day? The amount is astonishing. I forget the exact number – quite frankly, the statistics of my profession are not something upon which I like to dwell. It comes out to tons. Even for a town like Halisborough. Tons of scheit. In that town (while it still existed), there was always someone, somewhere, eating and excreting, eating and excreting, day in and day out. I imagined it like that, looking toward the town on a hazy summer afternoon: cook, chew, flush; cook, chew, flush. I don't know if there was even a pause.

We produce scheit while we sleep, you know? Of course, the body stores it, stores it for the morning. And then we excrete it. And then we flush it. And, golly gee whiz, it has to go somewhere.

I think Michael Dimmler was one of our biggest customers. Literally, as well as figuratively; the man must've weighed over five hundred pounds toward the end. He weighed about twice that when they found him, of course, but that wasn't exactly is own doing. The man was a consumer. I've estimated that he produced his own weight in scheit every two days. That's five hundred pounds more scheit going through the waterworks, from Thursday to Friday. Five hundred pounds.

And many more, smaller packages went into his toilet, and ended up here. And I think that's the reason for what happened. The precious little packages, lying down at the bottom with the scheit, fermented in there, fermented and changed and grew, and finally got up and stepped out of the vat and walked toward town with a terrible purpose in mind…

Do you know how many he flushed? A hundred and forty-three. A hundred and forty-three gone, and no one ever noticed, and no one ever cared. At least I didn't hear anything about it, not on my end of town.

Who knows? Maybe everyone was too busy to notice. Too busy chewing. Too busy flushing.

The waterworks can be a dangerous place. Just ten, fifteen years ago, before everything went fully automatic, they had divers. Can you fathom it? Divers, friends. To clear the vents and the valves, when they got clogged. When they got clogged, the tide would rise, and the alarms would go off, and you'd better get someone down there fast to clear out the vents, or you'd have a backup, and a backup at the waterworks is a terrible thing…

Most got down there, cleared the vents, and got pulled up, smelling like scheit but none the worse for wear.

On the other hand, some never made it up.

The currents could be a bit tricky, you know.

There used to be a man here who'd tell me stories, a very old man who had worked there for at least thirty years, a man whose very soul reeked of bourbon. He would tell me about all the strange things they used to find in the sludge vats, back before it was so big, and long before all the fancy equipment that meant you didn't have to see what surfaced. He told me about hockey pucks, blue jeans, dead tropical fish. Used condoms. Teeth. And one time, only once, he had looked into the vats and thought he had saw a human eyeball.

There were times, he said, when the Mafia would use the waterworks as a dumping ground. What better place? No one's going to dredge out a sludge vat to find some John Doe.

Besides, there would be very little left to look at. The bacteria would take care of that.

Michael Dimmler must have heard that same story. He was very careful, though. He didn't dump his packages directly. He flushed them down the toilet, one little bit at a time, very deliberately. Very meticulously. There would be no evidence left of what he had done.

Michael Dimmler was a very fat man. A very jolly man, they all said, but still quiet. Lived alone. Ran a daycare center. Happy Mikey's Happy Days Daycare Center, the sign said. The parents in Halisborough liked him, because he was very sweet, and their children went in squirming and came out quiet at the end of the day. The parents all approved, sent their kiddies there in droves.

Each one of those parents was about half of Happy Mikey's size, but this didn't mean they were fit and trim. All of them were plus-sized. Another strange thing about Halisborough, I think. A very fat community. Produced a lot of scheit.

Was it because of the beef country? Maybe. Or perhaps it was boredom. Whatever it was, these people liked to eat, liked to stuff themselves. Liked to stuff their children. All the children were as fat as their parents.

All except for my little Jenny. My poor, sweet little Jenny…

She went to Happy Mikey's Happy Days Daycare Center, too.

I had a .38 in my desk drawer. I should have got up, walked down to Happy Mikey's Happy Days Daycare Center, and blown his fat brains all over the jungle murals with the happy animals. And then I would have put it in my own mouth, and painted the walls my way.

But I didn't do it. The bottle was easier. I swam in that bottle for thirty years.

Do you know how many kids it was? It was a hundred and forty three.

State sometimes comes down to take a look at the Halisborough Waterworks. They are not fat people. With their profession, they must not have much of an appetite. Or they just eat out of a bottle. Most of us do. They come down here, and they poke around, and they pretend to fiddle with things they know they shouldn't touch, and then they nod their yellow hard-hats and write things down in their notebooks.

Me, I'd just watch. They wouldn't bother me much. They're just there to make an appearance, and then they leave.

Maybe they're from the beef companies. Don't they have to know whether we're consuming as fast as we should be? One look at the scheit vats would tell them yes, it was the same old story, the same old cook, chew, flush; cook, chew, flush.

Michael Dimmler, the Happy Mikey's Happy Days Daycare Center, a hundred and forty-three kids…cook, chew; flush; cook, chew, flush; cook, chew, flush…

The room was soundproof. There were special hooks he had installed along the wall, and drains in the floor. Everything was covered in washable tile.

He was a consumer, after all.

Who was going to believe a child? Who was going to believe their story about the blood, and the screams, and the monster who chewed on little girls and boys right in front of them, relishing their fear as much as the blood dribbling down his chin? Who wouldn't wake their child from a world-ending nightmare of blood and entrails to say, "it's okay, sweetie, it was just a dream"?

He flushed whatever was left.

Who was going to look in the scheit vats?

My Jenny…my poor little baby…she sat in the bottom of a sludge vat for twenty years, down in the dark, dark water. I would dream of her bones, glowing and glowing in the darkness, and I would scream myself awake. And then I would drown myself in the bottle.

But there was no bottle for me on that last night.

The alarms came first – it was vat number five, one of the big circular ones, and then all the vats. The pipes were rupturing.

It was only spitting rain that night, but the wind lashed it against the windows. I ran out of the control room, wondering if this was it, if it was finally the Big One. There were contingencies for these kinds of things, special control valves and overflow tanks, but I was always disappointed when they actually worked the way they should. This time I was sure they would fail. With cackling glee I grappled the overflow wheel on the deck and began to slowly turn it, my arms slick in the red emergency lights as the sirens clanged and the wind whistled.

And then came a new sound, a great, deep-throated thoom. The whole Waterworks shook. I stood there, hugging the overflow wheel, staring out over vat number five. The wind was loud. The rain was cold and stinging.

The surface of the vat rippled.

I backed up. I backed up as far as I could, until I hit the railing, and then my feet kept working against the slick concrete, moving without my bidding as I stared into the opaque and deadly surface of the sludge.

It rippled, and it moved, and then it boiled. Great black bubbles bobbed up and ruptured. The stench hit me like a wave. There was nothing like this stench, not even the sweetness of a liquefying corpse, not even thirty years of working and breathing scheit, not even thirty years of bitterness and alcohol and despair…the very smell hit you like a freight train, pulverized you, struck you to the earth…I sank to my knees, one arm still hooked around the railing, the wind and the rain lashing against my face.

And then the beast arose, and my blood turned to ice shards.

Like a great mountain it rose up, rose up with a slithering roar. It rose up, and it was clothed in scheit, wrapped up in it like a king in his robe, going higher and higher, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet, darker than the night itself. All the interconnected vats were drained from below, sucked up into the monster god.

Its eyes opened.

And then with one gigantic step it cleared the Waterworks and set its face toward town.

I stumbled off the platform and onto the road. The rain was still whipping around like silver needles, and the dirt road was washed out. I stumbled down the incline, peering into the stormy night. The forest on either side shivered ominously in the wind, the trees swaying, limbs squeaking together.

Had it been a dream? There were no footprints on the road, no damage in the forest. The only evidence was the smell of corruption still clinging to me, but the rain was quickly washing it away. What had I seen? Had the vats overflowed, or had I dreamed the alarms too?

But then lightning flashed, and that shape was cast blackly against the sky, big as a mountain. I briefly saw the town spread out before him, houses like white sheep, windows staring in mute horror. And then the world was plunged into darkness yet again.

And he began his march.

The earth shook. I heard squeaking metal and crumbling bricks, the whoomph of a house being crushed flat. I saw fire shoot up from a gas main, and then all three hundred feet of scheit monster was suddenly ablaze. The dark tower of flame rolled slowly through town, wading through it like weeds, grinding and crushing and smashing and dragging and adding to his mass with the wreckage of cars and houses. Its mantle of sludge burned away, and I could see its true flesh for the first time, a vast network of writhing veins and corpuscles, a moving ocean of organic matter arranged in a hulking humanoid shape. God only knows how long it had been arranging itself down there in its scheit-fermented womb, making the undead out of the dead, forming itself with blind, cold hatred. Its flames did not hinder it, only made it more terrible, only made it more awesome; down there in the town, the fat men and women were in their beds, producing their scheit, dreaming their dreams, thinking their slow and cowlike thoughts – and then down he came, and in an instant it was all gone.

Their god – their god of consumption, the burning effigy of their heedless excretion – had now come back to call in the debt.

It made its way to the center of town. Its feet churned the houses and streets and yards, and then it mounted the steps of town hall.

Standing there on the roof, the structure groaning with its tremendous weight, the beast raised up its fists to the sky. Its mouth opened. The earth shook as it roared. It stood there, thundering, oily flames broiling hellishly from its flesh, and then out of the storm came a lightning bolt, straight down.

The earth rocked with the explosion.

I saw only the faint outline of the creature vaporizing, and then like a hammer the shock wave hit me. I fell and saw no more.

The Feds found no one alive when they came crawling in with their black-beetle cars and helicopters. They swarmed over the whole reeking mess, black on brown, churning up the scheit and mud under which the whole town lay. Like scarabs they came, and hot Ra burned the ground with displeasure, and lo, the reek was foul. The poor assholes.

I know they filed some secret report. The residents were all entombed, it probably ran, "under a meter of excrement." And at the bottom of the report: "Total loss – no survivors."

Not that anyone was looking for survivors.

They did find a body, though. It was on a roof. Like a huge bean bag doll, it sat perched on the peak of the roof, sort of slouched on its side. They sent out a helicopter, but when the pilot saw it he just turned his chopper around and came back. He wouldn't speak another word for the rest of his life.

It was Michael Dimmler's corpse.

It was packed solid with scheit. So much scheit had been forced into him that even the veins were bulging beneath his skin. It pushed his eyeballs out, and now his eye sockets were plugged with excrement. To say nothing of his mouth and nose.

Swollen in death, as he was in life. He was a consumer, after all.

They dynamited the carcass and left it at that. Body parts and flaming scheit fell a quarter mile away. The flies wouldn't touch them.

As for me? I'm relocated now. I have a new life, a new job. New friends who can help me forget. This is my only confession. It shall be hidden in my house somewhere, where no one will ever find it, where I will forget it. I will take this secret to my grave.

I dream about Halisborough sometimes. I dream about them down there, eyes wide in mute horror, entombed forever in a reeking grave. I dream about their bones glowing and glowing in the darkness. I dream about the dread horrors spawned in that place, the worms and the insects in their millions, converging on the feast, churning and writhing and turning soft pale flesh into excrement. Chew, flush, chew flush – they are consumers, after all.

Yes, I dream about what happened in Halisborough that night.

And you know what?

I'm glad.