The Drowning Room

A Horror Story Based on the Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam

The detective stood in the lobby of the Cecil Hotel, looking at the worn carpet and the dust motes turning in the slant light from the street. He was fifty-three years old, and he had seen things that would make a man question the order of the world, but he had not seen anything like this.

"When did you find her?" he asked.

The maintenance man stood with his hands in his pockets. He was maybe thirty. Dark circles under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in days.

"This morning," he said, "guests have been complaining about the water. Said it tasted funny. Had a weird color to it."

"And you went up to check the tanks."

"Yessir."

"What time was that?”

"Around ten. Maybe ten thirty."

The detective nodded and wrote something in his notebook. Outside a siren went past and faded into the gray distances of the city. He looked at the elevator doors, their brass fixtures tarnished and dull.

"She was a guest here?" The detective asked.

"Yessir. Checked in a couple of weeks back. January sometime. Real quiet girl. Kept to herself mostly."

"Anyone see her with somebody? Boyfriend maybe. Anyone like that."

"Not that I heard of."

The detective closed his notebook and put it in his jacket pocket. He looked at the maintenance man.

"Show me," he said.

They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor and went down a corridor that smelled of mildew and old cigarette smoke. At the end of the corridor was a metal door and beyond that a ladder that led up to the roof. The maintenance man climbed first, and the detective followed, his knees complaining with each rung.

The rooftop was flat and colorless under the afternoon sun. Four water tanks stood like monuments to some forgotten purpose, their metal sides streaked with rust. The detective walked to the nearest tank and looked up at it. A ladder was bolted to the side.

"That one," the maintenance man said, pointing.

The detective climbed. At the top, he could see the lid was ajar, pushed to one side. He looked down into the dark water. He could see her there, suspended in the depths like some pale creature from the ocean floor. Her dark hair moved with the water's slight motion. Her eyes were open.

"Jesus Christ," he said.

He climbed down, took out his phone, and made the call. Then he stood looking at the tank and the city beyond it, the buildings rising into the smog like broken teeth.

"How'd she even get up there?" The maintenance man asked. "That door's supposed to be locked. Alarm's supposed to go off if anyone opens it."

"But it didn’t."

"No, sir."

"And the lid. How heavy is that lid?"

"I don’t know. Seventy, 150 pounds maybe. Takes two men usually."

The detective lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly. He was thinking about the girl. About what it took to get up here in the dark. About the weight of that lid and the cold water waiting below.

"What was her name?" he asked.

"Elias," the maintenance man said. "Elias Lam."

The detective's name was Holloway, and he had worked homicide for twenty-six years. He had seen murders that made no sense and murders that made perfect sense, and after a while, he understood that sense had nothing to do with it. People killed for reasons that only existed in the dark countries of their minds, and you couldn't map those territories. You could only walk through them, trying not to lose your way.

He stood in the lobby again two hours later and watched the coroner's crew bring her out. They had her in a black bag on a stretcher, and they moved through the lobby quickly as if rushing could somehow restore dignity to the procession. The few guests who remained in the hotel watched from doorways and corners. Their faces showed nothing. Holloway thought maybe they had seen too much already in this place. Maybe one more body was just one more body.

The hotel manager approached him. She was a thin woman with gray hair pulled back tight against her skull.

"Detective," she said. "The press is already gathering outside. What should I tell them?"

"Tell them nothing," Holloway said. "This is an ongoing investigation."

"They're saying it's suspicious. That there's no way she could have gotten up there by herself."

"What do you think?” It wasn’t a question.

The woman looked toward the elevator doors.

"I think this hotel has a history," she said. "Bad things happen here. Always have."

"What kind of bad things?"

Murders. Suicides. In the twenties, a woman killed her child and then jumped out a window. In the forties, a man cut his wife's throat in room 304. In the sixties,”—She paused. "It goes on like that. You can look it up if you want."

"I will," Holloway said.

He went outside, stood on the steps, and lit another cigarette. The sun was setting behind the buildings, and the sky had taken on the color of a bruise. Reporters were setting up cameras on the sidewalk. He ignored them, walked to his car, and drove home through the evening traffic.

That night, he sat at his kitchen table and went through the file. Elias Lam. Twenty-one years old. Canadian. Traveling alone. The last confirmed sighting was in the hotel elevator four days before they found her. There was security footage, and he watched it on his laptop.

The video was strange. The girl got on the elevator and pressed several buttons. The doors didn't close. She waited. She pressed more buttons. Then she stepped out into the corridor and looked both ways as if checking for someone. She stepped back in. She pressed herself into the corner. She started making odd gestures with her hands. Then she stepped out again and appeared to be talking to someone who wasn't there. She moved out of frame and didn't come back.

Holloway watched it three times. Each time, he felt something cold ripple through him. The way she moved. The way she looked at things that weren’t there. He closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a long time.

The next day, he returned to the hotel and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor where Elias Lam's room was. The door was still sealed with police tape, but he broke the seal and went inside.

The room was small and dark. The curtains were drawn. Her belongings were still there, scattered across the bed and the floor—clothes, books, a journal. He picked up the journal and opened it.

The handwriting was neat at first, with entries about her travels and the places she wanted to see. Then it started to change. The letters grew larger and more erratic, and the entries became strange.

Someone is watching me, one entry said. I can feel them in the walls.

The elevator knows, said another. It takes me to floors that don’t exist.

I need to get higher, said the last entry. If I can reach high enough, I can see what's really happening.

Holloway closed the journal and placed it in an evidence bag. He searched the rest of the room but found nothing else of interest. He stood at the window and looked out at the city. From here, you could see the rooftop and the water tanks.

He thought about the girl climbing in the dark. He thought about her lifting that heavy lid. He thought about the moment she went into the water. What had she been thinking? What had she seen?

His phone rang. It was the coroner.

"I got preliminary results," the coroner said. "You're not going to like them."

"Tell me."

"No signs of trauma. No defensive wounds. No drugs in her system except her prescription medication. Bipolar disorder looks like. She was taking her meds regularly."

So what caused her death?

"Drowning. But here's the thing. The water in her lungs—there's something wrong with it."

"Wrong how?"

"I don’t know yet. I'm running more tests. But it's different somehow. Like it's been sitting in that tank for a very long time. Decades maybe. There's sediment. Trace elements I can’t identify."

Holloway was quiet for a moment.

"How long was she in the water?" he asked.

"Best guess? Three to four days. Matches the timeline from when she was last seen."

"Could she have climbed up there herself?"

"Physically? Yes. The ladder's there. But the lid—I don’t see how. And the door to the roof was locked from the inside."

"From the inside."

"That's what forensics says."

Holloway thanked him and hung up. He stood in the empty room, trying to make sense of it. A locked door. A heavy lid. A girl who climbed into a water tank and drowned. He thought about the security footage, especially how she moved in that elevator—like she was being herded.

He left the room and took the stairs to the fifteenth floor. He went through the metal door and up the ladder to the roof. In the daylight, it looked different. Less sinister somehow. Just metal and rust and the sun beating down.

He walked to the tank where they had found her. The lid was back in place now. He tried to lift it, but it barely moved. He put his shoulder into it and pushed hard, managing to slide it a few inches. Then he paused and looked around.

No one could have seen her up here. The roof was visible from other buildings, but who looks at a roof? Who pays attention to what happens in the high places of the city?

He heard something then—a sound like water flowing through pipes. He turned and looked at the other tanks. They sat silent and still. The sound came again, this time from inside the tank where she had died.

He put his ear against the metal. The sound was clearer now. Not water moving. Something else. Like breathing. Like something alive in there breathing slow and deep.

He stepped back. His hands were shaking.

"What the hell," he said.

The sound faded away. The roof was silent except for the wind and distant traffic below. Holloway stood there for a long time. Then he climbed down and left the hotel, not returning for three days.

When he finally returned, he brought a structural engineer, a locksmith, and two officers from his department. They inspected the building thoroughly, going through it room by room. They checked the roof access and examined the water tanks. However, they found nothing that made sense.

The roof door had been locked from the inside, but there was no other way down except through that door. The security system had no record of anyone accessing the roof in the days before Elias Lam disappeared. The ladder on the water tank showed no fingerprints except hers and the maintenance man's. The lid showed no signs of forced opening.

"It's like she just appeared up there," the engineer said.

"People don’t just appear," Holloway said.

"Then I don’t know what to tell you."

They stood on the roof in the late afternoon. The shadows were getting long. Holloway looked at the tank.

"Open it," he said.

"What?"

"Open the tank. I want to see inside."

The engineer looked at him like he was crazy, but he did it. They got the lid off with a winch and shone lights down into the interior. The water had been drained days ago. The metal walls were covered in algae and rust. At the bottom were dark stains that might have been blood or something else.

Holloway climbed down inside. The air smelled of copper and rot. He stood at the bottom and looked up at the circle of sky above. From down here, it seemed very far away—like looking up from the bottom of a well.

He noticed something scratched into the metal wall. He moved closer and shined his light on it. Words, carved with something sharp—maybe her fingernails.

THEY ARE IN THE WATER

THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN THE WATER

IF YOU DRINK YOU BECOME

The last line was incomplete. Beneath it were more scratches—not words, just marks. Frantic and random. He touched them, and his hand came away wet, even though the tank had been dry for days.

He climbed out quickly. His heart was hammering in his chest.

"Seal it," he said. "Seal all of them."

"Detective—"

"Just do it."

That night, he sat in his apartment, drinking whiskey and trying to understand. He thought about the guests who had complained about the water, saying it tasted strange. He recalled the history of the hotel, with all the deaths over the years.

He thought about what the girl had written. They are in the water.

His phone rang. It was the coroner again.

I finished testing the water in her lungs," the coroner said. "You need to come down here."

"Just tell me."

"I can’t. You have to see this."

Holloway drove through the deserted streets to the morgue. The coroner greeted him at the door. He appeared pale and frightened.

"I don't know how to explain this," the coroner said. "The water in her lungs—it's not water. I mean, it is, but it isn't. The molecular structure is wrong. And there's something else in it. Something organic."

"Organic like what?"

“I don’t know. It's not bacterial. It's not viral. It's something I've never seen before. And it's alive.”

He led Holloway to the lab and showed him slides under the microscope. Holloway looked, but he didn't understand what he was seeing. Dark shapes moved in slow spirals—things with no clear form or purpose.

"What happens if you drink it?" Holloway asked.

"I don’t know. I don’t want to know."

Holloway straightened up from the microscope. He thought about the hotel—about all the people who had stayed there over the years, and about the water flowing through the pipes into every room.

"We need to evacuate the building," he said.

"On what grounds?"

"I'll think of something."

But when he returned to the hotel the next morning, it was already too late. Three more guests had been found dead. They had drowned. In their rooms. In their beds. In the air.

Holloway stood in the lobby watching as they carried out the bodies. The manager was crying. The police had sealed off the building. News helicopters hovered overhead.

He ascended to the roof one last time. The tanks sat quietly in the morning light. He placed his hand on the metal, feeling it cold beneath his palm. Inside, he could hear that sound again— that breathing sound— like something awakening after a long sleep.

He thought about Elias Lam climbing up here in the dark. He considered what she had seen and understood in those final moments. That the water wasn't just water, that something had been living in it all along. That’s when you drank it, it became part of you. That’s when you died; it brought you back to the source.

He looked out over the city. All those buildings. All those people. All that water flowing through all those pipes.

"God help us," he said.

But there was no answer. There was only the wind, the sound of breathing from inside the tanks, and the knowledge that some things in this world make no sense and never will. That there are doors you should not open, waters you should not drink, and heights you should not climb. The girl had learned this too late, and now she was part of whatever waited in the darkness below.

Holloway climbed down from the roof, left the hotel, and never returned. Six months later, they condemned the building. But the water still flows beneath the city, and sometimes at night, people say they can taste something strange in it—something old, patient, and waiting.

And sometimes in their dreams, they see a girl with dark hair floating in the depths. She tries to tell them something, but water fills her mouth, and all that comes out is silence.