By Joshua Vise – January 28, 2025

Published in Haunted Haus by CultureCult Press. Lulu: Paperback or EPUB

Alina Osbourne turned her car onto 6th Street, and she could feel her fingers digging into the soft material of her steering wheel. Using the thumb controls, she turned off the radio and flicked on the high beams.

Even among those who lived in East St. Louis, a place notorious for crime, poverty, and urban decay, 6th Street was a road most people avoided based solely on its reputation. Just mentioning it was enough to send shivers down the spine of anyone familiar with the area, let alone actually visiting it. Now, driving down the narrow asphalt strip at dusk, Alina could feel her pulse begin to quicken. She scanned her surroundings, her eyes flickering from one shadow to the next.

Not a single building, residential or commercial, lined the sides of 6th Street. There were no streetlights, lane markers, or signage, nor were there any sidewalks, crosswalks, storm drains, or improvements of any kind. In fact, 6th Street existed as a single strip of crumbling asphalt, and its sole reason for existing was to act as an access point to the pillars beneath the Illinois side of the Poplar Street Bridge.

Directly across from St. Louis, Missouri, the Poplar Street Bridge funnels 100,000 cars a day from the metro area over the Mississippi River and into the downtown proper. On the Illinois side of the bridge, twelve separate on/off ramps merge above an area the size of two football fields. Clustered in this relatively tiny space were hundreds of massive concrete pillars that supported the girders above.

Unbeknownst to most people, their foundations also supported the region’s biggest homeless encampment. At one point numbering over 250 individuals, several ordinance actions had whittled this number to roughly 130. However, enforcing no loitering and vagrancy laws had proved futile, and the city of East St. Louis resigned itself to the camp’s continued existence. Social workers like Alina were provided by the state, and were sent every 90 days to conduct a general census of the homeless population. An assignment like this would have been bad enough in the daytime, but such a census would be skewed as many of the “residents” would have left the camp in search of food, work or their next fix. This meant that Alina was forced to work in the evening, when most of the camp’s inhabitants would have settled in for the day.

As she reached the terminus of 6th street. Alina stared out into the cement forest in front of her, the only light coming from her high beams. Hundreds of pillars stretched from their foundations obscured by tall grass and into the blackened sky above, rendered starless from the highway lanes that passed overhead. Scattered among the piers were structures every bit as diverse as the people inhabiting them. Some were proper camping tents anchored to the dirt with steel pegs, their doors shut as tightly as their waterproof zippers would allow, with only the occasional rustling of the fabric betraying any hint of life within. Other dwellings were crude assemblages of scrap wood, corrugated iron, old pallets, and plastic tarps. One industrious individual had somehow arranged for a small, rusted shipping container to be dropped off at the site. Some individuals lacked shelter entirely. They slept on the raised concrete foundations of the pillars themselves, backpack as a pillow, and relied on the decking above to shelter them from the worst of the elements. Alina took in this view from the seat of her car, envisioning the entire area as some sort of brutalist Parthenon in which the only wisdom Athena bestowed upon her hapless worshippers was in surviving the streets.

“Don’t go in there tonight.”

The voice, startled Alina, and she nearly jumped out of her seat, stopped only by her seatbelt. She looked out of her driver’s side window at the source of the sound, and found Mason, a young boy she had met on previous visits to the camp.

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said politely. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Alina quickly recomposed herself. She grabbed her things from the passenger seat and exited the car.

“It’s okay, Mason,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm after receiving such a jolt.

“But you still can’t go in there tonight,” Mason repeated.

“Why not?”

“The river’s too high. It’s dangerous.”

His warning was neither pleading nor chiding, and he spoke in a flat, matter-of-fact way that made Alina immensely uncomfortable given their setting. Still, she did her best to brush it off.

“It’s my job, Mason. I’m here to help.”

“You’re here to count us, right?”

“Yeah, that’s part of it.”

“94.”

“94?”

“Yup. There’s 94. We’re all here at the end of the road because of the river, so you don’t need to go in,” said Mason, nodding.

“It’s not that simple,” said Alina, shifting her stance as she looked down at her tablet computer. “I am supposed to do more than just count.”

“Do you need to do it tonight?”

Mason’s continued inquiry started to exasperate Alina, mostly because she secretly agreed. She hated this assignment. She hated that it was at night, and that the city refused to send a police escort. She hated the feeling that all of her reports did nothing more than occupy some hard drive in a state office, destined never to be read by anyone including herself after she drafted them.

“Yes, Mason,” she replied. “It needs to be done tonight.”

Mason leaned in slightly, looking surreptitiously to his left and right. It occurred to Alina that this was the first time she had ever seen him nervous.

“Muck monster will get you.”

Muck monster, she thought to herself. Before she could say anything, Mason turned and ran, disappearing among the pillars just ahead. Alina could only stand there, silhouetted by her headlights, wondering whether or not to proceed.

*****

The only good aspect of the 6th Street assignment was that it was a quick one. Alina merely had to cover the 500-meter distance from where she parked to the edge of the river and back. As she walked, she counted the number of structures she passed and guessed as to their likely number of inhabitants. She would also note the race, gender, and approximate age of any people she encountered on her trek. While the methodology drafted by the state also asked for her to collect any information related to reasons for a person’s homelessness, Alina and her coworkers rarely bothered, preferring simply to write “Subject refused participation” into their tablets. The state took these guesstimates as fact, and nobody ever questioned the validity of her data. In truth, there were likely very few people who cared if the data was valid at all.

Alina marched westward to the river, each step fraught with purpose, her tablet and a small penlight in her hand. She hoped that Mason was right, and that everyone had pulled back from the river, as it would make her night all the shorter. Still, if he was right about that…

As she continued deeper into the settlement, she noticed that the usual signs of life in the camp were absent. Places that would normally be considered prime locations for a tent were left vacant, while the piecemeal shacks that residents had so laboriously assembled stood abandoned. The fact that such fragile structures had not fallen over yet suggested to her that they had been recently inhabited. Alina peered through their crude openings, but her penlight found nothing more than flattened dirt and trash.

Halfway through her trek, Alina noticed the ground becoming squishy and waterlogged under her feet, while the smell of mildew and stale water permeated the air. This was not surprising, given that at this time of year, the Mississippi River was at its highest point. Even in years when the river didn’t spill over its banks, the ground behind the earthen dams often showed signs of saturation. More bothersome was the humidity, as a sheen of condensation seemed to coat every surface elevated above the ground. The temperature difference between the water and air created shimmering waves in the sky, and the St. Louis skyline seemed to sway back and forth from the effect.

In the distance, against this dancing backdrop, Alina noticed a shadow slowly rising from the ground. This silhouette gradually took human form, its head, shoulders, and arms resolving themselves as the thing clawed its way up from the ground as if extracting itself from some unseen pit. It finally stood up to its full height, the gloomy shade seemingly facing Alina, its shoulders slowly rising and falling as if breathing heavily from its exertions.

Alina tempered her dread of the mysterious creature by turning to her training and experience. She reminded herself that this was not the first time that she had let her imagination get away from her in an environment that later proved to be benign. Slowly coming to grips with her fear, she breathed deeply, aimed her penlight in the shadow’s direction, and spoke.

“Hello,” she called, her voice resonating against the girders a hundred feet above her. “Social services.”

The creature remained still, save for its shoulders, which continued to rise and fall. From this distance, her penlight failed to discern anything beyond the wet grass a few feet in front of her.

“Are you in need of help?”

The rumble of cars passing overhead seemed to only emphasize the shadow’s immobility. Deciding that she had had enough, Alina turned and began to trudge her way back to 6th Street. She lifted her feet high as she trudged through the increasingly soggy earth, the ground beneath her squishing loudly with each step. As she walked, she noticed a similar sound from behind, as if something were following her. Already unnerved, Alina quickly spun around, wielding the small flashlight as if it were a weapon.

The shadow, once so distant, was nearly upon her, close enough that her penlight could now reveal every hideous detail. The creature, so human-looking at a distance, was merely in the shape of a man, with thick mud and sand in place of flesh. Twigs and sticks, stripped of their bark by the fast-moving waters of the river, poked out of what could be called the torso. Decomposing leaves hung from its arms and shoulder. Its head was a single concretion of river muck, the congealed detritus of the river itself. It wheezed, and oozing bits of itself dripped and recongealed further down its body.

All at once, the creature jerked its arms up above its head. At this motion, sinewy hands of mud exploded up from the ground, and Alina screamed as the muddy fingers wrapped around her ankles. She could feel their power as they tugged her downwards. Alina kicked, trying to free herself, but their grip was too tight, and she stumbled. She spun away from the monster and fell to her knees just as another set of arms exploded from the water, wrapping around her waist.

Restrained, Alina could do nothing more than cry for help as the humanoid creature crept closer and closer, hands still raised, until at last it towered over her. It leaned forward, body still wheezing, and the little remaining light revealed the squirm of thousands of mosquito larvae across its face. Its body slid over hers, enveloping her in a muddy cocoon which the hands of sludge then pulled below.

*****

The disappearance of Alina Osbourne gave the state the exact justification it needed to forcefully break up the homeless encampment beyond 6th Street. The homeless population scattered into the surrounding areas, seeking shelter in abandoned buildings, in light rail tunnels, and in the darkened corners of the city. With their dissolution, firsthand knowledge of the muck monster quickly faded, and the experience shared by a collective quickly became dismissed as the ramblings of mentally ill individuals. Still, the perverse momentum of the rumors assured that nobody would ever again seek refuge among the pillars of Poplar Street Bridge.