The Stain Pool Horror Story Preview
Step into the Riverbend Community Recreation Center after hours, where three teens find a chilling stain in the natatorium.
What seems like a simple cleanup unravels into a terrifying encounter with an unmovable, blood-red footprint and a pool that remembers.
Can they survive the night when an ordinary place reveals its dark, hungry secret?
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The Weight of Responsibility
The keys to the Riverbend Community Recreation Center felt heavier at night.
During the day, they were just jangling metal, but after closing, they seemed to carry the weight of the entire empty building.
It was a false authority, a flimsy cloak of responsibility worn by three teenagers over the shared, secret knowledge that they were just kids playing a part.
For Elias, Maya, and Ben, this was their world from ten until midnight.
They were the closing crew, the ghosts who haunted the silent basketball courts and empty locker rooms.
Their job was simple: wipe down the surfaces, mop up the day’s grime, and lock the doors on a world that would forget them by morning.
Elias, the worrier and de facto leader, took it more seriously than the others.
He needed the job.
Maya, pragmatic and sharp-tongued, saw it as a tolerable absurdity, a way to fund her weekend life.
Ben was mostly there because they were, his energy a bouncing ball of impulse that perpetually threatened to break something.
Their routine was a well-worn path, ending, always, in the vast, humid cathedral of the natatorium.
The air, thick with the chemical tang of chlorine, usually smelled like the end of the night.
Tonight, it smelled like the beginning of something else.
The Uncleanable Mark
“Oh, gross,” Ben announced, his voice bouncing off the high ceiling.
“Somebody’s kid totally beefed it.”
Elias followed his gaze.
There, stark against the clean, white tile of the deep end, were two footprints.
Small, barefoot, and vividly red.
Maya came over, her worn-out sneakers squeaking on the damp floor.
“Relax, it’s probably just paint from the art camp.
Or that weird slushy stuff.”
“That’s not paint,” Elias said, his voice quiet.
He walked closer, a knot of unease tightening in his gut.
The prints glistened under the sickly yellow sodium lights.
They were perfect, each of the five toes horribly distinct.
It was blood.
And it was still wet.
“Fuck.
We have to clean this before Henderson sees it in the morning.”
“Not it,” Ben said immediately.
“Fine, I’ll get it,” Elias sighed, grabbing a mop.
It was always him.
He pushed the heavy, wet strings over the first print, expecting it to smear, to fade into a pinkish cloud.
But it didn’t.
The mop head passed over it as if it were an illusion, leaving the footprint perfectly intact, a defiant wound on the tile.
He tried again, scrubbing, the wooden handle groaning under the force.
The mop strings grew grimy, but the print remained.
“No way,” Maya breathed, her skepticism finally cracking.
She grabbed the mop from him.
“Let me try.”
She put her whole body into it, her efforts just as useless.
The footprint seemed to laugh at them.
Ben, his joking demeanor gone, tried the second print with a bristle brush from the cart, the harsh scraping sound frantic and loud in the suddenly oppressive silence.
Nothing.
The tile around the print was scrubbed raw, but the bloody mark itself was untouched.
“It’s like… it’s printed on the tile,” Maya whispered, pulling her hand back after touching its edge.
“Or in it,” Elias added, his eyes wide.
The low hum of the filtration system suddenly felt like a predator’s growl.
The soft, rhythmic lapping of the water against the pool’s edge no longer sounded gentle.
It sounded like a tongue licking its teeth.
The Pool’s Hunger
Panic began to set in, cold and electric.
This was impossible.
This was a problem they couldn’t fix, and the adult world, in the form of their manager, was only a few hours away.
“They’re gonna think we did this,” Elias said, voicing the fear that was gripping them all.
“Some kind of prank.
Or worse.”
“Who would we even call?” Ben’s voice was thin.
“The police?
For a stain we can’t clean?”
Elias wasn’t listening.
He was staring at the pool, at the dark, waveless surface of the water.
It seemed to be watching them, a single, vast, black eye.
As he stared, he felt a wave of vertigo.
The reflection of the overhead lights warped, and for a sickening second, the water showed him something else.
A flicker of motion deep within.
A frantic splash, a pale limb flailing, a silent mouth opened in a scream that made no sound.
It was gone in a second, the pool returning to its placid blue as the sun dipped below the horizon.
The overhead sodium lights flickered on with a low buzz, casting the room in their sickly, yellow glow.
The three teens were frozen, the silence between them now a heavy, terrifying thing.
“Did you…” Ben started, his voice a dry crackle.
“We saw it,” Maya finished, her face ashen.
The urban legend, the weird stain, had just shown them its teeth.
Ben scrambled backward, away from the pool’s edge, his eyes wide with a primal fear that had replaced his earlier bravado.
“No.
No way.
I’m out.
I’m done.”
He didn’t see the puddle left by their cleaning efforts.
His foot slipped, and his arms flailed wildly.
With a choked cry, he tumbled backward into the pool.
The splash was a violent shock in the quiet room.
He came up sputtering, not with a curse, but with a scream of pure terror.
“Help!
It’s holding me!”
Elias and Maya reacted instantly, rushing to the edge.
But Ben wasn’t just splashing; he was being pulled, his struggles weak and useless against a force they couldn’t see.
“It’s so thick!” he shrieked, his voice filled with a horrifying, gurgling quality.
Elias dove in, ignoring the sudden, unnatural cold.
The water was impossibly heavy, like swimming through liquid concrete.
It clung to him, sapping his strength, its chill seeping into his bones.
He saw Maya dive in beside him, her face a mask of grim determination.
They fought their way toward Ben, but the water itself seemed to be fighting back, pushing them, pulling them, wrapping around their limbs like oily ropes.
They saw Ben’s face, eyes wide with a terror beyond comprehension, sink beneath the surface.
He was gone.
Then the water came for them.
It wasn’t a current; it was an intelligence.
A cold, ancient, and hungry presence.
Elias felt it seep into his mind, showing him a hundred other splashes, a hundred other silent screams, a long history of events the pool had witnessed, absorbed, and digested.
His last coherent thought was a blast of pure, unadulterated injustice.
It’s not even dark yet!
The water pulled him under, silencing his struggle as it had all the others.
The pool’s surface roiled for a moment, then settled, becoming a perfect, undisturbed sheet of black glass under the humming lights.
The Persistent Memory
The building was finally, truly quiet.
For a long moment, nothing changed.
Then, on the clean, white tile near the pool steps, three new sets of wet footprints began to materialize out of the dry floor.
They led from the pool’s edge and stopped, joining the two small, blood-red prints that had been there all along.
The stain had been fed.
The collection had grown.
And the water waited, patiently, for the next day to begin.
Places remember.
While we rush through our lives leaving our fleeting, messy marks, the tile and the concrete and the water hold the memory.
They wait for the right person to come along.
Not the guilty, not the wicked… but the diligent.
The ones who notice the imperfection and feel that foolish, fatal urge to make things right.
But you must understand.
Some stains aren’t meant to be cleaned.
They’re meant to be fed.