The old drinking fountain stood sentinel on a slightly neglected, sun-dappled patch of green along Wick Avenue, a forgotten, ornate jewel nestled somewhat incongruously between the imposing, shadowed facade of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society building and the bustling, student-thronged edge of the Youngstown State University campus. It was an undeniably elegant, turn-of-the-century bronze affair, its surface heavily greened with the thick, uneven patina of age and exposure, depicting a trio of surprisingly detailed, almost mischievous-looking cherubs struggling playfully to hold aloft a wide, shallow basin meant to catch the overflow. Most people hurried past it without a second glance, their eyes fixed on smartphones, distant destinations, or the immediate concerns of their day, utterly oblivious to this tangible relic of Youngstown’s grander, more optimistic, pre-industrial-decline past. But Sarah Jenkins, a graduate student deeply immersed in local history for her thesis and living frugally in a rented room in one of the nearby converted Victorian houses, often paused there during her walks between campus and her apartment. She appreciated its stubborn, slightly dilapidated elegance, a physical link to an era before the pervasive rust and economic decline had set in, a time when civic beautification projects spoke of prosperity and confidence. Sometimes, on sweltering, humid Mahoning Valley summer days when the air felt thick enough to chew, she’d even bend down impulsively and take a tentative sip from the low, sputtering, unreliable stream it occasionally produced, the water always tasting faintly but distinctly of old metal pipes and damp earth – a taste she associated with the city itself.
One particularly oppressive afternoon in late August, the air thick and hazy with heat that shimmered above the asphalt, Sarah succumbed to a wave of intense thirst during her walk home from a long archival research session. She bent down to the familiar fountain, anticipating the cool, if slightly metallic, relief. The water that hit her tongue tasted immediately, shockingly… wrong. Not just the usual faint metallic tang of old city pipes she’d grown accustomed to, but something else entirely – a distinct, acrid bitterness, underlaid with a swampy, almost vegetal foulness, like stagnant pond water mixed with something vaguely chemical. She recoiled instantly, spitting the mouthful onto the parched, brown grass, grimacing with visceral disgust. Looking closely at the stream trickling weakly into the basin, she saw it wasn’t perfectly clear as usual, but had a noticeable greyish, almost cloudy tinge, swirling with minute particles. Sediment, she reasoned quickly, trying to rationalize the unpleasant experience. Probably just sediment stirred up by recent heavy thunderstorms overwhelming the city’s aging storm drains, or maybe the municipal water department was flushing the ancient water mains somewhere nearby, a common occurrence that often temporarily discolored tap water throughout the neighborhood. Still, the foul taste lingered unpleasantly on her tongue, metallic and rotten. She wiped her mouth vigorously with the back of her hand and walked on, making a firm mental note to stick exclusively to her trusty reusable water bottle in the future, regardless of the heat or convenience. The fountain, she decided, was perhaps best appreciated visually.
A few weeks later, walking home late after an exceptionally long study session at Maag Library, the campus mostly deserted under a hazy crescent moon, she noticed from a distance that someone had carelessly left the Wick Avenue fountain running. A thin stream trickled into the basin, gleaming faintly under the sickly orange sodium-vapor glow of a nearby streetlight. As she drew closer, intending perhaps to try and turn the stiff, antiquated handle off if it wasn’t too difficult, she stopped dead in her tracks, her breath catching in her throat. The water wasn’t greyish this time. It was black. Utterly, unnervingly black. An inky, opaque stream was flowing sluggishly from the cherub’s basin, pooling darkly like spilled motor oil before gurgling slowly down the central drain. It looked thick, viscous, almost syrupy, catching the distorted streetlight in greasy, iridescent highlights that shifted unnaturally as the liquid moved. She stared, horrified and morbidly fascinated, rooted to the spot on the cracked sidewalk. It looked completely, fundamentally wrong, like crude oil or squid ink pouring inexplicably from the heart of the century-old bronze sculpture. It felt like a profound violation of the natural order, a dark secretion from the city’s underbelly.
She cautiously approached the fountain, her footsteps hesitant and loud in the nighttime quiet. As she got nearer, maybe ten feet away, a faint but distinct odor reached her – the unmistakable, stomach-churning smell of decay. It wasn’t the sharp, acrid smell of raw sewage, but something older, deeper, more primal – like layers of rotting leaves compressed at the bottom of a stagnant, forgotten pond, mixed with something vaguely chemical and cloyingly, sickeningly unpleasant. It wasn’t overpowering, not yet, but it was deeply wrong, fundamentally unsettling, and it clearly emanated directly from the black water itself, clinging to the humid night air. She watched, frozen, for several minutes, unable to look away. The black stream continued its sluggish, unnatural flow, coating the inside of the bronze basin with a greasy film. Then, abruptly, without warning, it sputtered. The color shifted rapidly, almost instantaneously, from opaque black to dark grey, then lighter grey, and finally began running clear again, the normal-looking water quickly washing away the last oily traces of the black residue in the basin. The foul smell vanished just as quickly, leaving only the usual damp, earthy scent of the small park and the faint smell of car exhaust from Wick Avenue. If she hadn’t stood there watching the entire transformation happen with her own eyes, she would have immediately doubted her senses, dismissed it as a trick of the low light, fatigue, and an overactive imagination fueled by too much caffeine and morbid historical research. But she had seen it. And smelled it.
From that night on, Sarah became wary, almost obsessive, about the fountain. It loomed larger in her consciousness, transforming from a quaint historical landmark into a source of potential dread. She found herself making deliberate detours on her daily walks just to observe it, noting its state whenever she passed, sometimes multiple times a day. Most of the time, it was dormant, dry and silent, or ran intermittently with clear, normal-looking water, making her previous disturbing experiences feel increasingly dreamlike and uncertain. Had she imagined the blackness, the smell? But occasionally, maybe once every few weeks, always seemingly at random intervals with no discernible pattern related to weather, time of day, or recent city maintenance activities she was aware of, she’d witness the phenomenon again: the sudden, inexplicable flow of black, viscous water, accompanied by that faint but repulsive smell of deep decay, usually lasting for only a few minutes – sometimes less – before abruptly clearing as if nothing untoward had happened. It seemed to occur more often late at night or very early in the morning, under the cover of darkness, but she saw it once in the bright, unforgiving light of midday, causing a passing jogger wearing headphones to stop abruptly, stare intently at the fountain with a look of utter disbelief, shake his head vigorously as if trying to clear his vision, and then hurry away at a significantly increased pace, glancing back over his shoulder.
She felt compelled, ethically obligated, to report it. This wasn’t just strange or aesthetically unpleasant; it felt potentially hazardous, a public health concern. She called the city’s water department again, navigating the frustrating automated phone tree before finally reaching a weary-sounding human operator. She tried to explain what she’d seen, more forcefully this time, emphasizing the black color, the oily thickness, the smell of decay, the intermittent nature. The operator was polite but audibly skeptical, their voice dripping with the practiced patience reserved for dealing with cranks. “Black water? From the old Wick Avenue fountain? Are you sure it wasn’t just very dirty, ma’am? Those old bronze fountains, they get leaves, dirt, algae, bird droppings, all sorts of gunk built up inside the pipes and basin over time.” Sarah insisted firmly it was more than just dirt; it was black as ink, oily, viscous, and smelled like something rotten, not just stagnant. The operator sighed audibly. “Okay, ma’am, I’ll put in another service request. We’ll send someone out to check it again within 48 hours.” The tone clearly implied it was a low-priority call, likely another wild goose chase prompted by an overly imaginative resident.
A few days later, she saw a city utility truck parked near the fountain again, and a different worker in overalls was fiddling with the fixture, looking bored. He ran the water for a long time, collected another sample in a small plastic vial, peered into the basin with a flashlight, kicked disinterestedly at the concrete base, shrugged, packed up his tools, and eventually drove off. Sarah managed to catch him later that week during another routine check further down the avenue and asked if he’d found anything wrong with the fountain this time. “Nope,” he said, wiping grease from his hands onto a stained rag, barely making eye contact. “Water tests came back clean again – standard mineral content, disinfectant levels fine, no coliforms, no unusual particulates. Pressure’s maybe a bit low on that old feed line, could be some harmless sediment gets stirred up sometimes if there’s a pressure drop elsewhere on the grid, but the water’s perfectly safe according to the lab results.” Safe? That black ooze hadn’t looked or smelled safe. It had felt anciently, fundamentally unsafe. Sarah felt a familiar surge of frustration mixed with a growing sense of unease. Was she the only one consistently seeing this? Was she losing her mind? Or was the problem so perfectly intermittent, so fleeting, so localized, that it defied official detection and standard testing protocols designed for more common issues?
Driven now by a mixture of academic curiosity, civic concern, and a growing personal dread, she started researching the fountain itself more deeply, as well as the complex, often poorly documented, web of plumbing beneath Wick Avenue and the surrounding historic neighborhood. The fountain, she confirmed, was indeed old, donated by the prominent, now-departed Arms family (whose former mansion housed the historical society next door) in the early 1900s, a symbol of civic pride and philanthropic largesse in Youngstown’s booming heyday. The water lines beneath that specific section of Wick Avenue were equally ancient, a confusing palimpsest of cast iron pipes laid down over a century ago, with numerous repairs, bypasses, undocumented modifications made during various street works, and potentially forgotten or illicit connections lurking beneath layers of asphalt and time. Could there be an illicit or severely degraded cross-connection somewhere deep underground, hidden from modern schematics? A point where a leaking, crumbling old sewer line, or perhaps drainage from the nearby, sprawling historic Oak Hill Cemetery situated just up the slope, or even residual chemical runoff from the long-gone industrial sites that once lined the Mahoning River valley further downtown, could intermittently backflow into the fountain’s dedicated, low-pressure water line under specific, fluctuating hydraulic conditions?
She explored other, less sinister but still plausible, theories. Could it be an extreme form of biofilm? Perhaps an unusual type of anaerobic bacteria or fungus, thriving in the dark, low-oxygen environment deep within the fountain’s old, corroded supply pipe, maybe colonizing a stagnant ‘dead leg’ section of the plumbing, was producing a thick, black, foul-smelling slime that periodically sloughed off in large chunks or dissolved into the water stream during pressure changes? That might explain the color, the viscosity, and the distinct smell of organic decay. Or could it be a complex, intermittent chemical reaction occurring within the pipes? Maybe residual heavy metal contaminants from the area’s heavy industrial past (lead, manganese, iron), lurking in the pipe scale or leaching from the surrounding soil, were reacting intermittently with modern water treatment chemicals like chloramine, causing the sudden precipitation of black manganese oxides or other dark, oily, metallic compounds? But why so sporadically, and why the distinctly organic, swampy smell rather than a purely chemical or metallic one?
The most unsettling possibility, however, arose from the rich vein of local folklore surrounding Wick Avenue and the adjacent historic districts. With its grand, decaying mansions whispering tales of former fortunes, its proximity to the sprawling, tombstone-studded Oak Hill Cemetery, and its layers upon layers of human history – triumphs, tragedies, secrets buried deep – the area was ripe with ghost stories and urban legends. Some tales mentioned cursed objects buried by disgruntled former residents, strange lights seen flickering in the windows of vacant houses, or hidden, forgotten tunnels (like the shifting, unreliable ones rumored to exist beneath other parts of the city - 10.9) connecting basements of old mansions, forgotten Prohibition-era bomb shelters, and perhaps even cemetery crypts. Could the fountain, drawing its water from deep beneath this historically and emotionally charged ground, be inadvertently tapping into something… unnatural? Was the black water not pollution in the conventional sense, but a form of supernatural blight, a physical manifestation of accumulated decay, sorrow, resentment, or unresolved trauma linked to the area’s layered, often tragic, past, somehow seeping into the water table?
Sarah developed a distinct aversion, bordering on a phobia, related specifically to the fountain. She found herself consciously altering her walking routes to avoid passing too close to it, especially after dark. She stopped drinking tap water entirely, even in her own apartment several blocks away, switching exclusively to expensive bottled water, plagued by a persistent, low-level anxiety that gnawed at her. What if the contamination, whatever its source – natural, industrial, or otherwise – wasn’t just limited to that one ornamental fountain? What if the problem could migrate unpredictably through the interconnected, aging pipe network that served the entire neighborhood? She vividly imagined turning on her own kitchen tap one morning and seeing that thick, black ooze pour into her coffee maker or her drinking glass. She hadn’t actually ingested the fountain water after that first foul-tasting sip months ago, but she found herself wondering, with growing unease, if anyone else had, especially children drawn to the playful cherubs, and if they’d suffered any subsequent, unexplained illnesses that doctors couldn’t diagnose.
She tried repeatedly, almost compulsively, to capture definitive evidence, lingering near the fountain with her phone’s camera ready whenever she passed, hoping to catch the phenomenon in the act. But the events remained stubbornly, maddeningly unpredictable and fleeting. She’d wait for an hour, sometimes longer, seeing nothing but clear water trickling peacefully or no flow at all. Then, days later, she’d walk past on a quick errand and see the tell-tale dark, greasy stain lingering in the bottom of the basin, indicating she’d missed the event itself by mere minutes or hours. The elusiveness was infuriating, feeding her feeling of isolation and helplessness, making her question her own observations.
One warm summer evening, sitting on a bench across the street, pretending to read but actually watching the fountain, she saw a group of rowdy teenagers gathered around it, laughing and shoving each other, daring one another to drink from the sputtering stream. Sarah felt a surge of cold panic rise in her throat. “Don’t!” she yelled, her voice sharper and louder than she intended, startling them. “The water… it’s not always clean! Sometimes it’s… bad. Really bad.” They turned to look at her, momentarily silenced, then broke into derisive laughter. “What, lady? Think it’s poison or something?” one of the boys sneered, swaggering closer to the fountain. “It’s just water. Chill out.” They looked like they might drink from it deliberately just to spite her, to mock her concern. Thankfully, their attention spans were short, and a passing car horn distracted them. They soon lost interest in the fountain, shoving each other again and running off noisily down the avenue towards the campus bars. Sarah watched them go, her heart pounding, feeling a profound sense of impotence. How could she effectively warn people about a potential threat that was invisible most of the time, dismissed by the authorities, and made her sound like a paranoid crank to anyone she tried to tell?
The black water incidents didn’t seem to escalate in frequency or severity, nor did they spread to other fountains or taps nearby, as far as Sarah could ever determine during the remainder of her time in Youngstown. They just continued their sporadic, unpredictable, unsettling appearances, a localized symptom of some hidden sickness deep within the city’s aging infrastructure or perhaps, more disturbingly, woven into the fabric of its history, bubbling up intermittently from below. The fountain remained, a picturesque landmark on a historic avenue, stubbornly guarding its dark, intermittent secret from casual observers and official scrutiny alike.
Sarah eventually finished her graduate degree, successfully defended her thesis on the social impact of Youngstown’s deindustrialization, and moved away from the city, eager for a change of scenery, a new job, and, admittedly, newer plumbing. But she never entirely forgot the Wick Avenue fountain. Sometimes, late at night in her modern apartment in a different city, filling a glass of water from a sleek, modern tap, she’d find herself pausing instinctively, holding the glass up to the light, checking its clarity with unusual intensity, sniffing it cautiously before taking a sip. The memory of that black, viscous water, smelling faintly but undeniably of ancient decay, flowing inexplicably from the mouths of innocent-looking bronze cherubs under the hazy Youngstown streetlights, was a lingering contamination in her mind – a disturbing, persistent reminder of the hidden rot, the forgotten histories, and the potential for the unpleasant and inexplicable that can sometimes lurk just beneath the surface of everyday things, even in something as vital, as fundamental, and seemingly pure as water.