Fishing the Mahoning River wasn"t like casting lines into the pristine, crystalline waters of some postcard mountain stream. It was an act of stubborn hope, a ritual defiance against decades of industrial abuse, dropping baited hooks into water that still bore the deep, indelible scars of a bygone era of heavy industry. You expected certain things: the sluggish current, the murky visibility, the occasional oil sheen, the ubiquitous scent of damp earth mixed with something vaguely chemical. You fished for what endured: hardy catfish lurking in the deep holes, resilient carp grubbing in the mud, maybe the occasional surprisingly feisty bass that had somehow adapted. And you always, always expected snags. The riverbed was a graveyard of discarded history – waterlogged tires, skeletal tree branches washed down from upstream, rusted chunks of unidentifiable metal junk coughed up from decades of accumulated sediment, sometimes even larger debris like shopping carts or fragments of machinery. What you didn"t expect, what the old timers down at the VFW hall or the corner bar sometimes muttered about after a few too many beers, their voices low, eyes distant, was pulling up things that didn"t belong. Things that didn"t belong in any river, on any planet.
Dave Kowalski had heard the stories, of course. He"d been fishing the Mahoning since he was a kid tagging along with his dad and uncles, knew its moods, its hidden currents, its likely holding spots for fish better than most. He"d pulled up his share of predictable junk over the years – a surprisingly intact shopping cart once near the Market Street bridge, countless tires, even a creepy, eyeless porcelain doll head near Campbell that gave him the shivers for weeks. But the wilder tales, the ones involving truly bizarre catches, things that defied explanation? He mentally filed those under "fisherman"s exaggeration," the kind of tall tales that grew taller with each retelling and each shot of whiskey. Until that grey, oppressively humid afternoon near the Lowellville dam.
He"d found a relatively quiet, secluded spot on the bank, downstream from the dam"s churning, artificially oxygenated outflow, a place known for holding decent-sized channel cats. The air was heavy, thick with moisture, threatening a thunderstorm that refused to break. The sky was a uniform, bruised purple-grey. He cast his heavy-duty line out into the deeper channel, the hook baited with a pungent chunk of chicken liver, a favorite catfish delicacy. He settled onto his worn folding stool, popped the lid on his thermos of lukewarm, slightly bitter coffee, and prepared to wait. Patience was the key to fishing the Mahoning.
An hour passed uneventfully, marked only by the drone of insects, the distant rumble of trucks on the nearby highway, and the constant roar of the dam spillway. Then, he got a hit. Or rather, a snag. A sudden, dead weight on the end of his line, heavy and completely unmoving. No tell-tale tug or run of a fish.
"Damn it," Dave muttered under his breath, frustration rising. He pictured a waterlogged tree limb, a discarded engine block, maybe another cursed tire wedged firmly in the rocks below. He braced his feet firmly on the muddy bank, tightened his grip on the thick cork handle of his sturdy fishing rod, engaged the reel"s drag, and began the slow, steady, arduous process of trying to reel it in, applying constant, heavy pressure, trying not to snap the heavy braided line he used specifically for this kind of bottom fishing.
But the weight wasn"t entirely dead. As he strained, slowly gaining inches of line, he felt… something else. The weight shifted, seemed to pulse almost, with a strange, sluggish, yielding resistance that didn"t feel like the inanimate drag of current against debris or the shifting of a log on the bottom. It felt… dense. Organic, maybe? Wrong. It felt profoundly wrong. And heavy. Far heavier than any waterlogged log of comparable size should be. He strained harder, his muscles burning, the rod bent into a dangerous-looking double arc, sweat beading on his forehead despite the lack of sun. Whatever it was, it was coming up slowly, reluctantly, from a deep hole just offshore, a spot known for treacherous currents and snags.
The water near where his line entered the murky depths began to churn slightly, but not like a fighting fish breaking the surface. Instead, slow, large, oily bubbles rose languidly to the surface and popped, releasing a faint, but deeply unpleasant smell – like stagnant pond water mixed with something sharp, metallic, almost like burning electrical components. Dread, cold and unwelcome, began to snake through his gut, replacing his earlier frustration. What the hell had he hooked into?
Finally, after several more minutes of intense effort, he saw it break the surface, emerging silently from the brown water. It wasn"t a log. It wasn"t a tire. It wasn"t any kind of recognizable debris. It was… an object. Roughly spherical, perhaps slightly ovoid, about the size of a regulation basketball, composed of a dull, matte black material that seemed to absorb the flat, grey light rather than reflect it. It appeared perfectly smooth, seamless, with no discernible markings, panels, or features, except for the incongruous sight of his large catfish hook firmly embedded near its center, the metal glinting against the absolute blackness. It looked utterly alien, out of place, impossible.
With a final heave, he managed to drag the bizarre object partially onto the muddy bank at the river"s edge. It settled with a heavy thud. It was incredibly, unexpectedly heavy for its size, far denser than rock or metal should be. Hesitantly, overcoming a sudden wave of revulsion, Dave reached out and touched its surface. It was unnaturally cold, despite the humid air, radiating a chill that seemed to penetrate his skin. The surface felt slightly yielding, like dense, cold rubber or smooth obsidian, yet somehow not entirely solid. It gave off no reflection whatsoever, swallowing the light. Where had this thing come from? It looked manufactured, deliberate, yet unlike any technology he knew or could imagine. Illegally dumped experimental industrial waste? Classified military hardware lost in transit? Or something else? Something not of this Earth?
As he stared, baffled and deeply uneasy, leaning closer, he noticed a faint vibration emanating from the sphere. A low, almost subsonic hum that he felt more in the bones of his hand and feet, through the damp ground, than actually heard with his ears. It was a deep, resonant thrumming, like some powerful engine idling far away, or the vibration of a massive tuning fork. He quickly, almost frantically, worked the hook free from the object"s surface, needing to disconnect himself from it. The sharp metal point of the hook scratched the black surface slightly in the process. As he watched, horrified, the shallow scratch seemed to flow back together, healing itself almost instantly, leaving the sphere perfectly smooth and seamless once again.
Sudden, overwhelming terror gripped Dave. This wasn"t just debris. This was something active, something unknown and potentially dangerous. With a grunt of effort and fear, he shoved the sphere hard with the sole of his heavy work boot, pushing it back off the bank into the river"s embrace. It sank instantly, without a splash, without displacing much water, simply vanishing beneath the murky surface, leaving only the disturbed mud, the slowly dissipating oily bubbles, and the lingering, unpleasant metallic smell hanging in the heavy air.
He reeled in his empty line, his hands shaking uncontrollably. He rapidly packed his fishing gear, fumbling with the clasps and straps, not bothering to clean his muddy boots. He scrambled back up the bank, got into his pickup truck, and drove away, glancing nervously back at the placid-looking river in his rearview mirror, the image of the cold, black, humming, self-healing sphere burned indelibly into his mind.
He tried to forget it over the following days, tried to rationalize it. He told himself it was just some weird piece of industrial slag, maybe a discarded mooring buoy coated in unusual algae, his mind playing tricks on him in the gloomy weather. But the memory lingered, intrusive and unsettling. The coldness, the weight, the hum, the impossible self-healing. He found himself compulsively researching strange objects found in rivers, falling down internet rabbit holes populated by blurry photos of supposed UFO debris, legends of lost Atlantean technology, government conspiracy theories about secret dumping grounds, and countless other fringe ideas. Nothing he found remotely matched the specific characteristics of the black sphere he had pulled from the Mahoning.
Weeks later, the memory still gnawing at him, Dave decided he needed to clear his head, to reclaim his familiar ritual, to prove to himself that the river was just a river. He went fishing again, deliberately choosing a different spot several miles upstream, near the town of Struthers, an area he knew well and felt comfortable in. He tried to focus on the familiar rhythm, the practiced flick of the wrist during the cast, the patient waiting, the subtle signs of fish activity. He needed normalcy.
This time, after about half an hour, he got a real bite. A strong, determined, fighting pull on the line. Definitely not a snag. A big catfish, he thought with a surge of relief, maybe a flathead. He played it carefully, letting the fish run, then skillfully reeling it in, feeling the satisfying weight and power telegraphing up the line. It fought hard, bulldogging deep, shaking its head – classic big catfish behavior.
As he brought the fish closer to the bank, tiring it out, readying his large landing net, he saw it thrashing in the shallow, murky water near the edge. And his blood ran cold again. It wasn"t a catfish. It wasn"t a carp. It was… something else. Something long, eel-like, serpentine, but thick as his forearm, maybe four feet in length, with pale, almost translucent, sickly white skin that seemed to shimmer faintly. It had no discernible eyes, just smooth skin where eyes should be. Its head terminated in a gaping, perfectly circular mouth lined with multiple concentric rows of needle-sharp, backward-pointing teeth. Short, vestigial-looking fins ran in ragged lines along its sides, and strange, irregular patches of bioluminescence pulsed erratically along its body with a sickly green light, even in the daylight. It writhed violently on the line as he stared, letting out a series of high-pitched, rapid clicking hisses that sounded utterly alien.
Dave stared in paralyzed horror. He"d caught monsters from the Mahoning before, over the years – mutated carp with grotesque tumors or extra fins, catfish with deformed heads, fish bearing lesions from chemical burns – sad casualties of the river"s polluted past. But this was different. This wasn"t just mutated; this was something utterly alien, something that didn"t seem to belong to any known branch of terrestrial life. It looked like a creature born of toxic waste and a fever dream, a deep-sea nightmare somehow thriving in a freshwater river.
Before he could react, before he could even form the conscious thought to try and land the horrifying creature or cut the line and let it go, the eyeless eel-thing convulsed violently one last time. With a final, sharp, impossibly loud click that echoed across the water, it bit clean through the heavy, steel-leader fishing line just above the hook with its razor-sharp teeth. It slithered instantly back into the murky water and vanished into the depths, leaving no trace of its presence except the severed line and the lingering image seared into Dave"s retinas.
He was left standing there on the riverbank, fishing rod held loosely in his hand, the severed line dangling uselessly in the water, his heart pounding against his ribs, the alien clicking sound still echoing in his ears.
He didn"t fish for months after that second encounter. The memory of the cold black sphere, coupled with the visceral horror of the clicking, eyeless, bioluminescent eel – the river suddenly felt profoundly hostile, alien, its familiar waters masking unimaginable depths and unknown horrors. He began talking to a few other old-timers he trusted, fishermen who had spent decades on the Mahoning, hesitantly sharing his experiences, expecting ridicule but finding instead cautious nods and shared secrets.
One old man admitted, after Dave described the sphere, to pulling up a strange, perfectly geometric metal object – a cube with intricate carvings – years ago near the same spot by the Lowellville dam, an object that felt "wrong" and unnaturally heavy, and that he quickly, fearfully threw back. Another fisherman spoke in hushed tones of hooking something near the Republic Steel site that felt "like dragging up a heavy bag of wet rags," which, upon reaching the surface, turned out to be a large, tangled clump of disturbingly human-like hair attached to a fragment of bone covered in strange, pulsating growths similar to what Ben Carter had encountered (linking to 5.2).
Dave began to realize the scattered, wild stories weren"t just exaggerations or drunken fantasies. The Mahoning River, poisoned and scarred by industry, was a repository not just for mundane industrial waste and debris, but potentially for the truly bizarre, the inexplicable, the monstrous. The pollution might have played a part, certainly creating mutants like the horrifying eel, but what about the black sphere? What about the geometric cube? What about the body parts adorned with alien growth? Was it all connected? Was there a hidden, perhaps non-terrestrial, ecosystem thriving in the toxic depths, incorporating human debris, consuming victims, evolving in the darkness outside the purview of science and sanity?
He couldn"t shake the deeply unsettling feeling that the river itself possessed a kind of awareness, a dark sentience, and that his fishing line acted less like a tool for recreation and more like a probe, occasionally, accidentally, snagging glimpses of a submerged reality best left undisturbed. He thought about the sphere"s cold hum, the eel"s clicking hiss, the whispers of body parts and strange, living growths pulled from the mud. What else was down there, lurking, waiting, evolving in the cold, dark, chemically-rich mud at the bottom of the Mahoning River?
Dave eventually went back to the riverbank, drawn by a morbid fascination he couldn"t entirely suppress, but not to fish. He just sat on the bank, watching the brown water flow sluggishly past, feeling its immense weight, its hidden depths, its veiled secrets. He felt its pull, its ancient, wounded power. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would never cast a line into its enigmatic waters again. Some things are best left at the bottom. Some mysteries are too terrifying to hook. You never knew what the river might offer up on your line as bait, what piece of its dark, alien heart it might let you glimpse for a horrifying moment before snatching it back into the depths, leaving you standing on the bank, shaking, wondering if it was the one that got away, or if, perhaps, you were.