u/Guilty_Response_378

I’ve recently fallen in love with this New Orleans classic, and I want to make it for myself. The problem is, I only have four of the main ingredients: rye whiskey (specifically Knob Creek), sweet vermouth, hennessy cognac, and angostura bitters. I don’t have peychaud’s bitters or benedictine liqueur.
The important part is that I actually DO have a bottle of something called B&B, which is a blend between benedictine and French brandy.
Can this work?

I.

If you look at Oakridge Estates on Google Maps today, it looks like any other late-nineties suburban boom: a neatly organized hive of cul-de-sacs and manicured lawns carved out of eastern North Carolina wetlands.

This was the neighborhood where I grew up, alongside my two best friends, Logan and Ben.

To the adults who moved there in 2004, my parents among them, geography was defined by property lines, HOA regulations, and school districts. They saw a safe, quiet community where you could leave your back door unlocked while you ran to the store.

But children don't live in the world of adults. We inhabit a completely different layer of the map. We don't care about street names or lot numbers; only the wooded buffer zones between phases, the construction utility paths, the drainage ditches, and — above all else — the pipes.

Oakridge was built on land that wanted to be water. To keep forty acres of tract housing from sinking into the mud whenever a summer storm rolled through, the developers laid down miles of subterranean infrastructure. Four-foot precast concrete culverts ran like an underground highway beneath our feet, linking small retention ponds to deep junction boxes before feeding eventually into the black creek at the edge of the woods. The whole system was engineered to do one thing: pull water away from the houses as fast as it could, out toward the woods and creek – anywhere but the crawlspaces where we all slept.

We never thought about it that way. We thought of the dry, static pipes as permanent — ours, the way a road is ours even though it really isn’t. It didn't occur to any of us that a system built to move water only knows how to move in one direction, and that everything else built to move with it moves the same way.

To Logan, Ben, and I, those pipes were a secret kingdom. They weren't only ours, not really — we knew that the pipes belonged first to the older kids, the middle-schoolers who claimed the deep junction under the main road the way they claim the good seat in a car. We also knew that somewhere below even them was a looser network of ‘Phase 2’ kids who left chalk arrows on walls we'd never seen, marking routes to places we didn't know existed yet. We were near the bottom of that order. It didn't matter. The pipes were still our private roads, immune to heat, traffic, and our parents’ eyes. Back then, we thought we owned enough of them. We thought the dark belonged to us, and that as long as we had a flashlight and were home by dinner, nothing could touch us.

There are things I remember about those pipes now that I didn't think twice about at the time. For one, the way sound behaved down there — how a voice from thirty feet away could arrive perfectly clear, while a voice from ten feet could vanish into the concrete like it had never been spoken. There was also the smell, too. We all called it algae, because that's the word that was available to an eleven-year-old for anything that smelled organic and wrong. But underneath the algae there was something else on the worst days, something closer to wet wool left too long in a hamper, faint and sour, gone again before you could be sure you'd smelled it at all. And every so often, on a dead-still July afternoon with no wind on the surface, a cold current of air would move past us in the tunnel…like when something large had just walked by in a hallway. We figured it was just the pipes being pipes.

We had no idea how wrong we were.

II.

"Pass the green beans, Maya," my mother said, not looking up from her plate.

It was a Tuesday evening in mid-July. The ceiling fan in our dining room hummed lazily, doing little to push around the humid, heavy air. My dad sat across from me in his work shirt, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, rubbing his temples in slow circles with his thumb and middle finger. He worked middle management for a regional logistics company and always looked tired by 6:00 PM.

"Ground's settling again under the back patio," my dad muttered, taking a drink of iced tea. "I was messing with the hose spigot after I got back, trying to get it fixed, and the flagstone near the downspout’s dropped another inch. Whole yard feels hollow under the topsoil."

"It's the rain we had last week," my mom said, setting down her fork. "I told you, the drainage in Phase 2 was rushed when they poured the foundations. The builder cut corners."

"Yeah, and then the utility company came out last spring, remember?" my dad said. "Walked the whole yard with some kind of sonar wand and couldn't find anything." He said it mildly, the way he said most things about the neighborhood's infrastructure. But I could hear the irritation beneath his words. "HOA's been fighting the developer over whose line item covers Phase 2 drainage since before we moved in. Probably’ll still be fighting about it when I'm dead."

My mother turned her eyes toward me, changing the subject. Sort of. "Maya, you weren't playing back behind Phase 3 today, were you?" She always had a way of going soft only in specific and predictable places — never for my father's complaints about the yard, and always for anything involving Ben's mother, whose worry she seemed to regard as a kind of fragile thing that needed protecting on her behalf.

"No, Mom," I said smoothly, keeping my eyes fixed on my plate. Under the table, very faintly, I could feel the floor tremble when a truck passed two streets over, a small vibration that ran up through the legs of my chair, there and gone.

"Good. Stay away from the unfinished houses. There's rusted rebar out there and the retention pond isn't fenced off yet. If you and Logan are riding bikes, stay on the asphalt where Mr. Henderson can see you from his porch."

"I will."

"And don't be dragging Ben into anything reckless," she added, her tone softening into that gentle yet still-present authority she always had. "That boy's mother worries enough as it is. She was up half the night a month ago because she thought she saw a van idling at the end of Bluebell for twenty minutes. She called the sheriff's office over it and everything. Poor woman."

"Ben's fine," I said.

That was the illusion of Oakridge Estates, I realize now. The adults thought that as long as we were visible from a window, as long as we stayed away from speeders and busy intersections, we were safe. They assumed the boundaries of our world stopped at the curb. They had no idea that while they sat in their kitchens discussing property values and HOA regulations and poor soil drainage and the county's failure to send anyone out about a suspicious van, we were crawling six feet underneath their dining room floors.

We were in the pipes.

III.

"I'm telling you, Yu-Gi-Oh is fake," Logan declared, tossing a pebble across the hot asphalt and watching it bounce into Mr. Henderson's lawn. "You can't just draw a card and magically win every single time. It's rigged."

"It's not fake," Ben shot back, sitting cross-legged on the curb and carefully scraping a dried patch of mud off the side of his sneaker. "And besides, Joey Wheeler's deck is based on luck. He rolls dice."

"Joey’s a cartoon, Ben," Logan snorted, leaning back on his elbows. "And he's an idiot. If I was in that show, I'd just punch the other guy and take his cards."

"You'd get disqualified," I said, squinting through the 2:00 PM sun glare. I was leaning against my bike handlebars, watching a line of black ants march across the curb gap. "And Mr. Davis would give you detention, just like he did when you threw an eraser at Tyler on the last day of fifth grade."

"Tyler deserved it! He told everyone I cried during the fifth-grade track meet!"

"You did cry," Ben said softly, a tiny, rare smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "You fell off the hurdles and scraped both your elbows."

"It was a medical emergency!" Logan yelled, though he couldn't hide the grin spreading across his face. He reached over and shoved Ben's shoulder hard enough to knock him sideways onto the grass. "At least I didn't throw up during the school play like you did, Ben!"

"I had stomach flu!" Ben protested, his face turning bright red as he sat back up, dusting off his arms. "And my mom made me go anyway!"

"You wore that raccoon costume for the whole second act after," I said. "Smelling like that. Mrs. Farris made you sit by the open window on the bus home."

"Don't remind me," Ben groaned, dropping his face into his hands, though he was laughing now too, a small huffed sound he always tried to hide.

"Guys, quiet," I laughed, pushing Logan with my foot. "Mrs. Henderson's looking out her window."

Logan looked toward the Henderson house, stuck his tongue out at the closed blinds, and then slumped back onto the curb. For a minute, the three of us just sat there in the heavy summer heat, listening to the drone of cicadas in the oak trees lining the street.

It was a good summer. We spent our mornings trading Game Boy Advance games on my front porch, our afternoons riding bikes down to the construction dumps in Phase 3 to hunt for discarded copper wire, and our evenings lying on the grass watching the streetlights flicker on one by one. Logan was the loud engine of our group, always pushing us into trouble; Ben was our anchor, quiet and cautious but intensely loyal — the kind that didn't announce itself but just showed up every time whether or not he wanted to be there, like a spare set of flashlight batteries already zipped into his backpack before anyone asked.

I was the glue in the middle, keeping Logan from getting us killed and keeping Ben from staying inside his house all day.

Logan cracked his knuckles, breaking the silence. He shifted his weight, his eyes suddenly narrowing as he looked toward the end of the street where the pavement died out into dirt and orange construction mesh. "Hey," he said, his voice dropping into a lower, conspiratorial tone. "Did your brother tell you about what happened down in the junction line in Phase 3 last week?"

Ben sighed, his brief moment of boldness instantly vanishing. "Logan, don't start."

"No, I'm serious!" Logan insisted, turning so he faced both of us. "He said the middle-school guys went down there on Saturday to hide some magazines. They found a sleeping bag, pushed way back into one of the dead-end runs. Said there were fingernail marks scratched into the concrete near the grate."

"Your brother makes stuff up," Ben said, picking at a blade of grass. "He told you Mr. Henderson used to be a spy just so you'd steal his lawn gnome."

"He didn't make this up!" Logan argued, leaning in closer. "Everyone knows about the guy who lives down there. Eric's crew has known about him since like third grade; that's half the reason they even claimed the main junction, just so they could keep the little kids out of his territory. The middle-schoolers call him the Silt Man."

"That's the dumbest name I’ve ever heard," I said, though I felt a subtle prickle of curiosity.

"It's not dumb! My brother said three years ago, when they were pouring the foundations for Phase 2, a guy on the utility crew got trapped in the pipes during a flash flood. The site foreman had locked up the security grates early, and the other guy couldn’t get out. They never found his body. Now he drags himself through the pipes, looking for kids who stay down there after dark."

"That doesn't make any sense," I said, shaking my head. "If he died in a flood, he'd just be a body."

"He isn't dead. That’s the thing," Logan whispered, leaning so close I could smell the cheap grape bubblegum on his breath. "That's why he doesn't use a flashlight. He crawls in the pitch black. My brother said if you're down there and you hear something dragging, you're supposed to drop whatever you're holding and run for the nearest street grate. And he said one time a Phase 2 kid found a grate out by the ball fields that was chained shut from the inside. Not from the top, where you'd chain it to keep kids out. From underneath."

Ben shifted uncomfortably on the grass, his knuckles turning white as he clutched his knees. Ben always hated stories like this. He was the kid who couldn't sleep with his closet door cracked open. Whenever I’d stay over, I asked him about it. He said it wasn’t the idea of monsters—he’d stopped believing in them years ago—but just the darkness itself, and the idea of…something lurking inside. I understood his fear then, and even some nights today I feel more comfortable with my closet shut. 

"It's just a dumb urban legend," Ben murmured, his voice trembling slightly. "Like the hook-handed guy at the campfire."

"Whatever, scaredy-cat," Logan grinned, elbowing Ben again, though gentler this time. "Look, if you're too chicken to go down the run today, Maya and I will go without you."

"I'm not chicken," Ben said softly, his cheeks flushing pink. "I just don't like how dark it gets past the second bend. The sound carries…weird down there." He unzipped the front pocket of his backpack, just enough to show the extra batteries rattling inside, like proof of something. "I brought batteries. I'm coming."

"It's fine," I cut in, standing up and grabbing my bike handlebars. "Logan's full of it. There's nothing down there except mud and old soda cans, anyway. Come on, let's hit the culvert before it gets too hot."

We didn't notice, on our way down the street—and I only realized much later—that the storm grate outside the Kowalskis' house was sitting very slightly off its seat. One corner was raised half an inch above the concrete, like something had been lifted and set back down in a hurry. We wouldn't have thought anything of it if we had.

IV.

The entrance to the retention run sat in Phase 1 at the bottom of an overgrown drainage ditch behind the actual retention pond. It was a massive four-foot circular concrete opening, surrounded by wild black-eyed Susans and thick brush. Even on a ninety-degree North Carolina afternoon, a cold, damp draft spilled out from the dark mouth of the pipe, smelling faintly of rust and wet silt. Algae grew in there as well, though the smell was dampened by the other two. The surface noise of the neighborhood, such as the lawnmowers and cicadas, seemed to fall away the second we crouched at the opening, swallowed by the concrete before we'd even gone in.

Logan went in first, pulling a heavy metallic flashlight from his back pocket and clicking it on. He was always loud when he went in, talking the whole way, his sneakers scuffing hard against the concrete like he wanted the pipe to know he wasn't scared of it. I scrambled in right behind him, dropping to my hands and knees, feeling the rough and cold concrete press against my palms. I moved slower than Logan — more deliberately, counting side-drains and grates without meaning to. I was building the same rough map in my head every single time we went down; I’d always thought knowing the way out mattered more than getting somewhere fast. Ben entered last, his sneakers dragging hesitantly onto the floor behind us, counting grates out loud under his breath as opposed to in his head. It always annoyed Logan and comforted Ben in equal measure. I thought nothing of it, anyways.

"Watch your head," Logan's voice echoed, oddly flattened by the tight concrete cylinder.

We moved in a single file. The air shifted immediately as the outside world vanished behind us — cool and stagnant, silent except for our rhythmic shuffling and shallow breathing. Every fifty yards, a vertical access shaft rose up to an iron street grate above, letting down a thin shower of sunlight and the faint, distant hum of suburban life: a lawnmower two streets over, the bark of a neighbor's golden retriever.

We passed chalk markings scrawled on the pipe walls — crude initials with the occasional curse words, and arrows left by the older kids who claimed the deep junction boxes under the main road. Someone had even drawn a rough map once back near the second grate, all straight lines and boxes meant to represent streets none of us recognized yet, with a single X marked deep toward Phase 3 and the word DON'T scratched beside it in jagged capital letters. The rest of the sentence was either never finished or scrubbed away by rain.

"See?" Logan called back, his flashlight beam sweeping over a drawn skull and crossbones on the wall. "Eric and his friends already claimed this junction. They mean to keep us out."

"Let's just turn back at the bend," Ben called out from behind me, his voice tight. "My mom wants me home by five."

"We've only been down here ten minutes, Ben," Logan groaned.

I didn't answer them. I was focused on the floor.

Just past the third street grate, where the pipe dipped slightly to meet an offset side-drain, the concrete seam was wider and packed with washed-up silt and dried leaf debris. As Logan's light flickered across the ground, something small caught the beam. A tiny glint of yellow, tucked deep into the rusted metal gap of the side grate.

I stopped crawling. "Hold up, Logan. Point the light down here."

"What is it?" Logan backed up a few paces, shining the beam directly at my hands.

I reached my fingers into the damp, muddy crevice. My fingernails scraped against metal and plastic before I managed to pinch the object and pull it free. The silt around it was still faintly damp even though it hadn't rained in almost a week, and a few inches away, half-erased by time but still visible if you knew to look, there was a smooth, shallow depression in the mud about the size and shape of a kneecap. None of us mentioned it. I don't think any of us let ourselves really see it.

It was a small hair clip, no bigger than an inch wide. It was shaped like a butterfly, made of cheap yellow plastic with tiny gold glitter embedded in the wings, attached to a rusted metal spring hinge. It was caked in dried grey silt, but the bright yellow color was still vivid against the dark concrete.

"Ugh, trash," Logan snorted, moving his light away almost before he'd really looked at it — quickly, like he didn't want the adventure to slow down for a dirty hair clip. "Some kid probably just dropped it down a curb drain three streets up during a rainstorm."

"It's not trash," I said, wiping the wet mud off the plastic wing with my thumb. "It's intact. The spring…still works."

"It's just a dirty hair clip, Maya," Ben whispered, leaning over my shoulder to look. Something crossed his face at that moment. Not quite disgust, or at least it wasn't only that — something quicker and more uneasy, then it was gone. "Put it down. It's gross."

I didn't. I don't know why, but something about it felt out of place in that cold, grey darkness. It felt personal. I slipped it into my shorts pocket without telling either of them. It was the first time I’d ever done that, though I didn't think of it that way then, that I held something back from the two of them instead of putting it out loud between us, the way we put everything else. The metal spring pressed cold against my hip, and I kept crawling.

V.

Three days later, on Friday morning, my mother dragged me along to the Piggly Wiggly on Highway 150.

To a child, the grocery store was a world of fluorescent lights and artificial air conditioning, humming with the chatter of shoppers and the beep of barcode scanners. Near the produce section, the misters kicked on with a soft hiss, and a kid from my class — Danielle, from Mrs. Farris's room — waved at me from behind a cart stacked with cereal boxes before her mother pulled her toward the registers. My mom was standing near the deli counter, talking at length with Mrs. Gable about the upcoming HOA meeting, holding a gallon of milk in her basket. I caught fragments of it as I drifted — something about the Phase 2 drainage easement, followed by something about the developer's lawyer. It was the same argument my dad had shrugged off at dinner three nights earlier, having followed us even there.

Bored, I drifted away from them toward the front of the store, near the sliding glass exit doors.

Against the brick wall sat a large community bulletin board, cork-backed. It was cluttered with layers of faded paper: everything from advertisements for mobile dog grooming and hand-drawn flyers for lost tabby cats to phone numbers for handyman services and notices for summer Bible school.

My eyes wandered aimlessly over the board until they locked onto a flyer pinned near the top left corner.

It was encased in a clear plastic sleeve that had yellowed around the edges from age. The bold, black lettering at the top read: MISSING.

Below the text was a full-color school photo of a little girl with pale skin and bright green eyes, her light blonde hair cut into bangs. She was grinning proudly, showing off a missing front tooth — a school picture day smile.

CLARA VANCE Age at time of disappearance: 9 Date Last Seen: August 12, 2002 Last Seen Location: Oakridge Estates, Phase 1 (Vicinity of Bluebell Court)

If you have any information regarding Clara's whereabouts, please contact the County Sheriff's Office...

I stared at the poster. Clara Vance. I had heard her name spoken by the adults before, always in hushed tones, and usually when they were telling us not to wander off or when they were complaining about how the police never solved anything. She had been missing for two full years. The town had long since rationalized her disappearance. They assumed a stranger in a van had snatched her off the main road, or that she had wandered into the deep woods behind the county line and gotten lost. Bluebell Court, I remembered, was two streets over from where Ben's mother had seen the van idling for twenty minutes and called the sheriff about it. Nobody had ever come out to check.

My eyes moved from her green eyes up to her hair. Clipped tightly into the blonde hair on the right side of her head, pinning back her bangs, was a small plastic hair clip.

It was shaped like a yellow butterfly.

I stood frozen in the middle of the grocery store, the noise of the registers fading into a distant hum. Somewhere behind me my mother said my name once, in the way she did when ready to check out and I'd wandered too far. I don't think I answered her. I reached into the pocket of my denim shorts. My thumb brushed against the cold, hard edges of the yellow plastic clip I had washed off in my bathroom sink two nights before.

I don't remember deciding not to tell my mother. I only remember that by the time she called my name a second time, my hand was already out of my pocket, and the clip was back where it had been for three days. My face must have looked normal enough because she didn't ask.

Outside in the parking lot, the sky had gone the color of a fresh bruise, and the first fat drops of a summer storm were starting to hit the asphalt as we loaded the bags into the car. I remember standing by the passenger door for a second too long, looking down at the storm grate at the edge of the lot, and feeling for just a moment, before my mother told me to get in before I got soaked, the exact same cold, damp draft that had spilled out of the culvert mouth three days earlier.

It was the last ordinary storm I would ever feel that way about.

These are two fics I’ve finished so far and posted to AO3! Hope you like them! :)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/89627176/chapters/238077731

https://archiveofourown.org/works/91609261/chapters/243893091