She first noticed the puddle late one summer afternoon.
The kids were out with friends for the day, and Mike was at work. She should have been at work too, but she had taken a day off to supervise a plumber (which seemed fortuitous at first), who had been on his back under the kitchen sink for over half an hour, hitting things with tools and mumbling to himself. He was showing no sign of coming up for air anytime in the near future.
After flicking through magazines for a while (mostly Mike’s, mostly golf), she decided to take a tour of the upstairs rooms, armed with brush and pan, polish and rag, tidying away oddments of clothing, cups and saucers, books and magazines that had made their way upstairs and that nobody had ever summoned up the energy to take back down.
It was as she was checking for cobwebs high up in the small bathroom that she noticed a patch of discolouration on the ceiling. It had not been there when they checked the place out before buying. At least she thought not. She was usually pretty careful about that sort of thing.
The patch was about a foot across, mottled and amorphous but roughly symmetrical, like an uninspired Rorschach blot or an incompetent child’s representation of the Shroud of Turin. It was mostly on the ceiling but seemed to be spreading onto the frieze, and it had a worryingly damp gleam to it.
So high and narrow was the bathroom that she had to sit on the lid of the toilet and crane her neck right back to get a proper look, and while she was doing so, a single drop of water detached itself from the ceiling and fell to the floor. For a fraction of a second, there was a shimmer across the linoleum that revealed the presence of a small puddle, and her heart filled with homeowner’s dread. There was no way that she or Michael would be able to tackle this one. The plumber would be quids in and over the moon. Lucky he was there, really.
She decided to bring him upstairs and get his opinion, but first she fetched an old towel from the linen cupboard and took it into the bathroom. She pushed the door shut behind her and got down on her knees and set about mopping up the standing water. There was a lot of it, more than she had thought, and by the time she stood up again the towel was soaked through, cold and heavy. She wrung it out into the washbasin. By the time she returned the towel to the floor, the water had begun pooling again.
After soaking it all up twice more, she decided that if she didn’t want to be on her hands and knees all day then she would need to employ a receptacle of some sort. There was a bucket on the landing that she had been using when she wiped the insides of the windows but it was too big. If she positioned it to catch the drops she would be unable to open the door wide enough to squeeze past to get out. Something smaller was required.
In the washbasin was a cup that she had removed from her son’s desk in his room, part of his antique beverages collection. It was half full of black coffee and scummed over with fur. She emptied the contents into the toilet bowl and flushed it away, then put the cup down on the floor, taking care that it was correctly positioned. She sat down on the toilet seat to observe progress.
She was surprised at how quickly the cup filled. When it was almost done she picked it up, emptied it and replaced it behind the door. To give herself time to get down to the plumber, explain the issue and get back would require more time. She let the cup fill again and emptied it, then hurried through the bedrooms looking for a bigger receptacle. Eventually she settled on a bulb vase from Susan’s . It had a slightly bulbous body and a long neck with a wide mouth. She estimated that it would hold at least twice and possibly three times as much as the cup which should give her plenty of time to get down to the plumber and explain things to him. It shouldn’t take too long, she thought. It was a leak. How complicated could it be? When she got back to the bathroom the cup was nearly full again. She put the vase down and hurried downstairs to speak to the plumber who said he’d be up in a moment when he had tightened something the name of which she did not catch.
When she got back the vase was already pretty much full, which struck her as being strange, considering its larger capacity.
Out of curiosity she put it down again and checked her watch. It read exactly ten past three. She watched the cup fill. When it was done she checked the time again. It was three eighteen. Eight minutes from empty to full. She emptied the cup and put the vase down in its place. It reached full at three . Eight minutes again.
It was baffling. The vase had roughly three times the volume of the cup but took exactly the same time to fill. She put the bucket down leaving the door shut. It was a , builders’ black plastic bucket with a wire handle and a wooden grip. Eight minutes later it was full, and so heavy that when she picked it up by the handle it distorted from the weight of water it contained. She had trouble lifting it into position for tipping down the sink. In the end she put the seat up and poured the water into the toilet bowl, as if she were clearing a recalcitrant blockage.
She had a growing suspicion that there was something strange about the way the drops were falling. They did not seem to fall more frequently when filling a larger receptacle nor did they appear to accelerate during flight, as her limited knowledge of basic physics suggested that they should. She used her phone to go on the internet and to check the usual size and behaviour of a falling water drop in a typical domestic environment and found that, subject to regional variations, air density, shape and size of nozzle, water purity and temperature, a typical drop was between three and five millimetres in diameter and contained between 0.05 and 0.06 millilitres of liquid, giving it an approximate weight of 0.05 grams. The size of raindrops in the wild was subject to a variety of meteorological influences, and could vary from 0.04 millimetres up to 8mm in tropical rainstorm conditions.
As to terminal velocity there were a wide variety of factors to be taken into consideration. Larger drops had higher TVs, while smaller ones fell more slowly. A typical raindrop might be expected to fall at 9m/s or 32km/h (on , of course, other planets of different sizes would have different acceleration due to gravity but might well not have the necessary atmospheric moisture for precipitation to occur.) Larger drops would often become unstable during their descent, flatten and break up before impact into multiple smaller droplets.
She reset the vase and hurried downstairs to alert the plumber, then went back up. When the plumber came she pointed him at the stain and he stared at it intently. She explained to him that both stain and puddle were new and that they seemed to fill their receptacle every eight minutes, irrespective of size.
The plumber stood for several minutes looking up at the stain and down at the vase. He checked his watch, folded his arms and leaned back a little to get a better view then rocked gently forward and back on the balls of his feet and his heels. He had blue plastic overshoes on and they rustled as he moved.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Well,” he said. “It’s unusual but I have seen it occasionally. With most leaks what matters is how much fluid is being released in a given time period. A leak defined by volume, if you will. That’s usual. The flow rate is a function of the viscosity of the liquid, the size of the puncture and the pressure in the system. But this is a leak defined by time. What matters here is not how fast the water is released but for how long. That’s a trickier proposition.”
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
He didn’t reply for a few moments but pursed his lips, sucked his cheeks in and issued a contemplative whistle.
“Well now,” he said, peering carefully at the corner behind the door, at the vase that was nearly full. “I should say so but it won’t be cheap and I’m fully booked until Thursday next week.”
Ten days. The whole ceiling could have come down by then.
An idea occurred to her.
“Couldn’t you switch from what you’re doing in the kitchen?” she asked. “That’s a minor job, isn’t it?”
She realised as soon as she said it that there was a danger that he would think that she was belittling the importance of his work and she took steps to remedy that impression.
“I mean relatively minor,” she said, hoping that she had done enough to rescue the situation. She was terrible at dealing with tradesmen and would gladly have left it to Mike if he wasn’t worse.
“ said again, and he did a little flat wave with his hands that indicated caution and uncertainty. “ said. “Maybe not. These things can be tricky and the minor jobs that you put aside soon become the major jobs that need dealing with urgently. I’ll come back Monday if you like. If you want to pay some up front as a deposit that would be good. You could add it to the cheque for what I’ve done today then it’s easier for us both.”
She noticed how he made it sound as if he was doing her a favour when she was pretty sure that actually it was the other way round. She decided to treat him with disdain. She would not be one of those people who grovelled with gratitude at men who were just doing their jobs and making a good living at it.
“Yes please,” she said “Thank you so much. It’s really good of you.”
The disdain would have to go down as a failure. She just wasn’t a disdainful person.
When he had gone back to the kitchen she watched another couple of cycles and it occurred to her that the best policy might be to get a really small dish of some sort to catch the drops. If that cut the flow rate then that would be good for the meter and if she missed the emptying schedule by a couple of minutes it would only be a couple of teaspoons spilt and no harm done.
She found a twist lid from an old bottle of cough medicine and put it on the floor but unfortunately the experiment was a failure. The drips kept on coming as fast as when they were falling into the vase and within a couple of minutes the lid had overflowed and there was water on the floor again.
It appeared that although she had not yet found the maximum size of receptacle to which the drip would accommodate itself there was a minimum and the bottle cap had gone below it.
She replaced the vase, checked that the fall rate had regularised itself and sat watching progress and figuring out what to do next.
Possibly she should call Mike and get his opinion but what should she say?
“Hello, husband.” She called him that sometimes. “Guess what. I found a small slippage in the continuum. Would you care to come home and see it before it sucks me and the kids into a parallel dimension?”
She typed it into her phone and paused with her finger ready to hit the send button but she wasn’t sure that he would pick it up, and that would just piss her off more. And anyway he was completely useless at anything involving tools of any kind. She might as well try and deal with it herself.
It was about now that she noticed that the puddle had moved. Not far, but far enough. Far enough for what? She wasn’t sure.
Where the drops had been falling behind the opened door they were now falling in front of it and starting a new puddle. She decided to switch to the cup which seemed to be inherently more stable than the vase and she set it down in the puddle’s new position. The leak appeared to continue on its cycle.
But a new routine seemed to have been established. Each time she replaced the cup it would fill, still taking eight minutes per turn and every time she took it away to empty she found on her return that it had moved a couple of inches and these movements did not seem to be happening at random. This was a puddle with a purpose.
First it adjusted itself so that it was lined up with the dead centre of the bathroom doorway, then it moved through and onto the passageway that led to the kids’ bedrooms. From there it was three iterations down to the landing. The puddle was lengthening its stride. (She couldn’t think of another word for it).
She grabbed the cup and the towel and set off in pursuit.
By the time she caught up it had reached the landing and set off down the stairs. It took the first four one at a time, then did three doubles and finished up with a triple which brought it into the hall, at the opposite end from the front door.
From this point on she gave up going back up to the bathroom to empty and started tipping into the kitchen sink. The plumber was still on the floor with his head in the cupboard but he said it was okay to use. It later occurred to her that she should have started tipping from the cup into the bucket. That might have avoided a few journeys to the sink but she didn’t think of it and so carried on with the cup and towel.
There was a console table just inside the front door, with a stack of magazines on it and a mirror on the wall above. It was a relic of the days when people had telephones. She and Mike had never had a landline but somehow having a telephone table seemed logical, a sign of permanence and respectability.
When she came back from emptying the cup into the newly repaired kitchen sink for the third time she had trouble finding the drips until she saw a flicker from under the table. She got down on hands and knees and reached under with the towel and as she did so she looked upwards at the underside of the table surface. There was a dirty stain up there from which the drops were coming but there was no sign of them falling from the ceiling to the table surface. Evidently the puddle system could adjust its altitude.
Two more sequences the puddle had left the house and was making its way down the concrete path to the street and she was following on hands and knees.
Mr Jenkins from next door was in his garden, working on his rose bushes.
“Good afternoon,” he said, adjusting his glasses and peering down at her. “All well?”
“Very well, thank you, Mr Jenkins. Just chasing this puddle,” she replied.
“Aah,” he said. “I saw the cloud above the house and I thought there must be an explanation. Weather systems small enough to fit into a suitcase are unusual in these parts.”
He motioned towards the roof. She followed his gesture and she could see a wet patch on the roof that looked to be directly above the bathroom where the drip had originated.
The puddle was now almost at the garden gate and ready to turn onto the pavement. For the first time she noticed that there was a small section of turbulent air, slightly darker than the rest, like a dirty thumbprint hanging above the forming puddle as if suspended from the sky by a fine invisible thread. The dripping continued and although there was, in principle, no reason why she had to keep her capture and disposal routine going she did so nonetheless, partly out of curiosity, partly from , partly because, to the best of her knowledge she was the only person in the world who had ever witnessed this phenomenon and she felt proprietorial and protective towards it.
She hurriedly explained the events of the afternoon to Mr Jenkins and enquired after his wife, who was an invalid, and as she did so puddle turned right out of the garden and headed along the footpath towards town. Her knees and hands were getting sore so when she did the next emptying (in the absence of a sink she tipped the water out over Mr ; he didn’t seem to mind), she stood up, checked her watch and then ran to the kitchen and through to the garage. She picked up a pair of leather gardening gloves, which she pulled on and Mike’s kneelers which she hurriedly velcroed to her knees.
She hurried back to the puddle. It was about ten feet further on from where she had left it. It was bigger too. It was late afternoon now and the air was getting cool. She was starting to feel lonely. Two kids on bikes came to a skidding halt beside her. She recognised them as acquaintances of her son. Not his best friends, she thought, but she had seen them around.
“What you doing, missus?” the braver one of the two asked her.
“Just clearing up this puddle,” she said and they nodded their heads sagely like it all made sense. “If you see Kevin will you tell him where I am?” she asked and they said yes but she knew all three of her kids were out until late evening.
Mike would be home soon though. Perhaps he’d come. She was sure he would. Or at least sure that he would if he noticed her absence.
Once it had made it into the street the puddle speeded up a bit, the gaps between iterations getting longer. Once or twice she had trouble finding it after a jump but it seemed to wait patiently for her to catch up, then restarted with the drips. Maybe she should slow down and let it wait for her more often, but she didn’t want to antagonise it, so she did her best to keep up and it waited politely if she was unavoidably late.
About two hours into the pursuit there was an unfortunate incident when she sat down for a breather and allowed her mind to wander and her eyes to close and when she opened them again the cup was gone. There was no damp patch where it had been, meaning, as far as she could tell, that while her eyes were closed someone had emptied the cup and taken it away. There were a few splashes on the pavement and she used the towel to mop them up.
As she did so she was aware of a car pulling up alongside her and she heard the doors open and close and the sound of big footsteps. She did not look up.
“Good morning, Madam,” a voice with big black boots said, polite but firm. “Can I ask what you’re doing?”
She moved her head up a little and above the boots a pair of dark blue trousers. A radio crackled some information. She could not make out what was being said but she surmised that she was now in conversation with the police.
“I’m looking for my puddle, Officer,” she said. “I know this will sound silly but it matters.”
“Your puddle?”
“Yes, my puddle.”
And where and when did you last see this puddle?”
She checked her watch.
“About four minutes ago,” she said. “And about 15 feet that way.”
She signalled back over her shoulder with her thumb.
The policeman had his book and pencil out and was making notes.
“And can you give me a description of the puddle?” he asked.
“Well, it comes and goes but it’s roughly circular, about thirty centimetres across, although it seems to be getting bigger with each manifestation. It’s about 5 mm deep, wet, and contains approximately 112cc of water. Wherever it appears there is a sort of dark tremulousness to the air above it. As far as I can tell it contains just regular water with the addition of such bits of dust and microscopic organisms as it may have accumulated on its travels. Oh, and however big the thing is that you try to catch it in, it will fill up in eight minutes. At the moment I don’t have a cup so I’m soaking it up with this towel.”
“And you anticipate its arrival here in the near future?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m not sure why it isn’t here has two minutes left.”
“And what happens if it arrives without you seeing it?” he asked. He sounded sceptical and a bit bored.
“I’ve no idea,” she said, “except that I’ve got a strong intuition that it will be something bad.”
At the mention of something bad the policeman became more attentive. His whole training had been concerned with bad things. There had been no classes at the academy about mad women chasing puddles. Now he felt more at home.
“Bad for you on a personal level?” he asked. “On a parish or municipal or state or national level? Could it have global dimensions? What I’m really asking is, would its be, or could it become, a police matter?”
All she could say was “I don’t This is my first time chasing a puddle.”
She was considering how best to explain the situation when someone nearby said
“Is this it?”
She glanced up and across the road. There was another policeman standing on the other side. The top and the peak of his cap beaded with droplets of liquid.
He was pointing at a wet patch on the tarmac directly in front of him. The puddle had evidently made a left turn and was making its way down the hill towards the shops.
She hurried over to where it lay and mopped it up as best she could with the towel, causing a car to brake sharply and swerve around her.
The driver wound his window “Fucking idiot. Get out of the she ignored him and carried on with the cleanup.
By the time she had finished and was ready to set out in search of the next puddle the first policeman had caught up with her and he was talking into his radio.
He said to her -
“I’ve spoken to the duty inspector and he says you aren’t doing anything illegal so I should just warn you to take care with the traffic and ask you nicely to stop before you get hurt.”
“I can’t stop,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
“That’s okay,” he said, sympathetically. “Just you take care
“I will.”
“And you might find this useful,” he said and he handed her a stainless steel coffee mug.
“ very much, . “How do I return it to you?”
“Just drop it off at the front desk of the station,” he said. “Tell them it’s for Officer Smith.”
The policemen got in their car and drove away.
While she was speaking to them the puddle had waited politely but as soon as they were gone it was off again.
She kept going. The puddle seemed to have made up its mind that it was going down the hill. Once or twice the gradient was steep enough to cause trickles to break free and set off independently but she managed to catch them and blot them with the towel.
The area of town through which the puddle was leading her was not one with which she was well acquainted. The houses were larger than her own with neatly tended lawns and flower beds. They were houses of a kind that she and Mike had once aspired to owning or at least she had aspired to it. She wasn’t sure about Mike any more. Sometimes she thought he had given up on aspiration.
There was a grass verge between the path and the roadway and there were trees planted at regular intervals - a cherry by every front gate and a silver birch at the halfway points. The cherries were in bloom, some with tightly packed blossoms of deep red and others which had already burst wide open to reveal huge pink, almost white, blossoms. They looked like a row of clouds.
They reminded her of a trip they took together, when they were very young, before they were married. Somewhere in Spain they came across a wide, shallow valley filled with cherry trees in blossom, all in rows and stretching for as far as the eye could see. They ate their meal that night on a terrace overlooking the blossom, the scent so strong and sweet you could taste it and that night they set their alarms to get them up at first light to go out with their cameras but when they got up and threw the blinds open they found that there had been an unseasonable frost in the night and the blossom had fallen and turned brown on the grass and all that was left was a valley of sticks. It was the first major disappointment of their lives as a couple and sometimes she thought that she should have taken it as an omen.
Another group of kids arrived on bikes and boards. They were slightly older than the ones from before and they were altogether more assertive. Thuglets. They pulled up, leaving their transport scattered across and more or less blocking the footpath. They crouched down, close enough to impede her progress and started asking her questions. They had their phones out and were shooting videos and uploading them and laughing and each other when they got likes or comments.
“Lady,” one of them said, “You’re viral.”
The puddle was no respecter of the demands of social media and while they were talking to her it had moved on. She stood up and picked her way through the bikes and chased after it.
The kids soon got bored and went away but it wasn’t long before she got more visitors, starting with a couple of bloggers, two journalists for the local paper and a film crew from cable news.
They each asked her name and address and what the reasoning behind her puddle chase might be, which meant she had to deal with the same questions over and over again, which was a nuisance. It didn’t seem to occur to them to pool the information.
She decided to keep the answer to the first question private. Of course people who knew her would recognise her on their screens but there was no reason why she should make the reporters’ jobs easier. As to her motivation she had no idea and she said so.
The media people seemed to find this all a bit dull. As soon as they had their images and footage and scrappy notes they left but as they went she heard a reporter say,
“I’ve never seen anything like it,”
And another one said,
“There was a guy came through this way one time, trying to set a world record for pushing a peanut from to John O’Groats with his nose. What a mess that was. Nearly scraped it clean off. bastard.”
Mike came by just as it was getting dark. She was about through a mopping cycle. He parked across the road. The kids were with him. She could see their dark shapes in the back. She couldn’t see their faces. Mike slid out of the door and quickly shut it behind him. The lights clicked and flickered on and off when he pressed the button on the auto lock. He turned slightly as he walked and she knew that he was trying to hide her from the kids.
A camera flashed and Mike held his arm up to his face. He wouldn’t want to be in the paper. He was still dressed for work. She wondered what he had been doing that had prevented him from getting changed and coming sooner.
He squatted down in front of her, balancing on his heels with his elbows on his knees and his fingers interlocked. He looked troubled but he didn’t say much other than -
“The plumber said to tell you ‘Hi’. He didn’t know where you’d gone.”
She nodded apologetically. A couple of times he tried asking why, but he stumbled over his words and she had no answer to give anyway.
After two or three minutes of failed interaction he said, “I’m going to bring the kids over. They’re scared. Don’t scare them any more.”
He went back to the car, shielding his face again. From the boot he produced a small folding chair, a fleece jacket, some more gloves and kneelers and some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, which made her think that maybe he had already figured that he wasn’t going to be able to stop her.
She thanked him, put the jacket on, put the policeman’s cup in the pocket, set the chair upright and sat on it and poured herself some coffee. She was acutely aware that the barrier was approaching and that she would need to be moving soon.
“Meet me up by the next lamp post,” she said. “Bring the kids,” and she was up and away before he had a chance to reply. She had the gloves and kneelers tucked under one arm. She did not take the chair or the thermos with her. As she walked she wrung the towel out into the gutter.
As she reached the next puddle Mike pulled up alongside her. He came round and let the kids out onto the path and they stood in a row in front of her. She didn’t know what to say so she kept her eyes low and studied their shoes intently as if they contained some sort of message. She continued to mop at the puddle with the towel.
Kevin’s shoes were as scuffed as ever and there was dry mud on the hem of his trousers. He had been playing football. He would rather be playing football now. She didn’t mind. How could she? He wasn’t the one chasing damp patches down the road. Peter’s shoes were almost as shiny as his father’s. Kitty wore pink sandals with pictures of unicorns on them. They had velcro fastenings. She had a habit, when she was feeling insecure (which was more often than either of her parents really liked to admit), of standing on the ball of one foot while rubbing the back of her calf with the upper of the other and she was doing that now.
“Are you coming home now?” Kevin said.
“Not now,” she said, “but soon.”
He nodded solemnly and turned away a little as if he needed time to digest her answer fully.
Peter looked towards his Dad for guidance but none was forthcoming. Mike seemed as puzzled as the kids. Peter didn’t speak.
Kitty took a doll from her pocket, a woman in blue with a white headscarf, carrying some sort of parcel. It was a Virgin Mary that she herself had knitted one year as part of a nativity to go at the foot of the tree. Kitty leaned down so that the doll was in her eyeline and she reached out and took it.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll look after it.”
Kitty shook her head a little.
“It’ll look after you,” she said.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll bring it home soon.”
Kitty nodded but she didn’t look entirely convinced. She held her hand out palm upwards and caught a drop as it fell. She inspected it carefully in the light of a streetlamp then flicked it away and wiped her hand dry on her dungarees. She put her hand into her pocket and withdrew a small parcel which she handed over. It was wrapped in one of the plastic bags that she used for their packed lunches. She looked inside it and found that it contained two slices of unbuttered bread.
“Thank you,” she said.
“In case you get hungry,” Kitty replied.
Something about the way they were standing made her look up and she realised that they resembled the children in old who were being evacuated to the countryside or saying goodbye to parents who were bound for the front and whose return was uncertain. They looked awkward, as if they knew that they should be feeling an emotion appropriate to the moment but were insufficiently experienced in the matter of strong feelings to summon one up. It felt like they had already decided that they were losing her and they were wary of exposing their own vulnerability.
“Take care of each other,” she said and then she stood up, kissed the palm of her hand and placed it briefly on each of their heads in turn. She nodded to Mike and then walked on in search of the next puddle.
She heard Mike say, “Okay kids, in the car,” and then she heard the engine start and he drove off.
The sky grew darker as she approached the lake area on the south side of town. The night was breezeless and the water was still as glass and as black as treacle. There was a row of lights in the car park. She got a few more visits, mostly from teenagers in their parents’ cars and a number of derisive serenades from their horns but after midnight everything went quiet. There were shreds of mist hanging over the water and big moths came out of the fern banks at the edge of the forest and buzzed above her head.
There was a jetty that led out into the deep water and the puddle led her along it to the far end where a huge cream coloured moon hung low in the sky, almost kissing its own reflection. This moon was called the sturgeon moon, after the lake fish that congregated in numbers in the shallows in late August and whose meat, smoked and salted, would once have sustained the local people through the length of the cold winter. The lake was no longer an important food source. Nowadays it was a popular area for recreational activities such as boating, pleasure fishing and furtive sexual encounters.
When she reached the end of the jetty she took out the bread that Kitty had given her and broke it into pieces. She took one crust and lay down on the planking and let her arm hang over the edge so that her fingertips touched the water. Within a few moments she felt a fish back brush against her hand, cool and muscular, and then more came. Soon the water was alive with fish and the reflected moon was riven by their black shapes and the sound of their backs breaching echoed across the lake.
The bread didn’t last long. When it was all finished she stood up, walked back to the forest edge and set off walking again.
It wasn’t easy keeping track of the puddle in the dark and damp, but it seemed to be co-operating with her, forming in clear areas where it could be found easily enough.
When the sun came up she was in open country pursuing the cloud into the dawn. It was not somewhere that she recognised. She could not see any roads or buildings. There weren’t even any birds.
By the next afternoon there were signs up all over town, printed on A4 paper, and tucked into plastic sleeves and fastened with pins to noticeboards and telegraph posts, to the inside of shop windows.
They said “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?” and showed a particularly unflattering photo of her.
Reports came in. At first there were dozens a day. After a year it was down to half a dozen a week.
She had been seen in Aberdeen, Bradford, Ipswich, Newquay and many points between. She seemed to be heading south.
The description varied. She was a white woman. She was black. She was . She was blonde, dark, , with long hair, , a bob. Once she was bald. She was equipped with a variety of towels, , rags, cups, bowls, jugs.
The police believed that she was constantly modifying her appearance in order to avoid capture. They had an idea that she might be on the run for some sort of crime, possibly water or towel theft.
She wore jeans, overalls, walking trousers with multiple pockets. T-shirts in a variety of colours. Kneelers. They seemed to wear out quickly and whatever she was wearing, she always had knees.
A number of websites were set up to collate information about sightings, with maps, photographs and videos and accounts of alleged encounters.
The biggest, Path of the Puddle Woman (www.pathofthepuddlewoman.com) achieved peak membership of several hundred thousand subscribers and their premium service generated revenues of over a million dollars gross. Their most liked and shared post concerned a woman who reported that she had found a woman with badly blooded palms asleep on her porch and had taken her into the house and given her food and coffee. She was accompanied by a puddle which sat on the floor near her feet. The woman had thanked her and had cuddled her dogs and spoken to them in some sort of gibberish. The owner thought she might have mistaken them for children. When the man of the house came home from work the visitor left abruptly and disappeared again into a forested area.
Other headlines included -
PUDDLE SIGHTED TRAVELLING ON THE HARD SHOULDER OF THE A45 NEAR SUNDERLAND
PUDDLE OBSERVED TRICKLING DOWN HILL INTO THE RIVER DERWENT AND EMERGING SEVERAL MILES DOWNSTREAM
PUDDLE PARTIALLY CONSUMED BY DOGS DURING HEATWAVE CONDITIONS IN NORTH WALES
PUDDLE NOW HOME TO SMALL FISH AND AMPHIBIANS CLAIMS BEDFORD NATURALIST
PUDDLE EXTREMELY COLD AND WET, ACCORDING TO NORFOLK NATURIST
PUDDLE EXPANDS AFTER DAMMING BY REWILDED NORTH LONDON BEAVERS
PUDDLE MAY HAVE REMARKABLE HEALING PROPERTIES SAYS KENT NATUROPATH
PUDDLE MAY HAVE ESCAPED FROM LOCAL AQUARIUM, DOVER POLICE REVEAL NEW THEORY
REWARD OFFERED FOR INFORMATION IN CASE OF MISSING PUDDLE WOMAN. FUNDED BY A JUST GIVING ACCOUNT
UNCLAIMED REWARD TO BE DIVIDED AMONG LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS: TRIBUTES PAID TO HONOURABLE AND DILIGENT SERVICE