[Original Novel] The Black Pool, Part 4

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Just then, something passed by outside the door. I didn’t get a good look, only what I could see of it through the narrow opening. A bizarre, tangled, impossible silhouette...My second sighting, though I didn’t yet realize it.

Terror gripped my heart. Burglars? A wild animal? Camille? None matched whatever I glimpsed a moment earlier. So I stepped out of the bath, wrapped a towel around my waist and warily emerged to investigate.

The front door hung open. Muddy tracks stained the carpet, shaped nothing like the sole of any shoe I’ve seen. I did a quick inventory of my belongings but found nothing missing. Only then did I notice the cat was gone.

Must’ve been a vagrant who broke in meaning to rob the place, too fucked up on meth or whatever else to actually carry it out. Or maybe he spotted me in the tub and booked it, having wrongly assumed the apartment was empty on his way in.

No sense going out looking for the cat. In all likelihood she hauled ass out the door when the burglar broke in, and would be too spooked to show herself for a day or two. I considered calling the cops, but didn’t want the hassle or prolonged interaction.

I considered notifying the landlord, but he’d just call the cops himself and I’d wind up having to go through all that tedium anyway. Instead I set a dish of food just outside in case Goblin came back while I was sleeping, propped a chair against the door from the inside, then climbed into bed.

Sleep didn’t come easily. I had to get up twice to puke into the toilet, after which I started having hot and cold flashes. Absolute misery. Must be coming down with something. For an hour or so I just couldn’t get warm no matter what I did.

Then for the next hour, I overheated even after stripping down and throwing off the covers. Nothing in the medicine cabinet looked appropriate for my symptoms. Nothing to be done except try to get as much sleep as possible, and hope I felt better come morning.

But when I next awoke it was not to a clear head, nor to the rising sun. Instead I awoke to the feeling of some heavy, ungainly creature perched on my back, pinning me down. My heart pounded, but before I could cry out or fight it, something pierced the back of my neck.

Whatever it injected made me go limp. I was still fully conscious but paralyzed as a second horrid monstrosity, obscured by the darkened room, loaded me onto the first creature’s back. I could feel it struggle somewhat to bear me along. Perhaps it normally targets smaller prey.

Even if I could move, I wouldn’t have been able to free myself. I was bound to its sleek, segmented carapace with some sort of sticky fiber. My mind raced feverishly, trying to work out what the fuck it was, where it came from and where it could be taking me.

A nameless fear silently gestated within my chest...one I dare not believe in until we reached the field. The moon loomed large overhead as the chittering, crawling beast beneath me made its way to the center of the field. Then down into the great, gaping hole.

Blood rushed to my head as we descended into the Earth. A starry patch of night sky, framed by the mouth of the hole, was the last thing I saw before I blacked out. Indeterminable hours passed while shadowy forms swirled about my subconscious.

I next awoke on the agonizingly cold, rough stone floor of a cavern. The ceiling was also roughly hewn grey stone, stalactites descending from it here and there. The first thing I did was check my body for injury.

I hurt all over, but that was mostly down to sleeping in an odd position on such an unforgivingly hard surface. My pale, clammy skin was marked all over with numerous cuts, scrapes and bruises...but nothing serious.

No broken bones, no sprains even. It surprised me to wind up at the bottom of a hole in such good condition until I remembered how I got there. I scrambled to my feet, whirling this way and that, searching the darkness around me for any sign of the creatures.

I found none in my immediate vicinity. But I did find five more naked, frightened looking hostages. Prisoners? I couldn’t yet say anything with certainty about the reason for our abduction. Only one made eye contact. A few stared silently into the distance, knees to their chests, slowly rocking.

Others lay curled up in the fetal position with their eyes closed, murmuring softly to themselves. All of them were situated around the edge of a natural pit in the floor, perhaps fifteen feet across, filled nearly to the brim with oily black syrup.

Directly above the pool, faint rays of morning sunshine radiated from a hole in the ceiling. The one I was brought here through, no doubt in my mind. The light was just enough to dimly illuminate the pool and a modest area around it.

Try as I might, I couldn’t stop shivering. My teeth chattered too, as did those of the fellow nearest me. “Wh-what is this?” I stammered. “Where are we?” He just kept staring at me, arms wrapped around his knees as he violently shivered.

I searched in vain for some sort of weapon. Something sharp, or something that would make for a serviceable club. Nothing to be had but other people. Frightened, naked masses of humanity, huddled together beneath the only source of light as moths might circle a flame.

My next thought was where my phone wound up. Would it even work this far underground? As I ventured further and further from the light’s edge in search of it, I realized nobody would come looking for me.

Nobody. I’d set up my life just about perfectly in order to wind up missing without anybody who lives in the same complex even realizing it. My family back home would be the first to know I’d gone missing. Camille, if not for them. Then the landlord would take notice when I don’t pay rent.

My stomach sank as I entertained, for the first time, the notion that I might be down here long enough for that to occur. So cold! I returned to the meager patch of damp grey cavern floor around the pool which the sunlight illuminated.

It was some small comfort to feel sunshine on my skin. Small then. I didn’t yet know, you see. Probe as I might into the darkness I could find no walls to this cavern and thus, no tunnels through which I might return to the surface.

I grew more and more frantic until the fellow I’d first made eye contact with seized me by the wrist. “Settle down. We tried that already. Don’t you think we tried? That was the first thing.” The blackness encroached so snugly against the edges of the light, with a nearly palpable presence.

“What is any of this?” I begged. “Where the fuck are we?” He motioned for me to sit down. “At the bottom of the hole, of course. They brought you down here like the rest of us. Although probably you were on your way down here anyhow.”

He handed me something resembling beef jerky. I accepted, though under the circumstances I had no intention of eating it, and asked what he meant by “on my way”. He reclined with suspicious calmness, slipping his legs into the bubbling black sludge.

“You were unloved, weren’t you. But that’s no crime in itself! Countless tiny little beetles, spiders and worms go through life unloved simply because nobody notices them. But you also didn’t love anybody yourself, am I right?”

He actually waited for me to say something, so I told him none of this babble got us any closer to the surface and that we should be collaborating to find a way out of this damp, horrible pit. “Probably not for lack of love thrown your way if I had to guess” he added.

I took him by the shoulders. “What the fuck are you talking about? We need to get out of here! If we climb on one another’s backs we might be able to-” He stopped me there. “Nope, that’s why there’s five of us. We can’t even reach the cavern ceiling with just five. That’s why they don’t bring more at once.”

Tears began to flow, though I was so numb I didn’t realize it until some wound up in my mouth. “They? What the fuck are you talking about? You, me and the others? Who is “they”? You’re crazy. We need to get out of here!”

I tried without avail to rouse the others. Catatonic for the most part, or violent when touched. Nobody else would speak to me or even so much as look at me. It seemed like my only option, if I meant to make it out of here, was to cooperate with a madman.

“Listen. Maybe you’re right about me. Is that what you want to hear? Alright, nobody liked me. I didn’t ask them to. I’m not asking you to like me now. I don’t fucking want to run for mayor, I just want to get out of this pit I woke up in. I just want to get out.”

He wore an expression I’ve seen so rarely before that I can’t place it. Smiling, but mournful, as if I said something tragically stupid that I don’t yet realize the larger meaning of. “You could’ve made some effort you know. Cautious, friendly feelers were extended in your direction. Only to be stepped on.”

No, fuck this. I shoved him away and resumed patrolling the edge of the light. “It isn’t any use. There’s nothing but darkness in every direction, forever. It has you now, all over and done with the moment you crossed the threshold. The sooner you accept that, the better.”

I shouted obscenities at him. As if that would make him wrong. As if it would suddenly reveal some hidden passage to the surface that I somehow missed until then. Of course it didn’t, only more blackness.

Worse still, once I ventured far enough from the sunlit pool, I nearly lost sight of it. That’s when I first realized that the ever-present darkness down here isn’t simply darkness. There’s substance to it, like a thick fog. I couldn’t see but twenty or so feet ahead of me in any direction!

Fear led me straight back to the sunlit pool over and over. There was simply nowhere else to go but into darkness. Into the unknown. Right then I desperately wanted comfort, and the only comfort available was the faint warmth of sunlight on my skin. How I came to cherish it.

The light isn’t always your friend, though. I didn’t realize it was preventing my eyes from properly adjusting until, on one of my longer ventures into the darkness, I first spotted one. Well, the fourth time really, if you want to pick at nits.

Something like a gargantuan earwig, easily seven feet long. Or cockroach? It had anatomical features of both, as well as immense compound eyes. I gasped and took a few steps backward. It shifted subtly as though uncertain what I’d do next, but not afraid of me.

It was hideous and altogether alien. I mean, it looks like many other common insects I was no doubt surrounded with daily back on the surface, I just don’t normally see them so close up. At this scale, they make a lot of the same sounds any other animal makes. At least the ones related to breathing.

It grunted, issuing a billowy cloud of stench from its huge, bristly mouth parts. Now more fascinated than fearful, I studied the beast more closely. Only for two more just like it to approach on either side.

When I didn’t retreat on my own, the three of them began advancing on me. Shepherding me, slowly but surely, back into the light. Once I complied, they withdrew into the shadowy fog. Skitter, skitter, inch by inch, until I could no longer discern even their silhouettes. They melted right into it, as if they’re simply solid forms which the darkness takes on whenever necessary.

I didn’t stray for a long time after that. They’d be looking for me now. If I meant to escape, it would have to be the way I came. As I sat there by the pool, deep in thought, I noticed the poor demented fellow from earlier rubbing black slime on his arm.

“What is that stuff?” He turned very slowly to meet my gaze, smiling softly. Just once it’d be nice to see him frown, given the circumstances. “Nothing” he responded. “Does wonders for cuts and scrapes though. Not much point, but I like to stay pretty in between.”

In between? Between what? I brushed it off as so much nonsense. But as I watched, everywhere he covered a wound in the black slime, he then wiped it away to reveal unblemished pale skin. That much, I could not chalk up to his mental condition.

Is it really possible? I assumed the black slime was just runoff or something. Maybe the pit was used for dumping toxic waste at one point. I leaned in to study the gently bubbling surface of the noxious brew more closely. Within it, countless tiny wriggling creatures swam to and fro.

Tadpoles? Not quite. I picked one out of the goo and examined it. Once wiped clean, I discovered it was bone white and resembled a spermatozoa. “Oh don’t manhandle those” the other fellow babbled. “They’re what makes it all work. If they catch you hurting one…”

I didn’t need to be told twice, depositing the writhing, slithery little thing back into the putrid soup it came from. The light by this point was noticeably dimmer. The sun must be setting topside. Opposite me, the rest all huddled together.

“Do you want in on this or don’t you?” I asked what they were doing. “What you’d be doing if you were smart. You think it’s cold now, wait till the sun’s down. All we’ve got for warmth in this deep, black pit is each other. Last chance.”

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