[Original Novel] The Black Pool, Part 5

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I declined, opting instead to curl up on the hard, damp, cold cavern floor. I didn’t know these people and had my doubts about their sanity. Even in a place like this, I wasn’t about to let a bunch of naked strangers spoon me.

There was just no getting comfortable. I couldn’t stop shivering, and no patch of cavern floor was any better or worse than any of the others I tried. However I curled up, it did nothing to warm my body, as I had no blanket or anything else to cover myself with.

I lay there for a time, propped up against the base of a fractured stalagmite. Fresh tears retread the paths laid down my face by those before them. This can’t be the rest of my life, can it? There has to be a way out of here.

Somehow I actually managed to fall asleep like that. The others were by that time already sound asleep in their great, fleshy pile. I began to wonder if I might’ve made the wrong choice by turning them down earlier.

It didn’t make much difference when the bugs came for us. Just that most of the food was neatly piled up for them, that’s all. I only realized what was happening because they tore into the others first. But before I could get up and run, two of the bugs pinned me.

What follows remains the most excruciating pain of my life. I felt nerves and muscle tearing as they pulled my leg out of it’s socket, then ripped it free from my body. Blood gushed out of the ragged stump as two more fought over the freshly severed leg.

I couldn’t form words. Not that they could understand it if I begged them to stop eating me alive. It’s something that almost every living creature experiences, but which humans are uniquely safe from thanks to modern civilization. Except for certain unusual situations of course.

It turns out one of those situations is being devoured by giant insects as you scream until hoarse, blood bubbling up in your throat. My arm was the next to go. The still unbearable pain from before muted it somewhat, but I still threw up in shock when they ripped my arm off.

The sickening crack of splintering bone followed. Then eager slurping sounds as they separated the parts of the limb they wished to eat from the parts they didn’t, mandibles furiously moving about almost too quickly to see.

Soon their heads were absolutely caked with my blood. It dripped from every bristle, collected beneath their massive bulbous eyes, then pooled under them on the cavern floor below. I felt myself losing consciousness just as the creatures, apparently finished feasting on me, dumped my remains into the pit of black stuff.

This is it, I thought. Of all the possible ways to die...but at least it’s over. I readily sucked the foul, soupy fluid into my lungs. Drowning is an unexpectedly painful way to die, but after what just happened it felt downright merciful.

Then I woke up. Still immersed, disoriented but somehow with all of my limbs restored. I swam desperately for the surface, and upon reaching it, gasped for air. Once I made it to the edge and pulled myself out, I sputtered in disbelief.

When you wake up after something like that, it’s either very good or very bad. In this place I could hardly imagine it meant anything good. I hurriedly examined the parts of my own body I’m able to see for any sign of injury. Nothing!

I spit out as much of the black goo as I could, then put two fingers down my throat. The rest of it came up shortly after that. The fellow from the other day laughed at me, still smug when I turned to glare at him. “What the fuck was that!?” I shouted. “...You know, don’t you.”

He urged me to keep my voice down, explaining that loud noises agitate the creatures. “Easy fella. It was jarring the first time it happened to me, too.” So it really happened? I demanded to know how I could be not just alive, but physically intact after those things gorged on my flesh.

“I told you how the slime works, didn’t I?” He gestured to my hand as I wiped more of the sticky black shit off my body with it. “They come after the sun goes down. They feast. The black pool revives us, regenerates us...so they can come and feast again the following night.”

I thought I already understood what my life would be, even if I didn’t want to accept it. But as he spoke, the rest of the grisly ‘big picture’ slowly unfolded before me. It can’t be. Can it? The evidence of my senses told me so, but my mind stubbornly rejected the unbearable implications.

They’re farming us. Has to be. Not exactly, but something close. There’s no need to breed us with one another, not when they’ve got this black pool to dump us into when they’re done feasting. We’ll just come out good as new, every time....almost, anyway.

I’ll never really get used to being eaten alive night after night, but after the first couple times I grew accustomed enough that I wasn’t afraid of it anymore. It became part of the rhythm by which I marked the passage of days.

As I carved another notch into the base of the broken stalagmite I was using as a calendar, my hand itched. But when I scratched at the itchy spot, the feeling only intensified, so I took a closer look. I found the beginnings of a fingernail sprouting from just beneath one of my knuckles.

I balked. But sure enough, that’s what it was. I had enough to worry about already, so I ignored it for the time being. On my way back to the sunlit pool, I tripped over something which I discovered, upon bringing it into the light with me, was my own bloody femur.

I gagged and dropped it in fright. It became real for me then. Completely, unreservedly. I’d just held my own remains, there was no longer room for doubt. That’s when I at last accepted that I was down here for the long haul, not just until some miraculous escape opportunity presented itself.

That’s a terrible habit to fall into. Thinking of yourself as the main character in a story, who can therefore never come to serious harm. “I don’t know how I’ll make it out of this” you might think, “but it’ll be okay.” Not because it necessarily will, but because the alternative is too distressing to contemplate.

I’m not going to be okay. I will never be okay again. My future, so far as I could tell, would be a possibly never-ending cycle of feasting and rejuvenation that I could imagine no escape from. So, I began at least trying to make myself as comfortable as possible.

No easy task, given how little I had to work with. But the bugs left scraps of my skin behind that I soon realized I could tan in the sunlight. I used my own urine in place of tannic acid as I once read you can make salmon leather that way. The only alternative was to make stiff rawhide which wouldn’t be much use.

It was a complete disaster the first few times I tried it. But that gave me time to strategize. If I pinned one of my arms or legs beneath a sizable rock just before they came to feast, more often than not it was still there after I pulled myself from the black pool.

That gave me much larger contiguous pieces of skin to work with. That, plus an increasingly refined tanning methodology, soon produced usable pieces of leather. I noticed in the process that two of the others, who never acknowledged me until now, were closely studying how I went about it.

I asked what they wanted, but got no response. So I just kept at it until I had enough for a blanket. It was promptly stolen from me. I made another in the same way, and another, until they had all the blankets they wanted. Only then was I left alone with mine.

Eventually I had enough for crude but serviceable garments. The others were routinely collecting their own remains by this point, copying the tactics they saw me use to trick the bugs into leaving whole limbs behind.

It didn’t do much to keep me warm, but having clothes to wear restored some meager feeling of control over my own life. Even though every night, I could do nothing else but disrobe and stack all of it beneath a nearby rock if I wanted it to still be there the following morning.

What a strange feeling, to wear your own skin. I suppose I always have...just not so indirectly. Indignity upon indignity, though of course that was far from the worst of it. The days blew by in this manner as I continued stockpiling my remains, this time in order to fashion weapons from the bones.

But at the same time, I noticed my body changing. Not at a linear rate either, but with accelerating severity. First it was the fingernail under my knuckle, which then sprouted into an entire additional finger. Then I found a new eyeball just above my right nipple which I could actually see out of.

The human brain isn’t wired properly for more than two eyes, so I kept it shut most of the time as otherwise it was nauseating. Just a bandage on a gaping wound, which only further widened by the minute. Teeth appeared on one of my shoulders, eventually forming into an eyeless set of jaws.

My hair started falling out. Slowly enough at first that I wondered if perhaps it might be down to the stress. But before long I was totally bald, and could feel that even my cranium was starting to change shape.

I fretted and wailed, realizing that not even the purity and self consistency of my body would be spared, but it made as little difference as ever. The bugs still came to feast every evening, and I still dragged my drenched body out of the black pool every morning like clockwork.

I estimate a month went by, give or take, before I changed so much that the bugs no longer recognized me as human. The others aren’t as far along and have shunned me due to my comparatively more grotesque form.

The fools. They don’t realize they’ll be like me soon. If I’d known on my first night what I knew now, I might’ve sought closeness with them. That ship has sailed, hardly the first I’ve watched indifferently from the shores even before I wound up here.

It didn’t stop the bugs from feasting on me. However, when I next strayed from the sunlit area surrounding the pool, they didn’t come to shoo me back towards it. It was the first significant change in their behavior I’d so far witnessed, so it stuck out in my mind.

It only took the next feasting cycle to convince me it was worth it to press further into the darkness. Whatever I might find out there, it had to be better than this. There’s not much I can think of, however foul, that doesn’t beat being torn apart and eaten by giant insects.

So, upon dragging myself out of the black pool the next morning and scrubbing my body as best I could, I set off into the shadows. Not hoping for escape, as by then I’d given up on it, but for change. Any change at all to the usual cycle.

I’ve changed enough now that I don’t fear the unknown anymore. I am the unknown. Maybe that’s how it happens for anyone. There’s not likely to be anything out there, hiding in the darkness, that’s worse than me. So I left the others behind.

Despite my convictions, I felt foolish walking away from the only guaranteed light and warmth in this place that I knew of. What if the darkness really does go on forever? Without the black pool to regenerate me, wouldn’t I simply starve to death after a while?

But even that was preferable to business as usual. I didn’t even look back, no sense in inviting temptation. I found myself wishing for a mirror as I walked. The only sense I had of how advanced my mutation had thus far come were the parts of my own body I could see, and the reactions of the others.

I had nothing resembling skin anymore, except on my face. Instead, my limbs were chitinous. An exoskeleton. Not quite insectoid, still flesh colored, but also unmistakably inhuman. The movement of my elbows and knee joints now felt almost mechanical, as did the movement of individual fingers.

Oh, those fingers. They’d grown so long and spindly since I arrived. The tips, now hard and pointed, were coated in countless tiny little bristles that were very sensitive indeed. What would’ve become of me if I stayed by the pool?

No way of knowing, and no intention to ever find out. But based on the changes to my body, I could work it out for myself. This must be how they increase their numbers, by this gradual metamorphosis from human to insect. For what purpose?

With no sense of their intelligence, it was enough to assume they were simply pursuing an instinctual drive to continue their species. When they herded me back into the light, it suggested some rudimentary intellect...but even ants deliberately farm other insects.

I almost wished I’d stuck around to observe their behavior more thoroughly. I couldn’t make myself go back out of curiosity though, I knew enough about them by now to stay the fuck away. I just kept walking until exhaustion forced me to collapse and sleep, then continued when I next awoke.

That is, until I reached the end of the darkness. I can’t really wrap my head around how there could be a physically discrete end to it, but there was. When I passed out of that wispy black fog, I suddenly witnessed something so beautiful to me that I struggle to describe it. A sight I dared not hope for all this time.

Freedom...of a sort. There had never been any cavern walls. I could now see that the cavern floor and ceiling didn’t come together anywhere, standing awestruck at the very edge of what I’d assumed until then was a subterranean cavity.

Where is this? How can all of this be at the bottom of some random hole in a field? A vast expanse of faint white fog spread out in front of me, punctuated by split stone pillars. Natural formations near as I could tell, if improbably regular in their distribution and proportions. It struck me as similar to a forest of petrified tree trunks, shrouded in luminous white mist.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 6!}