[Original Novel] The Black Pool, Part 6

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The pillars were clustered closely enough together that I could faintly make out movement in the one nearest me. The two halves of the pillar almost came together but not quite, leaving a thin sliver of open space between them.

By my estimation, about the same distance as there was from the floor of the “cavern” I now stood in and the ceiling. That’s when it dawned on me. I was currently standing within one of those split stone pillars. The space where they don’t quite meet.

It was never anything like a cavern. Am I even underground? What is all of this? What the fuck is it? How can it be here? As if to underscore my confusion, a flock of winged insects lazily passed in the distance, changing direction as a unified swarm in the manner I remembered seeing birds do it.

Those memories already felt like a lifetime ago. Back when I still thought this was only a hole in the middle of a field. Confronted by overwhelming proof to the contrary, all I could do was stand there, dumbstruck by all of it.

If this was all inside of a much larger cavern, I could see no signs of it. No rocky floor or ceiling were discernible on account of the white fog. The visibility was much better than the black fog, such that I could see even relatively distant split pillars. So if there actually are a floor and ceiling, they must be extremely far above and below me respectively.

The pillars must connect to something though, surely? Bit by bit, I pieced together in my mind a rough idea of how this place must be structured. Imagining then that it was possible for me to fully understand it, or that it couldn’t still surprise me.

The flock drew closer. I didn’t realize I was in any danger until it was nearly upon me. I threw myself to the ground just in time to avoid being knocked out as the swarm rushed overhead. They took up roost on the ceiling, clinging to stalactites.

Sensing an opportunity, I picked up a rock and threw it at one of them. Startled, it fell from its perch and I lunged at it. Wrestling something so vile, with so many bristly legs isn’t my idea of a good time. But once I tired it out, it grudgingly accepted its new passenger.

The winged bug proved much more docile than the ones which tended to the “cattle” at the sunlit pool. By tugging at clusters of long bristles behind its eyes I found I could steer it much as you would a horse. I had some doubts as to whether it could still fly with my added weight.

Those doubts were put to rest as it took flight, wings beating deafeningly to either side of me. I panicked as I had no idea how to direct it while airborne, but it seemed to instinctively maintain the appropriate altitude for traveling between the empty spaces which bisect the stone pillars.

Like countless little worlds unto themselves. Or islands in a sea of clouds. No telling what I’d find in the next one, but all I dared hope for was that it would be different from what I left behind. The next split pillar loomed larger and larger as I approached.

But something else also came into view. Just a massive, faint silhouette at first, which grew gradually more solid and clear. Even when I could see it properly, I couldn’t make sense of it. Something like a biological blimp?

The gas bag was covered in huge bioluminescent, transparent bubble-like pustules. Dozens of long, thin tendrils dangled from the creature’s body, like those of a jellyfish. Winged bugs buzzed around it, helplessly attracted to the light emitted by the pustules.

What is it? What could it possibly be? I had to get a closer look. A bulging cluster of what I assumed were vital organs dangled beneath the gas sack. On the tail end was a sail-like fin I assumed it flapped from side to side for thrust.

Without warning, the instant I flew close enough, one of the tendrils whipped towards me. In the split second before it impaled my winged mount, I noticed the tips were sharply pointed. I tumbled off its back...right into the open edge of the split pillar.

I blacked out on impact. Death, finally. But of course, I couldn’t escape so easily. Instead I awoke with a pounding head, coated in both the winged bug’s blood and some of my own. The creature which stood over me, studying my wounds with apparent concern, was at least as mutated as I.

He looked gaunt and white as driven snow, his mouth a ring of sharp little teeth with nothing resembling a lower jaw. Quite like the mouth of a lamprey eel. He was covered all over in weeping sores and his left leg terminated in a stump that apparently wouldn’t regenerate for some reason, but he could prop himself upright nonetheless.

He did this using a fleshy, pulsating trunk of flesh which sprouted from the left side of his head and neck, then extended down to the ground, terminating in something like a betentacled round foot. Despite myself, I recoiled from the sight.

Surely I’m no less disgusting by now. This new creature, formerly as human as I was, continued to study me for a time. I sensed no hostility from it, only curiosity. Then it spoke. It startled me, even though I knew of no reason it shouldn’t be able to.

I live in a world of monsters now, where I can assume nothing about anyone. Even the bugs may be brighter than they seem. It spoke with a man’s voice, asking if I could walk. I found I could stand alright but I’d landed on my arm, which felt as if I must’ve broken it in several places.

Shooting pain nearly made me collapse, but the stranger came to my aid, holding me on my feet. I mistook it for kindness until he slipped a leathery loop of rope around my neck. I pulled away and tried to flee, but it only tightened as he yanked me back.

“What do you want from me?” He told me I couldn’t be trusted yet. That I might be dangerous, but that if I came quietly he could heal my injuries. I grudgingly obeyed, taking note along the way that the rope had the same consistency as my garments.

The entire time I was on the lookout for opportunities to slip my bonds and make a run for it. But once we reached the middle of the pillar, such thoughts immediately evaporated. Before me stood a dingy white fortress, walls made of rough, pale bricks. Once we got close enough to examine them, the main doors turned out to be fashioned from bones, lashed together with leathery cord.

“I don’t understand. There’s no black fog here. Where I came from, there was this dense black fog everywhere.” He explained that the black fog is an illusion meant to keep us from straying too far from the “rejuvenation pits”, as he called them.

“Once you crossed the boundary, it no longer had any hold on you. So the illusion fell away. That’s also how the rest of us escaped.” The rest of us? He swung the door open and my jaw dropped. There was an entire village inside, populated with all manner of partially metamorphosed monstrosities like us.

The absolute last thing I expected to encounter down here was any semblance of civilization. As he led me inside, I studied the various tents distributed throughout the interior of the fortress. The tent poles were all fashioned from bone, the fabric was predictably the same sort of leather I’d fashioned my garments from.

“This is incredible. How did you build all this?” He pointed to one of the mutants, currently busy pouring steaming white sludge into brick shaped molds. “The bricks are made from powdered bone, bound together with an adhesive made from boiled ligaments. Our own remains, fished out of the black jelly.”

Indeed, there was a pit of black goo in the center of the settlement with a shaft above it. I stopped in my tracks, but he reassured me we were safe. I didn’t believe him until he led me to a stable, also made from lashed together bones, in which several bugs were restrained.

Another monstrosity milked the abdomen of the nearest bug. It secreted familiar black sludge into a bowl fashioned from the top half of a human skull. “You’ve...been down here a while” I muttered, “haven’t you.” He stared wistfully into space. “We all have.”

I then asked why they didn’t simply build a structure with which to reach the surface. “No need. We can just ride the bugs. That’s how we conduct raids of the surface to bring back more food for the captive insects.”

I choked. “You what? You mean to tell me you bring innocent strangers down here and feed them to those things?” He didn’t take kindly to being judged. “We’re just making the best of a bad situation. Same as you were before I found you, isn’t that right?”

I insisted it wasn’t remotely comparable. “After all you’ve been through, how could you subject other people to it?” He assumed a subtly defensive posture. “Who said anything about people? If you saw them yourself, you wouldn’t...Look, there’s a lot you don’t know about this place. You’ll understand if you go up the shaft.”

In order to do that, I first had to fix my arm. This entailed biting down on a piece of leather as one of the villagers amputated it with a saw which was itself carved from bone. After that, I submerged myself up to the neck in their black pool. When I emerged, my arm had fully regrown.

The next step was to request permission from their leader. They warned me before entering his tent, the largest and most ornate of the bunch, that he’s suffered more mutation than any of them. It turned out to be a severe understatement.

The tent interior was dark enough that I could barely make him out. Or her. No way to tell until it spoke. But even when the first words escaped its convoluted mouthparts, it was too far abstracted from human vocal patterns to say anything concrete about who or what this creature was before the bugs did their thing.

“Why have you come here” it gurgled. I explained everything as best I could remember, from the day that I saw the suited men removing the insectoid remains to present. “...I see. Do you come from another settlement?” I shook my head and described the time I spent by the sunlit pool with the others.

The mountainous, jiggling mass of mismatched body parts released a guttural sight. “Primitives. How I hoped you had resources to pool with ours. No matter. I’m told you don’t yet comprehend where you are. What it is that you’re inside of.”

I disputed that, describing the cosmology of this place I had so far worked out in my head. “Still just a glimpse” it insisted. “You have my permission to ascend the shaft and see for yourself. Then you’ll understand.”

That’s all I needed to hear. Soon I’d be back home. None of this would matter. I wouldn’t need to understand anything more about this place if I could escape it! The hobbling creature with the lamprey mouth then led me to the center of the settlement.

Another of the mutants brought me a docile bug fit with a saddle and reins. I was offered brief lessons in how to ride it but I declined, eager to be on my way. With a little experimentation I worked out on my own how to control the beast. Gripping the edges of its carapace tightly to avoid falling off, I rode it up the nearest wall of the fortress and onto the rocky ceiling.

I then made my way to the bottom end of the shaft. What exhilaration when I passed over the rim and began ascending it! At last, a way out of this fucking nightmare. On and on it went, the tiny speck of light in the distance growing ever larger along the way.

The closer I got, the more the texture of the tunnel around me changed. Where it had been rocky at the bottom of the shaft, it now transitioned gradually into a soft, undulating, fleshy material I couldn’t guess at the nature of. Nor did I particularly care, so long as I could leave it behind and return to a normal life.

I emerged onto the roof of a rusty, circular iron building of some kind. All manner of pipes and clunky air circulation machines surrounded me. When I looked back at the tunnel I stepped out of, I nearly collapsed in shock.

It wasn’t an opening in the Earth, but the orifice of an unfathomably long, thick tendril which trailed up into the sky. When my eyes followed it up to its source, just as promised, I at once understood. The entire sky was blocked out by a massive, pale, veiny creature.

Jet black eyes all over its surface from horizon to horizon periodically opened and closed. “What the fuck is that thing” I thought. “What holds it up?” As I scanned my surroundings I realized this was just one of thousands of towers, densely clustered, blanketing the landscape in every direction as far as the eye could see.

No grass or trees anywhere. Just endless rusty machinery, pipelines snaking across barren, rocky terrain from one tower to the next. It was bitterly cold, so it must’ve been fumes in the air rather than heat which made distant towers appear hazy. Everything further than a mile away shimmered subtly, like a mirage.

I began coughing erratically as the thick air pollution invaded my lungs. My eyes were also beginning to water. Everywhere I looked I saw another thick fleshy tendril, like the one I emerged from, reaching down to the top level of every other tower. Where am I? There’s no place like this on Earth that I know of.

Rather than wait to be seen, or worse, captured, I headed back into the tendril’s orifice. I didn’t especially want to, having just seen what it’s attached to, but I still meant to return home somehow. “This just wasn’t the right way” I told myself.

The transition was reversed this time, fleshy walls slowly hardening into stone as I progressed. Gravity also changed direction along the way, something I failed to notice before as the excitement of escape consumed me.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 7!}