[Part 1/2]

I watch for a minute more as the great shadow circles the platform. As it dips in and out of sight, ever-threatening to rise up and into plain view, overwhelming me, taking me as it took the corpses. And of course- trapped here on the platform as I am- there is in all likelihood next to nothing I’d be able to do in my defense.

I try to make out the shadow’s rough shape. Get a gauge on exactly what it is that I’m dealing with here. But every time it rises towards the surface… As my adrenaline surges and the deep-blue mystery below promises to give way to something more substantial, it just dips back down.

Waiting. Biding its time.

And eventually it simply disappears. I watch as it begins to shift and slither away beneath the water, gently rippling the surface with the mass displacement it causes as it moves… Vanishing away, back towards the direction of the slide and fading out of sight down into the depths.

I wait, and I watch.

For a long, long time.

My phone still works, but maddeningly only enough to input text into that curious, blue screen. It refuses to tell me the time, and as such I do not know exactly how long passes before I find the courage to return into the water.

…I have to, of course.

What other choice do I have?

Nothing else has come my way. There are no solid objects I can see in any direction, and my only hope of a change in environment is that blue light at the end of the mist.

So I have to go on. I have to.

I clamber over the rail and slip myself down into the water, doing my best to disturb it as little as possible.

Instantly afraid and hyper-conscious of my exposure to anything lurking beneath, I start to swim. Slow, powerful movements, gliding through the water to the limits of my abilities, focusing solely on the end ahead. On that blue light, drawing surely and steadily closer.

I resist the urge to look beneath the surface as I swim.

...It’ll do me no good.

All I’ll see beneath is the void. The deep, dark, endless void. And I daren’t tempt fate. I should think my mind would be overrun with panic were I to dip my face below the water. To see the appearance of some monstrosity beyond recognition emerge from the darkness far below.

And what could I do in such a situation anyway? What possible defense would I have?

So I just keep going. Praying silently as I leave the relative safety of the little platform far behind.

Through the mists ahead I see the unmistakable end of my surrounding fog-filled purgatory. I never thought I’d ever be so relieved to see a stretch of that damned, white-tiled wall, but here we are.

A passageway leads away through the wall, and it is this passage that is bathed in the blue light. It has no floor, however, so I will have to swim through it.

A sudden wave of cold passes over me.

The muscles in my body tighten, and with the end in sight, the fear that the shadow is now below me increases tenfold.

So much so, in fact, that I cannot prevent myself from looking beneath the surface.

I just have to.

I push my face beneath the water and bubbles stream up past my line of sight. A moment later and I am greeted by the sight of my arms. My legs.

...And the darkness of the deep.

From the very lowest depths of this gloom emerges a shape. Formless, yet dense. A blur arising from the world below. A rumble rises with it, and I jerk my head back into the air.

All pretence of care is lost as I throw myself through the water. Tearing across the surface as fast as I can, kicking for all I am worth towards what I have presumed to be the relative safety of the narrow passageway ahead.

Closer…

…

Closer…

It’s coming. The shadow is coming, Adrian.

I scream with desperation as my joints begin to burn, and at last I make it through the gap in the wall, swimming down the corridor as fast as I can.

My foot eventually strikes against something beneath me, and after a moment of near-debilitating panic I release to my overwhelming relief that it is simply the floor. Hard tile, rising up beneath me. I place my feet against it and scramble and splash my way up and out of the water, collapsing against a wall and struggling not to vomit, my raspy breaths heavy and echoed off the tile of the tunnel I find myself in.

Am I in Hell? I wonder briefly, retching and wiping my mouth, coughing and spluttering.

I feel so small in this place.

This sprawling, unending complex.

I want to go home, now. How do I get home?

I close my eyes, I try my best to remember how it was that I got here, exactly, but I am unable.

Once I’ve caught my breath I clamber to my feet, wincing, stretching out my legs, then striding down the length of the tunnel, my feet slapping against the tile with every step.

It widens into a hall much like all the others. The light in here is faint and green. A curved, tunnelled slide loops round and around and disappears beneath the water just ahead. To my left is a diving board, and memories are triggered of the diving board at the pool. The one I’d visit with my Dad. The one in this warped nightmare however is at least four times the height. It extends way up towards a section of vast, high ceiling. A ceiling that shimmers and ripples like the water itself.

I was always frightened by the diving board. The thought of jumping off something so tall unnerved me. My Dad had a go on it once, to show me that it was nothing to be scared of, but I still never went on it. Even when I was old enough to.

I look down at my shirt, the Hawaiian shirt that I’m sure belongs to my Dad, and I tug the collar.

I grimace and turn to the right, with the intention of passing around the water before me and heading through yet another arch in the wall.

As I do so, I hear the voice. Crackled, broken, distorted, from everywhere all at once.

“It’s the father. The father is the key. Proceed”.

In an instant, the water around me surges. It churns and begins to crash up against and over the tile like waves. The trickle that ran down a nearby slide becomes a raging torrent, spilling its output all over the floor, and it rushes past my ankles with a sudden strength.

“Oh Christ”, I mutter, running through the arch and into another hall, this one wider even than the first.

I stand on the second level. Water crashes and cascades in a rising crescendo, and I watch as the room’s pillars and slides are gradually submerged.

The various corridors and passageways out of the room close off to me one by one as their entrances dip beneath the water. My plan is to run around the edge, to pass through an open archway there and to hope for the best, but the sound of my father’s voice calling out to me from the rush of the water grabs my sudden, frenzied attention.

“Adrian!” I hear him call, “ADRIAN!” I look around, desperately, until I see him carried by the rushing of the river round a corner, arms thrashing.

“DAD!” I call out, abandoning my plan and skidding my way across the tile, jumping down into the water as close to the entrance of the corner as I can. The surge of the rapids grabs me at once, and I am rushed down a winding, open-topped corridor, one I recognize as the lazy-river. The one I used to play in all the time.

What I’m sure however was once a simple loop, gently carrying its passengers round and round in a circle, is now a roaring river, throwing its riders against the walls as it carries them through a labyrinth of passages.

“DAD!” I call out again, spluttering as a blast of chlorinated water splashes against my mouth.

“ADRIAN, PLEASE!” I hear him cry out again, and I propel myself through the water, fighting to keep my head in the air as I narrow the distance between us. The man is not as strong a swimmer as he once was.

I raise my head and I catch a glimpse of him, his arm out-thrown as he is hauled around the next corner by the relentless current.

“I’m coming Dad!” I call out to him, “just hang on a little longer!”

I kick for all I am worth, following after him, rising and falling against my will as the waves throw me around. Straining my muscles as I approach, my vision blurred by the froth and the spray, I reach out, and I grab him.

I hold him tight with both hands, “it’s alright Dad, we’ll get you of here!” I shout to him above the sounds of the waves, but he feels so cold.

Panicking, I look down at him, horrified by what I see to such an extent that for a second I simply release him in shock.

The man has no face.

No features of any kind at all, actually.

He is a dummy. A tool that lifeguards might use in training. He wears my Dad’s clothes and fake hair has been attached to the dummy’s scalp, but a dummy is all it is.

I grab it again, uncertain. Staring out and around down the river. “Dad?” I call out. “Are you there? Where are you?”

“What’s happening Adrian?” the dummy asks in my Dad’s voice. I look back at it at once, staring into its face, but there is no mouth. No way for the thing to speak.

“What the fuck is this?” I mutter, scared, and angry, now. “WHAT’S GOING ON? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” I shout out into the sky as the river rages.

But I receive no response. Not from above, anyway. “Where the hell are we?” my Dad asks, except… it isn’t my Dad. It can’t be. Every time I look at him, he’s just that ridiculous, lifeless dummy.

“…I don’t know… Dad”, I murmur in reply, coughing as water rushes up my nose.

When at last the river appears to be nearing its end and a platform becomes clear ahead, I reach out an arm to grab hold of the side.

The intensity of the waves and the river’s speed has died down significantly, and I am able to haul myself and the dummy up onto the side, with a little bit of effort.

Panting and wiping the water from my eyes, I look over at the dummy, sprawled out across the tile.

“…Dad?” I ask it, cautiously, but the dummy does not reply. It makes no further reply at all, actually, despite my several attempts.

I nonetheless opt to pick it up with a grunt, hauling it over my shoulder and carrying it through the only remaining archway available to me, and it leads into a room I’ve been in before.

The one with the diving board. That monstrous diving board, warped from my own memory, and in this moment I am reminded of the very first thing I saw upon my arrival in this place.

‘NO DIVING’.

A sign against the wall, a black stick figure crossed through in red, only, the diver wasn’t diving down. He was diving up.

I raise my neck to the ceiling above the diving board. To the watery, shimmery glow.

A humorless laugh escapes my throat.

“Is that it? Is that my way out of here?”

Movement catches my eye and I half-turn, looking up towards the ceiling.

There is another of those panels of blue, frosted glass. Eerie light spills from behind it, and shifting about beyond are those same, unsettling shadows.

“He is not ready”, comes a voice.

I glance down.

At the base of the wall below the glass is a hole in the wall, about the same size as myself. It is bathed in the exact same shade of blue as the kind behind the window, and it leads towards a set of tiled stairs, ascending upwards.

I consider this route. I consider heading through the arch and up the stairs.

Would it lead me to the room beyond the glass? Would I see for myself the source of the shadows?

I hear the sound of a gurgling drain, the kind a bath makes when the plug is pulled, and I turn around to see that the dummy has vanished. A great puddle of water remains, spilling out over the tile and pouring past my feet.

...I make my decision.

I head to the diving board. My intent whole-heartedly to leave this twisted world behind.

I’ve seen enough. I’m done.

“He cannot leave now”.

“He will never learn the truth”.

I ignore the voices.

I come to a halt at the base of the diving board’s enormous ladder, and after a deep breath, I begin to climb. Rung after rung.

Up I go. Up, up towards the board itself.

My stomach turns as I ascend, and I do my best to struggle through my anxieties. Childlike fears return to me, but instead of pushing them aside I allow them to wash over me, in the manner of the river. I feel them, ever-moving as I do so, rung after rung. Rung after rung.

And then I realign my thoughts on the goal. On getting out of here. The only way out, it would seem, is to break the rules and deal with the consequences.

NO DIVING.

We’ll see about that, I think with a bitter smile.

Up, up, up.

When I finally reach the summit and climb unsteadily onto the diving board, I become truly aware for the first time of how massive the structure really is. I am monstrously high off the ground, and it’s like I can feel a breeze against my face as I peer down over the side, hands shaking against the board.

The drop is nightmarish. Below me is nothing more than a wide, dark pool of silent water. Waiting to swallow me up.

I lift my head.

Above me is the shimmering, translucent ceiling. Flickering blue with occasional flashes of light from beyond. If I stare, if I really, really focus… I swear I can see shapes through the blur. Crude, solid shapes… but it’s impossible to tell exactly what it is that I’m looking at.

My heart pounds like a machine. I feel like I’m going to be sick.

What if this doesn’t even work? What if I screw it up and I crash back against the board, falling to the darkness of the void below?

But I have to try. I’ve been a pawn so far, pushed from place to place and merely reacting to the things around me. But now, I have made a choice. And I intend to stick to it.

So with blood rushing through my head, I stride to the end of the board, hyper-conscious of its narrowness, and I raise my head to the ceiling. I picture the stick-figure in my mind, diving upwards as he was to the world above, and off I go.

I throw my arms out before me, and I jump.

Upwards.

​

Imagining that the ceiling is the floor and that I am about to fall through it.

With my eyes closed tight shut I feel the pull of gravity shift. My inner-ears throb as my up becomes my down, and I am carried as I hoped, directly through the shimmer of the ceiling.

Like water it splashes and crashes against me and I feel myself completely submerged. I hear that voice again, like that crackly old speaker, but it is lost to the bubbles as I propel myself downwards… or… no, upwards.

I release a breath of air from my lungs and watch as the bubbles drift upwards away from me.

I follow them, kicking my legs and spreading out my arms, until at last I emerge from the water, gasping for air, scrabbling about for something to grab hold of.

I feel the edge of a tiled platform and pull myself onto it, shaking my hair of the water and blinking out the stuff in my eyes, cautiously taking in my surroundings.

I am alone, still, but I am not in the world below, anymore.

I sit by myself, at the edge of a pool. To my right is the entrance to a lazy river, and beyond are a pair of inter-linked slides. Directly ahead and on the opposite side of the pool is a sculpture of a white sphere with a crack down one side. It isn’t as large or as grandiose as I remembered it.

And to my left is an archway in the wall. It leads outside, to an area of open-air pool.

…Outside.

It’s night-time now, but the wall here is made of glass. I can look right through it and see the sky, with the moon and the stars reflecting their soft, ethereal glow against the face of the water.

I clamber to my feet and stretch my arms. I’m wearing different clothes, now. Soaked-through, of course, but mine. I set off towards an emergency exit, pushing through it with a clank and taking a long, deep breath of the cool night air.

I push aside the thoughts of the horrors I have faced, for now. There will be plenty of time to consider them later. The implications of my time in such a place, and the risk of an unwanted return one day.

But I think I’ll just get home, for now. Give my Dad a call. He’ll appreciate hearing from me, I should think.

Perhaps he’ll be amused to know that I paid our old pool a little visit.