Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  I mustn’t be dismayed by how she sounds—far away in the dark, her voice flattened and distorted by an acoustic I can’t place. She’s somewhere along the tunnel I’ve been following. “I’m here,” I call and turn in that direction.

  The camera has recharged enough to activate the sensor. I glimpse a stretch of floor and walls and even a hint of the ceiling. I have the impression—perhaps I owe it to the last time I used the flash—that they carry straight on for a considerable distance, which gives me the confidence to press on through the dark. I’ve heard no response to my call, and I’m wary of insisting; there’s no need to remind any pursuer that my parents are ahead, although I seem to have left behind the sense of pursuit. It could almost have been some kind of dream.

  My progress through the dark reminds me of one, especially since I’ve reverted to stealth. As long as I don’t need to hear my own sounds or to oversee the working of my muscles, my consciousness is prepared to let them go. I’m happy to be unaware how drenched I recently was, a sensation my body has subsumed. I’ve begun to feel like a sleepwalker despite my strides and my wakefulness. How far have I come? Where am I beneath? I must be within the ancient boundaries of Liverpool. Has night fallen up there? I attempt to read my watch by the glow of the sensor and then, having narrowed my eyes that felt enlarged by the dark, with the aid of the flash. That’s no use either. Moisture has rendered the face of the watch as featureless as a still pool.

  The condensation is inside the glass. At least the flash confirmed that the tunnel leads straight ahead. I don’t know when it finished sloping upwards. I wait for the residue of light to drain from my eyes, and then I let my body find the way. By now I’m convinced that the night is overhead, and my mind seems to reach up for it, only to be assailed by the impression that the landscape above me is showing too much of its age. I see a muddy lane made tortuous by haphazard ungainly houses in which lights flicker like will-o’-the-wisps that have strayed from the surrounding marsh. Black water crawls along the unpaved roadway towards the fitful glow of a lantern elevated beside a weather-beaten cross, behind which a cruciform shadow is prancing on the rutted mud. All this is oppressively real, and I can only fend it off by dredging my mind out of the past. That doesn’t work, because now I seem to be underneath a Victorian street more squalid than its predecessor. Tenements on either side of the enclosed court swarm with families, more than one of them to some of the cramped barely furnished rooms. They huddle away from the windows, which are letting in wind and rain along with the stench of the open sewer that runs along the middle of the lane. Are they also anxious to keep away from the denizens of the cellars? Whoever lives down there is closer to the darkness and the mud; it’s easy to believe that’s where they came from. They’re closer to me as well, and as my mind engages with them, theirs seem to reach for me.

  My mind recoils, shrinking like my eyes when the flash dazzled them, but the images stay more vivid than a remembered dream. Though the darkness lends them conviction, I mustn’t waste the power of the camera. They were the past, just remnants of the past, surely reshaped by waking dreams of it. Aren’t the earlier versions of the city not just drafts that were later reworked but a kind of dream the landscape had? Certainly I feel as if I wasn’t alone in dreaming what I just imagined. Perhaps the entire city and whatever it produces, human and otherwise, is a vast expansive recurring dream. If the dream I had in Frog’s Lane—in Whitechapel—wasn’t only mine, what does that imply or portend? I could fancy I’m an oracle who went unheard, not least by myself. My growing ease with the subterranean darkness has set my mind free to drift, but this doesn’t help my search. The clamour of the past within my skull seems to have given way to the babbling of John Strong—of his incoherent dreaming onto the page. I need to concentrate on whatever lies ahead.

  If the city is a dream or a series of dreams rendered solid, how much truer must this be of its buried secrets? They’re closer to the dark, after all—the solidified dark that’s the earth, which has done its best to engulf and diffuse and blacken the Pool. The proliferation of forgotten tunnels might have been trying to recapture the freedom of water, which brick and stone can’t begin to approximate. My mind sounds more than ever like John Strong, so that fumbling for the button on the camera feels like a bid to return to the present as well as to illuminate the route.

  The nearest section of the tunnel glows like embers someone’s breathing on, and I’m just able to see that it comes to some kind of an end. Is it a sharp turn or a junction? The tunnel can’t be blocked. The glow of the sensor wavers as I hurry forward, and it feels as if my consciousness is fluctuating. The tunnel does indeed end, but it isn’t quite impassable. Bricks have been dislodged from the wall across it, revealing utter blackness.

  The gap is about seven feet high and not much wider than my body. When I slit my eyes and set off the flash, it illuminates a passage through the sandstone. It’s too irregular to be artificial; it isn’t even upright but slants a few inches leftwards, extending further than my wary vision can take in. I have to wonder why it was bricked up and why it has been reopened, not to say from which side. Far more important, can my parents have squeezed through? They would have had a struggle if not worse. I’m waiting for the camera to recharge when my mother says “He’ll find us.” She’s too distant for me to judge her tone—I can barely distinguish her words—but she’s somewhere ahead. I step into the passage at once.

  I hadn’t grasped how thoroughly it slants. I have to bend well to the left to avoid bumping into the walls. Before long I feel so alarmingly contorted that I keep resting my hand on that side of the passage. The stone is so moist and smooth that I’m in no doubt the channel was formed by water. It seems to take minutes to straighten up, and I’ve scarcely rediscovered how to walk erect when my head is forced down by the roof. I’m made to duck and then to stoop, pressing my chin against my chest until I might as well not have a neck. At last I emerge into a narrow lofty chamber and regain my breath, but the route has further trials to offer. The ceiling drops again, so relentlessly that I’m reduced to a crouch and then to a squat in which I have to shuffle along on my haunches. How can my parents have dealt with this stretch? I feel as if the passage is teaching me all the shapes I never realised my body could adopt. My parents must be ahead, if only because they couldn’t have turned back; the passage is too constricted. I haven’t been able to rise from my squat when I’m required to squirm around a protracted bend with both hands on the walls. The sensation is so disconcerting that I resort to the flash, which shows me that the roof stays low until the bend cuts off the view. At least the walls are bare stone, however much they had begun to feel like slippery flesh. I keep reminding myself how it looked—how it must still look—until at last, having changed direction more than once, the passage widens and grows straight and high. I celebrate this with a glimpse of reddish dimness, but the prospect the sensor displays isn’t so appealing: while the roof stays a few inches above my head, the walls close in so that there’s barely space for me to walk between them. Before long I have to sidle, pressing my hands against the walls and eventually stretching out my arms on either side of me in an attempt to feel less confined. They only revive the sense that the substance of the walls is too close to my own, an impression that seems especially concentrated in the blackness in front of my face. It’s a struggle to reach for the camera, and when I succeed in triggering the sensor it shows me a glistening patch of sandstone, as far as I can discern it while being almost blinded by the nearness of the glow. The sight lacks reassurance, because I feel as if my right hand, which is groping ahead of the rest of me, is about to encounter an unwelcome presence in the dark. Something does indeed stir beneath my fingers, and I snatch my hand away. As I clutch at the camera the sensor flares again, and I’m just able to see that the chilly restless tendrils are trickles of water. They aren’t enough to flood the passage, although my feet grow wet as I sidle past. As my fingertips encounter more of the thin streams o
n the sandstone I begin to have the unhelpful notion that the water is flowing up the wall. I mustn’t give in to the idea or waste the batteries of the camera. A wet tendril seems to writhe away from my fingers, and another feels as though it’s dodging them, and then my hand and arm grope into space as far as they can reach.

  I have a sense of teetering on the brink of an abyss. As I recoil, the camera blunders against the wall. The echo of the impact suggests that the unseen space is enormous. My wary fingers grope along the streaming wall until it curves out of reach. They fumble at the dark and eventually locate the opposite wall, which curves away too. I inch towards the point where the passage widens, and then I press my clammy palms against the clammy walls while I edge one foot forwards. The floor continues ahead and to either side, but I rest my left hand on the wall for safety as I try the sensor. It shows me only a short stretch of wet floor ribbed like part of an enormous buried skeleton, and so I use the flash.

  It glares on the walls and the roof—at least, the nearest sections of them. The cave outside the passage rises to a height of twenty feet or more and grows at least as broad, but on the far side there’s blackness that the flash failed to alleviate, suggesting that I’m in the antechamber to a vaster cavern. It seems advisable to stay close to a wall, and I follow the right-hand one, having reminded myself of its course with the sensor. I can’t afford to be daunted by an impression that the cave is taking advantage of the darkness—that it’s changing or about to change in some way while I’m unable to see. If the floor feels soft as well as wet, that has to be mud or moss, and I don’t need to touch the wall. It isn’t until my footsteps audibly change that I’m driven to employ the flash.

  I’ve reached the far side of the cave. It does indeed give onto a larger space—so large that the flash leaves the depths ahead of me utterly dark. I barely glimpse the left-hand wall in the moment of illumination, but the other one is closer. As I make to follow it my mother says “That wasn’t lightning.”

  While she sounds more distant than ever, she’s somewhere ahead. My father mumbles incomprehensibly, and then they’re silent. They can’t be in the cavern, since there isn’t even a glimmer of whatever they’re using to find their way, unless the place is so gigantic that distance has rendered their light invisible to me. Are they close to an exit? Is that why one of them thought the flash could be lightning? I’m afraid that if I call to them they might flee into the city, where I’ll have to start searching for them all over again. Perhaps my mother wouldn’t let this happen, but I can’t take the risk. “It was me,” I only mouth, though vigorously enough to feel my lips take various shapes, as I set off along the wall.

  An echo dogs my footsteps, such as they are. It seems bent on demonstrating how minute they are by comparison with the vast blackness. Otherwise there’s silence so profound that it feels as if a crowd is holding its breath. Certainly I have a sense of being awaited. Has my mother succeeded in halting my father? I need to be quick. I lift the strap over my head and hold the camera in front of me at arm’s length as I activate the sensor.

  The reddish dimness glistens on a length of wall and a strip of smooth floor alongside it. The glimpse lends me the confidence for a few strides into the dark. Surely it can help me ward off the idea that more than my parents are awaiting me—that a multitude or something at least as considerable will be revealed next time I use the sensor. It’s just an unwelcome dream born of the darkness, which I can also blame for my sense that some all-encompassing transformation is imminent. Or has it already taken place under cover of the blackness? Some change has definitely overtaken my footsteps. They’re surrounded by more space, that’s all, or is it a different kind of space? I advance a defiant pace, and another, before I can’t bear the uncertainty. I stretch out my arm to its fullest extent—I feel as if the dark is adding to its span—and press the button halfway down.

  The sensor exhibits another length of wall and the corresponding strip of floor. What’s odd about the sight? It’s somehow different from the last section of cave that I saw. The visible area of the floor is narrower. Surely the batteries aren’t running out, but what’s the alternative? When I direct the sensor away from the wall, it still displays just a length of floor less than a yard wide. I hold the camera out and set off the flash.

  It doesn’t just illuminate my route. It frames the darkness that’s ahead and, worse, beside me. The lit section of the floor was so narrow because there’s no more to it. I’ve been striding carelessly along a ledge not much wider than my body above a chasm too extensive and too deep for the flash to touch its limits.

  I stagger back from the drop, too violently. My elbow collides with the wall. Although the impact feels softer than stone ought to be, it sends a jolt of pain along my arm, and the camera flies out of my hand. I hear it fall on the ledge and skitter over the brink. All I can do is wait in despair to hear it end up at the bottom of the chasm. It slithers down a wall and then, except for a momentary mocking echo, there’s silence.

  Could it have fallen so far that it’s out of earshot? I’d rather think that than believe it was caught as it fell. Whatever did that would be able to see in the dark. Presumably the hand or other appendage that caught it would have to be soft enough to engulf the impact, which is one more idea I’d rather not have just now. I need to focus all my consciousness on reaching the end of the unseen ledge.

  How far have I come along it? If I retreat, might I be able to find a safer way, particularly since I can’t imagine my parents could have used this one? Perhaps I just don’t want to think of them in such a plight. Suppose I go back only to discover there’s no other route across the cavern? “Where are you?” I can’t help pleading like a lost child. “How did you get where you are?”

  My voice comes back flattened, somehow suffocated. I don’t know if I want to learn why the echo sounds like that. Otherwise there’s utter silence, and I have the sense again of a multitude holding its collective breath. Might this be the presence that deadened the echo? That’s another notion I can live without—another distraction from finding my way along the ledge. I have to go on. I’m too dismayed by the prospect of retreating from my parents in the dark.

  I rest my spine against the wall and plant my hands on either side of me and inch in the direction I was following. I’m no longer able to judge how soft the wall is or I am. My sensations are at the mercy of the dark that presses into my face to remind me how much of it is waiting beyond the ledge. I could imagine the entire subterranean place is holding its breath, anticipating the fatal step I’m about to take, and withholding its own nature as well. I have the irrational but obstinate fancy that the ledge is growing narrower. I can’t recall seeing that, but have I sidled past the stretch the flash illuminated? I’m struggling with a compulsion to reach out a foot to find the edge when I realise that the darkness needn’t have me wholly in its power.

  I still have a source of light—the display screen of my mobile. No doubt I overlooked it because it doesn’t work as a phone down here. My father must have used his to light the way, and of course Lucinda has hers. I feel as if history has lost its stultifying grip on me, and I’m entitled to let out a gasp of relief. I rest my left hand on the wall as I grope for the mobile. Perhaps I was the only one holding his breath. I suck in another, and so does the wall under my hand.

  At least, it swells like part of the chest of an enormous denizen of the dark—a small part. The movement isn’t enough to send me off the ledge, but by the time I’ve realised that, it’s too late. Before I can think I’ve sprung away from the wall. I teeter on the edge, and my entire body tries to shrink back from the drop. It feels as if the core of my panic is striving to draw the whole of me into itself. In an attempt to hurl myself backwards I throw out my hands in front of me. If the blackness were as solid as my eyes suggest I could shove myself away from it. It isn’t, and my hands plunge into it, taking the rest of me with them.

  It snatches away all sense of myself as well as my
breath. Aren’t I supposed to have time to view edited highlights of my history? My mind is shrinking inwards, and I wish I could do that too. I squeeze my eyes tight as if this can bring the fall or at least my awareness of it to an end. The floor of the cavern does both, driving a last residue of breath out of me with a thin cry that leaves words behind.

  I’m sprawling on all fours. At first this is all I dare to feel. As I push myself up on my uncontrollably shivering arms I discover no broken bones or even much in the way of bruises apart from the renewed throbbing of my forehead. How soft is the floor? It seems to yield beneath my hands, so that I’m afraid they’re about to sink in. I push myself away from it and stagger blindly to my feet. The elastic surface gives a little but supports me, and I do my best not to fancy that the cave is a gigantic shell on whose contents I’m standing. I stumble away, but where am I floundering in the dark? I’ve taken just a couple of inadvertent steps when I hear a sound.

  It’s a wordless murmur from any number of mouths. It seems to come from every side. It robs me of movement, or perhaps a desperate hope does—the hope that if I stay still, whatever surrounds me may lose interest in me. Now it’s silent again, but does this mean it’s holding its breath while it waits for me to be unable not to move? The sound made me think of a hive, or at any rate a swarm of creatures with a consciousness as single as their voice. Perhaps I could see them by the light of my mobile, but I suspect I would find that I’d have preferred to leave them unseen. They can’t be everywhere, or I would have felt their presence while I was on my hands and knees. I have to risk a glimpse if I’m to find my way through the subterranean multitude. I begin to inch my hand towards the pocket that contains the mobile. Though it’s too stealthy for even me to hear, the movement is greeted by another murmur.