The darkness is a velvet thing that twists and stretches around me, smothering my screams, threatening to crush me, until suddenly, it spits me out. I land, hard, on solid ground but don’t feel pain. I get to my knees, try to suck in a breath but taste nothing, feel nothing. Are my eyes even open? Are we . . . in the abyss?
“Kyle!”
“I’m here.”
My eyes adjust. She’s kneeling beside me; our hands connect, but I can’t feel her touch. She says what I’m thinking: “This place feels like nothing. Like I’m dreaming.”
Or maybe more accurately—nightmaring.
The wasteland around us is lit by faint lights scattered in the distance. The ground is made of glittering black crags and broken up by puddles in all sorts of dark colors.
But as strange as it all looks, the landscape somehow seems familiar—like I’ve been here before, with every sleepless night, every disappointment, every unkind thought about myself and others, every feeling I’ve tried to ignore, every sense that the world is dissolving around me, every fear that I’m just not enough. Somehow, this feels less like a descent into alien territory and more like a homecoming.
Kyle stares numbly around us, then sinks to a crouch.
“You feel it too?” I whisper.
Kyle blinks once, twice, then spots something ahead. “Jasper! Look!”
I follow her gaze. Two dozen yards away there’s a flickering circle of gray light—and I think it’s our mart portal. It has to be.
We get up and hurry in that direction, holding on to one another’s hand, until I trip on a crag. I tumble to the ground, barely shielding my head from cracking against a rock. And yet somehow, it doesn’t hurt.
Instead, I’m struck by a weird thought: I could disappear and no one would notice. I’m about to say those words out loud, but then my gaze settles on a dark blue puddle I’m touching. I see the water trembling.
I stagger backward and wipe my hand on my pant leg. My head clears, and I whisper, “The liquid . . . It’s like it contained a thought—” I see Kyle kneeling motionlessly nearby. “Kyle? You okay?” And when I get no response, I yell out, “Kyle?”
“Stop asking if I’m okay,” Kyle mutters.
“I’m just—”
Kyle is knee-deep in a crescent-shaped puddle of maroon water. I head over to the puddle edge and tell her to get up. But she turns and snaps, “Stop trying to help me.”
I open my mouth, but she doesn’t let me speak.
“Stop telling me things will be okay—like you actually even give a shit!”
“Kyle. The liquid—” I try to get her out of the water, but when I reach for her arm, she shoves me away, and the water, or whatever it is, splashes my neck. Instantly, I feel something—not a thought, but a twisting inside my chest. “Hey! We don’t have time for this shit! Stop lashing out at me!” I grab her by the shoulders.
Kyle tries to wrestle out of my grip, but I refuse to let go, and we end up rolling into a shallow body of gray water. This liquid soaks the side of my shirt, and my anger is instantly replaced by a deep desire to just stop trying.
Kyle turns away. She won’t look at me, but her neck and arms are gray with droplets. I try to reach her, but she stutters, “It’s pointless . . . I . . . I’m always gonna keep messing things up.” She shifts farther away from me.
“Kyle,” I call out.
Somehow, I find the strength to fight that desire to give up. I struggle to my feet. I don’t know how I’m doing this. But maybe hopelessness is a drug and I’m a junkie with a helluva tolerance for it.
Shakily, I guide us both to dry ground, then wrap my arms around her. “Hey, hey, hey . . . listen to me. It’s the water. I think all the pools have thoughts or emotions.”
She tries to speak, but I just hold on tighter. When I finally pull away, I take off my work vest and use it to wipe my arms and hands, then her face and arms. “It’s not us.”
Abruptly, Kyle catches sight of something and freezes. I follow her gaze a dozen yards to the right, where motion emerges from behind a boulder. Kyle and I drop low just as a demon steps into view. It’s a humanoid made of what appears to be pink cake frosting. Oversized sprinkles are stuck all over its body. It has candles wedged in its eye sockets; the beast seems to be trying to pull out those candles—or, maybe, push them deeper in. It’s hard to tell.
Although the creature doesn’t have eyes, it swivels its head about, as though to scan the place. And I know we need to hide. I catch sight of a shallow crater to our right, and mouth to Kyle, There! Together, we quietly slip into the crater and drop just below the surface level. Unfortunately, my side touches a puddle that ripples in dark rainbow colors.
This puddle takes my mind . . . somewhere else.
One moment I’m in the abyss, the next I’m standing inside what seems like a medical ward. I’m surrounded by doctors, nurses, armed guards, and patients in thin white gowns. The patients are all strapped to beds. Is this a VC asylum? I try to look around but can’t.
I think I’m stuck in someone else’s point of view. A memory.
I catch sight of my reflection in a glass door. Somehow, I’m a tall guy in a VC uniform. A guard. Behind me in the same reflection, a young male patient is trying to sneak away. Must be a Doomie. In the memory, I turn around to lunge at the patient and punch him in the chest.
The Doomie sprawls on the floor.
I grab the young Doomie by his hair and drag him in the direction of a nurse. “Keep them in check,” I bark.
With a gasp, I snap out of the memory and shift away from the puddle. Kyle also shivers, and I sense she too witnessed that scene. However, neither of us speak as we peer above the crater to see that the cake-frosting demon has gone.
We get to our feet and try to go back to the portal. But Kyle slips on a loose rock and falls into a trench of rainbow water.
“Shit! Kyle!!!” I drop to my knees, ready to reach in after her.
The light shifts.
Something emerges to my left. A silhouette that twists and buckles in the air. It’s an . . . abyssal! I stumble backward, and my movement tugs the creature toward me, like a thin plastic bag into a breeze. I freeze as it hovers a dozen steps away, spreads out shifting arms, and speaks. Not with words, but somehow with the vibrations of the abyss air itself.
You! You, you, you! Come closer, it says tonelessly.
“Get away from me!” I hiss.
I retreat another step. But it just gets even closer. I might as well be back in that gray puddle, for a sinking feeling soaks through me and makes me think, What’s the point in trying to fight? Why am I bothering to even try anything?
But then, out of the corner of my eye, I see something. The maroon puddle from earlier. It’s only two steps away. I use all my remaining strength to step into this liquid, and instantly, my despair morphs into rage. Suddenly I’m ready to punch anyone in my way, over and over, till my knuckles match the puddle. But since I can’t touch the abyssal, I simply open my mouth and go fucking apeshit. “Get away from me!” I roar, again and again. “I’m not afraid of you!”
The abyssal might as well be a birthday candle, blown out by the wish of my words.
I rush over to the trench that Kyle fell into, and I reach in to try to grab her hand.
But then the water decides to show me a memory. I’m standing in my folks’ living room. In a window, my reflection shows Kyle. I’m . . . in one of her recollections, seeing through her eyes.
She says sharply in the scene, “I can’t do this anymore with you.” And she turns around to face me.
In the memory, I call out, “Kyle. You can’t want—”
Kyle steps backward and says, “You know what I really want? I want to stop going around in circles with you.”
Don’t get stuck in this memory! I tell myself abruptly. Get out! Hurry! Quick!
Shuddering, I pull myself free and lift Kyle out of the water and onto the rocky ground. She coughs, chokes, but gets to her feet, and soon, we race over to the portal and throw ourselves back through the circle of light.