Souls - XXX

There is a sudden flash of light and then an immediate overarching darkness. The shore is gone, my pool chair is gone, the people are most definitely gone. The only thing I see is swirling shadows spinning around me as if I’m in the middle of a black tornado. I breathe outwards and see bubbles float upwards.

I am underwater.

“You are not what you think you are.”

It’s my daughter’s voice, but it is not my daughter. I can hear that now. 

The shadows dissolve and I see. There is no light, it is blackness, but I see somehow. 

I see it all. 

The floor of the blue hole is littered with the humanity, anchored to the floor of the watery sinkhole. Their eyes are wide, they are gasping continually for a breath they can never have. A demon cannot kill you, you cannot die by their actions, but they can make things infinitely unpleasant. Those people are sitting up there, they are waiting patiently and full of faith, only to be drug down here to drown for eternity. 

Whatever has impersonated my daughter floats to me, smiling wide. Down here her teeth are blackened and slimy, living mold forming in an oral cavern. She speaks.

“I’m glad you came. I was calling for you.”

Again, I can hear as if we weren’t under hundreds of feet of water.

“Where’s my daughter?”

She smiles, “A mother can always tell.”

“Who are you?” I see the bubbles rise from my mouth, the oxygen rushing to the surface. 

“Consider me a friend. A fan of your work. Consider my appearance a tribute.”

“Where is my daughter?”

“Have you studied sinkholes? Interesting phenomena, the natural embodiment of seemingly solid ground slipping away and downwards to the truth. There is a lesson there."

“Where is my daughter?”

“We always fall.”

I feel my eyes sting with tears, they are absorbed into the water around me.

“Tell me.”

“I will give you a choice, a fork in the road. She is one of two places.” She points upwards to the shore, “Up there.” Her hand lowers to a cavernous hole leading to more blackness; the series of sinkholes. “Or down there.”

I look up, towards the purplish light, and then I look down to the seemingly infinite blackness. 

“The choice is yours. I will not stand in your way. But know this, if you travel back to the shore you can never come back here. You will never know if your daughter was down there.”

A part of me believes this is simply a demon who is especially malevolent, deriving all joy from the punishment and pain of humanity. She knows nothing, she can see my thoughts, she can see how to manipulate me, just like she knows how to manipulate the faithful up there. She appears as whatever you want to see.

Another part of me, the mother side of me, wonders. Maybe my daughter is down there. Why else would I be called here? Why else would she know? 

I would never know if I didn’t look.

I swim downward, past the gasping people looking at me with wild fear and disapproval, past the demon who looks like my daughter, past all of it. 

I will find my daughter. As I get closer and closer to the opening of the cavern I notice something, my thigh is burning. It gets hotter and hotter the deeper I get.

The soul, it’s in my pocket. 

It does not want to go through that cavern. I look back, through the swirling shadows and seaweed. The demon is not my daughter anymore. It is a grotesque and slimy creature that seems to be oozing from the floor of the blue hole. This isn’t just a cavern.

This is a gate to hell.