All Souls' Day

II

She awoke with some measure of regret. She remembered snatches of the night prior. Leaving the Halloween party with Phil. Summoning a ride on her phone and taking it back to her place. Sloppy drunk sex with a man she hardly knew. It was enjoyable enough, but now came the awkward morning. She was sure she would have a headache, and she would want to just get him out of her apartment as quickly as possible.

As she slowly opened her eyes, however, she found something that she did not expect. Darkness. Even if her blackout curtains had been closed, she would expect it to be brighter than this. Instead of the faint glow of a sunny Los Angeles morning in her apartment, she was confronted with a black space, accompanied by only the dimmest of distant orange light. Not the golden hue of the sun, but rather some eerie orange glow like a harvest moon. But even moonlight would be preferable to what she saw. It was actually more like a dim candle shining through some foul fluid like sewage or formaldehyde.

The latter correlation was all the more disturbing, considering her vision was being clouded by something. A thick film that was not only over her eyes, but all around her. She was immersed in some kind of suffocating goo. Literally suffocating, in fact.

Panic washed over her and she struggled to swim. It took her a moment to realize she could simply stand up. After some violent confused flailing, she rose to her feet and struggled to breathe. Sticky, warm, gooey globs of viscous liquid slowly dripped from her naked body as she gasped and coughed.

She was standing in a small pool of this gunk, whatever it was. It was too dark to make out its color exactly. But the smell was inescapable. An entire pool of putrid swill. Had she perhaps fallen down a sewer or something? Yet, whatever was covering her skin almost had the consistency of syrup.

As that hot muck oozed off her in long sticky drips, the space she was in grew rather cold. Clouds of vapor rose up from the pool like a hot tub in winter. The rest of that dark interior—lit only by sickly orange light from some unseen source in the distance—was nearly freezing.

Shivering from head to toe, she slowly stepped out from the pool onto a cold spongy floor of some indeterminate material. In the dim light one could just barely make out ripples in that surface. An almost organic surface, but not in a comforting way. It was somewhere between the skinless sinews of a dead animal and wet bone. And its appearance was almost insect-like. Like the exoskeleton of some great beetle. A low droning rumble emanated from the walls, along with indistinct crackling sounds. Something like rubbery bellows expanding and contracting. And occasionally the light plopping noise of some unseen liquid dripping, drop by drop every few moments.

"Oh my god, oh my god..." she started to mutter, quickly growing louder as she frantically surveyed that nightmarish landscape. As she did, the scene grew only more disconcerting. In the distance, vapor clouds rose up from other pools. Glowing pools in the dark. And inside those pools...

"Shh..." a voice whispered from behind.

She turned around toward the voice. When she did, the sight made her eyes widen and her heart pound. She was on the verge of letting out a scream of absolute terror, when that frightful figure grabbed her and covered her mouth, thereby muffling her wail. The horrendously shocking figure that had sent her into such mad alarm was—unlike everything else in this cold alien interior—terrifying in its fierce familiarity. For the hand that covered her mouth and the intense eyes that peered into her own was none other than... herself.

"They can hear you," her doppelganger whispered.

At those words, the room grew even colder as a chill ran down her spine. And in the midst of such cold, she froze. The other then held a finger up to her lips to gesture for quiet, before the woman silently moved to her side. The woman was wearing a thin white robe, and its silky fabric brushed against her cold wet sticky skin as the woman came up to her ear and whispered again.