All Souls' Day

III

Several minutes passed as they crawled in relative quiet through the dark grimy tunnel. After the other woman had fended off the "locust," the little girl started to listen to reason and passively rode on Christina's back as she scooted along on her hands and knees, following the sound of her doppelganger's own shuffling. The swish of fabric, the pat-pat of hands and toes, occasional huffs and puffs, and the perpetual scraping of the metal rod she dragged along with her. Whether from trauma or passive acceptance, the little girl remained silent, apart from the occasional sniff and soft whine.

"Okay," Christina spoke up, "you have to tell me now. Where are we going?"

"We're meeting up with a man named Phil," the other said with a sigh.

"Phil...? You wouldn't happen to mean—"

"Have you met a man named Phil yet?" she interjected. "Someone you related to?"

"Heh, well... Last night I just slept with a man named Phil."

The other woman stopped in her tracks. Christina's hands brushed the woman's feet, before she stopped, herself. After a moment, the woman continued crawling without explanation.

Finally, she spoke again. "Life was so much simpler back then."

"Back then?"

"Look, this Phil isn't the one you knew. But he's just as sharp. It's been over a year, but if he's right we might just be able to actually get out of here."

"Over a year? I just got here! Are you trying to tell me that... this is... there is... some kind of time travel or something?"

She replied with a sigh. If their inky surroundings hadn't prevented Christina from seeing, she probably would have been frustrated at the sight of how hard the other woman rolled her eyes. After a moment of invisible head shaking while they continued crawling, the woman spoke. "You still have the luxury of asking irrelevant questions. I lived through hell on earth for seven years before I got here. Whatever here is and when and how... I'll leave that to Phil. For right now, just save your breath and focus on keeping up."

Christina did as the woman said. They crawled for some untold age in the deep black void of that tunnel. A time that no doubt seemed longer than it really was in the discomfort of that tiresome space. The little girl on Christina's back remained surprisingly silent for the journey, letting out only the occasional sniff and sigh.

Finally, after that interminable moment, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Nothing quite like the reassuring brilliance of sunlight at the end of a cave, but rather more like the ghostly glow of some bioluminescent sea creature, floating in the distance amidst the inky black of the deep ocean. Nevertheless, it sometimes only takes a glimmer to reignite hope, and that fire burned in Christina's bosom, kindling her limbs, moving her to pick up the pace.

After momentarily bumping into the woman—who didn't share as much of that enthusiasm—her double sped up as well. Before long, they were emerging into the dim gray of some open space, with only the barest hint of blue to an otherwise colorless fog.

They each crawled out onto a narrow walkway, just barely thick enough to support a pair of feet while standing with one's back to the wall. A gray featureless wall which stood across a gap from another identical wall with its own tiny ledge a couple dozen feet away. Christina made the mistake of looking down, and her stomach immediately rolled somersaults. There was no discernible bottom. An endless dark pit growing mercilessly down, before fading into the dark fog. Likewise, above, the walls of that bland corridor rose endlessly into obscurity. Far below, beyond the blue-gray fog was the rolling, goopy, bubbling noise of what sounded like a whole stream of some kind of sludge.

Christina felt like asking the woman where the hell they were, but she was a quick learner. An irrelevant question to be sure. In the meantime, she had the child to think about.

"Come take my hand," she called back into the tunnel while extending a friendly palm.

The little girl stuck her head out and looked past the ledge with trepidation. "Scary! This is scary! I'm too scared!" And with that she started to pant and shiver with fear.

"Christina," the woman said.

Her call was met by a little harmony of voices, as both Christina and the little girl replied in unison: "Yes?"

Christina looked from the woman to the girl with a little shock and back again. The woman wasn't looking back at her. Instead, she had her eyes fixed on the little girl still on her hands and knees in the tunnel next to them.

The woman then bent down to the little girl's level and looked in her eyes with a stern expression. "You can do this. I know you can do this."

The little girl looked back at the woman and cocked her head. The woman reminded her of her mother, but in some strange way she felt even more familiar. The way she said "know" with such confidence and understanding gave her pause. But that only lasted a moment before she shook her head and said, "It's too scary. I'm gonna fall!"

"Christina," the woman said again, commanding the little girl's eyes back to her own, "remember when you didn't want to ride the ferris wheel on that beach back in Movie City?"

"Y-yes..." the little girl replied with a puzzled expression.

"Movie City..." Christina muttered to herself in awe. She hadn't heard that term in ages. That's what her late father called Los Angeles when she was taken to visit as a child. And that ferris wheel. The big one in Santa Monica. Riding it as a kid captured her imagination, and was one of a series of experiences that made her enamored with "Movie City," eventually leading her to move there years later after college.

"You rode it then," the woman explained. "You can do this now."

The little girl crawled out and took the woman's hand. The woman then turned to Christina and nodded her head, gesturing for her to take the girl's other hand. Christina nodded in return, and then looked down to the little girl and gazed at the side of her face. The first time she had really gotten a good look at her since escaping from... wherever that place was before. She shuddered with surprise when she recognized that face. A face she had seen so many years ago. A face she would have nearly forgotten, but for occasionally revisiting old photos with her mom.

"Okay, everyone. Nice and slow, like this." The woman started to side step to the left. Christina and the naked little girl between them followed her lead, hand in hand as they shuffled their way along the ledge. "And remember... don't look down."