All Souls' Day

IV

After a long period of sidestepping carefully along the precipice of that bottomless pit, the walls of the long gray corridor ran up to a third wall, perpendicular to both. A final dead end, bridging the gap. In the center of that wall was a great circular opening, a couple dozen feet in diameter. The women and the girl carefully climbed up into that vast hole. A hole that showed itself to be a kind of tunnel with the barest hint of light at its other end.

Just as they pulled the girl up into that great passage, in the distance a rhythmic tapping whispered in the dark. The sound grew steadily louder, as they all peered breathlessly into the far gloom. Against the backdrop of that remote light, a silhouette slowly increased in size.

Sooner than later, they both could recognize the nature of the sound. Footsteps.

"C'mon," the woman said. And with that, they both advanced toward the figure for a bit, before she called to it softly in the dark. "Hey, Phil, it's me. And I've got the secondary with me."

"Excellent," a familiar voice replied. Familiar, yet different. Somehow Christina seemed to recall Phil sounding a little gruffer. Not in a gravelly rustic smoker kind of way, but just the subtle lower tones and rich maturity that came with age. This man sounded very much like the Phil she knew, but somehow... younger.

"We're not alone, though," the woman explained, as she reached behind her and petted the head of the little girl hiding behind her legs in the dark.

"Oh?"

"The neefesh swapper ended up swapping in me as a child too."

"We don't know for a certainty that is you as a child." At this, the woman let out a groan. She knew it was the prelude to a bit of pedantic pontification, but she let him continue nevertheless. "We may have observed the growth process, but there's no way to empirically validate whether a neefesh even exists. For all we know we may be effectively clones."

"Wait, what?" Christina interjected with a gulp.

"Oh, hello there," Phil said as he turned to Christina in the dark. They could barely make out one another in the gloom. "My name is Phil."

"You—you don't... remember me? We met last night. At least, I—"

"I'm afraid I don't recall said meeting, sorry. Apparently I—or whoever's memories I inherited—lived until the age of nearly fifty. That being said, as a secondary like yourself, my memories are from an earlier period. Last I recalled I was twenty-six. That would make me twenty-seven now I suppose... assuming my memories are remotely authentic. If not, Christina and I are only a year old or so, heh."

"I'm this many," the little girl interjected, holding up the dim silhouette of a small hand in the dark, extending all five of her fingers.

"H-how old are you...?" Christina asked, turning to the other woman.

"Forty-eight," she said with a sigh.

"And, and... why am I a secondary exactly?"

"I came up with the term, actually," Phil explained. "Primaries are those who are awakened—or potentially created—first. Everyone starts out in the pools, as far as we can tell. But the primaries are generated first—or 'swapped in,' if you can believe the documentation—while secondaries come after. Usually not very long after. Most people only stay in the arboretum for a few days. Primaries have the full set of memories, while secondaries represent a snapshot of an earlier period. Well, at least 'earlier' from a certain relative perspective. Considering what we've seemed to find out about spacetime here, it's—"

"Wait," Christina—the younger woman, that is—interjected. "What do you mean, by 'full set' exactly?"

"It means I remember dying," the older Christina said.

A mixture of fear and malaise rippled through the younger Christina's body. Dead? Was she dead too? Was she destined to die at forty-seven? Or had she ever been alive in the first place? She slowly sauntered away from the group. It felt like when she was a child. Those times of such emotional distress that, in between open mouth crying, she felt like she had to go somewhere, but all she could manage was the most sluggish of shuffling between tears. But she wasn't crying now. At least not on the outside. After reaching nowhere in particular, she collapsed to the floor. A wet grimy floor sullying an already soiled robe, but she didn't particularly care. She had to catch her breath. One arm resting atop a bent knee. The other held lifelessly at the side of an outstretched leg.

In the dark, the little girl left the older Christina and went to the younger. She sat down next to her and cozied up to her like a cat. After a moment, the mid-30s Christina wrapped her arm around her child self and gave the little girl a muted smile. A barely visible gesture in that shadowy space. The girl in turn rested her little head against Christina's chest. Two lost girls comforting each other in the gloom.

The old Christina peering off at the two, finally turned back to Phil. "Why did the process bring in the girl?"

"Well, in retrospect it makes perfect sense. From what we can tell, it's a triadic entity that threatens us. In order to possess and assimilate, it likely needs a kind of tripartite instantiation."

"A suitable host..."

"Exactly."

"What about... the others?" she asked with a shudder.

"Others?"

"There were other pools. Dozens of them. I don't even know how long that room went on."

"Ah... That might explain what I read about the golems. Held in stasis, devoid of any neefesh. Something like a philosophical zombie. Of course, like said entity, it would be impossible to tell. Any one of us could be the same for all we know. Assuming we know anything at—"

"Excuse me," the younger Christina chimed in. "Is there something we can do for the girl here? She's shivering."

With that, Phil set down something in the dark. The soft plop of a sack. And from that container, the subtle rustling of some cloth.

"Here, stand up," Phil gently commanded the little girl. In the dim gray light, he held up a robe to the child. Finding a good place to fold it, he ripped the robe nearly in two, tearing off a good chunk of its bottom. "There. The arms are still too long. We'll have to keep them rolled up. But at least this won't drag on the bottom."

"So where are we going now?" the younger Christina asked. "How are we getting out of here?"

"The sheep gate," the older Christina replied.

"What?" her younger doppelganger responded in confusion.

"That's what we call it," Phil explained. "It's one of a number of ruach portals for infused livestock. It seems mostly sheep that go through it. The point is that it connects back to Earth for the most part, as far as we can tell."

"Ruach?"

"Look," the older Christina interjected, "we don't have time to go over everything. The point is that we have a chance to get out of here. All of us. Got it?"

"The real problem is avoiding any resistance," Phil explained. "Speaking of which, do you still have that flask of Persian powder?"

"I used it on a locust," the older Christina said. "It was damn near on top of us, so I used it all."

"Jesus," Phil remarked quietly. "Well... fortunately I brought a whole liter of the stuff. Hopefully we can avoid using it."

The older Christina replied with a nod.

"Shall we get going then?" Phil asked.

The little girl grabbed the younger Christina's hand and squeezed it tight. She returned the gesture with a smile, before turning back to the others. Everyone then glanced back and forth at each other in the quiet dark of the tunnel and nodded solemnly.