Black Water

Confrontation I

The next morning was just as strained as the one a day before. Dennis drove over at 8 AM just to check on them, before driving off again to his workplace. Jared spent the majority of the morning checking over emails and text messages, and Jenny busied herself with cooking and reading to the children. But after the emails were written, and after the text messages were sent, and after the children were satisfied with their reading, that cold energy once again took over the lodge.

Jared could not get the well out of his head. He promised to Jenny that he would spend the day indoors - after a rushed breakfast, he spent the rest of the day trying to catch up with his work. His team at NASA was now working on a satellite that they would be launching to Kalyke, one of the moons of Jupiter. They were wondering where Jared had gone, going as far as to send him messages saying things such as "Are you okay?" or "What's wrong?"

And while Jared's replies said one thing, his scrambled thinking and rushed conclusions said another. He approved of multiple models for satellite launch that day, most of which were incorrect in one way or another; it was unheard of for Jared to make mistakes while on the job. He was a computer - a beast of numbers and perfect calculation. And yet here he was, struggling with the most basic of problems.

The programming and numbers which once clicked so easily with him were now difficult to correlate in his mind. Every time he tried to solve a problem, every time he tried to visualize an equation or check a line of code, his thoughts would be interrupted with that horribly glassy water. That unending black. That thirty foot drop of darkness.

The jar of black water which Howard had given him the day prior was sitting on the kitchen counter, about twenty feet away from him. Jared glared at it - he glared at its smooth black exterior, at how it seemed to fill up the jar entirely with a solid material. He stood up and marched over, grabbing it and shoving it into one of the lower compartments in the kitchen. The water would not bother him there.

Jenny left the house during the afternoon to go shopping - before she left, she made Jared promise that he would not go into the backyard. He told her that he wouldn't - and he was serious about that promise. He didn't intend to see that cursed well today. It was enough to drive him away from nature - away from that which had struck him as so beautiful ten years ago.

Dennis arrived shortly afterwards, and spent some time with Jared in the living room. He asked Jared how the problem of the well was going, to which he responded by telling him that he didn't intend on seeing the well today. He needed to catch up on work, and was already falling behind on his new objective at NASA.

After Jenny got back home, Dennis promptly left the house, leaving the rest of the lodge silent and surprisingly cold. The only source of noise was the laughter of the children, which occasionally broke out upstairs. Jared in particular was getting frustrated - he was simply too distracted to be as productive as he normally was.

It was an issue of property at this point. Jared equated understanding with ownership - to own something, one must understand it first. It was an odd mentality, one which was born out of his time at graduate school, but now seemed to grip him in an iron lock. He couldn't shake that horrible feeling of a lack of control. It didn't do anything, it didn't say anything. Dennis and Jenny were both right - there was no reason to fear it. If it exists, there must be an explanation. Think logically, and the world will work for you. But even so, he still remembered Howard, when he described the well as unnatural. He remembered what he saw when he first approached the well alone - a flash of terrifying images, none of which he recognized, but all of which scared him out of his wits.

And then the next thing he knew, he was pulling out his diagrams and blueprints, and was poring over the measurements and angles and dimensions of every inch of the garden. Twenty seven feet in width. Thirty two feet in length. Eight hundred and sixty four square feet. Right?