Dark Pool

Who gets scared by this crap?

A young man, Dan, and his group of friends participate in an annual horror event at any number of popular theme parks. The one they are attending now, known as “Frightening Foray,” is the most popular event of this kind around. These events feel a little tired and played out to Dan. There are a select number of ‘lands’ that are featured in this theme park every year. Each ‘land’ features a different horror genre classic. The issue is that every Land, every year, plays out almost identically.

You and whoever you are led into a dimly lit collection of corridors and rooms designed around the themes of the given ‘Land’. Most typically, Lands are themed around popular horror icons or even something that borders more into action-thriller. Regardless of their inspiration, each ‘land’ plays out precisely the same. Jump scares, surprises, and a slightly unsettling atmosphere. Actors waiting around doors or hiding in specially-designed trick walls or areas jump out every now and then to simulate a degree of randomness.

The same thing. Every year.

Dan always went when his friends invited him, however, because if nothing else, he enjoyed his friends’ reactions, which were often priceless. He could always stand to get out of the house now and then.

“Ahhhh! That was worth the hour-long wait. What did you think?”

Raphael, the de facto leader of the night and the one who sets up and invites us all out to ‘Frightening Foray’ every year. He worked the event last year but refused to do it this year. Dan had asked why he wasn’t working it this year. Joining Raph and Dan is Raphael’s brother Jamal, a mutual friend of the entire group Riley, and Riley’s girlfriend, Dana.

“It has some nice setups but a little weaker than the other house, to be honest,” Jamal stated quite tersely.

“I had no problems with that one,” Dana announced confidently, earning her a swift elbow in her side from her girlfriend.

“Is that what you call all of that screaming?”

“I-“Dana looked off to the side, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Those screams were coming from the actors who were trying to score some easy jumpscares by being loud and random.”

“Sure are offering a lot of excuses for someone who claims they had no problems.”

Aghast, Dana responded, “Here’s what you didn’t notice, smart guy.”

Raphael’s input sent Dana into another long-winded explanation about how it couldn’t POSSIBLY be her. She’d been far too focused keeping Riley calm and safe because she was so scared and-

Dan started spacing out from the conversation. It’s not something he necessarily meant to do. Still, he found that ‘Land’ to be just about as scary as all of the other ones from that night and all of the other ones they’d gone to ever since they all had the money necessary to get tickets. This was to say, not too scary. Sure, Dan had flinched a couple of times but never once was he so surprised he involuntarily screamed, let alone physically reacted other than a quick hike of the breath. Dan simply walked in step with the rest of the group. He watched as the actors assigned to walk the streets of the theme park did the same thing the actors in the specially designated areas do.

Raphael broke off from teasing Dana as Jamal and Riley started collaborating to do just that. He noticed Dan roaming forward, occasionally grinning when he would overhear the rest of the group’s merriment. Raphael poked Dan on the shoulder, which shook him out of his disassociation.

“Doin’ good, man?”

“Oh, uh, y-yeah.” Dan stammered out.

“You just seem a little out of it. You enjoy that last Land?”

“Oh, yes. Yes! I enjoyed it like all of the other ones.”

This statement, while not wholly accurate, also didn’t count as a lie. Dan did like them equally; it just turned out equally was minimal. He felt the need to elaborate despite knowing this excuse would secure a quick and easy end to the conversation.

“I just don’t feel like this stuff affects me like it affects all of you. It feels too produced. Too precisely executed like a stage play. How can someone be afraid of something that you are far too aware is fake, Raph?”

Raph ponders Dan’s statement for a moment. He even went as far as to rest his head in one of his hands, making an “L”-shape to emphasize the thinking process.

“Sounds like to me the problem is with immersion! You don’t feel connected enough to the experience because you can’t separate the expectation of what you’re supposed to feel from what you’re actually feeling.”

Raphael stops in the middle of the walkway, “Hey everybody!”

The previously bickering group stops debating and turns their attention to Raphael. Raphael, noticing he has their attention, speaks. “We’re going to do one final Land tonight, and then we’re going to turn it in early. Dan says he’s feeling exhausted.”

“Dan, you should have said something!” Riley interjected.

Dan scratches the back of his head nervously, unsure of what to say. Raphael whispers to Dan.

“You’re picking the last one. One that you think might scare you.”

Dan was confused, to say the least. Did Raph not hear him? He wasn’t getting scared by these attractions? Frustrated but seeing an end in sight, Dan just decides to pick the closest one to their location. The young man extends his arm, hand, and finger for denoting direction.

“That one.”

The group follows Dan’s point to a land labeled ‘Darkness’.

“Darkness? I haven’t heard too much about that one.” Riley said.

“There’s not even a line for it.” Jamal followed.

“I think I heard a little bit about it when I researched the attractions this year,” Dana stated but quickly added, “Not because I thought it’d be scary. I just wanted to know!”

Raphael took the opportunity to question Dana, “What did you hear about it, Dana?”

Dana, taken off the high energy of denying her fear, explained to the group.

“The designers went with a minimalist approach. Allegedly, there are no actors in this one at all. It’s just a series of maze-like corridors that are completely pitch-black. I think the idea is the anticipation of what could be waiting in the darkness is supposed to be the gimmick of the attraction.”

Jamal is the first to respond.

“Sounds boring.”

Dan couldn’t help but agree with Jamal, “That does sound a little cheap.”

“Well, we won’t know until we check it out.”

Raphael gave the marching orders, and Dan and the crew followed.

Upon arrival at the front of the attraction, they looked at the rating system given by surveying random park-goers and ‘Darkness’ had by far the worst score of any attraction of its kind in the park. Fifty one-star ratings in a row with a lot of the complaints the group had figured would be a part of this setup such as ‘boring’, ‘cheap’, ‘nothing happened’. Despite this, the first rating is a maxed-out 10-star rating, and the review is one word: surreal.

Raphael bumps my arm and leans over to whisper to Dan, “You sure this is what gets you?”

Dan, not wanting to waste his time going to another attraction when a ticket back home is staring him in the face, nods his head vigorously.

“Well, at least there’s no line. C’mon, everyone!”

Raphael leads the way through the empty line queue, submerging himself quickly into the all-consuming darkness of the entrance.

“Maybe Dana can conquer one of these tonight without screaming.” Riley teased.

“Riley! I told you! That was one of the actors!

The girlfriends followed behind Raphael. Swallowed up just as quickly by the oppressive shadows. Jamal rested a hand on Dan’s shoulder.

“You ready, bud?”

Dan was ready for something, not quite sure if it was supposed to be this. Even still, he nods his head vigorously. Jamal escorts Dan into the attraction, and the pitch-black darkness quickly engulfs the last of the group.

Dan enters in before Jamal, and the first thing he notices is, of course, the nothing he can see. Dan goes to pull out his phone to use it as a flashlight. Just because this place is too lazy to provide lighting doesn’t mean I can’t bring my own, he thought. The second or two Dan takes to pull his phone out to use the flashlight function is ended abruptly by something bumping into him from behind him. The force of which causes him to drop his phone on the dark ground. Dan curses underneath his breath.

“Hey Jamal, watch where you’re going,” Dan says.

Jamal doesn’t answer back.

“J-Jamal?”

Dan turns around to face his friend, who he knows entered right behind him. Dan should be feeling his breath. Dan spreads his arms out to either side and before they are even fully extended, he can reach both sides of the wall, meaning the corridor is very narrow. This also means that there’s no way Jamal could have passed by Dan without bumping into him or Dan otherwise noticing.

“That’s…strange,” Dan said aloud to himself, trying to process the situation.

Dan kneels down to look for his phone, which he ends up dropping. He feels all around on the cold, hard ground, but there’s no trace of his phone despite how far he reaches and how long he searches. It’s like it disappeared. Dan started to get a little concerned.

“M-maybe… maybe I’ll ask an employee to get it for me when I get out….”

Dan strengthened his resolve and began to move forward into the attraction. It’s an attraction called darkness, and it doesn’t relent on that idea for even a little bit. The darkness is so thick and suffocating that you feel like you’re breathing it in with every breath you take. Something like that seems like an exaggeration, but the air in here is so still and hot…though that might be poor ventilation more than anything. Having successfully convinced himself that everything is fine, Dan keeps moving forward.

Occasionally Dan will bump into walls and be forced to turn right or left. The straight and narrow corridors seem to continue on and on until just the moment you start to get unsettled and then ‘BAM’, you hit a wall. Dan thought that was a poor design choice on the attraction designer’s part. It seems to destroy the point of making you your own worst enemy if you keep getting distracted by hitting walls- ‘BAM!’

“Damnit! Again!” Dan shouted.

Dan spread his arms out but found that there were still walls on either side of him. Trying to get his bearings, Dan backed himself up only to back into what felt like a whole other wall. It almost felt like the walls were moving. Dan sneered, feeling like he figured out the gimmick.

Dan thought that some actors were silently moving pitch-black walls in tandem with guests as they walked into the attraction.

Dan smiled smugly to himself, “a seemingly endless labyrinth of darkness to unsettle people by making them feel like they are just walking into some alternate dimension. One they can’t escape until they get some sort of reaction they’re looking for. Clever.” he thought.

Dan calmed himself down with these thoughts and moved forward again. He hit walls a few times on the way there. Eventually, though, Dan hit a door. He could tell it was a door because the doorknob nailed him in the gut. He opened the door slowly, and on the other side of this door, there was this extraordinarily dim light encircling something in this new room.

“Oh, not so dark anymore. Huh?”

Dan approached the small, dimly-lit circle in the middle of the room. Once close enough to the ring, Dan noticed it was...a small pool of water? Dan kneeled down and looked once again into the pool of water. A thin fog swirls around the surface, but past that, you notice three things: The first thing you notice being this close to this pool is that it stinks like something died in it. Dan pinched his nose but continued to look into the pool. The second thing you notice about the pool is that the water doesn’t really seem like water. It looks thick and black, like tar.

“That’d explain the smell if it were tar.”

The third thing you notice about the pool is that despite being thick and tar-like. The semi-liquid is just as reflective, if not more so, than any pool of water. Dan can see his reflection perfectly.

Well, almost perfectly. The reflection is grinning ear-to-ear. Dan panics and checks his face. Being in the pitch black, Dan opts to feel his features. His lips and cheeks aren’t smiling, nervously or otherwise. Dan looks back to the water. His reflection does precisely as he does and touches its face. As it does, its ear-to-ear grin is transformed into a toothy grin. Dan’s reflection has long, sharp, white teeth. Dan starts showing his teeth to the mirror image, causing the reflection’s toothy grin to get toothier.

“What? Is this some kind of funhouse mirror?” Dan snarked.

The reflection, whose face was mainly teeth at this point, grabbed his top lip and began stretching it over the top of his head. Dan fidgets from the uncanny nature of seeing your reflection mutilate itself. The lip of the copy starts ripping at the mouth, and right as Dan thinks the lip will rip off, more of his reflection’s face starts peeling away. A sudden swift motion rips off all the skin on the right side of its face. Dan stared in horror at a deformed, half-skinned version of himself. The long teeth were revealed to be reaching far past where they should’ve stopped. The rip went over the reflection’s right eye, a tiny black tendril writhes about in place of an eye. The skinless half of the reflection face starts bleeding, and Dan feels something hot and wet on his face.

Dan reaches toward his face and feels something liquid, pulling his hand back, and it’s dark and thick like blood. Dan’s breathing gets rapid and heavy as he looks back down into the pool, and the reflection has its head cocked as blood pours from its face. Dan desperately tries to keep the blood from flooding out of his face like it is in the reflection, but it just keeps coming and coming blinding his right eye. The reflection starts unhinging its jaw as it looks up at Dan revealing rows and rows of teeth. Two claw-like arms reach from the liquid and grab the sides of the pool, cracking the ground next to Dan, causing him to jump back. The half-faced entity then peaked its head from the pool.

“Are you afraid, Daniel?”

Its voice came out distorted. Demonic. Dan tried backing away from it but made it only a few feet before hitting his back against a wall. The creature started climbing out of the pool, slinking toward the scared young man. The rest of its body is reminiscent of a snake in the way that it slithers along the floor.

“Is this what you were…hoping for, Daniel?”

“How- how do you know my name,” Dan yelled back, unable to do much else.

It didn’t respond to Dan’s question. Instead, it just moved closer and closer.

“Is this what gets you...Daniel?”

The creature’s clawed appendages coiled themselves around Dan’s legs as it pulled in even closer to the young man’s face. Dan was now eye-to-eye with his monstrous doppelganger. The creature scratches the still-skinned side of its face, and Dan reacts, feeling his own face getting marked in the process.

“You’ll never be rid of me, Daniel. I am the fear you tell everyone isn’t there. I am the terror that makes your heart race in every dark corner. I am every horrific thought you’ve ever imagined. I am the thoughts that lie dormant in the back of your mind keeping you up at night.”

The creature’s head twists one-hundred-eighty degrees. Its neck stretches to loop around and stare at Dan. The creature leans in closer to the young man, its putrid breath passing over his entire face. They smile a big smile.

“Or perhaps I could end everything right here?”

Dan’s entire body was shaking, but still, he couldn’t move. Couldn’t talk. Couldn’t even begin to resist the creature right in front of him.

“No pleading? Well, it was fun while it lasted, Daniel.”

The creature lunges towards Dan with a gaping maw, readying to pierce him with any number of long, pointy teeth. Dan regains himself for just a split second and tries to back up hard into the wall behind him. Hoping beyond hope to do, well, anything. To his surprise, the wall behind him gives quickly. Within a second, the shining lights of street lamps were burning into his vision right before he slammed against the pavement hard. Drops of rain were falling on him.

Dan’s friends are all staring down at him and talking, but he can’t hear them. He can only stare down at a toothy reflection in the water puddle underneath him. His fist clenched. He cursed himself for not being able to enjoy things like this, about his brain working on overdrive to torment him.

“I’ll be with you tonight just like I am every other night. That’s my promise.”