hello hello! i present all my darling backrooms/poolrooms lovers with a little short story i wrote about the pool rooms <33
tw! this story contains minor themes of gore and death.
p.s if you have any writing requests for horror shorts feel free to leave them in my asks <33
This is familiar, isn't it?
The pull of comfort deep in your gut, the hazy warmth filling your head, the flicker of your eyelashes just barely held apart as you sink to this memory- distant and distorted left there like a photo bleached by the sun, left out too long now faded and pale, white around the edges.
Blue tiles sweep by your feet, glistening beneath you somehow soft despite their glass glaze, warm against your damp skin seeming to hold you in just the right way as if somehow, some way, this is home. You look down, watching as they swirl and ripple, reflecting light back up at you catching on their edges, their corners, glinting and shimmering as if watching you- thousands of tiny eyes.
It's comforting, isn't it?
Oh and the water, clear, crystal, lapping up at your waist with the smallest gleeful waves as if becoming you closer, deeper, further into its silky embrace, go play with them, it pleads, giggles buried in its ripples. It's warm, but not too warm, just enough to chase chilled shivers off, just enough to keep the goose bumps under your unbroken skin.
It's beautiful, isn't it?
Around you, you can hear rushing from somewhere, splashes and bubbles, so your eyes follow the sound and there before you is a slide.
Red shining plastic catches your attention, woven in a loose spiral, loopty looping up up up and around the park, bellowing out above you ending just a little ways away in an open end spilling fresh water back to the pool you wade through. You hear it echo, bubble, soft white foam creeping up to your chest the deeper you go till you can't see the tiles anymore- you can only just feel them, slipping against the soles of your feet as a reassuring presence whispering beneath you, “im here, its ok”
You can't believe you forgot this.
Mixing with the sound, the bubbling, the rippling, the splashes and pops, you can hear the laughter too, shrill giggles of people, strangers around you, bumping to your side and sending waves crashing over you- and you can't help but laugh too, because this is wonderful, isn't it?
You slip deeper, deeper, deeper still, a little bounce to your step now as sound echoes all around you, movement and waves and beautiful shimmers like dazzling sequins blinding you with glee- you want to stay here, don't you?
But, even in the giggles, the ripples, the shines and shimmers, you can't shake that feeling, one screaming that something is different.
and steadily you realise, in something you might call whiplash, that no one is here.
The water is still, all except the ripples you send out around you breaking surface tension so glassy, so perfect you’d swear you could walk on it if not for the water rushing past your ankles.
You stand there, alone, surrounded by this unmoving, unbreathing mass threatening to swallow you whole as the air too falls still, silent, empty and warm. There's no laughter, you wish there was, but it's silent, all to be heard is that of the water now trickling at your collar bones, rippling away as your toes brush the tiles bidding you adieu, and the electric hum of lights above you filling your ears yet you strain to hear it because it's all so far away.
You don't remember, do you?
Your eyes slide around the room, the edge of the pool vacant, the grates along each edge cold and still, but most of all, worst of all, the slide too has died. It stood there to your side, air seeming to groan from its open end, no water, no bubbles, no happy little giggles, just the dry empty red tunnel, darkness buried in its throat gurgling a silence that seemed to beckon you closer, staring to that void, that darkness, that emptiness.
You don't remember how you got here, do you?
It's just you, you and the water, and you don't remember walking this far out.
Your swimming now, bobbing up and down sending those little ripples out around you, feet just barely brushing the tiles yet each time you touch them you seem to float further and further away until they too are gone leaving you stuck treading water, eyes darting left to right, left to right as the lights above blind you to whatever may be beneath.
But, the water is different here.
You can't see the bottom anymore, the depth seeming to drown you. It's darker, thicker, your legs starting to struggle against it as shadows swirl by your ankles, tug at your feet and clutch at your skin. Yes, it's definitely thicker.
The water is different here.
You're tired, aren't you? Cold too I'd imagine.
But it's not the kind of cold brought by ice or snow, no, this is the kind of cold that echos for miles, the kind you’d only feel sat only at the edge of nothingness, by the drop of a cliff or beyond night time dreams- its the kind of cold you feel at the end of everything, the kind of cold that resonates death. Indescribable is that empty, for it transcends words.
At first you don't notice, not as your breath hitches, nor as the tiles beside you start to drag and slip away, water breaking at your front, rushing by your legs dragging you closer and closer in, but as you spin, as you slide to look behind you, you see it now, the end lights of the pool burned out leaving only shadows to drop over the water meters away.
For a moment all you can do is stare, stare out to the miles of still clear water waiting behind you, waiting for what? You don't know. So you watch. your gaze fixes to the light next to the one now dark, watching for it too to go off, to plunge you back to the night so far away, but it only stares back, glaring with that dazzling white- blinding and bright.
It's only when you go to look away, eyes flicking down, that you hear it again.
Your eyes dart back up and your breathing hitches, feet kicking faster as you find the darkness has come closer. Two lights out now, two metres of stretching shadow.
You start to swim, you don't know what good it will do, but still you swim. Water rushes by your ears, your breath quivers and your legs burn because it's thick- so thick it feels as though it's suffocating you, crushing you, dragging you under.
Oh yes, the water is different.
Another light out. You look back, panic rearing its head as what could be a whimper leaves your chlorine licked lips. It's so dark now. Only three lights left till you're stranded- blind and helpless in a sea of ink that now swells around you, hungry and waiting.
I wonder what it's like, to be hunted, stalked, preyed upon, perhaps you can tell me?
Click. Two lights left and you're running out of paddle room.
Ahead of you is a wall, a sign painted on the glistening blue tiles “deep end”, reminding you just how far down this water must go. You try to look down, but all you see is the light above you reflected back up, a mirror you can't see past leaving you completely lost, trapped in an ocean now too thick to swim through.
Your breath echoes against the tile around you- shaky and broken bouncing back to your ears as you linger under the last light on, a spotlight above you setting your stage for the credits, end call, curtain fall, and there in the distance they look back at you, the twinkling tiles you once found glee in seemed to become an audience of peeping eyes, every glint off every sharp corner gazing back at you forcing your heart to stutter and legs to tremble.
You're dangling, helpless, vulnerable, and there's nothing you can do but bob there, sending little ripples out around you. I wonder what will feel them, what will find you.
The water is different here.
You can see it now, in the darkness beneath you, that hint of red that forces your blood to freeze and your legs to pause for a moment, sending you plunging under. You bob back up, shocked back to reality gasping and sniffling, hands frantically grasping for nothing- breath- remember to breath.
around you the water swells, the ripples you pushed threw it revealing layers and layers of folding red lapping up at the tile wall meters away. It looks impossible to swim that far..
You just about gag at the sting of rotting copper, rolling up from the stirring surface twisting your stomach as if a fist has reached within you squeezing and rolling your guts around its clawed fingers.
“Where is everyone?”, The question now feels like a threat.
You don't know what possesses you, maybe it's the still tiles staring back at you, or maybe it's the silent slide breathing gusts of stagnant air back across the water, or maybe it's the question, that awful question, “where are they” ringing on in your head. but you take a breath, deep and rasped, then plunge yourself under; down, down, deeper down, eyes squeezed shut as your ears echo with the rumble of water.
It's a funny sound, the warbled growls, rumbles, laps at your ears, like curling static and swirling dread. It's deafening. But you don't dare pull up.
It takes you a moment, but when you finally force your eyes open ahead of you is an ocean of red. The dark, slimy thick kind of red you can feel soaking into your clothes, clinging to your skin. Looking up the light breaks it, and you can see it all. Pink to red to a fading black you're caught between, and looking down- oh it's awful. Blackness that seems to go on forever, strings and bits of god knows what swimming around your ankles.
Beyond that red, as you force yourself to swim closer, squinting threw the veil of slick, you can just make them out now; bars.
There are steel metal bars ahead of you, plunging down to the dark further than the eye could see, and as you look from side to side you find they too seem to go on forever, though the pool you thought, was never that wide- was it?.
You swim closer, because why wouldn't you? That question- where is everyone, wrapped around your neck tugging you closer.
You swim, struggle, crawl through the slop you've buried yourself in, chest spasming with the weight of your breath held in your lungs and your skin shuddering as something hard and sharp slips past your arm till you reach them, the rows and rows of endless bars like prison cells for what? You dare not ask.
Fingers reach out, brush the steel before gripping it tight, reeling yourself in with a loud pounding rush against your ears bringing you face to face with the endless darkness beyond.
Because surely, there has to be something.
And threw the dark, threw the slick, threw the bellowing plumes of red, there was something, something awful. First you find strings. Sticky, half seethrew tangled up with bits of something soft, something squishy, swirling and spinning as if suspended there. So you squirm closer, the burn in your chest long forgotten as you stare at them- the army of shadows, the army of dead. A chill runs up your spine, tears pricked at your eyes stinging now with chlorine and horror because before you they lie, your eyes barely making them out but all the same there like a nightmare you want to forget.
And it looks like your next.