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Probably, they should have seen it coming. It’s Gilear, after all—Gilear, who recently lost half of his wardrobe (the good half, reportedly) in the washing machine, because of either spontaneous dissolving or theft or both, Kristen is still unclear on the details. Gilear, who is also still unclear on the details.
Gilear, who once went to the hospital because he thought his mouth was bleeding even though it was really just that that’s what the vitamins he took looked like when they dissolved. (And also that the vitamins were expired, but that’s not really relevant to the hospital thing.)
Gilear, who has only ever gotten stood up or scammed or both from his multiple attempts at using Fantasy Facebook Marketplace. Gilear, who somehow despite only ever being the victim, still has an abysmal rating on Fantasy Facebook Marketplace.
Gilear, who almost got mugged by a group of middle schoolers last week before the middle schoolers realized all he had on him was a used plastic spoon with an empty yogurt cup (no lid), two bus tickets, and a pristine-looking gym membership loyalty card, and decided he was too sad to mug.
Gilear, who has failed every save he has ever been asked to roll in his life.
All this is to say that they probably should have known it was of course Gilear, who would get taken by the sentience living in the pool below the Strongtower Luxury Apartments.
Kristen knew it was haunted—or, something, but haunted was probably the best word she could think of to get the point across without having to go into specifics. And after finally seeing it for herself and not just hearing about it in passing, shuddering remarks from Fig and Riz, she does not want to go into specifics.
It was a late December afternoon when she first ventured down into the basement, the infinitely naive Kristen of two weeks past that wanted to do… something. When she tries to recall it now, the space between her brain and her skull shrinks and is filled with that same pulsing headache she’d found herself suffering from when she tried to leave the pool behind in the first place. She’s pretty sure she wanted to prove Riz and Fig wrong, but about what is not clear to her now. She hasn’t been back to the basement since, and she has scarcely spoken a word of the experience, either.
When Fig came home that first night, she took one look at Kristen and huffed an exasperated sigh as she dropped her bag to the floor and crossed her arms.
“Did you go to the pool?”
“Yeah,” Kristen whined.
“I told you it was haunted.”
“I thought you meant in the fun way.”
“I explicitly said not in the fun way.”
“Okay, well.”
Now, two weeks later, Kristen is laid on the couch again, apartment to herself. It’s a Saturday, this time, bright outside again, in the way a winter sky could be only when it was unforgivingly cold on the other side of the glass. Fig was off with Gorthalax again, and Riz was at the cemetery again, but this time it was Gilear that decided to take a walk. Kristen was thinking about asking him if he wanted to watch a movie or something, but he’d announced his departure shortly after she starting flipping through the basket of DVDs kept on the TV stand. She can’t quite blame him—she’s been getting really unironically into soup cubes since the bad kids first discovered their existence on New Year’s, and as such her relative social standing has taken a hit. Last week, she’d asked Gilear if he wanted company on his grocery shopping trip, and he’d kind of just grimaced and said, “It’s, uh, it’s nothing, erm, personal, Kristen, I just—Fabian gave me a fist bump the other day—” Hands up, defensive, self aware but taking the win where he can: “—probably as a joke but he still did it, so…”
She’s proud of him, she is, but watching the complete second season of Friends Cantrip just isn’t as fun alone. She puts it on anyway, halfheartedly filling up a bowl with the last of Gilear’s salt and vinegar chips—which isn’t a dick move, actually, because he told her they were too spicy for him and that she’d be doing him a favour by eating them. So she does—bravely, valiantly, benevolently—and scrolls through fantasy instagram for the better part of three episodes.
She’s about halfway through pumping herself up to get up and change the disc when Fig texts her.
fig: is gilear home???
fig: kristen
fig: kristen
fig: kristen is gilear home
Kristen sits up, moves the empty bowl of chips onto the coffee table. Fig has never shied away from double texting, but this seems more urgent than normal. Which isn’t automatically a bad sign, because Fig’s idea of urgent can range from anywhere from Should I wear the red socks or the black or should I mix and match them to I forgot what kind of sauce you asked for and I need to know right now because we’re ordering to Hey we might have accidentally killed Riz trying to learn pro wrestling moves can you come heal him please.
But Kristen has a bad feeling. It presses up on the inside of her head, holds her fingers hovered over the keyboard as she tries to type, no he went on a walk. She only gets so far as no he went and then Fig is calling her, and the bad feeling gets worse.
“He went on a walk,” she greets.
“My texts to him aren’t delivering.” Fig’s voice is worried. Kristen stands and walks over to the kitchen, just for something to do.
“Could it be a problem with your phone?”
“My texts to you are delivering fine.”
Kristen hums. “Could it—”
“Do you know where he went?”
“He didn’t tell me. We—do you have him on find your phone?”
“Yeah,” Fig sighs, shakier than Kristen would have expected. Shit. “Yeah, I—okay, We’re on our way home. Can you get Riz?”
Kristen gets Riz and Fig brings Adaine home, and shortly thereafter the four of them are rifling through Gilear’s room for any sign of why he might be missing. Find your phone informed them that Gilear—or his phone, at least, was still in the building, but it doesn’t seem to be in the room as they search. It’s a grab bag of effort—Riz is zeroed in, at least, treating this like any other investigation and looking for real clues. Adaine is studying the room thoughtfully, eyes glowing pale blue as she casts her magic. Kristen admittedly isn’t really doing anything, instead focusing her attention on watching Fig, who seems now, in person, actually really distressed about the whole thing, and not in the normal way where she’s cracking jokes about it.
When Goldenhoarde threatened to expel her for repeatedly interrogating Porter and called her mom about it right then and there in front of her, Fig just talked over him about how he was jealous the entire time, even though Kristen knew she and her mom had a huge fight that morning and she was probably shitting her pants about getting in even more trouble. When Dr. Asha tried to propose a shotgun wedding so their twins wouldn’t be bastards, she’d technically almost gotten kidnapped but had still texted memes to the group chat the entire time until she was able to disappear into a gas station and cast disguise self so he would think she’d bailed for normal reasons. And even when her old guitar got smashed to pieces that time they played magical manhunt in the Far Haven woods, she at least was laughing by the time she got done trying to beat Fabian up about it. Later, on the way home in Sklonda’s car, the shattered pieces of it spread out over her lap, she’d admitted it was kind of punk.
Right now, it looks like she’s never laughed in her life, eyes wide and terrified as she stands there shaking her leg in the middle of Gilear’s room.
After a tense collection of minutes, Riz stands up and breaks the silence.
“Well, his toothbrush is still here, so he likely didn’t run away.”
“Run away? What is he, a dog?” Kristen can’t help but stop and entertain the thought for a moment, imagining Gilear with a little backpack filled with nothing but a water bottle, a granola bar, and a dream of life beyond Elmville. “Wait, is this run away like ‘run away’ and really they’re dead or is it actually running away.”
Fig blinks. “He’s not dead!”
“Yet,” Riz mutters under his breath.
Adaine smacks his shoulder lightly, then hums in vague, thoughtful agreement. “Okay, okay, but if he ran away for real, where would he even go? He doesn’t have friends besides us.”
“Woah, I don’t know if I would say I’m his friend.” Riz says, “and also I don’t think he ran away. It’s too cold and he doesn’t know how to walk on ice without getting a concussion, even he’s smart enough not to risk that.” Fig’s frown deepens and Riz continues, oblivious. “But actually, if he did go outside, then he probably couldn’t have gotten too far. Did you guys check the parking lot on your way in?”
Kristen shuts her eyes tight at another stab of pain in her skull, nearly taking her down to the floor. Get on the floor, she thinks suddenly, oddly. There’s a melody to it, like half a lyric hedging to get stuck in a loop on her head, but she shakes it off quickly. It is too cold outside, but Gilear for sure went for a walk. And if he didn’t go for a walk outside—
“Wait, why is his toothbrush in his room?” Adaine says then, putting down the comb she was inspecting to put both hands on her hips and stare at the rest of them in confusion. “Why not keep it in the bathroom like a normal person?”
Kristen sighs and explains, “It kept falling in the toilet so he decided to keep it in here.”
Riz, rightfully, is incredulous. “Just keep the lid closed!”
“He does, it was when he was using it.”
“When he was—the toilet, or the toothbrush?”
“And has he gotten a new toothbrush or is the one that kept falling in?”
“Okay first one is sometimes both, but mostly—”
“Guys!” Fig wheels around and the laughter dies immediately at the sight of tears welling in her eyes. “Can you stop making fun of him?” Her voice breaks, just a bit, and the air is sucked out of the room. “I know he’s like, a total fucking loser or whatever, but he’s still my dad! Sort of! And I think really he’s in trouble this time so if you guys could like, like, I don’t know, maybe not be so fucking cavalier about it I would really appreciate that! Sorry!” She storms out of the room before anyone can react, leaving Kristen, Riz, and Adaine to blankly stare at each other and feel like assholes.
“Well.”
“We should—”
“Yeaaaaah.”
They leave the toothbrush where they found it in Gilear’s room, finding Fig a minute later in the corner of the living room curled up with her bass, sadly plucking out random notes as she glares up at them through eyelashes stuck together with tears.
“Hey,” Kristen says, gingerly sitting down on the floor beside her, “we’re gonna find him.”
“I think he’s in the pool,” Fig says, finally and miserably voicing the thing Kristen had inexplicably known the minute she first texted her, but had been too scared to even think, let alone say aloud. Her words are grave, but she quickly backtracks with a (failed, teary) attempt at being dismissive: “But he’s gonna be totally fine.”
“What’s… up with the pool?” Adaine asks, eyebrows pitched down in thought. “Have we—wait, how have we never been swimming here?”
“Pool’s haunted,” Fig, Riz, and Kristen all say in unison, harmonizing over various levels of defeat.
“What?”
“Pool’s haunted.”
Adaine stares at them for a moment, silent, evidently deciding whether she should press further or just accept it at face value. Clearly she settles on the latter as another moment passes and she just lets out a sigh, shakes her head, and says, “Oh, Gilear.” Riz finally volleys back her earlier disdain, giving her arm a backhanded smack and widening his eyes as he unsubtly nods his head toward Fig. She holds her hands in the air and brightens up with, “Who is going to be fine. We’re gonna get him and it’s all gonna be good. Easy! We’re the bad kids.”
Fig almost cracks a smile.
After that, they get ready for whatever’s waiting down there for them. It’s nice, actually to go into an adventure prepared for battle—it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call their last couple combats blindsides, as they probably should have known there would be some violence on the horizon at the factory and the bloodrush field, but Kristen does feel a bit better knowing they’re at least a little more equipped this time, even without Fabian and Gorgug.
That feeling quickly leaves her as they shuffle into the stairwell, filing down into the lower levels of the building. Kristen can feel a distinct shift in the air when they cross the threshold of the ground level, every step lowering themselves below the earth like a body into a grave. If she’s going to die (again), Kristen thinks, then the Strongtower Luxury Apartments wouldn’t be the worst place to do it.
They make it as low as the stairs will take them, and looking back up, they appear to ascend into a dark, winding oblivion above. Kristen has the distinct feeling that, if they tried to go back up, it would take them hours to return to the third floor.
The only option is forward, further into the heart of whatever beast holds domain over their basement. Fig heaves the door open and Kristen holds her breath as she peers inside, half-expecting something to jump out at them right then and there. Half-hoping for it to happen so the bulk of the fight could take place here, under the safe beacon of fluorescents instead of being bathed in the unnervingly warm incandescence found nowhere else in the building, throwing shadows like henchmen over the carpet, waiting to take them victim when they’re focused on something else.
Another part of her—a smaller, more naive part—is hoping that maybe it’ll be Gilear that will be spit out from the labyrinth of the hallway, a miracle on two legs doing their afternoon’s work for them. She knows that isn’t going to happen, but just to be sure she leans over Fig’s shoulder, checking the corridor for the telltale shape of a man perpetually cast in the role of the universe’s punching bag. Predictably, she doesn’t find that, but she does make another discovery.
She swears, this time, that the floorplan is different.
Where Kristen remembers a long hallway stretching seemingly into brown-toned oblivion, there is a short walk up to a dead end. Maybe, she’s just disoriented from the trip down the stairwell. Their footsteps did echo around them in a bizarre sort of way, coming back off the concrete sideways, wrong, in a slightly different cadence and rhythm than they’d been in the first place. As if the building was alive, taking their nervous steps and their strained words and giving them back just a little altered, like a joke repeated not quite right. As if the building was alive, and laughing at them.
So maybe it’s that that’s why the basement looks different this time, but maybe also it’s just actually different this time.
She’s not sure which option she likes less.
The four of them stand at the threshold of the door, holding to each other tightly. Kristen turns her head to look down the other end of the hallway—immediately wanting to look back as if the muscles in her neck were set on a spring, as if there was some invisible hand gripping her chin and pulling her back towards itself—and she sees an endless hall stretching off into an impossible darkness.
“Okay, so the pool is… some way,” Fig starts. Kristen doesn’t want to see how scared she looks, so she sets her gaze downward, staring at her shoes. The carpet is plush beneath her feet, beat up sneakers only partly visible as they sink into the floor. Is it a different pattern than last time? She can’t remember for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise her.
“—together, alright?” Fig is arriving at a point but Kristen only catches the tail end, too transfixed by the way the floor looks. There’s a distant, Shagadelic, baby! that goes off in her mind, her own voice somewhere far away from the cacophonous, pulsing club beat in the forefront of her mind. It’s almost too shagadelic. She doesn’t remember the carpet being so long, last time. She thinks, her shoes are really sinking into it, grungy strands of brown covering her toes and swallowing the shredded tips of her laces. But then she realizes that’s not right, entirely—she’s not sinking into the floor. She knows, somehow—the floor is growing upwards to cover her, like plush moss quietly persevering over the surface of a stone, unmoving and helpless.
“We should start walking,” she hears herself say, voice strangled and quiet. She looks up, blinking at Fig. For a moment, she hates her for having such a stupid, stupid dad. She shakes it off, clears her throat, and repeats, “We should start walking.”
They go in a single-file line, holding onto each other as they shuffle forward. This was the suggestion that Kristen didn’t hear—Fig braving the front of the line, clutching her bass to her chest, the strings softly glowing and ready to spit magic out at anything vaguely resembling a threat; Riz next, index finger of his left hand looped onto the hood of Fig’s (originally Gorgug’s) sweater and right hand curled around his arquebus, aimed straight over Fig’s shoulder; then Kristen behind him, almost entirely curled in on herself as they inch forward save for the single hand firmly holding to Riz; and Adaine at the end of the line, both hands—warm with magic at the ready—on Kristen’s shoulders like this is a birthday party and they’re doing a conga line instead of walking a death march in a cursed basement.
Kristen is regretting, slightly, not calling Gorgug and Fabian to come help them. Before, back in the apartment, she’d considered it. They would obviously be a huge help against whatever was down here, but she’d ultimately opted against calling the martial cavalry in for two reasons: firstly, bringing attention to how serious this mission might end up being would probably only exacerbate Fig’s growing panic; and secondly, so would Fabian’s inevitable endless inability to shut up about Gilear’s incompetence.
But now, Fig resolutely leading them through the first fork in the hallway, Kristen thinks that they all could have used an extra two friends. But, then again, she thinks, maybe it’s good that they’re not here ‘cause if we get haunted or whatever too then they can come down and try to save us. The thought brings little comfort, but not zero comfort. At least it wouldn’t be her rescuing them—Kristen knows that one, she is not strong enough to be dragging Gorgug or Fabian out of anywhere, and two, she also doesn’t think she could deal with Fabian’s inevitable endless incompetence at having the ability to shut up. Kristen, unfortunately much like Gilear, has no delusions about her own dignity, and would (maybe will) have no problem being rescued.
Or maybe we could have them join us down here forever, someone else, using her voice, thinks. Which is, well. Maybe not a good sign.
“Um, guys,” Adaine starts, holding onto Kristen tighter as she flinches at the sound of her voice. “I just cast detect good and evil, and it’s, uh—it’s really, really evil down here.”
No shit, Kristen thinks, this thought now entirely her own, shaking off the weird little echo in her head, which is nice.
Riz scoffs. “Oh is it? Is it evil in the evil basement with all the fucking, the fucking—the evil walls and evil carpet and evil ceiling and evil sounds and evil general aura of evilness?”
Kristen turns back to widen her eyes and exchange a silent look with Adaine like, Rude! When Adaine is done shaking her head, Kristen turns back and wordlessly squeezes Riz’s shoulder, hoping it’s more comforting than patronizing.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, a beat later.
“That’s okay.”
They fall back into silence after that, inching forward through the twisting yellowed halls. Eventually, the smell of decades old carpet is overpowered by chlorine, and their steps get a little more sure, a little more resigned to the beckoning of the pool. The air gets a little tighter around them, cinching them in. Kristen doesn’t even notice they’ve transitioned into tile until Adaine mutters a low Ewww as she tries to get an impossibly long strand of wet hair off her shoe. She manages to get the end of it in one of the thin puddles of water scattered over the floor—Kristen watches as the hair is sucked in, slowly at first, then ripped down into an apparent oblivion. She shudders, uncontrollable, and then gets the impulse to dip her toe in, also uncontrollable. She just wants to see what would happen, but then Riz is yanking her forward, worried crease between his eyebrows, and the urge dissipates.
Kristen looks up, equal parts disturbed and relieved. When she registers the space around them, it is finally familiar—illegible, vertigo inducing signs. Missing locks making for empty space leading to absolutely nothing. Punishing humidity and an air pressure that would suggest they’re closer to the bottom of the ocean than their own apartments. Rotted, fuzzy fingers of wet alien growth stretching out from under the heavy steel doors, teasing at what awaits them inside. Clumps of softly writhing hair. Murky windows, pale shapes behind them and the skull-compressing promise of unidentifiable, undeniable want.
They have arrived at the swimming pool of the Strongtower Luxury Apartments.
Fig sets her jaw. “He’s in there.”
“Yup,” Riz replies, splitting the difference between determined and resigned.
She sighs. It seems that her panic has subsided, at least enough to let her joke again. Or, maybe she’s just stalling. “Any last words? In case we all die in this stupid fucking pool?”
“We’re not going to die in this stupid fucking pool,” Adaine says.
“Those aren’t very good last words.”
“Okay, well—”
“If we’re doing last words, I want mine to be something cool.”
“Just ‘something cool’? Or something that is actually cool?”
Riz shrugs. “I don’t know. I think saying ‘something cool’ could be cool in a like, ironic way.”
Being ironically cool is probably your best hope at ever being cool, says the Fabian that exists in Kristen’s mind. That’s not very nice, she replies. Doing a sick cannonball into the pool would be unironically cool, says the other voice.
“I think you’re very cool, Riz,” Kristen says, earning a confused yet appreciative look.
Adaine moves on with, “Fig, do you have last words picked out?”
“No, I’m never gonna die, I just wanted to see what you guys were gonna say.”
“I know what I would say,” Kristen says, making a quick, lazy sign of the cross and blowing a kiss up to the ceiling, mostly for Sklonda. “Grab somebody sexy tell ‘em hey.”
There’s a beat, and then Riz exhales a nervous laugh. “What?”
“I’ve always wanted my last words to be a Pitbull lyric.”
“And you choose that Pitbull lyric?”
Adaine hums, raises a finger. “Pitbull doesn’t even sing that lyric.”
Fig can either sense that this is about to become a whole thing, or, she’s done stalling. “Okay, well, dale. It’s time to save my dad.”
When they open the doors, Gilear is already in the pool.
He’s doing a gentle breaststroke, cutting a murky, oil-slick path through the carpet of algae floating on the surface of the pool. It clings to him as he turns, holding on possessively as he raises a hand out of the water—not very high, not very long, plunging forcefully back into the pool with what Kristen swears is a hiss— and says, “Oh, hello, daughter. Children.”
Fig’s voice is a thin squeak. “Hi, Gilear.”
Kristen thinks she hears Riz mutter something like Fucking of course, but the sound of it is taken by the room, sucked into some far off corner. Gilear floats onto his back and holds his arms out invitingly, the path of his body creating some bastardization of a snow angel. Snow demon would probably be more accurate here, though. Snow eldritch horror?
“Would you like to join me? The temperature is actually very pleasant.”
“Uhh—”
“No thank you,” Riz says assertively, grunting out of it as Fig elbows him in the side and Adaine whispers Dude! He pinches Fig back, ignores Adaine, then turns again to Gilear, softening as he continues with significantly more tact, “We’re—we’re good. Just ate lunch, so. Wouldn’t want to break the pool rules.” He nods over to the board mounted onto the far wall, four heads turning to see cracked plastic covered in decades of dirt, and a collection of indecipherable symbols in the vague shape of a list. “Oh, well,” Riz deadpans, “I guess we can’t technically be breaking the rules if they’re all—” He gestures vaguely, blinking with the exasperation of someone much older than fourteen. “—fucked, or whatever.”
Kristen almost laughs—a short, absurd thing—but Gilear beats her to it. It’s breathy and weak, and the sound of it comes from behind them, somehow, despite his pained eyes boring into them from ten feet away, directly in front of where they stand. “If you come in, it says it’ll let me leave,” he says then, desperate.
Kristen throws up in her mouth, swallows it, then throws up again onto the sweaty tile.
“It really is quite nice.”
Riz sighs. “So Gilear’s fucking possessed or whatever, right?”
So, Gilear is fucking possessed, or whatever. Kristen feels the whatever in the uneasy throb of her heartbeat, reverberating in her skull. She couldn’t name it—wouldn’t name it—but she knows what it wants. It wants everything they have and nothing less. It wants oblivion, an endless circling of the drain, hypnotically tethered to the deepest end, to no end. It wants to bubble up and rise over the bounds of the pool itself, spilling out into the hallway and soaking the shag carpet with a seething, frothy rush, threatening to collapse the walls holding it captive. It wants to collapse the walls holding it captive. It wants to collapse. It wants to wrap its tendrils around any living thing it can get a hold of and grow inside the terrified, gasping crevices of every breath. It wants to know what it feels like to have a heart that beats and bleeds and loves and exists outside of this room.
It wants her.
And, now that she thinks about it, really thinks about it—would that be, really, so bad?
The water does look quite nice, actually. And how long has it been since Kristen went swimming? It must have been before school started. And at this point she probably isn’t going on her family’s annual summer trip to Sunpeak this year, so. She wants to get in the pool. And the pool wants her to get in it, too—it’s a win-win scenario, here. Gilear’s probably lonely in there, anyway—he’s always lonely. Kristen’s been feeling a little lonely lately too with the holidays and everything, but that’s all okay, now. She has the pool, and the pool has her. She wants to swim. She really wants to swim. It’s totally normal to want to swim. She’s always loved swimming. When she was little, she used to see how long she could stay in the hotel pool before her parents dragged her out. Her record to date is eleven hours and twenty eight minutes—she could totally beat that now, she doesn’t even have parents to drag her out. The closest thing she has is Gilear, and he’s gonna swim with her! She could totally beat the record now. She could stay in here. Where else would she have to go? She has everything she needs here. It’s basically Mr. Worldwide as she steps into the room. She wants to swim. She really, really wants to swim.
And to the pool she can’t promise tomorrow, but maybe she could promise tonight, right?
“Hey guys,” she says, the sound of it falling out of her sideways, out of time with the sensation of her lips moving, “I think… I’m gonna go for a swim.”
A delighted shriek comes out of Gilear’s mouth. “Great idea!”
“Not a great idea! No!” Riz counters. He grabs Kristen’s wrist as she starts to step out of her shoes, wetness from the tile soaking into the bottom of her socks. She’s pretty sure in this moment that the warm, uneven dampness of the cotton on her sweaty skin is the most refreshing thing she’s ever felt.
“You can’t go swimming right now,” Adaine tries, gentler, holding onto her other wrist, not gentler. From behind her, Fig strums a deep chord, casting a suggestion that the pool immediately counterspells and flings into the sweating pane of the window with a wet, muted smack.
Kristen hums, ignoring Fig’s affronted scoff. “Mmmm, I think I have to.”
“Okay, why’s that?” Adaine’s voice is trembling. Kristen thinks, distantly, that if she just went swimming with her, then the panic attack she’s about to have would just go away. If they all went swimming together, all their problems would go away. None of them seem that into it, but if being a camp counselor taught Kristen anything, it was to lead by example.
She smiles. Laughs a little, just to the pool. “I’m on fire,” she whispers.
Riz’s grip loosens, then tightens again. “What?”
She turns to look at them, blinks. “I’m on fire,” she repeats, adding a little melody to it. The room, thrilled, sings it back to her, echoing softly off the tile, sound of it already underwater.
Fig wheels around to stand in front of her, grabbing her face in her hands as she puts herself between Kristen and the pool. “What?”
“I’m on fire, I’m on fire—”
“Oh my god, she’s doing Pitbull.” Riz rolls his eyes and Kristen feels a surge of anger flare up inside her, somewhere deep, deep in her bones, a place she didn’t even know existed. It locks her in place, swelling and pushing out against her skin in thick ripples until it reaches her fingertips. The force of it doubles back on itself and bends her bones back and with a painful, involuntary flick of her wrist, one of the murky tendrils launching itself out of the water and planting itself on Riz’s chest, blowing him back across the room. Kristen doesn’t see it, doesn’t see anything but the water and the growth reaching up out of it, but she hears him thud against the metal of the doors.
The part of her that cries out for Riz is quickly diminishing, out of reach. That’s not good, and she knows it, but she can’t really find it in herself to care about that, or the horrified look on Fig’s face that flashes for only a split second before a long piece of curly orange hair slides her foot forward into a puddle so she slips, flying into the air and landing flat on her back. Everything fades to a pleasant, pale hum and the pool begins to speak to Kristen, its voice as at home in her head as her own.
While y’all slippin’, we runnin’ the game, it says to her. And it’s true—her friends really are all out here slippin’. Riz is still by the door, letting the algae knit itself over him. Adaine is casting spells that have no effect whatsoever, on anything. Fig is tuning her guitar against the lopsided acoustics of the room, none of her chords coming out right. None of them are prepared for this, but Kristen is like, totally calm. She’s runnin’ the game. She thought she was in her soup cubes era, but with the pool, she’s way beyond that. She’s blasted past her fist bump era, completely surpassing the need for even Fabian’s approval.
In the quiet, tranquil space of the pool deck, she starts to shimmy.
“Now big bang booty, get that kitty little noogie, in a nice nice little shade,” she sings under her breath, smiling as the water of the pool begins to churn in approval. Somewhere in the distance Gilear is cheering and hollering for what he thinks are the jacuzzi jets (These apartments really are luxury!) but Kristen is only focused on the performance—her offering to the pool for being so kind, so welcoming.
She shuffles forward, completely unaffected by the desperate chaos roaring behind her. There’s only the calm of the pool as she continues to get down. “I gave Suzie a little pat up on the booty,” she breathes, smacking her own booty for added visual aid.
The water splashes and offers one final invitation, low and beguiling. And she turned around and said?
Kristen smiles. She knows the words. “Walk this way.”
And with that, she steps off the edge of the deck and lets herself crash into the waiting water.
In the basement of the Strongtower Luxury Apartments, a battle begins.
Elsewhere, there is an interlude that echoes across future and past in perfect symmetry.
This is where Kristen waits, a child. Sitting on the floor with knees drawn up to her chest, either scratchy carpet or damp tile propping her up against the wall. Coloured glass or sweating windows. A litany or a chorus. It doesn’t matter which—neither body is really hers to puppet, here.
It’s not as bad as she’s making it sound. She doesn’t mind. She knows she should—should be concerned with the distant sounds of disarray; should itch to follow them outside the safety of these four walls, muffling anything outside this room, this room that keeps her sheltered from the things she doesn’t want to be; should want to make the choice. Any choice.
Unfortunately, it feels good to be good.
This is where Kristen lives, a child. She knows there’s something outside, something beyond. She knows it’s scary, like she’s been told, but she’s not so sure it’s bad, like she’s been told. If she really listens, she can hear it. Shouting and magic and waves rushing and second and third and fourth plans failing. It doesn’t sound like it’s going well. She’s not there but Kristen knows it’s her fault. The whole thing. It’s a familiar feeling, one this room is steeped in. Woven into the wallpaper and mixed into the grout. It’s her own voice that speaks to her when she hears You should just stay here.
Unfortunately, it is a comfort.
The door is closed, but it isn’t locked. Kristen wraps her arms tighter around herself and holds on as she listens to the world continue to leak in through the cracks in the leaded frame. She sees flashing light, nothing close to the brilliance of Helio. She smells chlorine, and burning, and dirt, so strong she has to check underneath her fingernails just to be sure. She hears her name cried on the lips of someone else and for the first time it doesn’t sound like a penance.
If she stays in this room, it will always just be this room. If she leaves, it could very well kill her. But if she doesn’t, there’s no way it won’t.
She aches, and something else—maybe her heart, maybe not—aches in there with her. The door has never been locked.
Kristen, obviously, is preoccupied—is elsewhere. But, for the sake of being thorough, here’s what the rest of the afternoon’s activities would look like, outside the small sad room, through the eyes of a neutral, third-party observer:
“Okay hear me out,” Riz starts, wringing out his cap before giving up and tossing it to the ground. It sinks further into a puddle than it should, physically speaking, and he mourns it for one second with eyes closed before he repeats, “Hear me out.”
Hearing Riz out this far into a battle this far gone, historically, does not typically end well, but none of them really have much other choice, though, so no one protests as he turns to a levitating Kristen, gaze intense. “You haven’t managed to flush Fig’s dead oyster yet, right?”
Across the room, a barely-conscious Fig makes a sound of offense. “Hey!”
Kristen, on the other hand, does not respond to the question, says and does nothing while the pool begins performing a bachata dance with her limp body. Not comforting, but better than her up until very recently still actively trying to kill them.
“Okay,” Riz decides curtly, jumping neatly over how deeply this disturbs him and finally not beefing his roll for insight, like a real detective, “so it’s still there. Cool. What I’m thinking is that this, fucking, whatever it is, is just like, lonely.”
Adaine frowns. “I’m sorry, what?”
It is a leap in logic. He knows this. The room is a wreck around them, steam rising from every surface with no respect for gravity, awash with stringy masses of spongy black growth, sullen and sore. There is a wetness to all their skin that seems to erase the memory of what it is like to be dry. The air is heavy with malevolence, weeping under the weight of its energy, almost vibrating against the force of itself forced to wait, suddenly. It’s not been like this—it’s been a chlorine blur, seconds or minutes or hours of fruitless violence Riz was starting to think would end them before it ended at all—but when he finally holstered his arquebus in favour of digging shaking hands into his briefcase of holding for a rope to throw to Fig, just a couple measly, terrifying seconds before she got swallowed by the whirlpool in the deep end—the churning shuddered and came to a dead stop. It was then in the warped echo of the final crash of water he realized—
“It’s not trying to hurt us, it’s just trying to get us. It got Kristen and now it’s not fighting back unless we fight it first. It’s—it’s dancing. Do you think Gilear would still be alive if it was actually dangerous?”
“Riz!”
“No, that’s what I’m saying, he’s not gonna die because if it wanted him to be dead, he would be already.”
Fig scoffs, incredulous. “Do you think that’s any more comforting?”
“No! I’m not trying to be comforting! I’m trying to explain how we fucking stop it!”
“You know, I—I don’t think it wants me in any way,” Gilear chimes in from where he’s now sitting on the edge of the pool, feet kicking dejectedly in the still-trembling water. “Now that there are better options on the table…”
“Not the time, Gilear!” Riz is shrill, deranged, arms flailing for balance as he scuttles across the floor in erratic patterns, barely dodging the unhaltingly writhing patchwork of algae. “It wants friends,” he shouts, “so, maybe we should just be friends with it?”
Adaine gives him a dubious look, defeated glow of a cantrip she knows will be useless—no spell slots left—thrumming at her fingertips. “I don’t really like the way you’re sounding right now, Riz,” she says, making eye contact with Fig, wary and pointed.
“Yeah, do you—”
“Oh my god you guys, I’m not getting possessed,” he spits, rolling his eyes in, to be fair, a very not possessed way. A thick, murky wave splashes up against the edge of the pool as if in agreement— nope, this one’s not mine. The bachata continues, Kristen’s hips helplessly swaying to the same twitchy beat of the growth squirming over the grout.
“Then what do you mean be friends with it?”
In lieu of explaining, Riz carefully bends down and picks up Gilear’s abandoned shorts, as sad and as sopping wet as the man who owns them. He ignores the confusion from the rest of the room and starts digging through the pockets, a man on a mission.
This mission is immediately successful, and produces four things that a neutral, third-party observer may already be familiar with.
The first thing is a membership card for the Elmville Community Gym, which is useless for several reasons.
“This looks like it’s never been swiped once.”
“It expired last year, and I—”
“Gilear.”
“What do you—Riz. What pleasure do you get from—look at me. Look at me.” Gilear gestures to himself. His point is made.
Riz tosses the card over his shoulder and goes back into the shorts.
The second thing is technically two things—two bus tickets, which will be useful later.
The third thing is an empty yogurt up, and the fourth thing is a plastic spoon.
“This is either going to go really, really good, or really, really bad, but I need you guys to trust me.”
There’s a short moment where Riz thinks they might just tackle him to the deck of the pool, but then Adaine nods and Fig winks at him, neither without great trepidation. He takes a breath and steps forward with Gilear’s yogurt cup in one hand and spoon in the other, and hopes for the best.
“Kristen,” he starts. Then, “Pool? Kristen and pool. I think—fuck. Are you, like, lonely?”
There’s a moment where his words just echo through the room, reverberating under their feet and shaking the puddles scattered about. The sun—presumably outside, wherever the part of outside that lies beyond these impossible windows happens to be—darkens, leaving them inside the murky green glow of the pool, reflecting soft, eerie undulations into every crevice of the room. It’s a quiet thing, despite the amplification of every sound here. Riz swears he can hear Adaine’s nervous breaths as the remaining mass of dark growth on the surface of the water glistens in response. It’s obviously not anything like a human response, and Riz has no idea how he knows this, but it’s an unmistakably sad gesture, nearly wounded.
Riz takes another step forward against every instinct of self-preservation and crouches down at the edge of the pool. “It’s okay,” he says, feeling half genius and half absolutely certifiably insane, but saying it anyway. “We—I get lonely sometimes, too. But, uh.” It’s harder to get out than he’d imagined, but he takes the feeling of an earlier, unpossessed Kristen’s bless, and hopes she can feel him giving it back to her. “Believe me, been there, done that. But every day above ground—”
“Wait, now are you doing Pitbull lyrics?”
“Guuuuys.”
“How do you know so much about Pitbull?”
“That’s not important.”
“Riz.”
“Adaine.”
“Riz!”
“Also, we’re not even above ground.”
“Fig, I’m going to sacrifice you to the pool.”
Before Fig can protest, Kristen’s strained voice whispers into every corner of the room, unbelievably wanting. “Every day above ground is a great day, remember that.”
Then, she is thrown onto the deck as the words echo around the sound of her unconscious body hitting the wet tile. Adaine rushes to her immediately, glow of magic casting Kristen’s features in a pallid, sickly light. Fig sidesteps across the deck to put her hand on Adaine’s shoulder without taking her eyes off the pool. Riz swallows back the lump in his throat and speaks again, voice betraying him as it shakes just slightly with relief.
“Do you want to come home with us?” He holds the yogurt cup up in offering. “I could put you in here and you could fuckin’—I feel like maybe calling you our pet might be a little demeaning or whatever because you’re like, clearly some deeply powerful entity and like—” The sentence strangles itself and Riz sighs and shakes his head, evidently not knowing where he was going with any of that. The pool sloshes gently, encouragingly, and Riz huffs another sigh. Why all of this happens here, to them, he does not know. “What I’m saying is that you could live in the fish tank with Fig’s dead oyster—obviously we would take the dead oyster out first and clean it out, it would just be your tank, we’re not gonna make you share with a corpse—and we could be your friends and you could be happy?
“I… used to be a little like you, you know I didn’t have too many friends, even though I was really social, which is weird, so I think probably you get it, but now I know the bad kids and I’m like, it’s really good. To have friends. But especially when your friends are these guys.” Fig and Adaine let out a pair of awww s and Riz waves them off, rolling his eyes through the smile he cannot prevent. “There’s Fabian and Gorgug too. They’re not here but they’re also part of our, like, crew. We call ourselves the bad kids, which is cool, and you sort of got a bad kid vibe going on with the whole malevolent energy and possession stuff, so really I think you’d fit right in with us. Not just saying that. And Gilear’s apartment is like, fine—”
“It’s okay, you can say it’s bad. I know it’s bad.”
“—but it’s, you know, it’s a place to stay.”
Adaine calls out and for the first time, it sounds like her voice is coming from the right location in the room. “You’re really sellin’ it, dude.”
“We have soup cubes!” Fig tries, “We could pop one in and you could become a broth! You could become anything you want!”
Gilear doesn’t entirely sounds like he believes it, which is probably just projection, but he does echo Fig anyway and affirm, “You could become anything you want.”
There’s a thumbs up from Adaine, her other hand still stroking Kristen’s hair. “You could totally become anything you want.”
Riz shrugs. Why not? “You could become anything you want.”
The pool could become anything it wants. And the pool wants—it wants that.
Kristen awakens into a thick haze, both worlds setting a heavy hand on her shoulders, still sick with the symmetry and half a child before she opens her eyes and realizes the room she is in, and who is in it with her. Adaine is producing a shock blanket out of her jacket like a clown pulling a silk scarf from its mouth, and in the time it takes to go from laughing about the comparison to finding out it really hurts to do anything that includes moving her body, Kristen finds it wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Her headache is gone, and in its absence she realizes her skull hasn’t felt this peace since before the first time she came down to the basement. It’s almost lonely without the static, a phantom itch at the back of her neck. She kind of feels sad, somehow, like something—yet another thing—is over, like maybe she didn’t want it to be yet, even if it was bad.
It’s almost lonely, but then Fig is squatting down on the tile, knees knocking into Kristen’s as she wraps her arms around her shoulders, squeezing hard against the loud crinkling of the blanket.
“Thanks for helping save my dad,” she says, voice smaller than Kristen would have expected. Despite this, she laughs before she can stop herself.
“I didn’t—I don’t think what I did was particularly helpful.”
“You were very helpful!”
“I got possessed. I tried to kill you!”
“Uh huh, and did you succeed?”
“I—”
“No, you didn’t, ‘cause you can’t keep a Faeth down, baby!”
Kristen’s eyes instinctually slide over to Gilear, who is currently wrapped in an identical safety blanket and trying to put his sopping wet cargo shorts back on while still sitting down. A high-pitched hum escapes out the corner of her mouth, threatening something a lot like a smile. “Well…”
Fig sits fully on the deck, not letting go of Kristen as she sinks down, bumping their heads together and letting out a sound that’s something a lot like a laugh.
Fig sighs into Kristen and starts, “Okay, listen.”
And she does.
On Monday, Gorgug and Fabian come over to meet the newest resident of The Strongtower Luxury Apartments, Unit 306. The story was told over lunch, and a bit of third period they all decided was less important than unpacking the events in full. But no retelling—no matter how many hand gestures and clarifications and dramatic reenactments and regretful realizations that Adaine totally should have cast fireball while Kristen was singing Fireball —could prepare them for the sight of the thing itself, sitting atop Gilear’s shitty old bookshelf.
It’s inside a fish tank, which is exactly where the normal parts about it being a pet end. The tank is completely filled with… well, Kristen isn’t sure how much is water, how much is algae, and how much is pure cosmic psychic energy, but it’s filled. With all of that. Very densely. Which is very interesting and maybe a bit alarming, considering what they brought up from the pool was just a single plastic teaspoon into a yogurt cup’s worth of the aforementioned all of that.
Fig was the one to tip it out into the tank. Kristen will never forget the sound she made when it shot out of its own form, rattling the entire tank as it pressed against the glass, twitching and shaking to get acquainted with its new home. You know, like a chihuahua or something. Kristen’s never had a dog; maybe they all do that.
“What does it eat?” Gorgug asks.
“Does it eat?” Fabian counters.
“We mostly just feed it bus tickets.” Fig shrugs, says it with the same levity as if she were describing her own breakfast choices. “It seems to like them, so.”
“How can you tell?”
Riz hums. “Well, it spells out stuff on the inside of the tank with hair, so.”
“I’m sorry, your new demon pet does what?”
“Yeah, and it has expensive taste, too,” Kristen explains, “It specifically asks for the express bus line tickets, which are like sixty cents more than the regular ones.”
Everyone considers this for a while, transfixed by the rectangular prism of pure watery void—maybe a little too transfixed by the rectangular prism of pure watery void—and then after a while Riz pipes up with, “You know, I’m surprised neither of you have asked about—”
“Yeah, I was gonna ask about that,” Fabian says, cutting him off as he throws a lazy sort of gesture up to exactly what Riz is referring to. “Is that a picture of Pitbull?”
It is a picture of Pitbull. More precisely, two pictures of Pitbull. Both are taped onto the glass, one so that the actual picture is facing inwards and only a vague shadow of a face is visible on the back of the page, and one that is that same picture again, but facing outwards so that the other residents of Unit 306 can enjoy it.
“Yeah,” Riz, Fig, Adaine, and Kristen all say in tandem.
“We put up the one where Pitbull is looking at us, originally, but then the—” she gestures vaguely to the tank, “—it got mad so we gave it one to look at too.”
“How do you know when it’s mad?”
“It froths,” Kristen says, “or boils. But it also does both of those things when it’s happy, so—it’s like very nuanced?”
“Very nuanced. You get used to it. Even Gilear can tell the difference now.”
Gilear throws a distracted thumbs up from where he’s sitting on the couch watching Friends Cantrip. “It possessed me because I was pathetic and lonely so now we have a profoundly intimate pseudo-psychic connection. There are two kinds of frothing.”
“Cool, cool.”
Gilear has no further comment after this—more important things on the agenda given that he’s now dedicated himself to catching up to Kristen in the show so they can watch together again, a gesture to indicate that the social rankings in the apartment have once again fallen into the correct balance—and the bad kids move on as well, as they do. Kristen doesn’t mind.
Maybe it’s been rough lately. Maybe it’s been so rough that an eldritch horror possessed her specifically because it knew she was categorically lonely. But right now, with the bad kids, and even with Gilear, it feels like it might all end up alright, in the end. It feels like, in the words of a famously well-traveled wise man, she’s taken her life from a negative to a positive. So maybe tonight—and, actually, maybe tomorrow, too, and the next day, and however long after that—she can just enjoy life.