For a long while I was watching this dream as if it were a TV show – I wasn’t IN it, but I could see and hear everything that happened.
There was something badly wrong with the water in the big pool. The pool was long and rectangular, and situated on a raised level with steps leading up to it, and a balcony to the right of it that looked down over the gym. There was a bar and some chairs also.
I only saw the pool in the dark, when the room was in the shadows, the bar dimly lit, and the pool backlit beneath the surface. It glowed in this light, but there was nothing welcoming about it.
The first thing I saw was a girl running up the steps to the pool. Nobody else was around; it was after hours. She climbed into the pool to take a secret midnight swim. She was doing some lazy lengths when she suddenly stopped. She looked all around her and began to shiver. She closed her eyes tightly as if there was something she didn’t want to see or hear. Then, as if in a trance, she swam to the side of the pool and got out. She walked across to the balcony and jumped off.
In the morning Catherine from CSI (I watched it before bed! Lol) came to assess the crime scene. She put it down as suicide, as the camera footage from behind the bar showed the girl getting out of the water and running and jumping off the edge. It was conclusive from the CCTV that the girl had jumped. But why?
She asked around the guests to see if she’d exhibited any unusual behaviour whilst staying there and they all said no. She asked her family if she’d ever been depressed and they said no too.
Catherine stayed at the hotel that night and decided to go up to the pool when everyone had gone to bed to see if there was anything strange that she’d missed.
As she came up the stairs she saw that there was already someone in the pool, another young girl. She was just swimming to the side and getting out. As Catherine approached her, asking why she was contaminating a crime scene, the girl got out and ran over to the balcony. Not liking the similarity to the other girl’s actions, Catherine ran over and touched the girl on the shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’ she said, ‘you can’t be here.’
The girl turned to look at her but said nothing. She was visibly shaking, her eyes wide and spacey, her manner frightened.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Catherine. The girl had obviously been spooked by something.
The girl turned back and started to climb over the balcony.
‘Don’t do that!’ cried Catherine, pulling her back. The girl twisted in her arms, trying to get free, ‘I have to!’ she insisted hysterically, ‘I have to!’
‘Why??’ asked Catherine.
‘I have to!!’
Catherine pulled her away from the balcony and back around the pool, aiming to drag her down the stairs and to her room. But the girl pointed out at the stairs with a quivering arm and screamed.
Catherine turned to see what had frightened her, but it was all a ruse: there was nothing on the stairs at all, and the girl had wriggled free as Catherine had looked.
She ran to the balcony and flew over the side, smashing onto the floor below.
As both victims had been in the pool before their ‘suicides’ Catherine wondered if there was anything actually in the pool that could give her a clue as to why the girls did it. They had both seemed extremely frightened. They had both jumped after they’d had a swim. One had said ‘I have to.’
Not ‘I want to.’
So the next night Catherine climbed into the pool and began to float about. It was dark again, this was a private experiment. She hoped another suicidal person didn’t come running up the stairs whilst she was there.
After a few minutes the water in the corners of the pool began to turn murky. Tendrils of darkness snaked up below the surface and made their way towards her. Catherine moved back, wanting to get out, but something held her.
Something was tugging at her mind, whispering at her, urging her. It told her the balcony, the balcony. Jump off the balcony. Die, die, die.
Catherine had no death wish and couldn’t understand why she was thinking these things. They didn’t seem to come from within her. They seemed to have been projected onto her. She didn’t like the murky water and couldn’t understand it, but she didn’t connect it at the time because it had made her mind foggy. It was as if she were being possessed.
She climbed out of the pool and staggered to the balcony. She looked over. There was still blood and tape down below where the two bodies had fallen in almost exactly the same place.
Catherine didn’t want to go down there, but something at her back was pushing her internally. She put her hands on the railings and tried to resist it, but it was very strong.
She climbed halfway over, hanging on for her life. The force was pushing her still, the voice in her head persuading her. But she fought it. She did not want to die. She wondered why the others had not had this struggle, why they had run almost gladly to the balcony and thrown themselves off. Perhaps it was because she’d seen it before, because she knew that there were bad things in that water. She had come prepared.
Nevertheless, she was now dangling off the balcony, and her fingers were slipping.
She half jumped, half fell, and because she’d clung on to the last minute she didn’t go down head first and smash herself open on the already bloodied floor. She fell on her side, breaking her arm and shattering her kneecap. But she was still alive.
When they found her, the hotel staff took her straight to hospital. They wanted to know why she had jumped too but all she could say was ‘I don’t know.’
Then I was actually in the dream. Woo.
Randomly the pool was now outside o.O and I was walking along the edge with my friend, who I don’t know in real life, just a random dream person. She was telling me about the people who’d died in it the week before. I said they didn’t die IN the pool, they died by jumping off the balcony. And she said yeah, because of the pool.
We looked into the pool. It was dark again and the underwater lighting of the pool gave it a ghostly shimmer. I didn’t like it but I couldn’t say why.
My friend dipped her toe in. ‘Lets go in and see what happens!’ she proposed.
I said absolutely not. I didn’t want to go sticking myself anywhere that people had been just before they died.
My friend got in at the shallow end, the water coming just above her knees.
As I watched, something dark began to swirl out of the corners of the pool and snaked their way towards my friend’s legs.
‘Look!’ I yelled, ‘look at the water, theres something in the water.’
But she didn’t seem to see it, or if she did, she didn’t seem to care. She was staring off into space with her eyes wide in terror, as if she could see or hear something that no one else could.
I ran across the side of the pool and reached in to pull her out. The darkness was wrapped around her legs, but it still had the consistency of water. I felt it tug her back as I pulled her out completely.
I can’t really remember what happened then. It seems we ran back into the hotel in fear, but I don’t remember where we went or if we told anyone, or what happened to my friend.
The next day, though, the place was a school. In my dream-mind it had always been a school, it’s only now I’m awake I’m able to distinguish that it had changed from a hotel somewhere along the way.
I came down some stairs from lessons, thinking that people were sure acting oddly today. A lot of people had begun to yell and shove each other for no reason. Anger choked the hallways, but if asked, nobody could say why they were angry, only that they had gone swimming. I knew it was because they had been in the water and been possessed or whatever.
I didn’t go to the pool myself, and a handful of others had kept away too. Like I say, I can’t remember if I told anyone about the evil searching tendrils I saw in the water, or that that was why people wanted to kill themselves or destroy each other when they had been swimming.
Then it was another day, time had passed though not much. Maybe a week. Things had escalated dramatically. The evil water had turned people into monsters, killers, maniacs. As I walked towards the front entrance to leave I saw someone casually shoot someone else in the head, and somebody else lurch out of a classroom with a pair of scissors to embed them in a boy’s face.
I started to run. All around me there were angry crazy people trying to kill each other, but there were also a few people like me, who’d never touched the water and were uncontaminated. They followed me as I ran and we formed a kind of team, pushing away whatever crazies came near us with their fists and sharp implements. We made it out the door, over the car park, and through the main gates.
But instead of a normal walkway/pavement, it was a kind of tunnel. I realised as we ran through it that the tunnel was made of human flesh.
Behind us were freaky people who’d been gouged and maimed and were looking for others to be gouged and maimed, and as we ran I saw that the people before us who we were catching up to were also contaminated, and had turned back to wait for us.
As we couldn’t go back or forward without being attacked, I started tearing at the skin tunnel, ripping holes and tearing out pieces, trying to get out. Eventually I made a hole big enough for all of us and we ran through into the proper street.
It was insane. Everywhere there were fires, overturned cars, burning trees, human limbs, heads, dead bodies, smashed windows. People, contaminated and normal alike, were running around the streets like maniacs.
We quickly hurried across to an abandoned shop and hid inside.
I was with two guys and a girl and some others but I don’t remember. One of the guys, I have no idea who that was. The other guy was a friend, whose name began with D. It was something unusual like Deacon or Devin. The girl was blonde and stuck up and wanted to run off with D by themselves. But D wanted only to stay and help the rest of us.
Then, the guys split up, going to find weapons and a secure place to hide. They told us to stay in the shop. We found some ice-cream in the freezer and sat at the tables in the corner, away from the windows, to eat it.
After a while D called stuck-up-blonde on her phone. She seemed to mostly be flirting with him but eventually she asked where he was and if he was coming back. And then ‘What do you mean, you’re stuck?’ she demanded, ‘We’re trapped here until you come and get us!’
I asked to talk to him and she put the phone down with a glare at me. He rang back but she put it on silent and put the phone in her purse.
‘You bitch!’ I yelled, ‘They might need our help.’
She shrugged, ‘We need their help,’ she said plaintively, ‘we’re stuck here! We can’t go outside with those monsters running about!’
And monsters they were. They seemed to be a cross between normal crazy homicidal maniacs and zombies from a bad horror film. They had missing limbs and eyeballs and scratches and scars and burn marks from where they’d fought, and blood all over them from where they’d killed. They hunted the normal people, but they also killed each other.
But we couldn’t just leave the guys to die, and I wasn’t going to sit in an old ice cream parlour with some tarty bitch until the monsters figured out where we were. I walked out through the back door and into a scrubbish bit of garden. I began to hurry up the path. A man ran towards me, and I stopped, wondering if he was contaminated or not. He didn’t seem to be. He waved as he approached.
‘You’re the only one I’ve seen who isn’t one of them!’ he exclaimed when he stopped beside me. ‘Why are people like this??’
‘The water,’ I said.
He didn’t understand but I suppose he was too old to have been in the school.
We ran back up the path together and out into the open street. The monsters were running about still, chasing normal people and turning on each other. There was blood everywhere.
We ran towards a museum (of clocks, lol) because it seemed big and safe. Inside, we locked the doors and looked out of the one way glass walls. People were being torn apart literally in the street as we watched. I hurried to the wall and picked up a clock, and we ran back out. I bashed people over the head with the clock when they came near me. What a weapon.
The next thing I remember we’d found the back of the school, the maintenance entrance where all the store cupboards were and the stairs for the janitors. D and his friend and some other people who’d gathered were hiding out there. D handed me a gun and asked me where the random blonde was. I told her I’d left her at the ice cream parlour, lol. He said he was afraid to leave this place as it offered good shelter, being down an unlit side street (it was daytime now but of course down random alleyways its always shadowy) and having a door that was lockable. He didn’t want to go into the main streets and get disembowelled. I told him we had to go, because other people might be trapped. He said we should stop and get some gas first (I don’t know why as we didn’t have a car, maybe its cause all people stop to stock up on gas in the films XD) so we ran to Sainsbury’s and filled up some bottles with gasoline. He said we could find a car later, lol.
When we came out into the streets again we were set upon by some weird freak. He was mutated, with extremely long teeth. The water must have given stages of contamination.
He ran at us making an awful sound and we ducked behind these flower beds to avoid him, but he found us and tried to bite us, so we ran round to the other side. He followed of course, and it was basically a game of keeping these big flower pots between him and us.
Then someone said that good mutants had come and that they would fight the monster. I looked over and saw several mutated people, all pumped up and full of weird veins and claws, but they were standing with the normal people as if to protect them. It made me glad to know that some people had fought the evilness of the contamination, but I didn’t have time to ask how.
We sent out the two biggest and they chased away the pointy toothed freak.
And then I woke up
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