The Far End

#FarEnd. "The Far End"
At first he thought the lights had gone out. There at the far end of the pool.

He was toweling off. Trying not to look at the floor. Complicated and nonsensical patterns in the tiles there always made him feel light headed.

He had completed 42 laps. A personal best. 42? Why did that number seem to mean something? Why did it make him think of the patterns in the tiles?

He trained at night after the indoor pool was closed. The silence of the room echoed off the hard surfaces of its walls.

A few fluorescents were left on overhead. They cast a greenish glow on the surface of the water and reflected undulating patterns of light on the tile walls. The patterns never seem to settle. Always seemed to be evolving.

A few of the globe lights under the surface of the water were also left on. They glowed like portholes in a submarine. They watched like the inscrutable eyes of some unimaginable sea creature.

In the night and in the dark the room itself was disorienting. A few years back they had built on to the room. Added the second pool. Some dictate of the topography had required the pools to be situated unevenly. At a difficult to define acute angle. It made the dimensions of the room seem off. Like a cinematically forced perspective.

As he dried off he contemplated the far end of the pool. The darkness there seemed unmotivated. Unexplained. Less an absence of illumination than a blanket of murky ink. Obviously it was actually some trick of the light. Some figment of his exhaustion. He laughed at his overstimulated imagination. Numbers and patterns and angles. What difference could it make? With meaning could it have?

Ridiculous and confused contemplations caused by stress and endorphins.

The exit was past the far end of the pool. He'd have no choice but to pass that way when he left.

He slid into his flip-flops. Threw his towel in his bag. And headed towards the dark.

He paused to check out the blackened water. Something in the bottom, in the blackness, was shimmering. Sparkling.

He thought an underwater globe light had shattered, scattering pieces of reflecting glass across the bottom.

But reflecting what? The overheads were dark. The nearest illuminated light source yards away.

He wanted to think they were jewels. It was a romantic notion.

Or as yet undiscovered tiny phosphorescent creatures. Even more romantic.

But more than they made him think of stars.

And they were almost imperceptibly moving.

He dropped to one knee to get a closer look. The thought crossed his mind to dive in. To investigate.

As he considered his next move the pattern from the floor tiles seemed to ooze out into the pattern of the undulating waters. Like a time lapse fungus growing in a petri dish. He felt dizzy. More artifacts of his exhaustion.

Then the room seemed to bend. To flex. It dipped where the pools did not meet. It rose where the outer walls danced with patterns of light.

It forced him off balance and forward. He slid through the dark surface and into the wet blackness. The force that pulled him down should have been gravity. But it didn't feel like it. Didn't act like it.

He twisted and turned to head back toward the surface. But the world felt flipped. The forces that should aid him in floating to the surface seemed to pull him deeper and deeper into the depths.

His lungs began to burn. The water became more oily. Blacker.

He was powerless to find the surface.

All he could do was float towards the bottom if bottom there was.

About him the blackness came to life. There he perceived an inconceivable combination of impossible geometry and improbable biology.

His movement forward accelerated.

Obviously he was no longer in the pool.

Moving ever deeper or ever higher he turned to see from where he had come.

He was in a world of senseless structures. Of unexplainable creatures. Of indecipherable intelligences.

His lungs seared. The air in them began to escape in clumping, oily, explosive bubbles. His eyes glazed. His head pounded.

As he floated or sank backwards - it was hard to tell which - the blackness around him began to change.

Redness seeped in to engulf him. Dark bloody veiny red.

Then flecks of blue and gray and green gave way to fathomless, round, sucking black hole.

As his consciousness and his life left him he felt the gentle embrace of warm and soft and smothering tentacles.

The townsfolk were stunned when the body of their most promising son was found floating facedown in the municipal pool.

Impossible to understand how such a strong swimmer could drown in a simple lap pool.

It wasn't long before the speculation and the gossip began.

Perhaps he had simply hit his head.

Maybe he had experienced a sudden and unexpected stroke.

He had been training so hard. A debilitating cramp could have pulled him under.

Some wondered if the odd spiritual yearnings he had expressed of late had somehow spurned him to suicide.

One thing was certain. He had suffocated.

The petechial hemorrhaging proved that.

The whites of his eyes had turned a dark bloody veiny red. The red almost seeped into the flecks of blue and gray and green of his once stunning irises. But not into the impenetrable blackness of the dead pupils. Pupil that even in death still seemed like a gateways. Passages. Portals.