This in not a healing pool and that is not a holy man

Part 1

I never expected the response I received to my first post about the healing spring.

A lot of people commented with ideas on how to destroy the horrible place, with its giant carnivorous purple fig plants. The ones living in secret on the floor of the lake. They had stolen the lives of innocent people who had come to be healed, replacing them with doppelgangers. These imposters now roamed the earth angry and thirsty, full of rage, and looking to spread their vines and infect as many others as they could.

I had run into two of these replacement plant-people during my outpatient appointment at the prosthesis clinic. The purple fig monsters had stolen my leg but weren’t satisfied with that, it seemed. Now they wanted the rest of my body as well.

“What are you doing here?” The occupational therapist had asked. “Didn’t you hear about the healing spring? It’s very close. We can show you.” Her long, purple and gold vine-tongue had popped briskly out of her mouth after that and she had poked it back in with a dainty finger, the nail freshly painted in a glossy, bright pink shade.

The occupational therapist and her assistant had the same telltale eyes that my uncle had possessed after being “healed” by the spring. There was a second pair of pale blue eyes beneath the superficial ones, and they blinked perpendicular to the first, staying closed almost all the time, only showing themselves occasionally to a select few, myself included. It was like they wanted me to know.

I had slid right off the paper-covered stainless steel examination table, my mouth agape. I jumped up, terrified, and ran out of there on my good leg and prosthesis as quickly as I could, screaming. They didn’t try to stop me, just watched, smiling. They held their clipboard and stood still as a pair of statues, only their eyes turning to watch me go. I was more frightened than I had ever been in my life, my heart beating fast and hard, as I backed away and hurried out of the office.

“Let us know if you change your mind!” Their voices rang out cheerily from behind me as I ran away.

When I got home I didn’t know what to do. I typed out what had happened to me on the computer so I wouldn’t forget a single detail and as a bit of proof in case something should happen to me. By the time I was finished I realized it read like a horror story. And what better place to share something like that, I thought.

You all can decide for yourselves if it’s true, I said to myself as I hit the “Post” button. A small part of me wondered if anyone else who had witnessed the healing pool’s curse on a loved one would read it.

Surprisingly, someone did contact me asking where the pool was located. They said they had a similar experience with one of their loved ones and wanted to know if it was the same place. I was a little scared of giving out my location. Who knew exactly what kind of person I was dealing with? They could be a spy for the church. A plant, I thought to myself, then laughed out loud. Fuck it.

jgrupe: How about this, where is the place that you’re talking about? I’ll confirm if it’s the same one.

!Anonymous!< : The healing spring I visited with my cousin was in >!______!<

jgrupe: … Holy shit… are you fucking with me?

!Anonymous!< : No. For real. I take it they’re the same?

jgrupe: Yeah. WTF.. Alright. Taking a chance here. Call me. Here’s my number >!______!<

We ended up speaking on the phone for a while and it turned out the guy lived in a neighbouring town. I know they say never to meet up with people online, but this seemed different. I got the distinct impression he was genuine. Not only that, but he had a plan. He said he would tell me more in person. I decided to trust him, although I still arranged for it to be in public. We met at a coffee shop and he waved me over from his table.

“So I guess you’re jgrupe?” he asked.

“And you must be >!Anonymous!< ,” I said. “Very original by the way.”

“Thanks. I wish I could say the same,” he half-joked, sipping his black coffee. “Listen, I don’t know if your story was true or not but I tend to believe it. There’s too many details that match what happened to me when I was a kid.” The guy looked deeply troubled. He had dark circles beneath his eyes and his hair was long and greasy. The lines on his face told me he had been through hell and barely come out alive.

“What happened anyways?” I asked. He stared at his coffee for a few moments longer, deep in thought, before speaking.

“I was just a kid. My cousin wasn’t that much older than me. But he had a bum leg. It had been like that since he was born. He couldn’t play sports, couldn’t run around with the rest of us kids. My mom was a believer, and she heard about the healing spring. Said we should go up there one Saturday, and bring Billy and his mom, my aunt Cathy.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said.

“Yeah, right. So anyways, we get there and Billy goes out in the water. I was gonna go in with him but my mom told me I had to put on sunscreen first. So there I am putting on the suntan lotion and my mom is getting my back for me and I’m watching Billy out there in the water. He’s swimming around and splashing and I’m thinking, ‘Hurry up, mom. I wanna get out there, too.’ Y’know, I’m getting impatient. That’s when I see him go under. His head goes straight under like a loon going fishing. Or like something yanked his leg and pulled him down, quick-like. Something real strong.”

The guy took a sip of his coffee and set it back down. He sat there for a while and looked into the pitch-blackness of his drink. He took a deep breath and continued.

“So I tell my mom I’m going in there. To hell with the sunscreen, y’know. So I run over to the edge of the water, and she’s yelling at me, but I don’t care. And then I see Billy pop his head out of the water. I’m relieved at first, until I get a closer look at him. I think to myself, that ain’t Billy. That’s somebody else wearing a Billy-suit.” The man looked up at me, and gave me a look as if he was waiting for me to call him a liar.

“What happened next? I thought my uncle was an imposter right away too.” I gave him what I hoped was a solemn look. I had been through something similar and remembered how no one had believed me. Not even my own mother.

“So I jumped in the water, and started swimming out there, right past the kid. I had my goggles on and I looked underneath but I couldn’t see nothin’, it was so murky under there. I tried to swim down but I couldn’t find him. My mom nearly had a fit, yelling and screaming at me. She kept telling me my cousin was right there. He was healed, and what was I doin’ out swimming in the water when a miracle had just happened. Eventually I had to give up and come out of there. I almost believed it myself for a little while. Tried to convince myself it was true. But I always knew, deep down.” He had forgotten his coffee for the time being and just looked at me, waiting to see what I would say.

“I believe you, first of all,” I told him. “I know that’s not what you’re used to hearing when you tell that story. At least that’s not what people said when I told them what happened to me. They called me a fucking liar, and every other terrible name you can call someone.”

He nodded and looked down at his coffee again. We sat there in silence for a minute, and I wasn’t sure what to say next. But then he very hesitantly told me the main reason why he had contacted me. It took a while for him to get around to it, a lot of beating around the bush, but eventually I got it out of him. It turned out he had a plan.

I listened intently for over an hour as he went through the details. He said I didn’t need to decide right then and there, but that I should think about it. After all, this was a big decision. It could mean jail-time for both of us if we were caught.

I went home and had trouble sleeping that night. I tossed and turned, trying in vain to get comfortable as my non-existent limb screamed in impossible pain.

When I finally dozed off my dreams were vivid, the tension crackling in the air like static before a thunderstorm. This dark energy transformed itself into nightmares that felt indistinguishable from reality.

I always had nightmares these days. After the occupational therapist’s office they had gotten ten times worse. It was like the creatures at the bottom of the lake could see into my mind now. They had planted a seed of something evil in my head, from which terrible, horrible visions grew while I slept, while I was exposed. It sounds crazy, I know. It probably is crazy.

In my dream I was at the bottom of the lake again. The plants were all around me, towering high above me. The vines slithered like a pit of vipers all around me and I saw I was up to my neck in them, looking out, helpless. I was being consumed by them like quicksand. I gasped for air and felt their weight on my chest and pushing the breath from my lungs as I struggled and sank deeper into the writhing, tangled mass of leathery vines.

One of the giant purple fig plants leaned over from its great height and came towards me. I saw the face inside belonged to my Uncle Dan. It was pale and bloated, rotten and decayed. His eyes were gone now and small fish swam in and out of the dark hollows were they had once been.

His mouth opened and inside it looked just like the inside of a fig. As he spoke, the little finger-hair cilia vibrated and swayed.

“You belong here, with me. Come back to the healing pool. There’s a spot right here next to me, Jayson. It’s been reserved just for you. It will take you in and make you one with it. You will not be missed up above. Join me.”

I saw an eel poking its head from his eye socket and it went back inside to hide in his skull, shy. The darkness from where his eyes once were stared back at me. He continued to speak in my Uncle Dan’s voice but I could no longer comprehend the words, they were in an alien language that I had never heard before.

I felt the vines crawling up my neck, then my chin, over the lips and past the gums, strangled breathing, here we come. Down my throat, reaching inside of me as I retched and gagged.

The vines reached down my esophagus and I felt them moving around and settling in my stomach, planting roots there. My uncle saw this and smiled at me, his mouth made of cilia that jiggled in delight as he watched my terror grow.

I woke up, panting, covered in cold sweat. My heart was beating heavily in my chest. The dark room around me was full of malicious-looking shadows. One of these shadows looked like a person standing over me, and I turned on the bedside lamp, terrified.

A priest in a long purple robe stood over my bed. He had been waiting there in the darkness, watching me sleep. His eyes were pale blue and he had a small, humourless grin on his face. He gripped a long staff in his left hand and he lifted it up then brought it back down to the floor with a loud BANG!

A vine crept out of his mouth and inched towards me, and I found I couldn’t move. His pale blue eyes watched me as they blinked irregularly, from side to side.

I looked and saw my hands and feet were bound tightly with purple and gold vines. They dug into my skin painfully, crushing my bones.

The vine from the priest’s mouth came towards me more and more quickly, its face now that of a King Cobra. It came at me suddenly, bolting straight at my face and my open mouth as I screamed.

I opened my eyes and realized as I did that it had been a false awakening. The second dream had been even more terrifying than the first. They had both felt entirely too real.

I made up my mind then. We would go through with the crazy son of a bitch’s plan. I only hoped he knew what he was doing.

Part 3

JG