The Blue Eye 👁️

Every Friday evening, I swim in cold waters. It’s become a happy, although, oftentimes freezing habit. My local lido allows cares and struggles of the week to drip from me as water upon water-repellent feathers, allowing free, less constricted breath; to think sharper as the curlicued blade of a scythe.

As I change into a navy-blue swimming suit at home after work, my eyes misgive. An electric blue shimmer catches, hooking curiosity, enticing me to look upwards at the full-length, bevel mirror. A pale peppermint frosting laces edges of the glass. A ghostly fringe. I dismiss it as tiredness, mixing with distorting glare of the direct light bulb overhead, missing its lamp shade. I’ve been too busy to replace the broken one in my bedroom. Burning, my eyes ache in dizzying spasmodic arrays of multi-toned light, distorting balance. Awkwardly, with one leg hobbling mid-air, I try to pull my second leg into the suit without tumbling straight into the glass.

Silly woman. Give yourself more time to get ready! I chastise myself for hurrying, as always. Exercising, being a mother, teacher and writer sometimes pulls too hard upon the hours of a day, mimicking tightened reins of a horse from its rider, pressuring me: from all directions.

Dismissing the frozen, dappled ribbons of pale blue that frame my reflection, I search for car keys, readying to leave the house.

I can’t miss my time slot. I need to get in the car, and quickly.

Eventually after much fumbling, I arrive at the pool, placing glasses, door and car key, along with my hooded dry robe into a steel-blue locker. I’m drawn to it. Number 30. Such an alluring shade like the bobbing heads of cornflowers in a spring field. Beautiful. Different. Enticing.

I make my way to one edge of the shimmering water, coated with a grey, wispy mist. A hazy fuzz rises from the surface. It baffles me a little, unsteadying my steps.

Odd. A little odd.

Bizarrely, fuzzy lines of rippling blue light buzz upwards from the outline of the swimming pool, striking the haze easily, summoning me to enter the enlightened pool. I set my Apple Watch to time my swim, enter a ‘Workout’ mode and select ‘Outdoor swim’. The seconds begin to whirl away, unravelling on my left wrist, as I don a bright fuchsia, woolly hat bearing ‘Nirvana’ on the front. Multi-tasking while striding purposefully to the entrance steps of the pool, I pull googles over my struggling eyes, already clouded and filmy in perception.

I forgot to put in contact lenses after work. Silly! However, swimming in glasses is definitely a no. I’d lose them in the unreachable depths of the deep end, never to be seen, or worn again.

Dismissing hurdles that I’ve had to jump in order to make this swim, I glide into ice-kissed waters. A translucent, perfect, arctic blue. Fluid bands of cerulean currents invite me, hastening each step to my designated swimming lane. Limbering up, I ready my body to swim as close to one thousand metres as I can: my nightly aim and challenge for any cold swim here at the lido.

To begin, distorted vision baffles me. Underwater climes are smudged as ink spill upon parchment. It is as if clingfilm enwraps my vision, a ghostly cloudiness, tightening around my eyes, as I struggle to perceive forward, eyeing thickly dark waters of the barely discernible, cavernous deep end.

You can do this, I tell myself, aiming to soothe my nerves and sense of purpose. With or without contact lenses, you are fine. All you have to do is swim up and down following the bright red lane divider. How hard can it be?

The first few lengths strip my breath from my lungs, so glacial are the rippling bands of water that channel around me, but I persist regardless. A stubbornness attends me. Always has.

By length six, I begin to experience slightly warming waters that coat hands and feet within the neoprene gloves and socks. Cleverly, they allow trapped water to heat a little, to around the same temperature as your body, allowing extremities to not become too iced. Protecting, as much as possible, fingers, toes and an exposed head over the waterline, potentially vulnerable to being battered from the unpredictable weathers above, is integral.

After the first accomplished ten lengths, I allow myself a brief pause in the shallow end, nodding brief hellos to fellow swimmers in the next-door lane to where I stand.

“It is colder tonight, isn’t it?” an older lady asks, but it isn’t truly a question, more a statement from her. I nod, partly smiling in return.

“I’ve swam in worst,” I chirrup, feigning a lightheartedness that I don’t truly possess this evening.

“Good luck!” she adds before submerging herself into unsympathetic waters. Her face and body above water were blurry to me, due to my lack of sight, but now she turns into a sleek seal, beneath the surface. Her shaky, darkening shadow travels away from me – a corporeal body transformed by the pool’s water, almost becoming less human with each stroke she makes.

Persisting, I push on from the wall with my feet, using all the force that I can summon in my legs, to help me glide the early part of the next length, giving my legs and arms, a brief respite from constant swimming as I move.

Time elapses as I willingly allow my brain to switch off, tunnelling deeper into mindfulness that wintry calm offers me. I plan weekend outings and work commitments in my head, creating a tick-list that is completely abstract, yet purposeful in my enclosed, private thoughts. This clarity has a beauty: a beauty that exists only here, in this water, and at this low temperature, allowing all my senses to work at higher capacity, sharpening astuteness, doffing all cares of the day and normal, busy life. Worries drown in the undergrowth of depths below me where blue-eyed lights track my progress.

More lengths elapse beneath my moving body. Countless lengths, if truth be told.

I’ve lost touch with the length tally. Lost touch of where I am, to a degree, becoming inexplicably a little fathomless. Dizzy, yes, perhaps dizzy and a tad off centre.

I allow myself rest time, holding onto the hand railing belonging to the deep end, facing away from other swimmers and wider pool. I hear lifeguard chatter above. It calms me without knowing why. Three stand above in warm coats, discussing plans for after work and the weekend ahead.

Half-listening to them, my breathing slows to a more comfortable pace. I sense my heart rate lower, breaking out of its hard-beat skip, as I take deep inhalations of crisp nighttime air into panting lungs. The air has a slight freshwater tinge from the windy uplift gathered over the surface of the nearby river. It adds to an awakening here tonight, a partial rebirth, if you like. A natural remedy is what a cold swim offers: ideal for grounding or regrouping oneself.

Eventually, I turn around to face the stretches of pool.

I have more lengths to swim.

As I endeavour to examine lanes elongated in front of me as pulled, azure elastane, surprising and misplaced rippling tassels course past me, furling into a core: a body of ghostly snakes in the next lane. I dismiss it for blurred vision or a blot upon my perceived senses. Continuing, I swim at a pulsating rate, pushing myself to glide quicker, escaping any threat or danger. Within a few strokes, I quell my mind.

You aren’t wearing your contact lenses. What do you expect, Emma? There are no monsters here. Silly woman!

Critiquing myself, and summoning crystal-clear rationality, breaststroke movements become calmer once more. I swim at a regained leisurely and measured pace. A pace that I’m used to, dispelling black intangibility from my mind, casting it to depths of the pool beneath me. The would-be gloom beneath is welcomingly enlightened by a cacophony of steel blue-lights, like tilted, eager eyes, that rotate peripheries of the pool’s lower regions. They normally click on mid-way through my swims as darkling night gathers shrouds around the pool’s outer edges, but the season is progressing, and they have clicked on earlier than usual tonight. Each orb offers a beam of reassurance, soft, pastel-blue light as that of a newborn boy’s woollen hat, stretching rays to the surface lid, aiding sight a little. The lights of the pool became my eyes, guiding me forwards and backwards.

Ten lengths later, I begin to tire. Having just passed a fellow swimmer clad in a black wetsuit offering me unspoken company, I feel assured enough to allow myself a rest at the deep end, perhaps to even strike up a chat, whilst the night continues to dim around the lido. Clutching the silver metallic bar, benumbing to those that are gloveless, I raise my goggles from my eyes, placing them on the woolly rim of my bobble hat. Blearily, I wipe chlorine water droplets that distort vision; droplets that drip-drip, drip-drip, into my eyes, clouding scope and clarity as a smoke-filled mirror.

“A few more lengths to go,” I speak to my kindred swimmer, paused as I am in the deep end, only a few yards from where I bob at the surface, next to me in the slow lane.

As my vision unfurls from the watery lair of the pool, I stop. Frigid in thought. Infirm of purpose and struck cold with inaction. The fellow swimmer that I hoped to strike up a little chitchat with to wile the time away, is absent. The perceived black mass is no more. Totally non-existent. My voice bounces back from empty walls next to my lane, I feel stupid. I’m talking to an empty space. A hollow. A nobody.

I’ll never swim without my lenses again, I self-berate.

Pulling steamy-lensed goggles from my forehead, I rinse away messy fog gathered in eyeglasses within the chill of the pool, holding on with one hand to the bar. Shaking the liquid free, I replace them, readying myself for more exercise.

What an idiot! What an idiot you are, Emma! I add to my thoughts, endeavouring to hope that self-humour will soften the blow of my own far-fetched, disturbing thought processes as I swim during this January evening.

Reformatting myself, after readjusting my hat, pulling it further down to protect my eyes from the biting cold and pulling the Lycra costume around my legs to fit more comfortably, I am reset. Ready for ten more lengths – at least. Eyeing a red-clad lifeguard at the side of the pool, I recalibrate, with a needed, added confidence, on clocking his presence.

I am watched. Protected. Nothing bad can happen here. What a fool to even contemplate such ludicrous notions, Emma. You need more sleep tonight.

Faintly smiling at him as I pass, the next few lengths are easier. Allowing piercing cold of the unheated water to cleanse my mind, it baptises my completely submerged head in chilly waters, centring me, allowing sure-rooted thoughts: sharper, and more distilled. An astuteness lines each one, framing in thick black outline as dramatic eyeliner worn at Halloween parties. Planning for the future, and prospective writing projects is a godsend. Thoughts crystallise, spin in fruition, where judicial, sage thinking are welcome additions, on top of the clear health benefits from cold swimming such as improved blood circulation, reduced cholesterol and a general sense of well-being from keeping fit in my ageing forties.

As I return to the yawning deep end, I eye the crimson-clad lifeguard from before, sat in a white plastic chair, surveying the handful of swimmers left on this inclement Friday night in deepest, ghastly winter. He’s probably hoping that each of us will soon leave, bringing his knock-off time for the night sooner. In my mind’s eye, I imagine his ghostly silhouette walking the hill into town, grabbing a pint and a Chinese takeaway, before trundling back home to chill with a girlfriend and Netflix.

We are all fools! All fools: anyone that swims tonight in this hypothermic pool! I joke with myself, as my body travels, once again, ever closer to the tall heights of the deep end. A pool that feels too deep to swim to the bottom of, if needed. I know, after coming here since a baby, that the depth is exceptional due to the high diving boards that have since been removed. Enough clearance had to be given to boys and girls that dive-bombed from the top. I had watched such divers through childhood and adolescence, marvelling at sheer audacity as they crashed into the awaiting water before miraculously resurfacing with broad smiles, laced with adrenaline.

I spot a known lifeguard as my pondering refocuses on the present. One particular lifeguard is here all through the year: covering both the summer and winter season. A manager, I surmise, as my strokes bring me closer to the silver bar, where I can gather my breaths, breathing in the night sky air as a brief reward for my cardiac efforts, especially so after a long day at work.

Yet, as I infringe upon the last stroke of my current length, when I gaze up to the seated area of the lifeguards, it is devoid of life. Nobody is there. Through the blurry gaze offered to me from my googles, I tell myself it is just my eyes. Again.

Once safely moored, I hold onto the steely bar with one hand, and raise my goggles with the other. To my dismay, what I thought was a reassuring human figure: the lifeguard manager, is nothing more than a folded down red umbrella. They tend to sit under them in rain, covering themselves in downpours but equally protecting themselves from the burning rays in the heat of the summer – the well-known frenetic season locally.

A red umbrella, Emma! Not a lifeguard.

Shaking my head to dispel my own silliness at making non-concrete shapes from my own poor, lacking eyesight, I turn to face the shallow end, readying to swim back. Unease builds swiftly in me, knowing that the security I sought in having the lifeguard nearby is shattered, crumpled as burning paper: paper reduced to mere shards of pointless, brittle ash upon a fire.

Stupid. Stupid woman, I scold myself, repeating the mantra over and over.

Shakily, I turn to regard the wider swimming pool. Expecting to see a few late-night swimmers, my eyes struggle to detect seal-like silhouettes of wetsuits in the water. My searching sight finds no comfort. Nothing tangible. Only macabre laces of ill fate are presented in front of me.

Inky ghosts.

The pool is awash with an army of oil-sleek ribbons – millions of them as gothic eels, twisting and writhing frantically in the wintertime waters as onyx snakes. No humans. No wetsuits. No fellow faces of recognisability are there to greet me. Only sable insecurity, slippery waters, topped with silver flashes of eels’ tails. There are millions of them – inordinate numbers of black eels plague the pool – slashing water with electrically charged tails.

I discern no other swimmer. It is only me. My vision dims so that I can barely detect anything, except the swivelling and turning bodies of the spidery-hued eels, working together now as a dark robotic machine, weaving me into its central web – a place that I know, instinctively, that there will not be slither of a chance to escape from.

Barely buoyant now, I endeavour to hold on with all of my might to the side rail, but within milliseconds, my ankles are lacerated by eel bites and electrical shocks, weakening me further. My body battery begins to drain. The need to fight and kick becoming a soft blur and not a red alarm siren as needed in this life-or-death predicament.

Am I possessed? Bewitched by these creatures? Are these demon eels released from the underworld? The Devil’s servants here to punish me from a disservice of some form?

Frantic yet biblical thoughts fall and tumble in maddening force, mirroring the thrashing tails and glass-eyed heads of the periscope eels, so alien. Otherworldly. Ghostly.

I close my eyes, turning to partially shield myself with the wall, praying, somehow, to banish the pool of evil from my thoughts.

Until…

They are dragging me down, latching themselves to my ankles, pulling me, in great swathes, acting as one, to the fathomless deep below.

The pool is near to five metres at the deep end, and I am within the deepest corner of it, but the underbelly has expanded by leagues, now an incalculable, fathomless space. Silky laces entomb my legs until I am mostly comprised of a cacophony of charcoal eels – they wind tightly around my body, embalming me as a living mummy in shrouds of darkly tough snakeskin. Bones begin to crunch under the strangling pressure of their collective strength. I waver, in and out of consciousness, as my head leaves the surface taking away any semblance of survival.

I cannot breathe.

Water begins to fill my lungs as I inhale large gulps of water in sheer panic. Marble-white fingers reach up to try to alert somebody to help me but as soon as my arms are raised above my head, more eels encase my upper limbs, drenching me in claustrophobic, raven silk – a damnable silk that covers every square inch of my dying flesh.

Is this how death feels? I half-consciously ponder as life streams from porous parts of me, releasing any former hold on the mortal world. A world that still blithely spins and rotates above my sinking form, completely oblivious of my cascading doom.

All quietens. No longer do I discern the thrashing of the eels nor the panic, twisted contortions of my own limbs. The pool returns to its baby-blue charm as it presented itself at the start of the evening before I dipped a toe into the raw waters.

“Blue light. Blue light. Blue light,” resounds, echoing in my ears as I fall to the farthest reaches of the pool. Sinking down. Farther and farther…Deeper and deeper.

My body lies prostate. Inactive. Dead.

A wispy hand that belongs to me but at the same times feels not my own, reaches for the face of a submerged lazuli pool light. I caress its Siberian-fringed surface, coaxing an ardency within me inexplicably towards it, akin to that of a new lover.

Staring into the embers of light, a partial, spectral figure flickers in strangled beams. A snigger of its lips. A raised, expectant eyebrow. A demon – of some form.

“You have done well, my beauties?” reverberates from the pool’s hollow walls. A male, baritone voice: the owner of the verbal praise.

It or he is thanking its servants. The black eels. I am nothing but prey to it.

Without power to prevent it, my spirit is sucked from my body, drawn by the lucidity of the blue-lit eyes. Detaching soul from physical body, my shell-like corpse rises to the surface. Bloated.  Not needed. A useless casement.

I watch, although formless, my body risen to the surface as the lifeguards pull the nighttime cover over the pool, putting it to sleep for the night. Leaving me defenceless. All alone. Apart from the indomitable, blue eye. My captor.

Do they not see me there? Why aren’t they trying to save me? Surely, they should be dragging me from the water, heaving me over the side and trying to resuscitate? It makes no sense at all.

As the tendrils of my soul begin to be dragged into the hungry mouth of the pulsing blue eye, I note a disturbing reflection above. A wriggling black eel replaces the pupils of each lifeguard –eyes, sight and actions no longer their own. Each one moves like an automaton, bewitched by an unknown, hidden power. One linked to the all-seeing blue light not wanting them to note my corpse.

My last conscious thought is of the high-pitched villainous laugh of my monstrous master. It bounces off each wall surface of the coffin-like pool, entrapping me forever under its heavy, chill-blue shroud, as I disappear, my soul sucked and swallowed whole, by the unwaveringly blue eye.