by Micah Castle
I staggered to my feet, my body covered in a cold sweat, and faced him.
“Where are—” I started to say but a coughing fit overcame me, then it subsided. “Where are you taking me?”
“To the Heart. I will bite into it like fruit. The blood will dribble and flow down my chin, chest, and legs. A puddle will form underneath me of its juices, and I will lap it up, like a dog. Ich werde geheilt werden, ich werde gerettet werden…”
Before I could ask more questions, he turned and began moving ahead. I followed from a distance.
XV
It must have been an hour later when we rounded a corner down a narrow corridor. The gray walls slowly transitioned into blackened stone, as did the floor and ceiling. The cold that consumed us immediately dissipated, being replaced by extreme warmth. The cold sweats never left me, however.
A portal revealed itself to us. I tried to ask Ritcher what he meant about the Heart, or what the Island really meant, or the sea-demons, or damn well anything, but his pace quickened, moving through the opening. I ran behind him, doing my best to keep in the light casted by the torch. I stumbled to a stop, nearly crashing into the Captain.
A room was beyond the opening. The ceiling curved upward and converged together to form a narrow point, and the floor circled a gaping hole. An enormous, pulsating, looming, malformed dark violet and luminescent green heart hung in the center, entangled in emerald vines. They wrapped over the beating heart, snaking into the hole below and up into the ceiling.
Its beat was like a drum being pounded, its vibrations shooting through the air, shaking my innards. The glow it gave off illuminated the room. The Captain dropped the torch to his side and walked slowly over to the heart. He raised an open palm and placed it onto its body.
“Wha— What is that?” I asked, my words trembling. “What the hell is going on, Ritcher? What is with the sea-demons, the sacrifices, your carvings, this island, this large heart!” As if my questions had been blocked by a mental dam, and the barrier finally collapsed under the immense weight, they flooded from my mouth.
Despite the overwhelming fear that consumed me, and the sanity that slowly, but surely, was being dragged down into the tarry depths of madness, my desperate need to know what this was all for pushed me forward. If I would at least be given answers, I could perhaps not succumb to insanity, could perhaps rationalize it all and move on with an almost normal life.
“Is it not obvious?” Captain Ritcher spoke, his words slow, deliberate. “Something this great has to be protected. What better than the things that live deep in the ocean? Those things must eat. Better to feed a fish with bait you own rather than you are becoming the bait yourself. The Island, this wonderful Island, not many know of, ja, not even the best fisherman, or hunter, or captain, knows of it. It is like one of your fictional stories, your myths, your legends.
“A place alive, a place with its own heart. A Heart that heals all, can cure all.” He balled his other hand into a fist, looked down at his flesh, its carvings, as if it were the first time seeing them. “It can even cure this, this family curse. The things you call sea-demons, my ancestors, give temporary relief when fed on. This," he rubbed the Heart, "can give permanent relief.”
“Why bring me here? Why am I a part of this at all? You don't need sacrifices, you don't need anyone to watch you! What is the point of me being here?”
“Security, Müll, security. I knew of what the sea held, but not the Island, or its Heart. I might have needed another sacrifice.”
XVI
He turned away from me and faced the Heart. Stretching out his arms and gripping its gelatin-like surface, he leaned his head back, opened his mouth as far as it would allow, then bit into the Heart.
I heard its skin rip, heard his neck crack when he whipped his head back, taking a chunk of the organ with him. He gulped it down in seconds, then repeated the process; he gnawed, gnashed, and ate his way into the large organ. He devoured so much a hole formed in the Heart, green liquid streamed down his chin and body.
I should have turned and ran, should have returned to the boat and fought the sea-demons, but I did not, I stood there dumbfounded while a madman ate a larger-than-life organ. Finally, he finished his meal, released the heart, and turned to me. Wiping the gore from his face, revealing an ear-to-ear grin, his blue eyes pierced the gloom and seemed to glow.
“Now we leave. I won’t knock you out this time, I’m far too tired to drag you.” He said, narrowing his eyes. “But don’t get any foolish ideas, Müll.”
The trip back through the cave seemed to be more difficult, as if the corridors and walls had shifted. In some instances, we got lost, in others, we came to dead-ends. Eventually, the entryway to the outside revealed itself like a beacon of hope, and I ran to it. The Captain merely walked, as if he knew we were going to find it all along. Once we left the cave, we continued forth until we got to shore.
Ritcher paced ahead of me, moving briskly towards the White Sea. Suddenly his legs collapsed underneath him, and he toppled onto the sand. His entire body became tense, every muscle flexed underneath his suntanned skin, and his hands groped his abdomen, apparently in search of something. When he rolled onto his back, I could see something moving underneath his flesh, in his stomach.
The carvings in the Captain’s flesh had long dissipated in the cave, but they came back and pulsated over and under his skin. They rippled, tightened, relaxed, then would tighten again even further, all the way to bone. Wincing, tears streaming down the sides of his sweat covered face, he screamed out for relief. What could I do? Dumbly, I asked what he needed.
In gasps of breath, he answered.
“Get a knife, get something to cut it out!”
I looked to my left, then my right, finding nothing but the sandy shore. Then I remembered the fillet knife. Quickly I pulled it out and knelt over him, gripping the handle in both hands, the blade pointed down above his abdomen. I looked at his strained face.
“Mach es jetzt.”
I rammed the knife into his stomach. It sliced his flesh with moderate ease. Blood gushed out and over my hands, over his body, soaking the sand underneath him. I could not see anything, could not find the root of the problem, so I cut more. I cut a large skin flap from his abdomen, big enough to see inside.
Covered in blood, with an oily sheen, almost surreal looking, were his innards. His stomach was enlarged, it appeared to have some sort of tumor. The handle of the knife became difficult to hold with the gore covering my hands, but I did my best to slice open his stomach further. When an opening large enough to fit my hand had been crudely made, I tossed the knife to the ground and plunged my hand into his stomach.
I gripped something sharp and jagged. I winced and cried out but pulled with all my strength. As soon as I saw what I pulled out, I dropped it as if it were burning hot. A large chunk of shattered glass glistened underneath the sun, blood and stomach acid soaked. My hand bled profusely. I frantically tore off my shirt and wrapped it around my hand, though it soon bled through.
Ritcher looked at the shattered glass, shivering and crying, then up to me. He knew what was to occur before my brain even caught up to the idea. With a whisper, blood foaming at the sides of his mouth, he said to pull him out to sea. Even though he was a bastard, I felt some pity and nodded.
XVII
I dragged him through the sand, into the tide, then finally waist-high into the water.
His body submerged, his face not, he looked up at me and said, “Danke. Müll.”
I slipped my arms out from under him and walked a few feet away. His complexion drained from his body, fading into a ghostly white. His hair fell out in tufts, drifting on the sea’s surface. His teeth followed suit, as did his ears and nose. His jaw grew abnormally large and long, and blood poured out from the sides of his stretching mouth. I thought I heard him scream, but I do not believe I could, as he no longer had the vocal cords to do so.
Before my wi
de eyes, Captain Ritcher's body took shape, into a sea-demon. The last part of his transformation was that his legs fused together, flesh over flesh, until they became a tail similar to that of a tadpole. His arms grew long, thin and skeletal, they seemed to be able to reach out for at least two yards. I do not know if my mind had played a trick on me due to the exhaustion, delirium, and madness that had ensued in the last three weeks or not, but before what-was-once-Captain-Ritcher swam down into the depths of the ocean, to be with his ancestors, I swear he glanced back at me.
Once he was gone, I moved up onto the shore, collapsed and fell unconscious.
XVIII
I do not want to bore my reader further with this strange tale, thus I will go quick. Eventually I returned to the ship, I cannot explain how exactly I managed to get the ship back out into the ocean, but it seemed to weigh less than a sheet of paper. Perhaps it was the Island at work, or even the unseen assistance of the Captain? I did not bother to ponder it or discover why. Once the White Sea was out on the water, I found a compass in the Captain's cabin, then steered North. For how long, I cannot say. Perhaps two months or more.
The waters I crossed were less murky, less frothy, and the sea-demons never made an appearance. Again, I believed that was due to some willing of the Captain. Day by day, the temperature dropped, and the ocean became paler and paler. Chunks of large whitened ice floated in the sea, and the sky became dreary and gray. At dawn, the horizon became shadowed and flat. The water soon became impossible to navigate through, almost entirely frozen. By mid-afternoon, the White Sea was completely stuck. The ship would move no further. Wrapping myself in all the clothing and jackets I could find, and taking my bag filled with the small amount of food I found in the Captain’s cabin and what little crumbs I had left from the crew’s bunks, spoiled or not, I made my way onto the ice, then began walking.
I should have stayed on the boat and waited for someone to come out and help, because within a couple of hours, the cold became too much, and I fell unconscious. It is hard to remember exactly when or what happened, only that I remember faint glimpses of a grizzly man, a sled, and twelve husky dogs barking. I remember the harsh, frigid wind against my cheeks as the scenery blurred passed. Then I was somewhere warm, a cabin or perhaps an inn. The smell of soup and strong stench of black coffee filled the air.
When I came to, I found myself naked, shivering and sweating in a bed. An old woman sat nearby, soaking a cloth in water. She said her name was Mrs. Johnson, and that her brother, while he was hunting, spotted me out in the middle of the frozen sea — I was lucky to be alive, though I had lost two toes and two fingers due to frostbite.
To cut this short, once more, my dear reader. I will skip the two weeks of healing, of being sick, vomiting daily, drenched with cold sweats, day in, night out. When I finally could manage to get words out of my mouth and not rancid liquid, I explained my situation to the old woman, although neglecting to mention the Island or what transpired there. After some time, through an agreement with her brother, the same one who saved my life before, that he was to take me to the Canada border.
Before leaving the old woman’s abode, she gave me a bag of food and some money. I hugged and thanked her, nearly weeping, then left and found her brother outside with his sled and dogs. He was a large, silent man with a dark beard that covered almost his entire face. The trip was grueling, numbing, and long, but I arrived at the border without injury.
From there, I found a poor cabby in a small town surrounded by woods and gave him nearly all the food and clothing I owned in exchange for a ride in his carriage to the border of the United States. The poor soul must have been down on his luck, for he agreed.
The cabby ran his horses ragged, but we arrived after two weeks. After the cabby had left, I used what little money I had to find another cabby to take me another town, then I repeated the process. I stayed in small, dingy rooms, or benches in the parks, or stoops of abandoned buildings; I ate what the restaurants threw out at night, or from the trash, or the food that some blessed souls gave to me in the parks, for weeks and weeks, until I reached California.
After I retrieved the last of my inheritance from the bank, I purchased an apartment, some paper and a pen. Then, every evening I would take a table by the window in a small coffee shop across from the shore, and drink cup after cup of coffee, watching the tide ebb and flow over the golden sands underneath the lowering, brilliant sun. And, of course, I would gruelingly write this story.
It is funny, I suppose. Even with the madness that occurred — the unknown of the sea-demons, Ritcher’s family curse, the depths of the Island that no books seem to cover, and the giant Heart — I managed to obtain what I set out to do from the beginning.
To discover something worthwhile to write about.
The Doorway
The Doorway is several, The Doorway is everywhere. They cover the peeling walls of my office, the termite-eaten floorboards, the gaping ceilings. Their decrypted flesh covers thin, sharpened bones that weave towards the ground and sky underneath. At first, I felt them — who wouldn’t? — I felt their cold and papyrus surface and a chill went through my body.
In the bookstore, with my wife the first day I could leave the hospital. Not a mental asylum, no, a medical hospital; a place I stayed for months after my eye surgery. A mugger took my vision away, but a doctor returned it, with a price.
In the bookstore, between two large hardbacks, the first Doorway appeared and opened. Infinity swirled into an abyss of nothingness. Tall arching bodies, long sinewy limbs, gaping crevices where their eyes should’ve been. They drifted across an infinite pool of gray towards a twisting cavernous vortex of white, outlined in black, ripped into the dreadful ivory sky.
That was the first I saw them. Before I was torn away and thrown into unconsciousness.
I was placed back into the hospital. The doctor said it wasn’t the eyes that caused the vision — not vision, no; I’ve seen what’s there, beyond the layer of reality — but it was the drugs. A drug. Novisca. Experimental, strong, too potent. He halved the dosage. A few weeks later, I was released.
Home, oh home, the house my wife and I bought together. The house in which we tilled the soil and grew flowers and vegetables and planted an oak tree in the front yard. The floors we carpeted and the walls we papered and decorated every season. The rooms in the house we made love in, one by one, until we were both sore and out of breath and we sat out on the porch, giggling like teenagers, and drank wine naked under robes while the night breeze wafted in between our legs.
The house is now in shambles. The floorboards are like bones without flesh, yawning holes from the ceilings, the walls yellow and look like they’re suffering from liver failure. The sinks and toilets and bathtubs are filled with debris and shit, and the yard is so overgrown that not even the strongest of adventurers can manage their way through.
But I stay, I live, in the spare room that once was my office. Where I wrote stories about things that weren’t real. The computer was stolen, the desk is in splinters, the boxes of papers that once contained my life’s work are in a pile of blackened ash in the corner. Warmth comes first, doesn’t it?
The Doorway, The Doorway, The Doorway. They disappeared. No, that’s not right — they were waiting. Once they’ve been seen, they cannot be unseen; no medicine or surgery can change that — I learned. They were waiting for the time to appear once again. They waited a long time. Then, the second Doorway appeared.
When the house still had meat on its frame, and my wife hadn’t left, I was returning from the bathroom and there it was, inlaid into the lower wall of my office. Too small to fit through. Before it I crouched, I felt the cold papyrus layer and idly waited. For what? I didn’t know. To see? To see something beyond The Doorway like I did before? Did I really want to see the strange world? Did I really want to see the unraveling of reality? I guess I did.
The Doorway slowly ripped open, like tearing flesh from bone. A mist billo
wed out, covering the floor and my feet. Oddly warm. I got down onto my stomach, closed one eye and peeked into the portal.
An oily sea stretched into infinity. It was as if I laid right upon the surface, so close that I thought maybe my clothes would get wet. Something on the horizon appeared. A black form. Tendrils slowly jutted out from its frame, then blossomed across the dreary sky. Like veins pumping blood, they grew and grew across the bleak backdrop, before they reached so far that I couldn’t see. Then, I saw them.
They clawed at the corners of The Doorway. Like vines they shot up the walls and stretched to the ceiling. I jumped to my feet and backed away. They moved across the ceiling, down the opposite wall, across the floorboards. I followed them down the stairwell, into the bedrooms. They grew and stretched to every possible place in my home before all that was left was utter blackness.
Then they began to chip away like dried paint. It began to rain blackened ash. Each falling piece was replaced by the cloudy sky. It happened within seconds. Then I was in nothingness, in the world where the giant creatures drifted towards the vortex in the distance.
There wasn’t a vortex and there weren’t any creatures. I stood in the gray ocean and saw nothing.
Eventually I screamed. Eventually I cried. Eventually I pissed myself and prayed that someone or something could take me away from the madness of that world. There were no sounds, there were no thoughts, there was utterly nothing. I ran endlessly through the water. I came to nowhere, then I turned around and ran again; coming to nowhere once more.
I fell into the water and couldn’t get back up. The seabed teemed with life. Teemed with tiny tendril claws that hooked to my body the instant I fell onto them.
A maw opened below me, a maw lined with endless rows of beady gums that pulsated with vivid purples and blues. Then I was inside, engulfed into the warm womb of the seabed. Colors cascaded with blackness; Oblivion danced with unimaginable hues. One moment I was upside down, another I was downside up. A gooey substance covered my body, entered my mouth and coated my stomach. Everything was warm and comfortable and slowly I fell into a lull.
