by Doug Kelly
To their relief, after landing on the black beach, they discovered that it was composed of firm sand, but its appearance was so unpleasant that they could not bring themselves to sit on it. They walked toward the ledge of rocks, thinking that they would find a more pleasant place there. The rocks were stacked like a staircase, and Aton stepped on them to climb up, and his foot went deep into what he had thought were hard angular stones. He kicked one, and his shoe easily entered the crumbling mass because it was made of compacted sand. It was impossible to climb up the bank. The ground rose inland. Curious to see around them as far as possible, they ascended the slope to take advantage of the elevation.
From the hilltop, they could not see farther than they had on the shore because the pale yellow mist rose up around them and hid the boat on the beach. The extreme desolation of the dark and barren ground deterred them from going farther. There was not a tree, bush, or living creature, not so much as a buzzing fly. They turned to go back down, and then for the first time noticed that a faint red rim surrounded the outline of the sun, apparently caused by the yellow vapor. The sun was so obscured that they could look at it without squinting, but its heat seemed to have increased, although it was getting late in the afternoon.
Descending toward the boat, Aton thought that the wind had significantly changed course. They sat down in the vessel, and ate some food. Their tongues seemed to wither with each bite because they had nothing to drink. The great heat had made them very thirsty. Wearily, and without thinking, they pushed the boat from the black sand. After they climbed onboard, she slowly floated out, but as they were about to hoist up the sail, a tremendous gust of wind struck Hauk down and nearly carried him overboard. He had caught the mast as he fell, almost going headfirst into the black waves. Before he could regain his senses, the boat drifted against the ledge of rocks, which disintegrated into a slurry of thick sand and sank under the water. She passed over what they had thought were stones, but were now just a thick paste melting into the black water of the lake. A tar-like substance had held the sand together. They hoisted the sail and were ready to leave.
Hauk took the oars out of the water, and Aton navigated the boat as well as he could. The fury of the shifting wind was irresistible, and they were at its mercy. In a few moments, as the wind swept them along the shore, it carried the boat between the beach and another immense sandbar. Here, because the waves were broken and less powerful, Aton decided to get the boat ashore again. They lowered the sail. After jumping out, they dragged her up as far as they could onto the land. When they had done this, Aton noticed that the gale had ceased. A perfect calm succeeded the tremendous burst of wind, and the waves had stopped their violent crashing.
That was a relief because they had feared that a storm could have broken their exposed boat to pieces somewhere along the unfamiliar shore, leaving them stranded and possibly entombed on the island, but without a wind they could not move from this dismal place this evening. There was no breeze, and they were too weary to row. They stayed on the boat to rest and fell asleep. Aton’s head dropped heavily onto his chest and partly woke him several times when it happened, but his stupor overcame the discomfort, and he continued snoozing. When they woke, they felt dazed and unrefreshed, as if the slumber were entirely just a nightmare. They were extremely thirsty and oppressed with the increasing heat. The sun sank, and began to hide behind the high ground, partially dimming the light.
CHAPTER FIVE
Aton thought there was a chance that they might find a spring with fresh water somewhere on the island, and he started up the hill to search for one. Hauk chose to stay with the boat, to guard it and their treasure. Aton paused at the top of the hill. The sun had not sunk below the horizon yet, but its former shape had disappeared. What had appeared in its place resembled a swirl of red because it looked so much like a twisted, bloody rag that a demon had squeezed across the skyline. Over the sun, a tinge of translucent blue flickered, like a flame. The black waters reflected the eerie glow through the yellow vapor that saturated the air. Although momentarily startled at such a macabre sight, he shrugged away what he saw, still dazed and confused from lack of restful sleep.
He went on, looking for a spring, sometimes walking on firm ground, sometimes sinking to his ankles in black sand. The ground looked as if flames had scorched it, but there were no charred stumps of timber or singed grasses like those that he had seen in the woods close to his home clan after forest fires. Fires in the woods were common enough during the heat of summer after lightning strikes or from the campfires left unattended by careless hunters, so he was familiar with that type of damage, but this was different.
With each step, the extreme bleakness compounded by desperate thirst seemed to depress him, but he continued as if he were walking in a nightmare. Descending the hill, he went onto level ground, and he lost sight of the flaming sunset and the black waters behind the ridge. The level ground accentuated the desolation because there was not one blade of grass. The surface was hard, black, and appeared burned, resembling the pit of an old fire. In places, it reverberated under his feet, and he thought this was the echo from mysterious ancient passages; something the Americans had created. The landscape reminded him all too much of that mysterious shipwreck, its dark appearance, and the death he had found aboard it. The warnings from the two maps of the lake he had recently seen flashed beacons of caution from some dark place in his memory, but he was having trouble thinking correctly. His good judgment was failing him, slipping away with every breath of the toxic air that he inhaled.
He shook his head several times, tried to straighten his posture, and attempted to throw off the somnolence that seemed to increase with each step, but he could not do it. He walked with a bent back and crept over the scorched land, which seemed to radiate heat, or maybe it was just something from the dark soil that had permeated his shoes and was burning the skin at the bottom of his feet. A silver shimmer that resembled reflected water appeared in front of him. His thirsty eyes urged him forward as he raised his arms to grasp it. He quickened his pace, but he could not get to it, and realized that it was a mirage that receded as he advanced. He dropped his outstretched arms. Here on this horrible island, the evening was no pleasant summer dusk. The gloominess of isolation and misery succeeded the impending sunset, and while that metaphorical shadow hung overhead, the yellow vapor hovering around the island was faintly radiant.
After stepping on the remains of a black skeleton, he stopped suddenly. The dark ground had camouflaged the skeleton with the same grotesque oily blackness that had covered the pile of slowly disintegrating disarticulated human bones. Close by, he found several more, superimposed upon each other like a three-dimensional collage, as if the unhappy beings had fallen across each other, and in these contorted positions, had rotted away and left nothing but their bones as the only testament to their existence.
His path led him to a variety of objects, ancient relics, which appeared as if someone had randomly dropped them. From these relics, he picked up a small wooden box and opened the creaking lid. Inside were ancient coins and jewelry of the Americans. Evidently, it had belonged to these treasure hunters before this foul place had taken their lives and had left them lying as a jumbled mass of intertwined limbs, to rot and transform into the darkly camouflaged skeletons at his feet. He dropped the box and unknowingly proceeded to walk like a zombie.
Although he was startled at first, his daze seemed to attenuate his better judgment regarding the potential danger of walking farther inland. Because of this, his current circumstance did not seem to convey the gravity of his situation and the possible threats of this hazardous environment. Inhaling the gaseous emanations from the soil and the contaminated lake water that discharged the yellow vapor had hypnotized and tranquilized him. The mysterious fumes caught him between reality and a dream world. The narcotic ether, which seemed to fill the air, had deadened his senses in such a way that he saw things as if they were distorted and distant, while he was next to t
hem. He unintentionally looked back at his footprints, and as far as he could see, the impressions shimmered with a colored iridescence, like how a thin layer of oil on still water could create an expanding rainbow across a flat liquid surface. The effect was absent at a close distance and did not appear until a short time had elapsed. As the evening drew on, the vapor became a haze and caused a burning sensation in his lungs, lips, and nostrils.
Still anxious for water to relieve his mouth from the burning sensation and to quench his increasing thirst, he proceeded as straight ahead as he could. In his peripheral view, he sensed translucent shifting forms on either side of him, keeping pace with every step. When he turned to glance in either direction, the ghostly cloud he looked at disappeared, the other reappearing on the opposite side. Whichever he looked at was not visible to direct observation, yet he was aware of it from the corner of his eye. Shapeless and threatening, the gloomy thickness in the air floated beside him like the nebulous monster of a dream. Sometimes he imagined that he saw a body materializing from the shadows on either side of him, desperately clawing its way back to the realm of the living. A pocket of smog floated in front of him and turned into the shape of a contorting face, then vanished as its mouth opened with a silent scream of terror.
His mind began to fill with unstable thoughts as he sensed flickering things moving around him, but he was still not afraid because of the dullness of his senses in his trance-like state. He felt as though there was an increasing subterranean heat under his feet making them agonizingly hot, as if he had a fever. He panted at the warm air with a tongue like leather, but did not perspire because he was severely dehydrated. A dry heat like an oven seemed to burn the blood in his veins. His head felt bloated and his eyelids seemed heavy. With each blink of his eyes, the pause of sightlessness grew longer and his lids occasionally remained closed as he walked forward. He thought his path was straight, but it had actually curved, and he did not even realize that he staggered as he walked, veering from side to side.
Before he comprehended it, he had stumbled onto the ruins of an ancient city. The remains of low concrete walls crumbled with the touch of his heavy hand. Steel girders had rusted to a mere pittance of what they had originally been. He pushed another wall over and it toppled into the murky abyss of a vast cavern filled with poisonous waste.
After the asteroid impact had occurred many generations ago, the land opened in various places and exposed vast subterranean caverns, sewer systems, and fractured the foundations of deep concrete basements. In the area around where he stood, violent earthquakes had broken a pipeline, filling the hollows with crude oil. Toxic chemicals had seeped through the shattered remains of chemical processing facilities and poured freely from the broken underground storage tanks. A cocktail of noxious waste marinated the surrounding land, creating a forbidden zone around the remains of this ancient city.
As he advanced, the remnants of buildings increased in number, so numerous that he had to weave in and out around them. In some places, the walls had already fallen, and he could see down into the deep concrete basements and the cracked foundation walls, through which seeped toxic waste. The hollows beneath the ancient structures had partly swallowed the old buildings. Whether the fallen walls had been made of bricks, stone, or other material, he could not discern because they were so brittle.
Tired of meandering around the ruins, Aton turned and retraced his steps until he was outside this vulgar place, and then went toward the left. Not long after, as he still walked in a trance, he descended a gradual slope and noticed the ground change in color from black to a dull red. In his dazed state, he had taken several steps onto this red ground before he noticed that it was liquid, slimy and greasy, like thick oil. It quickly deepened and was rapidly over his shoes.
He returned to the black shore and stood looking out over the lifeless water. The luminous yellow vapor had risen to twice his height and formed a roof over the land and over the black water, under which it was possible to see for a great distance. The surface of the oil, which appeared to cover the lake, was perfectly smooth. It did not seem as if any wind could arouse even a little wave on it. Still desperate for drinking water, Aton mechanically turned to go back to the boat.
He followed his shoeprints, which he could see a long way in front of him. His trail curved so much that he made many short cuts across the meandering path he had left. His fatigue was now so intense that all feeling had departed, physically and emotionally. His feet, his limbs, his arms and hands were numb. The toxins from the ground’s secretions had begun to deaden his nerves, but he continued walking, sometimes shuffling and dragging his feet. Because the rising fumes had affected his senses, it seemed like an eternity had passed before he returned to the location where he had discovered the black skeletons.
He stepped around them and stumbled over a dark, concealed obstacle, camouflaged on the black ground, and it was just as black, like the earth around it. When he tripped over the object, it jingled with metallic resonance, so he looked down and saw that he had kicked his foot against a heap of coins and jewelry. They were black as ink. He picked up a handful and stumbled away. Until now, Aton had accepted everything that he had seen as something so strange that it was inexplicable. During his exposure to the poisonous vapor that he had inhaled with laboring breaths, it had slowly stupefied him. His mind had partly lapsed from competent judgment. His consciousness reacted, but it was a delayed and hesitant response. As he remembered finding the heap of blackened wealth, he began to realize the seriousness of his situation. The recollection caused a chord of his foggy memory to hum like a stringed instrument, but like one out of tune, because of the toxic fumes permeating the air. These skeletons were the miserable relics of men who had ventured in search of ancient treasures, and into the deadly marshes over the site of an ancient city of the Americans. Aton finally realized that the deserted and utterly extinct city of Baton Rouge was under his feet; it was not a myth.
He had penetrated into the midst of this dreadful place, of which he had heard many tales. Stories of how the earth was poison, the water poison, the air poison, and the very light of the sun and moon brought luminous venom down to all things below, transfixing anyone foolish enough to enter this toxic realm into a stupefied paralytic state, slowly killing the marsh’s victims and imprisoning their souls for eternity. Persistent rumors had said that there were places where fires danced on the surface of the earth and belched acrid fumes, all of which were actually the result of mysterious chemicals that the Americans had stored underground for some reason that only they had understood. On the surface of the water, there was an oil slick mixed with toxic chemicals. He feared that touching the vulgar substance would bring certain death to any creature. Sometimes it floated with the wind, and fragments became attached to the brown water grass or reeds far from where he now stood. If a seagull, duck, or any living creature floating on the contaminated water, even brushed against the tainted reeds, it promptly died. He had not heard sailors speak of the black waters into which they had unwittingly arrived, and wondered if this was due to its lethal nature, because dead men tell no tales. He thought that only rarely had anyone survived to convey the story, to simply forewarn others.
Ancient stories had warned him that ghastly beings haunted the old cities, shapeless monsters, which hovered in the night sky, weaving a fearful dance in the beams of moonlight. These fabled spirits hid in the shadows, waiting for their next victim. The ancient legends told that apparitions caught fire and burned as they flew or floated in the air. Remembering these tales, which now seemed to be true, Aton glanced to his sides. His confused imagination ran wild, and he thought an apparition was following him, so he put his hands to his ears just in case the darkness that surrounded him whispered some horror of the ancient past. As he stumbled along leaving oily footprints behind him, he thought that the black earth on which he strode was composed of the putrefied bodies of countless people who had passed away after the city’s mysterious collapse. H
e shuddered as he moved and tried to quicken his pace, but could not go any faster because his anesthetized limbs would not permit him to move. He feared that he would fall asleep and never wake, like what might have happened to the dead smugglers, the seekers of treasure and wealth that Aton and Hauk had found on the black ship.
Ready to go to his boat and leave this dreadful place, Aton surmounted the hill and looked down at his vessel. It seemed as though it was on fire. From this distance, it appeared as though Hauk was flailing his arms in an attempt to extinguish the myriad of small flames, appearing and disappearing almost instantaneously, leaving only wisps of ghostly smoke as a trace of their brief existence. When Hauk swung around, Aton could then see that his friend had actually been swinging his sword in wide arcs, violently slashing at an invisible foe. Even from the hilltop, Aton could see the wild look in Hauk’s eyes, as if he were struggling against a formidable rival on the battlefield, fighting for his life. Realizing that it was a hallucination that Hauk was enduring, Aton struggled with his mind to discern what was real and what images were delusion. In a brief intermittent moment of mental clarity, he imagined both their bodies rotting away in a convoluted twisted heap of jumbled limbs, and their bones turning black and decomposing into the deadly soil. He knew that he had to make it back to Hauk and quickly leave this horrific place, or they both would surely die here.
CHAPTER SIX
Aton tried to run, but he felt as if his feet could not move. Something mysterious had paralyzed his arms and legs, as happens in nightmares. His body and mind were operating on two different levels, confusing him. His mind told him that cryptic paralysis had frozen him in place, but in reality, he did move, just very slowly and with an unsteady gait. After approaching the boat, his terror subsided because although it appeared burned, it was not. Flames had not scorched the sail, but a dark ash-like residue had coated it. It seemed to him as though swamp gases had collected in the low area and static discharge had ignited them, bringing small transient flames to life, like floating clusters of glowing fireflies. When he got to it, the little flames had disappeared, but a sulfuric stench remained, and that reminded him of the stories of evil demons, and the putrid odor they emitted in the presence of humans.
