He awoke to a graveyard of mirrors. Hundreds of pinpoint lights filled his eyes as he willed himself to sit up. Astigmatic vision cleared as his pupils contracted. Waves revealed themselves, buxom waves which folded, crashed, each reflecting its light at him for a moment of dying glory. The sand crinkled as he shifted his weight and cleared the aches and nerve needles from his legs. The sun, nuclear mouth of God atop empty azure sky, spat rays upon him and he embraced the warmth.
Then came the memories, floodlike. He and his companions had set out some distant morning to catch tuna. A rented boat, no guide, foreign place. A storm had raged, they had gone too far seaward. There was no respite, no salvation, only four beings and the whims of the ocean. A crack, the plastic vessel cleaved under the command of a great white crest. And then here. Where? Alone, nothing to see save the blues of sea and sky and the golds of sand and sun and mottled green-browns of seacliffs.
He arose and his clothes crunched with salt and grit, cotton tee and pants made crystalline, and he picked a direction and walked. The cawing of a gull perched upon the cliff to his right revealed some other life some other thing to share in the muted simplicity of his present lot or to cackle at it so at least in the humor of the world's memory he would not be forgotten.
The Man trundled forth in a direction he thought to be North, slipping in the silica grit with each step, sliding down in the depressions his mass created. The beach, infinite in its extent above and below rejected his advance and compelled him to reject his own motion. It wanted nothing but tranquility and in that tranquility, stasis, the long death.
There was no way to measure distance, for the sameness of the landscape allowed no metricity. Miles were inches were marathons. The passage of the sun and a memory of motion might yield some felt rate but what if memory ceased with sun as cause?
That vast solar spectrum pierced his every fiber and its warmth diffused through every nerve drawing forth water, sweat, heat's blood. This sweat poured from him, spilling on the beach, flowing back out to the vastness which had carried him here. The hours slid past, finally yielding to night.
In that darkness, an even more infinite monotony ruled. Auditory torture was brought by the slapping, the grinding of the waves upon the shore, the great cerulean behemoth named Water extending its arms atop land desperate in its clawing for him. In the instant he thought he could take no more of its wrath, sleep came for him.
~~ A diffuse ochre landscape, a solitary light in the impossible distance, some brazen army of glass foot soldiers lining the horizon. The redness expands, slow, taking more of the light away, obscuring the form of the soldiers, till finally all is overtaken. Sound reveals Geigeresque machines turning, enmeshing, their mechanical symphony building to a clamor, then sudden silence. The redness parts to reveal a stark white raven in a spherical chamber, the chamber walls pulsating, driven by anonymous heartbeat. The raven speaks four words, "Mors tua, vita mea." ~~
A gentle hand shaking his shoulder brings him out of the dream. The Man dazes up in the early morning light and sees the faint outline of some Other man. This other one stands before the sun, outlined, haloed by amber, pinkish hue.
Morning there, buddy. How are ye?
Struggling to whet his vocal chords,
Not great. Had a hell of a dream, probably some sunstroke from walking all day. I could use some water and some shade. I don't mean to be impolite, but who are you?
Not impolite at all. People used to call me Nate. I've got some shade, sure, and there's plenty of water. He gestured seaward, Problem being it's salty.
The Other extended his left hand and the Man saw two fleshy pink calloused nubs where a ring and pinkie finger should've been. The Man grasped the lot of flesh, pulling himself up into the dawn light.
The two marched, paired along a line perpendicular to the water. After a spell the cliffs to their left broke to reveal a cavern entrance whose rim had been eroded by millennia of wave violence yielding the impression of some conflagration whose flames had been frozen and transmogrified into cream beige stone. The man stood still, accosted by the thing and the darkness which beckoned within. The Other walked straight in and only when he had disappeared behind the grand black curtain of the cavern's false night did he speak.
Welcome home then, buddy.
The Man struggled for words, internal thoughts his sole line of defense against the Other. He thought of origins, of how the Other had arrived here, of how long he had stayed, of how he had subsisted on the barren bounty.
Come on in, nothin bites. Water's in the rear, shade's everywhere, just like ye asked for.
The Man walked in, pupils dilating with each step as the place revealed itself to him. The ground had changed from sand to gravel and the individual rocks were monocolor in a sick-sweet blue-green. Spiral lines had been combed in it like some Zen garden and standing in the center of the pattern stood the Other but no footsteps were around him that one could use to ascertain if he had weight, if he moved like man.
Thus spoke the Other.
Delivered from the frying pan into the fire, is it ole buddy? Man in his infinite hubris yearns for compromise with nature, but listen here, there ain't no such thing. See you not then that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? See you not the scorn this earned him?
What a prohibition, what a lesson. And yet you venture out, in your blindness, into the domain from whence you came. You squawk like dying birds when God's scorn falls upon ye. The surprise is too much to hold inside a limited mind!
You think 'How could this be? How could this domain which we have mastered and imposed our will upon possibly rise up against us?' trust me buddy, the comedy would be lost on many but not on me. I've know plenty of God's scorn. I've become jaded to the whiplash when ye run head-first into it. Now it's been crystallized, saccharine, into humor.
Sinners, all. You bring forth idols from the dirt, from the loam, you bend photons away from their true paths to erect your artifices. You spit on what is natural, you curse what He has layed out for you. Benedic domine nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi. You speak these words and God hears them and is angered at your blithe disregard for his gifts. You cast lines in the ocean to take what is His and you perish for the disregard.
Look upon yourself, look upon your friends in the abyss, look upon the colony you set out from, look upon the mass of humanity as a whole. Look upon your works and see how they pale even to a simple anthill, to a gnat encircling your head as you walk through your cities. Look upon your boat thrown asunder His waters, see beneath the seabed the black crude oil, see your cursed alchemical incantations to turn it into whatever you so desire. See the golems, see them staring back at you with blank eyes and empty hearts, see their lifelessness, gaze upon your inability to truly create.
With a casual wave, the Other finished, Go on now, get out.
The Man backpedaled, scrambling, out into the baking sands, then he turned fully and ran. He struggled to believe that the Other's cavern had been real. Surely it was sunstroke or some other malady wrought upon him by the coast. When he was far away and had paused long enough to recover his breath, he turned back again to face the looming cavern.
Yes, an utter impossibility, the whole encounter must've been a hallucination, an absurdity. His courage built with this rational reflection, mind triumphing over body's screams to stop, to get as far away from the place as possible, and he retraced his panicked flight back towards the cavern.
He entered the familiar dark. Eyes adjusting again, an empty banality was revealed. No gravel, no Other man, just a sandy floor bereft of demoniac presence or allegory.
Relief washed over the Man as he sat to rest, to calm his nerves. A few minutes passed, then he heard a faint trickling coming from the back of the space. Water? Fresh water? In a hypnotized trundling gait he advanced to the source of the sound, honing in on it stepwise.
He found a thin, clear, vertical stream falling from one corner of a hexagonally perfect hole in the ceiling, some stone spigot fashioned for him alone. He cupped his hands together to gather the cavern's sacrament, filling them with a sea in miniature. He first saw waves lapping in that microcosm, then saw swirls of crimson mixing in, finally seeing, staring, jawstruck at the bloodied gap on his left hand where a ring and pinkie finger once were.