White Beach Part 2

The rustling of leaves woke me. I looked around and saw in the moonlight, what looked like a pile of rags over by the dingey. I carefully picked up the flare gun and the knife, stood up and moved closer. The pile heard me and turned. It turned out it wasn’t a pile of rags but a small, wrinkled old man. His skin was browned and tough and his eyes were wide. He reminded me of a bushbaby or some other nocturnal creature. He held one of the cans in his left hand which had dark almost black nails which more resembled claws. His other hand was a scarred nub. He gazed at, through and all around me at the same time. His clothes were hanging on to his malnourished frame seemingly by force of habit alone. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until I breathed out at which point the stench of him invaded my nostrils. He seemed not to notice my repressed gagging. He continued to stare at me and through me and then suddenly began talking. He talked in a continuous stream and didn’t trip over or hesitate on a single word. The way he spoke gave me the feeling that he was reading from a script. He must have been practicing what he would say to the first human he came across.

He said “They have lived in the lake for hundreds of millions of years and they have wandered this island for almost as long. Certainly for millions of years before we even existed. Before our ancestors could crawl they had been running, YES, running and hunting and eating. And worshipping. They seem as monsters to us but their GOD is something we could not even begin to understand or comprehend. Though they appear strange to us but they OF THIS WORLD. They were born from the same primordial soup that our ancestors were birthed in. But their god was not born here, if she was even born AT ALL. She did not come from that same soup. She lives so far away but she feels so close here. It could be to do with the position of the stars and constellations. Gravity. Worm holes. Or perhaps it is beyond our comprehension entirely. I do not think they understand it any more than we could. They try their best. They try to draw her here. They have tried for so long. They give half, she devours half but one day she will devour whole. She is old. She is vast. She is Yag-Ropth. She is the God of Terror.”

I just stood in stunned silence. The intensity emanating from this man was incredible. His eyes shone in the dark. He had paused for around 30 seconds but he suddenly continued as if there had been no pause. “Their efforts are plain to see on the beach. So many MILLIONS of years have they hunted and sacrificed. They have always given their half. It’s why I’m still here. They hunt their game in multiples of two. They have to so as to ensure she gets half. They cannot catch three or five because they cannot be halved easily. For the same reason they cannot hunt just ONE so they have left me to my own devices. Now though… there are two.”

Again I was dumbfounded. I still held the flare gun and knife absentmindedly, vaguely pointing them in the direction of this obviously crazy man but I almost forgot I was holding them so deeply fascinated I was to hear what this person was saying. He related these things so earnestly that my mind was entirely preoccupied trying to understand his ramblings. He seemed to recognise my utterly confused state and without changing his expression or breaking eye contact he swiftly brought the can in his hand sweeping into my temple. My ears rang and as I lost consciousness I still had his musty stench within my nostrils.My mind became buoyant and floated. I felt it rise up through the layers of tissue and bone and skin and up through the air. It passed through the clouds and out of the Earth’s atmosphere into the coldness of space. It sluggishly floated past the planets of the solar system. Mars’s dusky red surface, the immensity of Jupitar, the pale yellow of Saturn surrounded by its icy ring. I saw them all as I floated past. Past the cyan atmosphere of Uranus and the deep blue of Neptune. Out and further out, I floated. Past asteroids and comets and new stars and old stars and dead stars and voids. It was all so beautiful. The eternity of space passed me. You know when you are sat on a train and there is a train on the next track and for a second you can’t tell if it’s the train you are on that’s moving or it’s the neighbouring one? It was much like that. Was I moving through space or was space re-positioning itself around me? I couldn’t be sure. The movement continued for an age it felt like. Every wonder in the galaxy and of other galaxies floated past. And then I saw it. It was a long way off for a long time. A tiny blip of deep blue in the nothing. It grew and grew until it was enormous. It was awe-inspiring. It filled my view and then I saw the dark shadow crossing in front of it. Blocking its light. It was a tiny spit of rock compared to this gigantic blue sun but there was something in it that drew me away from the blue light. My mind (or was it my soul?) was drawn down to the rock. It skirted the cracked and scarred surface. It navigated the ravaged and eroded mountains that were mere nubs now but were still twice the size of anything the Earth has ever produced. Deep canyons and craters littered the black surface. I saw shapes moving and other shapes not moving in the perpetual night of the dark side of the planet. I saw giants and creatures that can only be described as like the pagan gods of thousands of years ago. I saw watchers and hunters and great tangled masses and other things that I couldn’t see but that I could feel as chills that ran through the heart of me. I descended lower against my will. I floated through the deeper canyons and the beings I saw living in that hellish blackness could not be described by any living thing. There were things that defied human language or comprehension. I flew down into an even deeper void of one of the canyons. The rock’s crust itself was rent in two. I fell down into the blackness. I noticed that the black was blacker straight ahead, where I was heading. The massive chasm engulfed me and still I fell. It felt like the dark was eating me whole. A great seam ran across the void. The seam parted. A yellow eye of colossal proportions, lit the dark. The pupil was staring directly at me. The eyes are the windows to the soul but this eye… There was no soul.

It’s now been two weeks since I last wrote about the island. Reliving that hellish vision I had… The blue sun. The rock. That which lived inside that rock. I still have nightmares. I think I always shall. But now I shall return to my story. Again I begin with myself waking up on the beach after my vision.

I was screaming and crying into the night for a long time. My head was bleeding and I wandered through the forest and screamed. My memory of that night is patchy. I think I gained and lost consciousness more than once. Eventually I came back to myself in the early morning. I was shivering although it was already warm. I picked my way back through the forest and came to the shelter and the dingey which had been emptied of cans. The knife was gone but somehow I still had the flare gun in my hand. I didn’t notice it was there until I started looking for it. The metal box with the flare gun rounds had been thrown into a bush nearby. I sat and tried to think. First off I had to get away to somewhere the crazy bastard that had tried to smash my skull in wouldn’t be able to find me. Secondly I had to get water and food. The water would be easy to get as I already knew the stream nearby was purer than silk. Food would be a problem. The jungle was just too thick to see, hunt or even simply move around in. I guessed I would have greater luck on the other side of the island in the tall grasses. I reasoned the deer would be easier to track. The third thing I had to do was to try and get rescued. If I could make a fire big enough on the top of the ridge, the smoke column could reach a thousand feet up. I looked out across the beach. The tide had taken the yacht.

I quickly made my way to the stream and gorged myself and cleaned the dry blood from my tender temple. Again I made the climb up to the ridge and again I was hit with the glare of the white beach. As I picked my way down the rocks and boulders on the other side, I couldn’t shake that beach from my mind. It was like the glare had been so bright it had been burnt into my brain. The ridge on the other side was much clearer of vegetation but what it lacked in greenery it more than made up for in hard, sharp rock. After hours of carefully picking my way down the slope I got down and pushed my way through the grass. It was dry and yellow and almost as tall as I was. After ripping my arms up and down with cuts, I stumbled onto a beaten track. It was wide and obviously oft used I assumed by the deer that inhabited the island and that I had already met. The earth had been pounded down, almost to rock and the seedlings on either side kept a respectful distance from its centre. What was puzzling to me at the time was how much wider it was than the deer I had seen. I started to wonder whether I had seen only a juvenile or whether they travelled in a single herd on this side of the island.

The trek to the grass fields had taken much longer than I had expected and it was getting dark. I decided to follow the track and hopefully come to some more open space to set up a camp. I felt stupid for even thinking it as soon as I said it. A camp? I had the clothes on my back (which were ripped and torn and blood soaked), the flare gun in my waistband and the three flare rounds in my pocket. That was it. What I really meant by “camp” was “somewhere I could lie down”. I hadn’t eaten for the entire day so was feeling fairly weak but the water I had drunk from the stream was so refreshing, I managed to push on. I was passing along the track when I noticed the grasses were thinner on my left side. I pushed them aside and saw that a clearing had been stamped out. In the centre rose a thick tree trunk. The very top resembled a great fish’s head, mouth open to the heavens, eyes bulging out on either side. The scales had been delicately cut into the trunk but the bottom end was covered in scratches and symbols crudely hacked out of the wood. The delicate carved head was old and weathered but the lower scratches were fresher and… violent. All around the clearing wooden stakes had been driven into the soil. Some were old to the point of crumbling whilst others looked like they had been planted the night before. They varied in height from 30cm to two meters. They had no discernible order, being placed randomly hither and thither. What was most unnerving were the stains. Deep brown stains around the tree trunk. The place unnerved me but it seemed it was the only clear area other than the track so, not wanting to be trampled by a herd of deer on the track, I gathered some grass around me and lay down at the far edge of the clearing to sleep.

I slept badly. What did it all mean? Clearings in the grassland? Carved statues surrounded by stakes? Dark stains? Was this all the work of the castaway? How long had he been on the island? What had happened to him? These questions swirled in my head and robbed me of rest. It was whilst I was lying there that I remembered the castaway’s words. He had spoken of monsters from the lake that worshipped a strange god. The Yag-Ropth. The “God of Terror”. I remembered my dream or vision or hallucination or whatever it was. The great eye in the void of the rock that orbited a vast blue star. I finally fell into a fitful rest. The stars shone so clearly, the sky was almost white with them.