The God that was a Mountain - A fantastical, horrific, literary, life-changing story.

The night sea threatened to swallow him, rising in green-gray sheets that made the world seem as if it were tumbling. Brine lathered his beard, a foam that’s bitterness was matched only by his ire. He clung to his threadbare vessel, holding the scrap-iron mast in place when the riggings snapped and the wind came screaming, filling the sail and pulling the boom hard, until he stood with his arms stretched wide, a screaming Christ lit by tungsten spokes of lightning. The blisters on his hands popped, the frayed ropes like razor wire in each tender inch of flesh.

He held until he felt death burning in his lungs; and then held another hour, just to spite it.

The morning found him moaning the names of his wife and daughter. He didn’t know how long they’d been dead—not exactly. The days and nights had blurred and shifted, a rippling pool of heliogram memories in which he combed their hair, and wept, and let the sun burn his back to keep the light from accelerating their decay; and despite his painstaking effort to shield them, the blue wreaths of livor mortis, rising along their necks and arms with all the funerary beauty of pagan jewels; his refusal to eat them, despite his starvation; and the moment of their burial: no bubbles or goodbyes, only rippling green eternity, drawing them down into the deeps in which no histories are kept.

“God,” he whispered, though to the seagulls riding the thermals it must have sounded like a scream, a curse with the power to undo all of creation.

The man stood, his hands leaving bloody trails across the wood, the rubber gaskets, the chains and scrap-steel refuse he’d gathered from the island deathcamp to build the vessel of their escape. He stared into the sun, a withered Aztec, aware of his heart’s vacancy, two hollows in the shapes of a daughter and wife.

“YOU’VE WON!” His back bowed, and white spittle burned in the heat. “MASOCHIST! BASTARD! STOKE THEM WITH YOUR BELLOWS ONLY TO PLUNGE THEM INTO THE FIRE! AND HAMMER, AND HAMMER AGAIN! IS THAT IT? AM I NOUGHT BUT A GRAVEWORM CHEWING THE PIECES YOU LEAVE BEHIND? ARE WE ALL NOT WORMS LEFT TO CRAWL THIS CORPSE YOU CALL A WORLD? YOUR TRUTH IS A DEATH RATTLE; YOUR INCENSE, THE JUNGLE STINK; YOUR VOICE, THE DRONE OF A BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE WOUNDED ARE LEFT TO FREEZE! A FILTHY APE IS WHAT YOU ARE! A MAKER OF FILTHY APES! AND IF THIS IS YOUR VISION, THEN HEAVEN MUST BE A TOILET!”

           

He was dying. And as he collapsed to the rot-softened fenceposts that made his deck, he felt the bowl of his body crack, draining his lifeforce to the sea. He turned and smiled, bitter on the cracked clay of his face. He was an apostate, and he would die that way. This satisfied him in a way food and nourishment could not. To rebuke the glory of the Master, and wade willfully into the shadows beyond his love.

And then a world moved beneath the world, a dark shape that made the ocean suddenly black. The water churned white, hissing steam into the skies. The man gasped. It was like watching the creation of a mountain, a cliff of scales rising out and up from the green mystery into the blue death heat of skyline. Pearls of water streamed endless to reveal the deep gray ridges of what could only be a forehead. Crenellated and glistening and fused with coral. Spires of cruel bone punched up from the ocean, cutting the clouds to wisps. The living city froze with half its face above the water. And there before him, from a membranous oval with veins as thick as trees, came the wet sounds of shifting muscle and stone. The lid clapped open on a wall of wind. The man covered his face against the spray, and when at last it settled along the rocking waves, he was staring at a milkwhite eye wider than the horizon.

He made himself stand, the last of his energy coughing into the pistons, giving him the ghost of strength as he probed the eye’s luminous surface, the swirls and dancing striations, a pale sandstorm of movement in which he read the world’s dark history, and inevitable wasting-away.

The man’s expression changed. It was sudden and electric, and he knew then that he was staring at a God. One too old to be remembered. One that lay hidden in valleys and dungeons, in the cave-sanctums of dripping earth, and the bellies of her oceans. This was no adversary of the Master; this God treated that other as a horsetail treats a fly.

The man gripped the jib boom, leaning out, staring up along the cliffface of its head, the shoulders tapering down for miles beneath the water. It was impossible not to see: he was a tick upon the hide of an elephant. They all were. 

“I believe,” he whispered to the mountain. “Will you have me?”

The pattern of milk-white swirling didn’t change, and in its indifference seemed to say, I already have you.  

The man nodded, limped back to the broken mast, and pulled a long, sharp bar from the rigging platform. Then he jumped, a long triumphant jump, his strength so low that he only went five feet, his knees dragging in the water, flopping him forward, the bar too heavy, pulling him under, and his eyes staying wide the whole time, seeing through the salt-burn a living continent of plated muscle and scale and skin, a continent upon which animals and sea-grass swayed, upon which skeletal ships had lodged their rotted prows. And there, in a chasm that glittered like moss-covered glass, were the shapes of his wife and daughter, buried in green kelp ropes like pale and grinning seeds. He stabbed the pole into the mossy cleft, swimming through the green and clutching their cold flesh to his own. And then the God that was a mountain moved and sunk and took him to the bosom of the earth, away from pain, away from death, in that abyss where no histories are kept.    

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