The Great Death (An alternate creation story) - READ IT, YOU DOG!

“And the earth was as a poison, pushing creatures from its wounds. Woken from their stasis, they learnt the ways of speech. Their tongues forgot the taste of blood; sought the taste of power. Spears were dropped for the Chieftan staff. And He, the first, whose name was Adam, looked upon his likenesses and wept. For they were lost to him. His heart no longer felt them. And so he went to breaking them upon the wheel of governance, knowing no God kept watch among the broken of His flock.”  – The Philospher's Codex, Chapter 2, Verse(s) 4-7

1.

Gundersen didn’t trust the Arctic water, the way it sprayed in gasps of vapor against the steel hull of the ship. He stood transfixed within the elemental violence, simple physics the only wedge between him and the ocean’s hunger. Each fracture of pack ice sent a shudder through the deck. He could feel it through his boots. Like trampling the fragile bones of an animal.

And here came the captain of the Freya now. A coward and a drunk. Through a gray beard yellowed by nicotine he complained that the fee Gundersen had offered was insulting now that he’d had a week to mull it over, that the small ice-breaking vessel would need repairs after such a perilous voyage, and besides, he was too old to be doing favors for skinflints.

“You already took the money.” Gundersen braced a gloved hand on the gunwale, smoking the cheap Turkish cigarette the seaman had offered when Gundersen’s stare had become too uncomfortable to challenge. “What good is a man without his word?”

The captain frowned. “What good is a ship without its fuel?”

“I was told you were trustworthy.”

“Trust is inedible, Mr. Gundersen. I’m here to make a living.” The Captain sparked his pipe and eked smoke from the stem. “Perhaps we’ll just drop anchor and wait for you to become sensible.”

Gundersen sneered and watched the old man pause as he caught sight of Gundersen’s teeth: shards of tungsten, bright as knives. “Now you’re making foolish threats.”

The Captain scoffed. “This being a fool’s errand, I think it rather suits it.”

“We’re close.”

“Close is relative in the Artic Circle.”

“Close enough to swim.”

“And freeze to death for your trouble.”

“Not if I use your body as a float.” The words hung so heavy the wind could not budge them. Gundersen turned with the slow unyielding imposition of a machine. “Those buoys there, a few good knots. You’d make a formidable raft.”

The Captain stared at the ember in his pipe as a fogbank rolled across the ice.

“Drop your anchor, if you must. But know this…” Gunderson pressed his face into the orb of heat emanating from the captain’s body. “You’ll be wrapped in its chain.”

Rage glinted in the pale diamond eyes, then snuffed itself as the Captain pulled the flask from his coveralls and swigged. “You’d kill me, would you? What good would my money be then?”

“None at all. It would be mine again.” 

The Captain limped away, stopping at the stairs to the wheelhouse. “You know there’s nothing that can keep me here once you’re ashore.” And when the tall imposing stranger said nothing, the Captain disappeared up the creaking stairs.

Gundersen turned his attention back to a point obscured by whorls of snow. Felt the steady crunch of the ice reverberate through the hull. There was music in it, what might be described as the rudiments of language. It made him think of the Anchorite, out there in his desert cave, covered in filth and groveling as some devolved thing in a miasma of superstition. The old lunatic was the only reason Gundersen was here. The only reason he had not killed himself in the streets of Jordan.

2.

The Anchorite’s voice was like a crow’s, if a crow had learned Arabic. “Why have you come?”

“I don’t know. Not really.” Gundersen stepped into the cave with a hand raised to his nose, the smell of human waste like a poison. “I feel dead. As if every word leaving my body is evidence of my own evaporation. I was told you understand such things.”

The Anchorite leaned forward into the low licking flames of his dung fire, the bluish smoke worming along the rocky ceiling. “Death is the only reality. God and it are one and the same. Did you not know this? To be dead is to meet God. To feel death while breathing is to know God. So, traveller… tell me how it is you came to know Him?”

Gundersen told him of the Philosophers, that shadowy cabal of learned men bent to the quest of existential unraveling. He told the Anchorite of their texts and parchments, of the codex hidden in scripture ranging from Torah to Biblia to Quran, the linking of similar parables and inversion of those stories to chart the hidden tale of Man’s creation. Not an Edenic garden of perfection with flower and sprig—but a stasis of eternal union. The theory that men and women were vestigial in their earliest phases of Genesis. Things with no more import than trees or rocks. The true cause of the Fall from Grace coming not from Man’s partaking of the fruit, but Man’s partaking of his own anima. A fated moment of self-awareness that severed the divine umbilicus linking him to God.

“It’s driven me insane.” Gundersen was trembling. “Life means nothing to me. I’ve tried to explore emotion. But it’s a lie. I’m filled with such thirst. To know why we decay. Why we’re allowed to elevate above nature only to destroy it.”

The Anchorite nodded in solemn agreement, chewing the dried reptiles that comprised his diet. “You allude to truth, but only in fragments. Fragments are correlative, traveller. But only when viewed from on high. You must elevate yourself to see.”

“How?”

“You must die.”

“I feel dead.”

“But you are not dead. Not yet.”

3.

Gundersen saw the island ahead. Blackish spires upthrust from the foaming waves. Strangely, the ice did not touch this place. Fingers of steam eddied amid melted angles of igneous rock. It appeared no larger than a polo field, cloaked in hot belts of mist.

“Drop anchor!” Gundersen yelled.

To which to Captain, drunker now, yelled back. “This is as far as I go!”

4.

“When you are close, you will feel it.” The Anchorite stroked his beard, the grease glazing his fingers in the firelight. “I felt it once, ages ago. Beneath the Throne of God. I gazed into His eyes and knew this world was not just removed from my attainment, but humanity’s. We were not meant to be here, to exist here. Which is why the structure of time works against us with its violence. But there, beneath the Throne.” His black eyes filled with awe. “There is no time.”

“How will I know when I’ve found it?”

“You will know,” was all the Anchorite would say.

5.

Gundersen leapt into the icy water and felt his ribs close like a trap. The sea attempted to digest him, tumbling his body and threatening to pull him under. He fought and kicked and felt his knee shift as it smashed against a rock. By the time he dragged himself onto the craggy beach, he was bleeding from a dozen scrapes.

He looked back as the Captain emerged from the wheelhouse. The old man pulled the pipe from his teeth with disbelief. Gundersen held his gaze and nodded. The captain nodded back. It was the first time since the voyage they had agreed. 

Gundersen began to climb then, careful not to lacerate his gloves. What at first appeared to be smooth stone proved to be a death trap of razor angles. And he knew deep beneath the logic comprising him that such geology was purposeful. Designed.

He ascended for what felt like lifetimes, maneuvering up and across the shelves of dead black stone until his muscles were trembling. When he looked back, the light in the sky hadn’t changed. The Captain still watched from the small iceless bay, a rictus of morbid anticipation etched upon his face.

Gundersen no longer felt the wind or cold or his hunger. Thought he might be freezing to death. When he bit off a glove to wipe his face, it was feverish and damp.

Still he climbed higher.

The spires leveled into plateau. He heaved himself up the last shelf, the island’s magmic history writ in dark ripples and folds. Rivulets of steaming water coursed the surface, created a kind of atmosphere. The heat became so profuse he was forced to strip his gear.

Standing naked but for his boots, he wiped the sweat from his torso and flung it to the pools. The ripples steamed and churned. Made the water bubble with light. He flinched at the violence of the reaction, the way it crackled and spat.

And when nothing more happened, Gundersen crept to the pool’s edge.

Sheets of silt swirled up from the depths. The complexity of blooming color against the pale white sand was cosmic. Filled him with the strange certainty that he was glimpsing the formation of a universe. Sensation fell away from him, piece by piece, until the idea of Gundersen fell with it. Where before had stood a man over a pool of glowing water, now trembled voided flesh. A housing with no purpose beyond witnessing.

His mind explored the water, where another tiny world, with its own life and systems, might just now be churning into existence. He imagined the intricacies of accelerated evolution, the rise and fall of civilizations, the agreed subjective truths and their ultimate unraveling. An entire history being shaped up from nothing. Perhaps one day another solitary acolyte would stand transfixed above a similar pool down there, beholding yet another world destined to repeat itself. The beauty of it broke his heart. To be locked within a cycle from which there was no escape. To know the earth surrounding him might have come from the flung sweat of a confused creature that would unknowingly become its God.

Gundersen was on his knees with his face nearly pressed to the water, when instinct thrust from the sediment of his brain.

The sudden vision of a deep-sea fish wooing prey froze him. He saw it clearly in his mind: the innocuous glow of filaments. Distraction before the fatal strike.

He took a deep breath of humidity. Blinked the sweat away. Then stared more carefully. The color was gone, the water smooth as glass. And there, beneath the settling of the silt.   

Two pale eyes were staring back at him.

6.

The dung fire had snuffed to embers. Ribbons of smoke braided with light leaking from the cave mouth behind them. The Anchorite had been sitting that way for days, his chin lowered to his chest.

Gundersen began to reach for him, when the black eyes snapped open.

“You seek death?” The breath dry and rotten. “Truly?”

Gundersen sat back, thought hard before answering. “It’s code, isn’t it? The Philosophers spoke in the same fashion. What you’re asking is if I seek the knowledge of God. If I’m yet willing to murder my beliefs. My self-imposed molestations. And step reborn into the abyss.”

The Anchorite smiled too long and too wide for Gundersen’s liking. Even worse—his teeth appeared to be metallic. “Do you know how long I’ve sat in this cave?”

In the streets of Jordan, Gundersen had heard of the Anchorite’s ascetic order, a long line of seekers that had held lone council in the desert caves since the times of Saint Anthony of Egypt. He’d heard they never sickened and rarely spoke. That they lived to incredible ages, despite their lack of resources. When he’d asked where he might find them, the villagers had shrugged or grown afraid. Not until the goat farmer Basam, a toothless man with eyes that had refused to blink even as they beheld the desert sun. I show you, Basam had said. I know.

“I wouldn’t presume to know your age,” Gundersen finally said.

“Guess.”

Gundersen appraised the folded sacks beneath the eyes, a charcoal beard twisted with white, eyebrows flared like moth wings. The nose was sharp and spotted. And the teeth…

Gundersen avoided looking at them. Crafted in crude spears of brass, their divoted surface appeared to ripple in the ember glow. The gums themselves were white as eggshells. Dead of circulation. “You can’t be older than eighty. Ninety, at most.”

At that, the Anchorite began to laugh.

7.

Gundersen jumped to his feet and froze at the edge of the pool, his heart thumping against his ribcage. At first, he was sure he was seeing his own reflection. But when he bent to study it closer, the reflection didn’t follow.

It floated beneath the water with straightened neck and tightened lips, as if created for the sole purpose of emoting pain.

When he stared directly in its eyes, the air around him shifted. Like a coupling. A connection. A strange doubling sent his mind into the water, so for a moment he saw his frightened face through the rippling surface of the pool. It was gone as quickly as it had come, but not all of it. A piece of what lived down there had attached itself.

Then he felt it, sliding up his body, a cold encircling. The skin of his forearms depressed in the pattern of ropes he felt but couldn’t see. Gundersen screamed for help, screamed and began to choke as the pressure filled his mouth.

The force of it slammed him to his knees. The wind roared to life, scooping at his back, forcing him toward the water. He thought again of the rocks and their formation, set at angles to repel exploration; of the unbearable heat that had forced him to strip his clothes. This was not an island, but a body. An extension of some deeper secret set on killing to protect itself.

The thing beneath the water tilted back its head and grinned. Its teeth were made of light. The bluish beam framed Gundersen’s face, crawled in through his eyes, filling him with truths beyond comprehension. Horrors his bones had known all along. He tried to gain his feet but the muscles were weakening, snapping like the cables of a great bridge.

It was then Gundersen knew what it was to be alive and in that life be destined to disintegrate. To be drawn into the light and at the last moment understand the light was a kind of trap.

He closed his eyes and thought of the Anchorite.

Heard the splash below him as two gray limbs shot from the water.

8.

“I’m ready,” he told the Anchorite.

They stood in the mouth of the cave, aflame in the desert sunset. The old man had incredible posture for a thing so ancient. It was still hard for Gundersen to believe the Anchorite could be as old as he claimed, but what motive would such a man have for subterfuge? He who had shed the burden of society and taken up residence with shadows.

“You are not ready. Not until the very moment you see it, can you be ready. And even then, it might kill you.”

“I thought dying was the point.” Gundersen peeked to see if the Anchorite was smiling and let the grin die on his face when he saw the black eyes watching him.

“You cannot be ready. But you can prepare.”

“How?”

The Anchorite opened his mouth. Raised one gnarled finger to his teeth and tapped the brass incisor with a fingernail. “You must taste it. But human teeth will not suffice. Precious metals found in the belly of the earth. Only they can bridge the chasm that first separated man from his maker.”

“The chasm.” Gundersen tasted the phrase. “The birth of consciousness, you mean?”

“No. The dissolution of all life into life. The Great Death that began everything.”

Though he tried to make sense of it, Gundersen couldn’t understand. He let the Anchorite lead him back into the cave. Helped the old man refresh the dung fire. Then reposed on an altar of red stone and waited until the Anchorite set a clay bowl on his chest. “Drink this.” 

Gundersen sat up one elbow. Studied the milky fluid. “What is it?”

“It will help with the pain.”

Gundersen drank and laid back and soon fell into a sleep as still as death. There were no dreams but for the vacuum of eternity, whispering to itself in the vastness of God’s corpse.

9.

Its claws clamped his neck.

The thing’s grip was merciless. Gundersen could feel his tendons crackling. A swollen pain beneath his adam’s apple. His body tried to cough and the compacted air hid the world beneath a veil of flickering fog. The artic sky, the smooth black stones, the steaming flesh of the half-drowned thing trying to strangle him—all wavered in ghostly waves.

Gundersen braced his hands against the pool’s edge. Strained his back and pulled until he was sure his vertebrae would fracture. When he failed, he lowered himself and tried again. Over and over until he felt the thing lift from the water, the slow eke of leverage, as if he were attempting to uproot a tree.

The Anchorite’s voice rose in his mind then: Not until the very moment you see it, can you be ready. And even then, it might kill you.

He brought up one knee and centered his heel. Struck the thing’s face and used the break of force to center the other boot beneath him. He could hear its panting now, the soft gnashing of its mouth. Trying to say something. Trying to whisper.  

Gundersen grabbed its wrists and screamed, extending his legs, wrenching it up and watching the bottom half of its body snap away from what appeared to be a complex root system protracting from the pool’s stony bed.

The scream of its agony was a mystery. No semblance of language. Only the fractious sounds of nature, of calving ice and hurricanes. Gundersen pried the steaming hands from his neck and hurled the body to the slick black stone, the sound of its landing like a thawed fish dropped into a bathtub.

Then he collapsed and began to weep.

It was not until Gundersen could breathe again that he saw his own crude features in the shapeless face.

Not a creature.

But a twin.

10.

Gundersen walked what seemed an impossible distance, considering how small the island had appeared from the deck of the ship. He thought of nothing but the Anchorite. Words that had before seemed cryptic and yet now held all the importance of talismans. Each syllable echoed in his bones.

He closed his eyes and walked without need of them. Until the stars themselves snapped firm in fated alignments. He felt their power, their urgency, course the length of his spine. Felt the bones fuse until he was flexed so straight the sinews of his abdomen buckled.

Now, he thought. Open them now.  

His boots were balanced on the crozzled lip of a wound within the earth. Two more steps would have sent him tumbling straight into its mouth. Hot bursts of steam belched from the blackness, blowing back his hair.

The chasm resembled frozen black whirlpool. He could hear the slow trickle of feeding streams, and the muffled roars of a river somewhere deeper. The fumes baking up from the hole burnt his eyes. He made himself stare through the tears. Knew it was important.

When you are close, came the whisper of the Anchorite, you will feel it.

Gundersen was trembling. Could feel the place attempting to conquer him. A weight that tried to dimineralize and fold his body into stone. It took all his spiritual preparation to resist unconsciousness. And he wondered now if the temptation of Saint Anthony of Egypt had been this difficult, this painful.

“I am death.” He croaked the catechism, his voice as withered as the Anchorite’s. “I come to see. And will see. I come not to die, but already dead. I come as death to know itself, and in its knowing give shape to a life vacated to propel its own creation.”

Gundersen closed his eyes.

And when he opened them again, he saw a staircase in the chasm wall that had not been there seconds earlier.

11.

The floor of the chasm beneath the island was more a bridge.

The darkness below him on either side roared with the thunder of rushing water. He walked slowly until his eyes adjusted. The walls and ceiling were honeycombed with tunnels. Ganglia of bluish white mineral coursed their surfaces like veins. The bridge was pitted as well—holes large enough to drop a skiff through without fear of scraping its edges.

The way got steeper, until he was climbing, levering himself through the pits and fractures. He almost slipped a dozen times but reached on instinct and found the needed holds. The exhaustion was hypnotic. Until Gundersen fell away, climbing with only his flesh, while his mind hovered in the womb of soft light visible far above him.

He was almost to the top before he realized what he was seeing.

A throne.

Carved from the earth.

And seated upon it…

12.

The Anchorite was staring when Gundersen awoke. The empty clay bowl sat beside him on the altar, filled with glistening pomegranate seeds. His face felt swollen, the taste of dull iron in his mouth. Thirst came in cramping waves. He reached for the bowl, for the seeds, and heard them clatter like marbles.

Gundersen hesitated as he picked one. Rolled it in his fingers. He couldn’t see. Not yet. The cave flickering in and out of fog.

“The pain will come later,” The Anchorite whispered.

Pain. The word entered into some unthinking piece of him that must have been awake even as he’d slept. For he suddenly knew what the sharp hard crimson chip in his fingers was. And what the space it had once occupied was filled with now.

Gundersen sat up. Turned.

The dung fire had burned low. But there was still enough light by which to see the belts of dried blood coating the Anchorite’s hands. The crude hammers and surgical instruments. The bone needle and thread resting in a bowl of pinkish water.

Gundersen dropped the thing in his fingers.

And watched his molar clatter across the cave.

13.

Gundersen pulled himself onto the dais. Looked up. And felt everything he’d ever thought about God or the nature of life evaporate.

The throne bulged from the earth in a snarl of bluish soapstone. Large enough for the hull of the Freya to sit between its armrests. White moss bloomed in every crevasse, dusted with red blossoms that appeared to shiver when Gundersen watched them from the corner of his eye. The cave walls stretched domelike above it, an opening in the ceiling affording a beam of the eternal Arctic summer.

The light framed shoulders as wide as a city bus. They were asymmetrical, the left hulking upward while the right lay withered in its joint. What vestments such a holy monstrosity might have worn had long since rotted. But the legs—at least Gundersen thought they must be legs—spilled across the dais in tubes of cartilage.

The face was human; if a human had been subjected to decades of radiation. One eye was fused shut, the other flaring open in a skull riddled with hard knobs of bone. The chest cavity had exploded, ribs splayed open like the legs of a dying spider. The exposed gristle was still wet, still issuing steam, as if the cataclysm had happened moments earlier. He knew that was impossible. That he was beholding perhaps the first death in existence.

The dissolution of life into life. The Great Death that began everything.       

He stared into crooked face. The Nameless whose presence had been encouraged and relied upon since time immemorial. Who cave things had honored with the clatter of stones, and much later, more civilized cave things had honored in icons of gold. The irony that it was dead filled him with lunatic joy. His laughter echoed above the roaring water. Made him raise his arms and sway between the flowing tubes that were its feet.

Then he fixed his eyes to the hole in its chest. Phosphorescent mites crawled over the entrails. And in that light he saw the beginning and the end, saw the concussive force of a self-proclaimed suicide, and the birth of all that had resulted from it. The scars of the event were evident across the cave’s dark walls, the rock melted in the wax-drip pattern of frozen flow, radiating outward from the throne.

He imagined the blast of its broken heart. The widening nimbus of light and matter. A cosmic furnace that would cool into organic life; though life that would be burdened to recreate the death of this great being. That would be destined to decay.

And there it was. The answer he had sought since first stumbling into the Anchorite’s cave. The answer every flower craves as its pedals begin to choke it.

The Anchorite’s voice flapped like a raven in the darkness: You must taste it. But human teeth will not suffice. Precious metals found in the belly of the earth. Only they can bridge the chasm that first separated man from his maker.

Gundersen dropped his knees.

And groveling in a fever of possession, bared his teeth upon the nest and fed.

14.

The man pushed into darkness.

He was trembling and cold. Had spent all his money getting here, then spent what was left of his dignity trying to bribe a mountain guide. Almost no one could remember the Ascetics. Almost no one could speak. Society had degenerated, though most of them had no awareness of it—which was further evidence to the profundity of decay. Too many people, too many mouths, and too little supply to feed them. Genetic repurposing had become commonplace. The pressing of the dead and filtration of their fluids into potable water. The bones harvested for carbon. Even the skin. The man shuddered to think of the clothing and rucksacks and furniture, of children running through trash-heaped streets on soles of triple-ply dermis. Innocence was the daydream of lunatics. People destroyed each other for sport. Love was a thing of antiquity. The Race of Man had become a Race of Beasts.

He was still thinking when the gaunt hand reached from the shadows to brush him.

The man almost slammed into the red rock of the wall. Eyes crazed. Panting. His pupils dilated until the living skeleton came into view. A full foot taller, and appearing doubly so on account of his emaciation. A black beard hung to a waist devoid of clothing but for a scrap of cloth covering his sex.

“Why have you come?” The mystic’s eyes were the white-blue of soapstone. “Surely not to tremble there like an animal.”

“Are you the one they call The Anchorite?”

“I have been called many things. Traitor. Witch. Even Gundersen, once upon a time.”

“Can you help me?” The man pulled himself from the wall and turned out his pockets. “I have no money. No food.”

“Truth needs neither.”

The man licked his lips, wincing at the sandpaper sound his tongue made against the blisters. “I was told you could help me.”

The thin giant smiled, revealing a shelf of silver teeth. “There is no help but death.”

“I am already a ghost.”

“This world is full of ghosts. But are you ready? Do you feel it with every fiber? The wasting. The fragile structures that bring you comfort? Time? history? Would you recant all of them for truth?”

The man looked down at the dirt, then slightly upward until he fixed the yellow talons of the Anchorite’s feet. “Yes.” He raised his eyes. “Yes I would.”

The Anchorite smiled. “Then let the work begin.”