day_into_night_into_day lycanthrope It was a sunny day when it started. We were on a beach – our parents sat and talked further up the shore while my two younger brothers played in the surf. The sea went out unmarked and the sky was clear, in the other direction our parents were whispering something to each other and kissing. My father stood up and reminded me to put on my sun-screen. “I’m not applying aloe to your blisters again. I can still hear the screams in my dreams” My mother yelled out half-jokingly “Your father is rhyming again – he’s serious. I tricked the twins into blowing up the river raft we brought to the beach with us. As their older sister it is not just a privilege but a duty to trick them often and well. We had water fights, took turns dumping each other over the side of the boat, with me letting them cooperate together to overturn the boat with me in it. Sometimes they would be able to genuinely trick me at least once by pretending they needed an arm into the boat and then pulling me out. “You’re such a sucker for that” John said, with Hayden taking credit – “it was my idea”. After some horseplay or another, we all were lying on our backs out of breath, and the sun was so warm. John and Hayden had started to nap. For a moment I was afraid we’d float away, but the water was so still, and when I looked up my parents were looking at us and smiling. It’s strange how you can never really tell how long you’ve been asleep. Sometimes you’ve been asleep only ten minutes and it feels like years have passed. Other times you plan to lie down for ten minutes at noon and you wake up to midnight. I’ve never awoken to this kind of darkness before. For a moment I sat there alone. I wasn’t even sure my eyes were opened, except I could feel that my eyelids weren’t pressed shut. My eyes just weren’t adjusting, despite my having just been asleep. My first thoughts were where was I? I noticed that we were bobbing slightly and could feel the rubber of the river raft beneath my legs. I was still in a bathing suit. I blindly felt over and was slightly reassured by the soft still drying hair of my brother’s head. I had almost been afraid something would bite me from the darkness. I felt him stirring and sitting up. I almost had wished he hadn’t, because I didn’t yet know what this strangeness was and I knew he would look to me for answers or responsibility of some sort. “Where are we” he asked and I could feel him stretch languidly like one does when waking up in the car during a family vacation. I instinctively shushed him without thinking as if I didn’t want to give any advantage to whatever this silence contained by breaking it. Hayden was awake now too. “Why don’t my eyes work?” he asked in his usual sarcastic manner. Between them, each always wants to be the first in on a joke. We recounted what had happened before and we all remembered the beach and the sunshine. We all were still in the same boat, in our bathing suits, and with the same greasy feel of sunscreen on our skin. As what seemed a half-hour passed we grew more uneasy, but also our eyes started to adjust. It appeared we were floating on an ocean of some sort of black liquid. It seemed almost obsidian, but I couldn’t tell if that was just the darkness. There was some strange light from the sky, but we couldn’t tell the source. We had the next hour or so to discuss what was happening, and I slowly became convinced as we moved endlessly through this sea that this was perhaps not a dream. There were no landmarks to judge distance by, and it felt very frightening and alone. When I was younger sometimes I would wake up entirely under and too enwrapped in my covers and my fertile imagination would posit that I somehow had been engulfed in some never-ending blanket. This is what that felt like. The boys too were starting to whine, and ask where mom and dad were. I suppose they were wondering also if they were okay, but like me it seemed they felt more abandoned than parental. There appeared around this time, actual light, behind what appeared to be clouds. “Maybe we’re all dreaming” John said looking more and more blank and afraid with each passing moment. “We can’t all be dreaming I told him. Only one of us can be and the rest of us aren’t real.” “I feel as real as I usually feel” John said quietly. “We can’t all really be here” Hayden said, now seeming on the verge of tears. It was then that the first moon appeared from behind clouds which in the light turned gray and looked like the matted wisp hair of an unbathed elderly woman. John started to panic and as if in response the wind was picking up and the water started to become choppier and choppier. John started crying when the second moon came into full view. “I want mom and dad” Hayden felt safe enough to almost demand when the other twin started to cry. “I do too” I told him. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want them here and I was afraid, and I found that I felt guilty for some reason, as if this was somehow my fault. And I felt resentful of them and my parents at the same time. And yet I felt such love for them as if I wished this were only happening to me and not them and yet they were all I had and there was nothing I saw myself able to do and. and the waves were getting bigger, so that the boat was now a see-saw at times erratic. The third moon came into view as if in answer to the other two moons. It came out shortly before we saw the shape. When we first saw the shape, we didn’t actually see it. It just must’ve been so large that its swift motion created a demarcation in the thick black water. When I first saw it my heart beat so fast I felt assaulted. It’s strange how your heart’s beat almost feels to encroach on you from outside you. Your brain is your existence, but your heart is your life, and you can feel the two in tension when it beats frantically. I didn’t tell them I saw something. For a moment it was almost a relief, because it ended what seemed the endless floating and speculation. But what it replaced the uncertainty with was what seemed somehow a more hostile certainty. When Hayden first noticed something following us, he started to cry. The waves were now getting so large that with every swell we had to hold on to the sides and each other. Sometimes the wind would howl louder than our screams. Hayden and John both were grabbing onto me so tightly that their nails were digging into my skin. I was clutching them just as fiercely though. Sometimes the waves would subside for moments. The shape would go in and out of our sight, as if it was sinking to some great depths and then returning. We no longer were saying anything to one another. We were too shocked. I don’t know how many hours passed, but I know I was starting to get hungry. The boys too complained once or twice. But it wasn’t the type of complaint that expects resolution, it was merely commiseration. This was too much to make sense of. It didn’t make sense. Even now I don’t know if it does. The waves were growing dangerously large, and I was afraid one of us would fall into the strange bath. Waves were coming now in the other direction as well, so that they would crash upon one another and drop us into a valley as the spray rained down on us, the liquid feeling strange and viscous. On one of the jumps Hayden finally fell out of the boat on the way down. I don’t know how far up we were, I know only that for a moment we had to check ourselves to make sure we were still in the boat. We heard him screaming and we paddled towards him which felt stranger still when we dipped our hands into it. I can only imagine how it felt to know that massive shadow we had seen earlier may be even closer to you than before. Somehow the safety of the boat had been some irrational sort of safeguard, but now it was gone for him. We reached him despite the waves and when I went to pull him in, he pulled me into the ocean with him. It was the strangest reaction, and I plunged headlong in the fear I had felt for him. I immediately kicked for the surface as panic racked my body. I pushed him into the boat first and then I climbed half on as a wave brought us up and then slamming down. I scurried my legs back over the edge and I grabbed him. “Why did you do that?!” “I was scared” he replied. “Are you okay” I asked him. He just started crying. Soon thereafter the shape reappeared. Sometimes it seemed as if it was about the breach the surface like some monstrous whale. My brother spotted it first and shouted. “Look at that!” I wasn’t sure what it was, but as we came closer it appeared to be a cement pier of sorts. I wasn’t sure if it was, because it had no supports that I could see. We paddled towards it through the waves. The boys were getting harder to coordinate and my arms were tiring. “We should just got back to sleep again and then we’ll wake up. Dad won’t believe this dream” I didn’t even respond and just kept paddling. At first I had tried to keep them laughing and hide my concern. But I had since then told them to shutup whenever they talked. There just seemed no point for most words. All we could do is take what we found and wait. As we got closer we saw that it indeed resembled a pier and had a good width too it. But it seemed too high to reach, and there was nothing to climb. I had to make a decision. I thought maybe we could follow it to land, but the ocean seemed endless in all directions. I decided we’d have to reach it somehow. It was only about three feet or so out of jumping height. We didn’t have to wait too long for a large wave. The waves in this ocean seemed to follow the most erratic of patterns. Large waves and stillness would sometimes follow within fifteen seconds of one another. Only the wind was constant. At first I tried lifting the boys up, but they kept missing a grip and falling back to the boat. At least we found it was solid enough to hold onto. Hayden again landed in the water once. We were slightly calmer now, though it could have been the dullness of our hunger. I decided on a different plan. One would grab onto my back and then I’d grab a hold of the pier and they’d climb to on top of it. First Hayden went, then John. As I was climbing up I heard them screaming. I panicked and almost dropped, but as I climbed up and turned around I saw the raft being pulled over by what seemed a flash of teeth and then the familiar shape shading away. The walk on the pier seemed to take an entire day. All in all, we had maybe been there a day and a half. We hadn’t slept. The prospect of waking up again here would be too saddening. We all seemed to clutch to the notion that we really were dreaming and sleep was our final escape. Slowly the darkness shifted to light at the same rate our eyes adjusted, so that it seemed as if we were walking into a permanently fixed sun. It was as if we could create sunrise by walking towards and sunset by walking away. The wind was heavy up there, and uncomfortably cold. Still in our bathing suits, we huddled together and kept walking. As the light grew we saw that indeed the pier had no supports and the water truly was black as obsidian. It was a day before we reached what was perhaps the beach. It turned out that this was not only a pier but a bridge. For the water did not connect to the land. The water cascaded as far as the horizon off of a cliff like an endless waterfall. The bridge connected us to what seemed another island in the air with a beach of sorts. The beach was composed of gravelly substance so fine grained that it appeared to be silver sand. This world was certainly alien, but was it an alien world? I had no answers. For a moment I felt like jumping at the waterfall. I almost had reason to believe that the usual results wouldn’t happen. That it would just be another unexpected turn, another unfair surprise. At the edge of the beach there was what can only be described as a forest. The trees themselves had the requisite bark and leaves, but the leaves seemed in a constant state of squirming. My brothers hadn’t talked for what may have been three hours. They just followed me, holding my hands. Strangely I felt like they were leading me, however. If I hadn’t had them to take care of, I most likely would’ve just given up. It was so strange how sweet the next sight was. There was never a time the appearance of my mother just in the distance ever felt more promising or hopeful. She walked out of the woods and at first she didn’t seem to recognize us, her eyes seemed hazy and her steps uncertain. But as she grew closer her eyes lit up. John raced Hayden to run to her, and I was close behind. As John made it close first, and as he did, she lunged to all fours and was upon him attacking him savagely. She was biting at his throat and his chest and her eyes were rolling white. Hayden shrieked and froze. I grabbed his arm and didn’t look back. I can’t say we thought a lot after that. The obvious question was why. The obvious thing to think was how cruel. But we had already done that so many times, so instead we walked largely catatonic. Hayden moreso than I. We saw more people, but they all had the same slightly stilted walk my mother had had. We found that if you stayed outside of thirty or so feet of them they couldn’t hear or see you. We knew because Hayden had dumbly yelled out “Mom” when we had first hid from one. We had to run from one. They ran surprisingly fast for being on all fours, but again their eyesight seemed to keep us safe. We found something which looked vaguely edible later that day and we shared it. It was soft and pink and resembled fruit I guess. In all this strangeness it was one of the most wonderfully tasting things I’ve ever had. My arms felt stronger and I felt comfortable enough to sleep. We laid down next to a tree. Once I tried to touch the strange squirming green leaves, but it burnt my hand so badly that I laughed at my stupidity. As if it was obvious. As if suddenly it all made sense to me. When we woke up, we were still there. After what had happened yesterday it was even more depressing to wake up again and be here. As the ocean had always been dark, here it always seemed sunny. I noticed Hayden was crying softly, and holding his stomach in the fetal position. I can only imagine what pain he was in. For my own part I felt strange. There was a blurring at the edge of my eyes and my stomach hurt. Perhaps it was hunger or that fruit-like thing we ate. Hayden no longer would move. I had to drag him. We were chased out of the forest by one of the people-things and he was such dead weight that my leg was grabbed. I smashed the thing’s hand with a rock I had picked up while running and in the process cut my own leg. But we got away. My head hurt even more now. It felt as if I was getting tunnel vision. “Mom” Hayden said again. “I’m not mom, I can’t help you.” I said almost coldly. I felt like slapping him for a moment, and them myself. It was as if I was saying it to myself as well. I just wished he didn’t feel half as alone as me, but I knew he probably felt even moreso. We sat on the beach for a while in silence, and he got up and walked over to the edge of the cliff. I walked with him. We looked over, and you could see now the black ocean continued on at the bottom of the waterfalls, up against the edges of the cliff. I still don’t know why I did it. I guess I was looking for some ultimate answer, as if this was the most loud thing I could do. I pushed him over the edge. He fell in total silence. I guess I thought this was all a test. Or maybe it was the same as when he had pulled me into the ocean. I didn’t know. Was I hateful or merciful. He would’ve just slowed me down and himself down. Was I selfish or selfless? And was it worse than what happened to John? I didn’t know. Not caring seemed as close to selfless as I could come. It wasn’t that it was easier not caring, it just seemed I could end the pain for me and him more quickly that way. He was gone. Nothing happened. There was no answer. I just looked down and his lifeless body was bobbing like a drain-plug in a bath of endless black. I went back into the woods in silence. I still was thinking, but it seemed more flat. I thought in facts. Forest, beach, water, hungry. There’s no one to have anything more complicated to say to. My head really was hurting, but strangely my fear was gone now. This world didn’t seem as hostile, I almost felt a part of it. I didn’t care what happened to me. It wasn’t as if I could return now even if that were possible. As the days passed all I had was this tension keeping me alive. I ate more and more fruit, because all I had was hunger, and it kept increasing. I felt this tension as if my body had to rage. A hunger more in my head and face than my stomach. A couple of days after I stopped counting days I went to go to the beach again to see if my brother was still down there, or maybe to see my mother. As I arrived I saw a young girl about my age standing there. I felt excitement course through me. I walked toward her and I suppose I was ambling. I wanted so badly to get closer to her. The closer I got the more frightened her face became. Suddenly I lunged to all fours and I leapt onto her. I was much stronger than she was. And as I gouged at her face and her neck with my teeth I realized it was my body doing this unwilled, I was still doing this. What was left of me. Her flesh was tender, and the experience new. And it all almost made sense. 050203 ... lycanthrope that should read, it was NOT my body doing this unwilled. anyways...i was just trying to write a creepy fantasy/horror with dark and secretive messages. hope it worked. 050203 ... Piso Mojado holy shit lycanthrope, that was awesome! 050204 ... lycanthrope thanks. 050204 ... skp you did it i really could feel the tension and when my little brother called me and broke it, i even was a little irritated because he kept me from reading 050612 what's it to you? who go blather from