The Sands of Time

There are sands stretched along the sea, and it is night. A cool night, like a night along the gulf in early March. The moon is large and pale blue, just slightly off-centered from being directly over head, and the air is almost sweet, as is all the air brought in from across this sea.

Time here turns in on itself like the waves. The sands and water stretch out for end on end. There is no sun. No seasons. No stars. No trees nor any other growth of life. Just sands and waves that stretch out for end on end under the vast expanse of night.

I’ve been here many times before. Most of the first times I didn’t know I was here. I was here, once, when the oil tankers burned along the shore and I was cast under the waves, but that time is now gone. And I walked here before with Denham and sat with a yet unknown friend behind me, once when the sky was full of stars and pale and lilac green. But the sky is no longer full like it was that night. There is no wreckage left here to mark the burned ships now past. No footprints. No signs. Everything here is blank. There is no past. Only being. Time here is immemorial. Like the waves and the sand, it turns in on itself and stretches out for end on end.

This time, I have come when the waves are full of crying, of screaming, of horror, and of pain. The wind here howls in terror. It is the blunt serene of night.

Awake! Awake! And nothing will be seen
…
Pass on, pass on, it shall once more
the shape of day beneath the light
of shadows cast by still of dark
The night, it comes again

I have come again to my senseless terror, and its shouting is all that I can hear.

God help me.

There’s something jutting out from the side of a hill off in the distance. Its outline is fuzzy and dark. I draw closer. Three long obsidian slabs jut out from the side of a hill. They’re stacked together like an A-frame, one catty-cornered across the other two. There’s an opening to the front. I duck a little, and the sand sweeps down until it meets the front of a door. It’s cedar. Old cedar. Unfinished, with sand filling in its rough little grit, with horizontal strips of paneling across the front. The door is triangular and arched, wide at the base, pointy at the top, with a long cast iron handle to the right.

Then someone opens the door.

A warm gush of air blows out and stings. There’s a fire deeper in, a sultry amber glow, but everything else seems like shadows against its light. Who is he? He beckons me in, drapes something over me that feels heavy like burlap, and shuts the door.

The sound of the waves and the water, they stop, but I still can’t hear the fire. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. No words come out. He reaches behind me and takes hold of something. I can’t touch it. I can’t feel it it. But there it is. Like a Medusa’s head of twisted worm, a monster of howling and screaming, a ball of twisting and squirming just half an arms-length wide, he reaches out and takes hold of it. I writhe. He holds it out in front of himself and looks at it. His lips don’t move this time. There’s a jar on a shelf, alabaster in color, light as pine, just like the shape of an ostrich egg toward the back of the room. He goes over to it, opens the jar, and places the ball of worm down inside. When he shuts the jar, the seam around the opening disappears, and everything falls silent.

I start to hear the crackle of the fire, slow and muffled at first, but then he adds more wood. “Sit,” he says. There’s a low, square table in front of the fire with four rough-hewn benches, one on each side. He covers me again with a blanket, this time plush and warm, and pours something sweet into a tall-stemmed glass made of copper and rough quartz. “Drink.” The room starts to swirl. The walls turn from shadow to deep, slowly flickering amber, and the cast iron of the shelves, with their smooth, polished flanges, begin to separate themselves from the paneled cedar walls behind them.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I am the maker of time,” he answers, “and I have brought you out of your world, but not quite into mine. What do you see of me?”

I looked up from the table. I tried to peer at him. He was across the table from me… surely he was there… but… I couldn’t. The more I tried to focus, the more the shadows thrown by the fire seemed to dance and flicker in every corner of the room.

“That’s alright,” he said, “You don’t have the eyes to see me yet. They will come. For now you can listen to me. That’s good enough. Here, drink some more.”

He placed another glass made out of copper and quartz in front of me. I lifted it to my mouth, and as it tricked down my throat, the far shadows in the room seemed to fade a little.

“Sorry if this is a dumb question,” I said, “but what am I doing here? How did I get here? I’m not dead, am I?"

“No,” he laughed, “quite the opposite. You’re very alive indeed. Otherwise you wouldn’t know I was here.”

“Then… why hasn’t any other sign of life followed me here except that awful racket of pain and horror? Thanks for making it stop, by the way.”

“Pain is not life, but it is an incredible tool to shake a man out of believing that what he sees constitutes life itself. It drove you here, didn’t it? But once you were here with me, there was no need for it to deafen you any longer. Do not be surprised when you hear that monster again. Pain lies and confuses, but as it has driven you here before, it will drive you here again, and it seems that it is here where you listen closest to my voice. It’s a nasty little irony.

“The skies here seem dark, for this is as far as I can take you from your world while you still have your present body, but oh, if you only had the eyes to see what you will one day see! We’re barely at the foot of the shore that leads to the Eastern Gate, my home. You can’t see it now, but one day… If only you could see how radiant your face is!”

“Radiant?” I scoffed. An hour ago I’d been haunted with terror, six hours ago sobbing belligerently. I had been in my bed, crying. I’d been there for days. No one else knew where I was. I was about to lose my home. I didn’t know where I was going next. Had I fallen asleep? Was I dreaming?

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m here to show you something that you cannot see yourself. Look closer.”

“At what?” I asked. “I can’t even see you.”

“Look at the shadows, the ones in the corners you noticed when you drank. Here, have another.”

He placed another quartz and copper glass in front of me, and this time when I drank, though the shadows remained, a flicker of blue pulsed along the door frame, and a foggy mist seemed to lift from the floor.

“I must be seeing things,” I said.

“Yes, quite right. It’s the beginning of sunrise in my world. Dawn comes in a good ten thousand years or so. Oh, don’t worry, you’ll have the eyes to see it by then. They all will.”

At this point I started looking around the room for a bottle with a quantifiable proof stamped on the front, wanting to convince myself I’d been drugged into a sort of fanciful delirium—but finding none, I decided emotional overexertion was taking a larger toll on my sanity than I’d previously anticipated.

“I brought you here to show you something that matters more than you realize—something that will look differently to you in the world to come than it does to you now. But here. Just one more, and you’ll be ready…”