I wrote this just over a year ago in a bout of creativity I've yet to recapture. I had been reading a hell of a lot of HP Lovecraft's stories then and just had to try my own. This isn't all that great, like all my short stories, written in about two hours and with only a tiny re-read for grammar errors and spelling, so don't expect gold, as I usually say. Gatekeeper The nurses gave me this pen and paper for just a few hours, so I have to scribble down as much as I can before they come back and send me back to the nightmare. The last time I looked at a calendar, it was June 7, 1943. I was part of a carrier fleet out in the middle of the Pacific, one of those endless stretches of open sea that just goes on and on and on for infinity. The war had been going on for a good year and a half by then and we were all pretty used to the daily drills and endless monotony of a pilot’s life without much fighting. Sure, we got airborne every so often, but at the time, we were just a backup fleet in case the Japanese ever made a sneak attack somewhere like they did back at Pearl. So when our flight leader suddenly ran into the daily briefing room all out of breath and half shaved like a man in a panic, we all knew something was up. He told us that a Jap carrier was just spotted by a recon plane a few miles away from us and our group was going to hunt it down. I can’t tell you how glad me and the boys were to finally see some real action. We weren’t even tempered by the fact that any combat meant we might never see home again. We were too young, too uncaring of the fragility of human life back then. I can’t report much on the actual fight, unfortunately. Not because of any secrecy forms or anything I had to sign way back when, but only because it doesn’t really matter. I took off at the right time and joined up with my squadron like I’d done a million times… … and then I remember falling out of the sky like a brick tossed from the roof of a building. Fast, stomach-churning and horrible. At first I cursed my fortune for sending me down to some unknown place in the middle of the pacific, but my mind went black a moment later. At the time, I knew I was going to be lost in some empty part of the endless ocean, adrift and dead in a few days time. My folks wouldn’t even know what had become of me until long after my body had been consumed by whatever fish and birds prowled the ocean for drifting meat like mine. But then I woke up on an island. A deserted island not larger than a baseball field and covered in short grass that rustled in the gentle wind. My first thought upon waking was thanking God in heaven for saving my life, but that praise was quick to turn to damnation when I tried to stand. A pain, jagged and horrible, shot up my right leg faster than lightning. I’d apparently broken it on my fall, but my slumber was miraculously deep enough for me not to feel it upon impact. Fortunately, no bones were popping out of my suit and no blood oozed from any cuts, so it was a small break and I wouldn’t die of gangrene in a few days on this mysterious island. By my eighth hour on the island, I was already parched enough for my mouth to be nearly glued shut and my movements sluggish. I hadn’t moved more than a few feet from the spot where I awoke on, thanks to my busted appendage, so my entire surroundings as far as I could tell were a small sandy beach and enough ocean to drive even the sturdiest man mad. Fortunately, just before dusk hit, I was hit by some divine inspiration to crawl further up the island to avoid the rising tide. It took many more hours and the sky was as ink when I reached the thickest part of the grass, but I was saved from drowning in the tide. It was then I saw it; a stone about four feet tall and just jutting from the center of the island as if placed there by intelligent hands. I’d heard stories of ancient travelers going from island to island in the pacific, settling in places like Hawaii and such when they landed, but even ancient mariners would know to avoid staying on such small outcroppings of land with no resources long enough to place a monument or something on there. As I looked over the stone in the bright moonlight, I noticed several markings on its surface, not words, not really. More like those picture writing hieroglyphics the Egyptians used in ancient times. But the pictures made as much sense to me as those from Egypt in my textbooks. I could make out a few shapes that looked close enough to men, but they were somehow wrong, like they were childish scribbles with inhuman shapes and proportions, especially the heads and arms. Other pictures were just maddening to look at. Shapes and lines that made no sense to my conscious mind, but somehow scared me deeper down in my thoughts than even I care to admit. Something about those half-men worshipping the tortured carvings, those shapes made of madness, sent a chill down my spine like nothing ever had before. At that moment, I finally felt that fear you’re supposed to have before battle. The fear that forces you to flee at a moment’s notice but higher thinking then forces you to face it. But that wasn’t all that wasn’t all that was on that strange piece of rock in the middle of nowhere. At the very top, like a capstone atop some strange monument was something I can only describe as a trinket of gold glimmering in the moonlight. About the size of my palm and covered with the same picture writing as the rest of the rock, it looked like it was just resting on the stone as if gently placed there only hours before I got there. But when my greedy hands reached up and tried to grab it, I was surprised to find it firmly stuck onto the stone as if it was glued or somehow welded onto its surface. No matter how hard I pulled, it remained stuck, as if to taunt me and my weak condition. I put all my effort into freeing the gold piece, still motivated by greed for a souvenir of this horrible experience more than anything. It was then my fortunes took a turn from unfortunate to mad. Just before morning arrived and the last bits of adrenaline both from my crash and the excitement from trying to free the gold piece, my leg began throbbing with the horrible pain I had been missing since the moment I tried to stand. Fatigue was wearing into my still dehydrated person and I recall my eyelids shutting more than once, but my greed kept me working long after I should have collapsed. Finally, when the moon finally slipped under the endless water and the sun had taken its place, the gold popped from its cradle like a cork from a wine bottle. My hands were long since numb from the effort and bleeding slowly from pulled flesh and cracked fingernails, but I didn’t care. I had my trinket and would have laughed if I could have opened my mouth. It was then I saw him. I had just closed my eyes in sweet relief for but a moment when I opened them to behold the sight of something that could only have come from my dehydrated and sleepy mind, staring at those strange pictures all night. A man. But not a man. Like a half-man-half-fish that looked exactly like the men in the stone’s picture writing. He stared at me in the morning gloom with two large, unblinking eyes, dripping water as if he just came from the sea and yet there were no footprints anywhere near him. I stared at the creature for what seemed like hours, but the sun made no movement in the sky. Like it was stuck there. For the longest time, we just stared, the fish-man’s eyes drifting from my face to my bloody hand clutching the gold to my broken leg, which had swollen to twice its normal width. My eyes, however, were always locked on his, those massive fishlike eyes almost the size of my entire fist plus a few inches. It was then, or maybe after a few more hours of staring, did I see it. Just behind the creature something bubbled from the deep ocean that surrounded my tiny refuge of land. At first, my exhausted eyes could only make out a few bubbles coming up from the deep, creating a sickly yellow foam on the surface that made one of the most foul stenches on this earth. But then, then my eyes could barely comprehend what came next. Gigantic. Mammoth. A true behemoth of the deep. A creature I can only describe as the terrible sketch of a madman trying to draw an octopus while succumbing to his own perverse thoughts. It rose from the water slowly, as if stretching legs longer than even the biggest ships floating in the sea, its hundreds of tentacles over its body unfurling and waving in the air for the first time in ages. The foul stench of the foam began to overpower my nose, forcing the few contents still in my stomach to the surface, finally pushing some moisture across my lips. And all the while, the fish-man stood there, watching me with his huge, unblinking eyes. Almost as if he accused me of something. Like I was at fault. My next memories are fuzzy, but I do remember the fish man sliding back into the ocean long after the creature sunk back into the water, his gait like a man resigned to some horrible fate that could only end horribly, like his next moments were sure to end in death. I woke up several days here, in a hospital somewhere in San Francisco. I find I can’t sleep at night thanks to my experience. The visions of the island, the gold, the fish man and then the creature, oh God! They won’t leave my mind! The sun is down and the nurses are back now. They’re going to take my pen away and hold me down while the doctor tries to force more of his damn medicine into my system to make me sleep. They do this every day, but they just won’t listen. My dreams are worse than my reality. I can’t sleep. I won’t. I’ll fight every night if I have to. The straight jacket they usually keep me in won’t hold me forever. I’ll escape these walls, these iron bars. And I’ll tell my story to the world. My gold is long gone, taken most likely before I woke up. I’ll get it back. I’ll never sleep again.
