“Vatnajökull is thousands of years old,” Holly argues. “For most of that time, it hasn’t changed, but 168 square miles of ice have deglaciated since 1958. The ice is melting. The human race has seen to that. New layers are uncovered every year. This might be the first time this...whatever it is, has been exposed since the beginning of the iron age.”
“Humph,” Phillip says.
“I’m
agreeing
with you, Phillip,” Holly says, reaching up and flexing her fingers, open and closed. “Give me your ice ax.”
“You are?” Phillip sounds both genuinely surprised and delighted. He pulls his ice ax from the side of his pack and hands it to her.
While Holly goes to work on the ice, digging and scraping, I stand and check on the others. The big man’s toe has doubled in size, thanks to the copious amount of gauze and tape wrapped around it. Despite all the extra padding, Kiljan winces as Diego slides a sock over the injured foot. It’s going to be hell getting his boot on again. Diego is right. Kiljan can’t continue, which means we all need to head back. Three scientists and a writer alone on the barren ice pack might make for a good story, but I doubt it would have a happy ending. The story would probably have someone else’s byline, since I’d be frozen solid along with the rest of them.
It also means that the mysterious spike jutting out of the ice is the closest thing to a scientific discovery we’re going to make. “How long until we can move?”
“Ten minutes,” Diego says, though he sounds unsure.
“We will go nowhere,” Kiljan says through grinding teeth. His toe hurts more than he wants to admit.
“Are you
trying
to be ominous?” I ask.
He grins through the pain. “We cannot walk through the night. We will camp here. Leave in the morning.”
Diego nods and looks pleased by the decision. None of us are athletes. The trek has already taken a toll.
“Abe,” Holly calls. “Come see this.”
As I stand, Diego looks back at Holly with eager eyes. He has yet to see the object of our fascination.
Kiljan shoos Diego away with one hand and picks up his boot with the other. “I do not need a wet nurse. I can put on my own shoe.” He sounds gruff, but it’s an act of kindness. Scientists with new discoveries are like children on Christmas morning. Anything short of opening the box and making a mess right then and there is a disappointment.
Holly moves to the side at our arrival. She’s dug out a foot deep crater around the object, which looks like a black, ten inch tall, upside down carrot with a severe case of freezer burn, not to mention weird red veins running through it.
“What is it?” Diego asks.
Holly scrapes away ice crystals until there’s just a sheen of frozen water remaining. Breathing heavily, she leans back, places the ice ax down and shrugs.
I lay down on the ice, viewing the strange spire from the side again, seeing subtle streaks of pink, like veins, crisscrossing the surface.
Or is it just distortions from the ice?
As though drawn to the thing, I remove my glove, reach out and wrap my hand around the inch-thick stem. Numbing cold burns through my hand.
Water drips between my fingers, melted by my body heat. I close my eyes, resisting the urge to pull my hand away.
“What are you doing?” Holly asks.
Melting the ice,
I think, but don’t answer.
I
can’t
answer.
The scent and taste of salt tickles my nose and mouth.
Ocean waves crash against a rocky shore, the sound like thunder in my ears.
Tall grass tickles my outstretched hands, blown by a warm breeze.
“Abe.”
The voice is faint. And not Holly’s.
“Abraham.”
I open my eyes.
Iceland is gone.
2
A gull squawks, hovering like a kite in an ocean breeze. The way it hangs there feels unnatural, like a moment frozen in time. But it’s still calling out, its orange tipped, yellow beak opening and closing, its unblinking eyes focused downward. I follow its gaze, past the endless ocean, blue splashed with whitecaps tossed by the same wind that holds the bird aloft. Then past the rocks, craggy and blemished by patches of white barnacles. And then to the beach. Sand stretches down to the water, where a layer of smooth, round stones mark the high tide line.
I slip out of the tall grass surrounding me. The thick blades slide through my hands, sharp enough to cut. The sting of a bloodless wound draws my eyes to my hand, and then lower. I’m naked, my far from toned ‘dad bod’ revealed for all to see, but I feel no shame at it. When I look up again, I’m standing on the rocks, overlooking the beach. The grass is behind me now, bending in the breeze atop a short, sand-covered hill that divides the beach from the rest of the world.
How is this possible?
I think, boggled by the moment’s surreal vibe.
How did I get here?
Memories slide back into place as my mind comes to grip with the new surroundings. I was in Iceland. Kiljan was hurt. We found something in the ice.
I touched it.
And then...I woke up here.
I didn’t
wake up
. I was never asleep. I was laying down when I closed my eyes, dressed in winter gear, and when I opened them again, I was here, standing and nude.
Fear nudges its way into my chest, wrapping its hand around my heart and squeezing.
“Don’t be afraid.”
I flinch away from the voice, wondering how someone was able to get so close to me. After stumbling over the jagged rock and nearly slipping in a patch of seaweed, I steady myself and turn toward my company, staggered by who I find.
“Ike?”
He lifts his hands away from his hips and grins, saying ‘Here I am,’ without saying a word.
Except it isn’t Ike. Not really. The face is the same—close enough to recognize—but Ike, my son, is still eight years old. The person standing before me is a man. And there’s a long scar on his cheek that isn’t there now. My mind spins with possible explanations, dipping into science, both real and fringe, from stories I’ve written over the years. Teleportation. Time travel. Out of body experiences. Lucid dreaming.
I lock on that last possibility.
I’m unconscious,
I decide.
Dreaming.
I wrote about lucid dreaming three years ago, about how dreams can be controlled. The trick is that when most people realize they’re in a dream, they get excited and wake up. But there are ways to stay in the dream, like jumping up and down, or waving your arms in circles. Then, you can fashion the dreamscape into your very own fantasy world. But it takes practice. And a lot of it. I performed the techniques for three months, keeping a dream journal and failing every night, until I found myself standing at the edge of a lake, beneath the most magnificent nighttime sky, and thought, ‘This is a dream.’ When a duck swam at me, I willed it to become a dog, and it did. Then I turned the dog into my wife. And then, with a thought, my wife stood before me, naked, at which point I woke up, disappointed and alone in a motel room. I left that last part out of the article. The point is, I recognize this place. It’s a dream, and now that I’ve acknowledged it, I can take control.
“Wake up,” I tell myself. When nothing happens, I close my eyes and shout, “Wake up!”
The dream remains. While I’ve never
had
to wake up from a lucid dream before, I was told that this was a simple and surefire way to do so. “Wake. Up!”
“You are awake,” my aged son says.
“This is a dream,” I tell him.
He shrugs. “Yet, you are awake.” He clasps his hands behind his back and turns to look out over the beach, smiling like some kind of Buddhist monk, content with the world. “A vision, perhaps?”
“Great,” I say, dragging my fingertips over my cheeks. “Now even my dreams are sarcastic.”
“They’re like grains of sand, don’t you think?”
Dream Ike has definitely been smoking a little too much of something. What part of my subconscious could he possibly represent? “It’s a beach,” I say, turning toward the sand. “Of course it’s...”
The sand looks strange. It’s moving. The separate granules shift into strings that merge and bend in varying colors and forms, becoming individual shapes. The beach stretches to the horizon, filled with lumps of...of hair. Faces turn up, looking at me with something close to reverence. Some are white. Some are black. Most are something in-between. But in all of them, I see familiar features. Sometimes in the nose. The cheek bones. The chin. The hair. The further back I look, the more muted it becomes, but there’s no denying that I am a part of all these people.
“Who are they?” I ask.
“Your children,” a new voice says.
My second son, Ishah, stands to my left, as aged as his half-brother. The pair were born from two different mothers, two months apart, and they look nothing alike. While Ike is a blend of his second-generation Korean American mother and me—a black man of South African descent—Ishah’s mother is as pale as I am dark, leaving him a shade of brown that makes his blue eyes pop. I look from one boy...man...to the other. They don’t look much like their child selves, but I see them beneath the stubble and age lines, and I see myself in them the same way I do all those faces in the beach.
“This isn’t possible,” I tell them.
“All things are possible,” Ike says.
Ishah takes my hand. “Out of the ashes, a nation will be born.”
“What ashes?”
“The world will burn,” Ike says.
“It has been evaluated,” Ishah adds.
Ike takes my other hand. “And has been found wanting.”
“Evaluated by who?”
A new voice rises up behind me, carrying the thunder of crashing waves with its every syllable. “The machine.”
Ike’s grip tightens. “The Ancient.”
“Death.” Ishah holds me back, as I try to turn around and see who’s there. “And rebirth.”
The ocean recedes as though it was a tablecloth yanked away by a magician. Millions more bodies are revealed, all looking toward me. The water rises up at the horizon and rushes back in. The earth quakes. Fissures open up. Beyond the beach, lava bursts into the sky, smoke billowing black as the world shakes around us.
I look out at all those faces, water and lava closing in from both sides, and I see devotion. “No,” I say. “Stop!”
I close my eyes. “Wake up!”
When I open them again, the ocean is calm. The lava is gone. The beach is sand. And my sons are missing. Overcome with emotion, I fall to my knees and feel a stab of pain, as the jagged rocks dig into my flesh.
“Abraham,” the roaring voice behind me says.
I turn around slowly, and I see a writhing black shape. It rises up above me, reaching out two flowing black arms, holding a blazing hot staff between them. I cower beneath the figure, which is as impossible to ignore as it is to look at directly.
“What do you want!” I scream, raising a hand in fear.
The form rushes down at me, thrusting the rod into my open hand. The air fills with the hiss of burning flesh, and I scream. Steam sprays out from between my fingers. My flesh boils and pops. I scream again, but am quickly silenced by the emergence of a face, concealed by roiling smoke, but filling me with a sense of relief.
“Abraham,” the voice says again, a waterfall of sound cascading around me. “I am with you.”
The pain returns with a sharp vengeance. I scream again, snap my hand away and leap back, staring into the surprised eyes of Holly, Phillip, Diego and Kiljan. I’m in Iceland again, though I’m pretty sure I never really left.
Holly reaches out for me. “Abe...” Her eyes travel down to my hands, one clutching the other. “Let me see your hand.”
Suddenly aware that the pain has not yet faded, I look down at my right palm and find a band of burned, blackened skin stretched across the middle of my hand.
“Where I held the staff,” I say.
“I would hardly call it a staff,” Phillip says. I look from him to the spike jutting out of the ground. Memories collide with the dream. I reached out and took hold of it. I wasn’t burned by heat, I was burned by extreme cold. A dream after all. “How long was I out?”
“Out?” Diego asks.
“Unconscious.”
Holly lifts my hand, inspecting the wound. “Abe, you grabbed it, held on for a few seconds, said something and then screamed. You never lost consciousness.”
I stagger back and plop down onto my butt, sitting on the ice. “What did I say?”
“Veneno mundi,” Kiljan says, his baritone voice reminding me of the dark force’s watery growl.
“What the hell does that mean?” I ask.
“Poisoned world,” Phillip says. His translation is followed by a wet gurgle. All eyes turn to the sound’s origin at Phillip’s feet. The small hole that Holly dug is now partly filled with water. Phillip leaps back. “What the bloody hell?”
We stare in silence, waiting for it to happen again. And then, just as I notice that the water is steaming, a thin stream of bubbles roils to the surface.
Diego kneels down beside the slowly growing puddle. He holds his hand over the water as more bubbles churn the surface. “These bubbles aren’t gas,” he says. “The water is boiling.”