The face in the wave.
A storm moved in off the ocean, and the sky grayed out. The waves broke against the beach, growing with incoming wind, and the harsh white noise drowned out all other sounds, except the low scraping sound of stone moving against stone, and two young girls were caught between the ocean and the tomb.
Three days before, Anna and Druuna had snuck away from their homes with some food and skins of water. They followed the smell of salty ocean air as it blew across them from the east. They camped the first night, without fire or shelter, afraid of being found by their parents and dragged back home. The tall grass of the plain gave them ways to hide, and when Druuna heard her father yelling her name, they crouched down and crawled away unseen. With the rising sun they were off and away. The cliffs of the seaside stopped them dead. They had never seen anything like it. Their lives, to that point, had only been movements in and through endless grass lands. The sight of rocks and water, and the sweet salty smell of the ocean, it was another world to them. They found an old path down the cliffside to the beach. They played in the sand and swam in the water, and off in the distance they saw the tomb.
Its size was almost beyond understanding. Its golden roof shimmered in the sunlight, and were it not for the yellow glint bouncing off, the girls would have mistaken it for a cloud in the sky, so tall and vast was it. The columns reached up so high, and were so pure and white, they had to tilt their heads back to follow them from bottom to top. They beheld it for all its splendor, and then they stopped playing and swimming and started walking. And as they walked, the tide came in slowly, pushing them further and further in towards the vertical face of the cliffs. Neither of them noticed that the beach was shrinking as the tide crept further and further in. But at last they reached the tomb and stood at the bottom of its steps, with the ocean lapping at their legs.
They looked up from the bottom, and from there, the top of the tomb really did extend upward into the sky. They walked up the steps and after a few hours they finally reached the base of the columns, and they saw something they did not plan on seeing. They saw a door, a colossal door and it was ever so slowly swinging open.
It ground against the base, making a low scraping sound that was alien to their ears. They went to it, curious to see what was in the total blackness within. Neither looked back at the water until it was too late. The door had finally creaked forward enough that some light could get in, and Anna pressed her face against the crack to look. It was then that Druuna noticed the wind had picked up. She grabbed Anna by the shoulder, pulling her away from the door right as something small, dark, and flitting ran across the narrow gap. They ran back to the top of the steps, and saw that the ocean had risen, and the water covered half of the stairs they’d climbed up, trapping them where they were, as they beach had disappeared entirely.
The waves grew taller and moved closer in. Anna thought she could see faces in the foam falling off the crests of the waves. But she got rid of the thought, thinking it a hallucination from despair. Druuna had stopped looking. Her mind was overrun with thoughts, and she was thinking of everything she would never see again. Anna noticed a giant wave forming way off on the horizon, and was horrified when it did not crest and break at the point other waves did. It continued on, growing in height and speed, until it finally broke right on the steps and the force of the wave cracked her head against the column, knocking her out.
Druuna, on the backside of the column, did not take the full force of the wave, but as it hit against the wall further in and receded, she was pushed underwater and forced backward against the column, where the water tried to drag her out. She threw her hand out, hoping to grab Anna’s robe, but there was nothing there. The water kept her head under, and Druuna felt sure she would drown. Her lungs held for as long as they could, but she could only hold for a few seconds more. She started to thrash and she had to open her mouth to exhale. The last of her burned up air left her mouth, bubbling off to the surface, and Druuna was just about to gulp down the water that would drown her, when her head finally broke above the surface, and instead of breathing salty death, she inhaled air.
It took a moment longer for the water to recede enough that she could move without her feet being swept from under her. She rounded the column and saw Anna, and the sight of her made Druuna recoil in horror at the monstrosity.
Anna had become part of the ocean. Her body was no where in sight, but her face had taken shape in the water, and the water had formed an exact copy of her face, held up on the front of a wave hundreds of feet tall and miles wide. Drunna stared off across the distance to the colossal face of her friend, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. And after a few moments, Druuna thought that nothing would. It was then that Anna’s mouth crept open, and Druuna’s robe and hair lifted up and out toward the ocean. A slow whooshing sound grew in volume, and she realized that it was the wave inhaling.
The pull was not bad at first, and Druuna was more confused by it than alarmed. But as it gathered strength, panic washed over her and she started to back up, trying to put as much distance between her and the face as possible. Every step back was harder. She tried to get a breath, and as she opened her mouth she felt the air being pulled from her before she could catch it. She turned her back away and bent over at the waist, struggling to move forward. There was nowhere for her to go, she thought. The wind pulled her and chilled her soaking wet skin to the core. Thoughts of her family came to mind, of her childhood and her parents, of catching food and finding water, of playing with friends. I’ll never see them again, she thought, and it dawned on her that there was no way out, she would die here, pulled out to sea and drowned.
The door caught her sight at last, as it was still creeping open, and it was open just enough that she might be able to get a hand through the crack and hang on. Druuna knew she had to get to that door. She started towards it, bending so law as she walked that her knees struck upwards into her chest. The noise of wind pulling back drowned out all other sounds. It forced her to her belly, and she crawled towards the door, hand over hand, fingernails bending backward as she clawed her way forward.
The pull was so strong now, that for every foot she crawled, she was dragged back a half. And the wind was only getting worse. Druuna threw her arm out and the tips of her fingers brushed against the edge of the door. She threw her other arm forward to grab it, but the inhaling wind pulled her away. She dug her toes in to stop the pull. And then a set of eyes appeared in the doorway, horrible yellow pupils with black vertical slits. Druuna pushed herself away, caught between certain death in the sea and whatever horror was waiting in the doorway. The wind was too strong too fight. Druuna rolled on to her back, and the giant wave with the face of her friend was only yards away, and it was breathing in all the air for miles in any direction. Far away, The girls’ parents were struggling to keep their houses from blowing away in the wind. Druuna finally tried to scream as the strength of the wind pulled her forward into the mouth of the standing wave.
Her scream was cut short by the feel of something wet and scaly grabbing her forearm. She used the last of her remaining strength to tilt her head back and look at the door, where the eyes had not moved, but a long soaking wet arm stuck out from the door. A human hand, decayed and bony, gripped her arm so tight that blood could not flow to her hand. And it pulled her backward.
She kicked and thrashed, and the two forces pulled her in opposite ways. She felt she might split in the middle. The arm and wave pulled without regard for her body, and the pain sent stars across her vision. The skin around her waist began to tear and she felt her joints being pulled from the sockets. But the wind had reached it’s full force and could not get any stronger. The arm from the door had only just begun. At last, the force pulling her back was greater than the force dragging her forward, and Druuna inched backward to the still opening door, where the yellow slitted eyes gazed at her. Her outstretched arm pulled back through the doorway, and her shoulders caught on the door, too wide to fit through. The wave tried harder and harder to put any more force out, but it could not, and Druuna thought she saw something like desperation in the wave. Miles away, her father was sprawled on the ground, keeping low and avoiding the stones and dirt that were flying through the air, out towards the ocean.
A second cold wet and very strong hand grabbed Druuna’s hair and lifted her up. Then the two hands began to squeeze her and twist her, very brutally, so that she might fit through the gap. They pulled her inward with incredible, painful, force. But the gap was simply too small for her to fit through. Suffocation closed in, as she stuck sideways in the gap, but the hands continued to pull. Her vision clouded with black spots, and if she had been able to draw in any air, she would have screamed in horrible pain as her ribs broke. Blood began to trickle from her mouth and her eyes turned red. And then the doorway creaked open just enough, thousandths of an inch, to allow her body to squeeze painfully through the door, where only the sight of the yellow eyes, the cold strong hands, and total blackness were. The colossal door stopped its move outward and began to close, moving far faster than it opened.
The wave, seeing the girl pulled out of reach, found some well of unknown strength and pulled in air with a force unseen in the world. But it was worthless. The door closed shut with an echoing boom, and Druuna was sealed inside the tomb.
The inhalation tapered off, and mouth of the wave closed. The face stared at the tomb for a moment, and the wave started to fall apart, features losing form and shape, becoming nothing but foam and water again. Miles away, the villagers started to get up and look at the wreckage of their homes.
The wave was almost completely gone, and the ocean was almost settled. The last feature of the face, the mouth, was only vaguely seen, and was seconds away from disappearing.
But it did not disappear. The wave reformed, and the face appeared again, where it drew in one final enormous breath, and screamed.
The resulting outpour of energy hit the tomb and caused the entire structure to shake. The wind reached the village seconds before the sound did. And it appeared to them as a concussive force, flattening the grass as it moved towards them at millions of miles an hour. Everyone was picked up and hurled away. Druuna’s father tried to grab his wife and other daughter before the wind hit them, but he did not make it, and they were pulled away in different directions. Anna’s mother saw the wave coming and grabbed her husband by the hand, the wind picked them up and hurled them away together.
The tomb began to crack all over, and thousands of years of dust and decay shook loose and blew away. The columns were almost bending in the middle. The golden roof pulled up piece by piece, leaving spots of black scattered all over its distance. The wave screamed loud and hard, and it shook the tomb nearly apart, cracks splintered and widened along its surfaces, but the door remained untouched and shut. The scream continued and the middle of the columns began to bow, dangerously close to shattering and bringing the tomb down. It screamed louder and harder, pushing the columns as hard as it possibly could, and it sustained this force for minutes. The bowing continued and the dome sagged ever so slightly, the wave pushed and screamed with all the force it could find. The columns were only seconds away from collapse. The wave gave one last incredible push to force them to their breaking point.
The columns were only hundredths of an inch from the point where they would give. But they did not go past that point. The wave screamed and yelled and blew, but the tomb would not give the last little distance.
The wave finally stopped. It stared at the tomb for a last few moments, and then it started to dissipate, slowly melting away. The eyes were the last to go, and they stared at the tomb for as long as they could, before finally disappearing back into the ocean.
Miles and miles away, and in many different places and directions, the villagers that survived got up and looked around, hoping to see someone else at all. Some did, and whoever it was, they ran to them and hugged them and cried. But many did not, and they could only yell out names that they knew and wait for a response. Druuna’s father found himself in the middle of the grassland, with no landmarks to tell direction by, all alone, with no sight of his wife and other daughter. Anna’s mother was still holding hands with her husband, both face down in the dirt. She pulled her head up and tried to stir him, pulling his shoulder back to reveal a fist sized stone smashed into the middle of his face. She let him roll back over, and though she wanted to cry, she simply didn’t have the power to. Dozens of voices cried out for another, but all were left alone in the cold and coming night.
The sun came out and the ocean calmed down, receding all the way to low tide. The tomb sat untouched for thousands of years. And over time, the wind blew salt and dust into all the cracks, filling them completely, where they too hardened to stone, and the tomb was made sound again.
Anna’s body showed up on the shore, hundreds of miles north of the tomb, where a tide deposited it on an outcropping of rock. The body laid there for weeks, where the sun and birds wore it away. She laid there for months, where the heat and light drained it of color. She laid there for hundreds of years, where the wind ground her bones to dust and blew them out to sea.
