Where all is dark,
one is sent to see the light

by Colin Alcock

Where all is dark, one is sent to see the light.

Crawling through dark earth, climbing inch by inch from seven miles deep. Two years it took, growing from a new-born as he went. Chosen by his nine-foot Elders to seek what lies above the highest sediments of the spinning planet. Those sent before, who did not perish, told fanciful tales, so Ankwmoa was put on a slowly rising spiral path without even knowledge of his own world. Apart from his name, and two thoughts injected into his brain, at birth, by chemical messages. I must reach the top to see the place that has light. I must return to tell what I see. Only then would the elders truly believe that there were creatures living beyond their darkness. For Ankwmoa would have matured with no preconceptions, only the sparse knowledge gained from his journey.

From cavernous chambers far below, he first followed previous explorers’ paths, but after one month’s rapid growth, Ankwmoa had the size and strength to break new ground. For his kind grew to full maturity at three years, with massive strength in bulbous shoulders and short arms, able to tear through rock-hard sediments laid over many millennia. Already, the six strong fingers on each shell-backed hand scooped and grabbed his spiralled way upwards, thick haired stubby legs with four-toed feet thrusting him forward. His long green tongue sought out any living bugs and decayed vegetation that had survived the compression of eons. He digested many minerals, too, as his body grew and his primary tail, a store of chemical energy, shrank to a short stub of rotting flesh. Not for him the ritual ceremony of excising it, it just scraped away, painfully, to an angry red scar.

The higher he climbed, the tougher. Hard rock bearing little oxygen to breathe, even less subsistence, fatigue forcing him into days of fitful sleep, absorbing his own fats for energy, gasping, aching, driven by one goal. Through layers of heat and cool, unaware of his own cavernous underworld, faintly lit by phosphorous rocks, with mosses and fungi that should be his staple diet and the delicacies of fleshy creatures best consumed live. But some subconscious instinct told him of pleasures yet to be encountered. Desire for another. Perhaps not quite like himself.

Breaking through an igneous layer into a bed of softer sedimentary clasts, he felt the winter chill of the planet’s outermost crust. Finally, came glutinous clay that clung and dragged as he ploughed upward to break through into light. Light so bright he suffered physical pain, jet pupils shrinking to micro-slits, barely perceptible in huge, round, golden eyes.

Ankwmoa stood tall, stretched out his eight-foot of still growing gnarled body from the cramped posture of digging, eyes slowly adapting to the searing light, and let out a gasp. Before him, wonderment indeed. Creatures beyond belief. Shiny coloured beetles with four revolving feet that scurried in hoards along flattened pathways, dodging in and out of greater beasts with eight or ten of those same strange pedes. Above him the brilliant orb of the sun. And giant silver crosses floating high across the blue. Beside him, small feathered and furred creatures darting in and out of green foliage.

Grasping a leafy stem, he bit into it, sour and unpalatable to his taste. He reached out, caught a goshawk in mid-flight that had ventured out of a pinewood behind him. Much tastier, but Ankwmoa had spied other fayre ahead. Striding across the flattened path, he was initially alarmed by the screeching and screaming, the stench of burnt rubber, and cymbal clash of metal bodies spinning across the highway. But he strode on, to a field of cattle, pulling a calf away from suckling its mother, to feast again, tearing through flesh, and gnawing its bones. Onwards, towards the glint of glass in towering structures and low redbrick estates. To a garden where a subliminal urge took hold.

The dark-haired woman, young and lithe, stared up in horror, screaming as he clasped her tightly to his body and performed a ritual no one had taught him. He had found what he sought. Time to take his prize home.

His descent was near vertical. After only eighteen days of digging and scrabbling through extremes of subterranean geology, dragging his specimen with him, crushed and scarred, her life expired, he stood before the Elders with a handful of rags, torn flesh, and shattered bones. Hearing his story, they unanimously declared that no one must ever know of this outcome, recording it only in the Secret Book of All Life, kept solely for the most senior of Elders to study. A book that told of banishment from above to caverns in deep layers of antiquity. Existence of outside life denied.

Miles above, rumour and legend spread, of a monstrous being stealing a pretty young girl. And a deep sink hole discovered close to a motorway fuelled stories of a voracious monster’s future return, with everyone fearing to venture through the pinewood nearby.

And disturbed by vivid dreams, Ankwmoa does return. This time to stay.