Chapter 5: Atop the Cliffs
Far below him Ansen watched as the natives on the ground of a sudden swarmed up the face of the cliff.
The children, the women, the warriors - one and all scurried as might ants up the bole of a tree towards the cliff-top, as if they sought to escape an approaching flood coming to wipe out their village which lay at the foot of the precipice. As they topped the cliff they stepped back from the edge, as though fearful. Ansen knew they did not fear the vertiginous heights and wondered what frightened them.
Megrodomigran, their chief, stepped toward a podium of sorts, a raised dais of stone with a slab in the center that grimly resembled the altars Ansen had seen at the ruins of Cholula and Kalibangan during his wanderings.
They dragged a man forth – one of the porters. The Viking winced.
And so it begins, he thought fiercely.
The terrified man’s eyes rolled in fright, the whites starkly vivid against his black face. He would have been screaming hideously, the Viking knew, had his mouth not been stuffed prior with the skin of some animal, the wad then bound in place with sinew behind the man’s head. Roughly, they threw him across the altar and then bound him fast to the surface.
Four other men, acolytes of the chief apparently, took positions at each corner of the altar. The chief stood at a position closest to the porter’s head.
In a sing-song chant Megrodomigran began reciting a ritual that had been ancient when Ansen’s Arapaho forebears crossed the land bridge thousands upon thousands of years before to propagate their races in the Americas. Torches, inserted into holes in the stone arranged in odd patterns about the surface of the cliff cast their garish illumination upon the doomed man’s glistening skin - skin that was wet with the stinking sweat of a hideous fear.
Ansen never saw a signal but as if on cue the four men at the corners began pummeling the bound man’s limbs, beginning at their extremities, with heavy mallets of a dull, metallic substance. At each concussion of the blunt instruments the man’s bones were shattered, and in this manner they worked their way up towards his torso until his arms and legs resembled split and bleeding shapeless sacks of broken pottery. Ansen, although sickened by it, for the life of him could not tear his eyes from the worse torment he ever witnessed a human being suffer.
At some point he realized that even through the stuffed animal skin in the man’s mouth he could discern a high pitched, ringing squeal, and comprehended that it came from the porter’s throat. Nothing could dampen that scream, a shriek ripped viscerally from a body undergoing a level of agony that few in history have suffered. Just as that cry reached a crescendo, Megrodomigran plucked that throttling skin from the victim’s mouth, allowing one bright, clear burst of tormented screeching before he brought his own instrument to bear - a great scythe-like instrument.
In an overhanded swipe he split the porter’s head, throat and sternum longitudinally, the split extending nearly to the man’s groin.
Thank God, Ansen thought, furiously. That final blow had at last ended the man’s horrible suffering.
Cries of fright and horror at a fate that possibly awaited them all were audible from the cages up and down the cliff line. Surprisingly, Eva and Cecil, like him, were silent and merely observing. Perhaps they were of sterner stuff than he had originally believed? He would have expected both of them to be shaking like a dog passing razor blades at sight of this horrific suffering. The girl seemed to have an expectant expression upon her face, while Cecil, further away, simply looked contemplative.
As if that killing blow had been a signal to the other natives of this savage isle they set up a great howl. The sound of it reminded him of a moaning of supplication, a wailing such as he had heard when the women of his tribe would, when distraught, pray over the fallen dead.
From below now came a thunderous sound as of the parting of earth; a sullen roar such as that made by the cataclysmic sliding of seismic plates, the rending of rock and the pouring out of sand from buckets the size of moons. Aghast, Ansen and the others turned to look away from the awful tableau atop the cliff where the porter had been sacrificed and down to where lay the village at the foot of the precipice.
Three hundred feet below them lay the village, ending at the wide, curved clearing - a preamble to the rocky escarpment from which they depended like fish bait over a pond. From his high seat Ansen saw the jungle far below him begin to blur, and then to part like the Red Sea of Biblical lore. Deep, deep into the Earth a great rent began to appear, a sundering such as might have occurred in the planet’s infancy when continental shelves and sea basins were carved with unimaginable and unwitnessed violence.
Ever wider the rent appeared, elongating as well, and deepening until the molten flow of veins of magma were beheld. Ansen watched as the horrid gash in the planet’s crust assumed a width of over half a mile, twice that in length and seemed so deep that his eyes could not even begin to gauge the distance. He dimly guessed he was staring into the Earth’s core, a dizzyingly rotating mixture of superheated nickel and iron, but he had no real idea what drew his eyes as the mesmerist’s pendulum draws the gaze of the hypnotized.
At some point the voices of the natives’ coalesced in his consciousness – a single, loud voice made up of hundreds, all chanting the same word, at the same time: Koyltentapharr! Koyltentapharr! Koyltentapharr!
What meant that hideous word? He could not speak their language - none of them could. Who or what was this Koyltentapharr?
Below, the rent in the surface began to darken with a night-black smoky, sooty cloud that finally ceased boiling and billowing, soon clarifying into what appeared like a nighttime sky, with pinpoints of star light and the gaseous, nebulous smudges of distant galaxies. But nowhere in the sky that appeared below in the rent in the Earth’s crust did he see any constellation familiar to him – and he knew them all intimately, having spent the bulk of his life outside beneath them.
Out of this other space a monstrous darkness crawled forth, nebulously at first, but soon taking shape and form. Like a giant worm poking its ugly snout up out of the ground, it wriggled upward. Its size defied reason, its gaping maw immense. Circlets of eyes ringed the grotesque body completely around, from which it obviously could see in any and every direction simultaneously.
From the hideous mouth multiple tongues twisted and snaked, tasting the air of this world. Far into the sky the thing climbed until it looked down upon those gathered upon the cliff. The natives finally ceased their invocation and Megrodomigran stepped aside, chanting in his unknown speech to this demonic beast he’d summoned from, apparently, another world - or an alternate reality, Ansen knew not which.
The multiplicity of tongues seemed to be that with which the creature navigated upon this plane, for these seemed to focus in the direction of the porter’s body.
“Attal, Koyltentapharr!” shouted the wizard of the savages.
The great worm leaned down until its ugly snout hovered just above the body on the blood soaked altar while its many tongues lapped the spilt gore upon the stone and the surrounding ground. After a moment the mighty maw spread wide and covered the surface of the stone dais. When it rose back into the air it left an empty altar. The great beast then began to sway as if in ecstasy. It reared its head straight into the air, and Ansen swore he saw its eyes close partially as if it had just imbibed the most succulent of viands, while blood dripped and coursed from out of the corners of the split that served as its mouth.
Megrodomigran shouted instructions now, rapidly - as if the pressure to act had become intense. His men ran forward to the cliff’s edge, selected the next porter in line and pivoted the crane-like assembly about 180° until the cage swung back from over the edge; then they lowered the cage to the rough stone. The whole thing seemed like a nightmare where one cannot seem to escape the horror which chases one through the dark, nightscapes of one’s own mind.
They dragged the porter, nearly fainting wit
h an awful, horrific fear, toward the stone altar. But while they prepared the next sacrifice the creature, its eyes suddenly slitting with malevolence and intent, moved with blinding speed and gulped one of the porters that yet dangled over the cliff’s edge in his basket-like enclosure. Cage and all were consumed at once, the man’s pitiable cry cut off succinctly, as if chopped in half by an axe.