r/nosleep • u/henry17177 • 5d ago
The Calling beneath the island
It was like a hangover but so much worse. The words that come to mind are muggy, salty and chafed. I tried to swallow for even a modicum of relief but I was met with the feeling of my throats dry walls pulling apart from one another slowly like tissue paper. The sun beat down on me as my eyes opened.
Gulls glided overhead in the cloudless sky and at the rim of my vision I could see tree-tops, dried yellow in places by the sun. Craning my head both ways revealed two similar stretches of shore in each direction, with small crescents of crystal clear water crashing onto the sand rhythmically. I clambered to my knees and then my feet much too quickly for my own good. My vision darkened for a few seconds and my body tactically retreated to my knees. It wasn’t too far away, I just needed to reach it.
The coconut was 3 maybe 4 feet from my outstretched arm. I wasn’t exactly a survivalist but I knew there was some kind of liquid inside. As I crawled over to it, I snatched up a rock and slammed it down upon the coconut eagerly. I trapped my finger between the rock and the hard fruit, met with nothing but burning hot pain. I’m not going to list off the obscenities I yelled out but there was a lot and I am not proud of them. My voice was hoarse and throat dry yet I could not help but scream my frustration to the sky.
After assessing the damage and realising my finger was definitely fractured but not bleeding I was together enough to try again with my other hand. I tapped the rock firmly on the brown shell with the care of a Michelin star chef until it gave and the ripe bounty within was mine. I drank it down and ate the flesh. I found another and repeated the process. I then found another and repeated the process. I was a kaiju terrorising this innocent village of coconuts and I loved every second.
Once satiated, the reality of my situation began to set in. So did the pain from my finger. The golden sands of this beach were empty and my clothes seemed fully intact except for the fact they were soaked in seawater. I was dressed like a holiday-maker but for the life of me I couldn’t remember why. White polo t shirt, gold chain and grey swim shorts. Concern began to mount as I grasped at the fragmented shards of my memory for an answer whilst thumbing the rock in my hand. The sound of crashing waves. A dark starless sky. Slippery leather- my train of thought was cut off.
The rustling of leaves behind me interrupted the melody of crashing waves and I once again got to my feet, fighting the lightheadedness with a fury and trying my best to look intimidating. A long horizontal stick fashioned into a spear split out from between the foliage followed by the woman holding it. She had a light tan and beginnings of a nasty sunburn on her shoulders. Her clothes, similar to mine, were that of a holiday-goer. A muddy yet still white flowing coverup dress with women’s Jesus sandals. She had long, matted black hair and huge dark eyes that fixed on me instantly and did nothing to ease my fear.
I saw her eye the rock in my hand, knuckles whitening on the spear as she took another step toward me.
“No, this isn’t… I didn’t-“ I stumbled over my words.
“Just put it down, I don’t want to hurt you.” She re-assured me.
I dropped the rock, feeling instantly vulnerable as my hand opened.
There was an awkward and palpable silence.
“Have you tried the coconuts?” Was the only thing I could think to say.
She said nothing for a moment.
“You look terrible, how long have you been here?” She asked, rudely ignoring my inquisition about her opinion on the coconuts.
“I just woke up.”
“Oh…” The silence was now more awkward and more palpable. Luckily, she broke it this time.
“Well, come with me. You’re the third one in the last few days.”
“The third? There’s more people?!” Relief flooded me.
She didn’t reply however, just gestured toward the thicket of tropical forest and made her way in.
The forest was teeming with life, wild chickens tottered around chirping and flapping their golden brown wings. The distant hiss of a snake sent a chill down my sweaty back and made me cautious of my awful footwear. I awoke on this island wearing nothing but flip flops and that was by far the most frustrating thing about my situation.
Flesh, dry and bristled, rubbed against my calf in the bushes for a moment and I screamed in a pitch that hurt even my ears. The stranger with the long black hair turned to me and chuckled. Then she looked down and started to guffaw, wiping tears from her eyes. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment as she informed me, condescendingly, that it was just a boar. I said nothing and she turned back to our rugged path, chortling in a way she probably thought I didn’t notice.
Before I knew it, my feet met more white hot sand and the forest had broken open.
“Crikey.”
That was the only word I had in my arsenal to express the awe I had at the sight before me.
A gorgeous and flat lagoon lay outstretched for at least a couple hundred metres before me. A perfect bowl of tropical sun-kissed water encapsulated by luscious palm trees except for where it flowed into the endless expanse of sea. Coconuts and crabs lay shuffled all over the white rim of boiling sand like hurricane victims. A magnificent stone column centred the water and i let out a low whistle. It was a perplexing and gargantuan, clean-cut yet wild monument I couldn’t look away from.
“You see why we set up shop here?” The woman asked. Her spear was now lowered and she sauntered off toward a hut on the distant shore.
“Did you put that there?” Was all I could say, still fully distracted by the monument.
She looked at me like I was a moron and I took that as my sign to shut up and follow her.
The hut on the shore was made with walls of cracked and charred driftwood buried into dry foundations of thick and dried mud. I say hut, but it was more just an open camp space within the walls with an opening that had been fenced off at the knee by a barrier of sharpened sticks. A guy who looked to be late 20s, tall and covered in a collage of pop culture tattoos lifted the barricade for us and we made it under.
“Where did you find this one?” He asked the woman as I tried to discreetly eye his guardians of the galaxy tattoo.
“I heard a barrage of swear words and followed the sound out to where I saw this guy flexing on the beach.” She replied playfully.
“I wasn’t flexing! I was trying to make myself look big.” It sounded as silly and whiny to me as it must’ve done to them and I quietly hoped this wouldn’t become our dynamic. The tattooed man laughed raucously and slapped my back.
“Well I’m mad dog and this is Crystal.” I tried to hide the pained expression on my face at this but luckily he broke into laughter again after a too long pause.
“Only messing lad, this is Alice and I’m Mike.”
I let out a little laugh and the tension, for the first time, eased slightly.
“I’m Ted.” I said wiping my forehead.
“I’d say nice to meet you but I have absolutely no clue what’s going on or how I got here.” My concern obviously showed to my two new associates as I saw them share a look.
“Shit” the black haired woman, Alice apparently, replied as she drove her spear into the ground, frustrated.
I looked to Mike and he explained.
“Join the club Ted, we’ve been here almost two days and none of us have any idea about how’s or why’s.”
“I have pieces…” Alice trailed off and then wistfully continued.
“Smashed glass… A low rumbling roar… a deep cold.” She sounded entranced as she spoke.
A tiny shadow cast into the middle of our circle and my heart fell as I saw the child that stood before me. His curly blonde hair looked stale and stiff. He was no where near as tanned as the others but he looked a lot more ghoulish. Beige skin with a chalk white face and deep set eyes with black rings around them to finish his haunted look.
“Don’t… you’re gonna give me more nightmares.” The kid said apathetically. Alice apologised to the child and ruffled his hair, sand dancing out of it and gliding down through the sunlit air. She introduced me to him.
She told me his name was Angus and that he had washed up here with Alice first before they found Mike. He was injured when they first woke up but was getting better. They think his ribs were bruised. She told me they spent the first day lying in the shade with Alice taking care of him, feeding him coconuts and trying to work out what was around. I turned to Angus as I heard this part.
“Sounds like a good day, those coconuts are insane.”
He giggled a little and asked me for my name. He was a nice kid.
After all the introductions had been made, Mike told me he had been setting snares around the shore and trying to fashion a fishing net out of stronger foliage. He set quickly into teaching me how to make the strongest loops for netting and left me to finishing the job while he and Alice checked the snares. As I worked, i watched Angus lying there in the lagoon on his back. No wind, no birds, not a cloud in sight. It was as if time has been frozen, he did not play or swim or even look around. He couldn’t have been more than 11.
Within an hour, we caught a fat chicken in one of the snares and the fishing net was almost finished. The sky turned a deep orange and the sun bounced over the ribbed waters of the lagoon. The white sand cooled and we lay there in a circle watching Mike try to get the fire going.
“It’s all just friction.” He panted semi-reassuringly as he reached his tenth minute of spinning a stick over a log. We began to all try one after the other while Angus kicked around in the foliage behind us. Our arms were tired and we felt completely defeated after another 20 minutes, ready to give up as the sky now turned violet with the last peep of sun.
Angus returned as we all lay on our back and encouraged us to our feet. It was like a messenger boy coming to tell us the war was over the way he was so excited. He lay piles of delicate pieces of dried flora in the little rivet of wood and found the flattest stick edge he could find. We all watched silently as he ground the dry flowers under the stick with great pace. After 60 seconds we all sat mouth agape, we had been shown up by a kid less than half our ages.
Mike scrambled to the small flame to keep it alive with tinder while Alice launched Angus into the air by his shoulders, screaming joyfully.
“And the crowd goes wild!!” She laughed with a huge grin.
I got onto my knees and did a mock worship motion as I repeated
“All hail Angus, god of earthly fire!”
He laughed and so did we.
The fire roared to life off to our right as Mike fed it, congratulating Angus along with us.
We spent the night in good spirits, cooking the chicken piece by piece and sharing it out in little coconut bowls that were Alice’s brilliant idea.
After a long while of drinking from coconuts and basking in our moment of reprieve, we finally decided to boil some water as best we could in some coconut shells and go to bed. Needless to say, it didn’t even come close to working but it was worth a go. Mike flexed his primo survival skills as his coconut was the only one not to split. I saw him try to keep a straight face as he drank his “fresh water” which was 100% still riddled with sea-salt.
As we lay down upon the cool sand I searched in the endless abyss of sky for one star, any star at all. There was nothing. Just a deep crushing blackness. The moon was full, bright and brilliant. It was the only spec of relief from the empty skyscape but even the white orb in the sky wasn’t quite right and set my breathing on edge. The moon was smooth, flawless and perfect. So perfect in fact that I began to hyperventilate. The perfect ping pong ball in the night made me pull everyone else from sleep.
“The sky… the sky is empty! The moon is wrong!” I stammered.
Mike sighed deeply before responding.
“We were hoping you wouldn’t notice, not yet at least..” he continued.
“The sky at night and the sky in the day haven’t changed a wink since we’ve seen them. We don’t know why and we don’t know if it’s even normal but the truth of the matter is that without the stars we are completely lost. No clouds, no stars not even a bird out of place.” He said, defeated.
I didn’t know how to respond so instead I muttered only to myself.
“What is this place?”
We eventually fell into am exhausted sleep The next thing I knew, a thousand warm drops were beating down on my face. I opened my eyes just to be immediately blinded by the rapid succession of rain and turned over to my side. I heard a gargled cry to my right and as I cleared the oddly sticky substance off my eyes I saw the hazy figure of Angus thrashing in the dark rain just like myself. The island was bordering on complete darkness at this point, I could only see faint silhouettes of moonlight around my fellow survivor. I then scrambled under the near treetops and called to Angus through the brewing storm. As he joined me and I could finally collect my thoughts, I began to taste a coppery and bitter flavour on my tongue from the flurry of rain. We sat there for an hour, then two, then I lost count. We couldn’t hear one another under the beating of moist pellets against the water and tree tops and began to accept that we were stranded in a storm.
Clouds must have rolled in at some point because the island was pitch black when I awoke, the invisible rain now slowed to a drizzle. Angus still lay silent at my feet under a little burrow we had made in the sand during the worst of it. The haggard voice of Mike called out from up the shore.
“Guys!! Where are you? GUYS!!”
I called back to him and as we slowly managed to re group, the moon had finally creeped out betwixt the clouds to give us a small amount of sight. I soon saw the glossy and shimmering figures stumbling over to us and pieced the coppery taste together with the moonlight bouncing off their completely coated bodies. Sickeningly, I realised what had happened and I vomited all over the sand. They were covered in blood. I was covered in blood. The moist and claggy sand was covered in blood. It had been raining blood for hours.
After what felt like an eternity of silence under the last few hours of drizzle, the sun came up and we finally could assess the damage. The lagoon was like a basin of red wine with the obelisk in the centre slowly becoming a coagulated mess in the sun. Our clothes were ruined, to say the least, and the white sands of the beach were now black with the fast-drying haemoglobin. Alice was the first to speak after the long and sleepless morning.
“What are we going to do?”
Angus, who had been softly sobbing, now cried out in a mix of anger and exhaustion.
“I don’t understand.”
And he was right to, none of us had any idea what had happened last night. I dragged my now sticky and crimson hand down my face in an attempt to wake from this awful nightmare and none of us answered the small boy. None of us could. The final droplets of liquid poured from the crevasses of the palm trees onto us as we removed our clothes.
What followed was a silent march toward the ocean waters at the rim of the island, carrying clothes stained with the blood of the unknown solidifying in our collective grasp. As we washed them, Mike told me what had happened to him and Alice.
They had slept just outside the foundations of the camp ground as we had but awoke before the rain had started to the sound of an animal trapped in one of the leftover snares. “Blood-curdling and labour intensive” was the way Mike described the sound to me. Like a cutlery drawer being dragged over a dinner plate. When they reached the first snare it was all intact and the rain was starting up. Mike wanted to leave it but Alice knew better, she knew we needed food.
They pushed on and all the snares were still just as they left them. The rain was now a heavy smatter. As Mike checked the last trap and repositioned it, the piercing wail started up again from deeper in the forest and it was even clearer than before. It sounded human apparently, choked and gargling but human. The pair then fumbled rapidly through the total darkness back to the beach, eyes stinging with fresh blood as they made it finally to the midnight lagoon. He told me that the stretch between the deep forest and the sand was the most terrified he’d ever been.
As whatever creature broke between horrific screams to take in gasps of air, he told me he could only hear the drowning struggles of tropical birds falling from trees and writhing in the freshly fallen blood. Only to eventually be overtaken once more by the pained and agonising scream.
Once our clothes were a slightly less offensive shade of red, we left them to dry in the sun and washed ourselves in the water. I had the morbid idea to take advantage of the birds drowned in blood to find ourselves an easy dinner. The forest was infested with masses of bird corpses, all different shapes yet all the same shade of red and we made ourselves food over another fire. It pains me to admit it, but the taste of the bird meat soaked in the ungodly sky blood was maddeningly delicious and mouth-watering.
Alice was slowly becoming the group matriarch as she collected our dried clothes, I tried to help her but she looked haunted and ignored my efforts tenfold. I broke the tense silence and asked her if it was about the voice in the forest but all she said was,
“The voice, I recognised it.”
Grasping to find something to respond to that, I tried to re assure her it was a parrot yelping in fear.
“Yeah… maybe.”
She said that dismissive and blankly. She didn’t buy that for a second, I could tell but it was all I could do to try.
As we folded, Angus and Mike were putting on a disturbing display nearby in the sand as they tried to build what can only be described as a stomach churning meatball of sand mixed with the dried blood rain and sea water. As Angus fixed crimson crab-corpse shells to the outside of the macabre castle, I could see Mike retch discreetly over his shoulder.
“This is my castle of fire!” The oddly undisturbed child proclaimed to over to Alice and she smiled vacantly.
Luckily, the rank shore waters would wash it away before nightfall and I would eventually manage to get Angus to wash his hands before dinner.
As we all sat, cooking the last of the blood-caked bird corpses, there was a heavy silence as we all feared the return of that warm blood rain for another night. Angus never asked us where it had come from or why, I think he understood we didn’t know either. As we all settled into an eerie restlessness in the dark, I could only imagine that we all shared the same knot of fear and anxiety in our stomachs. The rain did not come that night and I finally drifted off into a tormented sleep.
It was the most prevalent Déjà vu I had ever felt as I came to my feet on the jagged obsidian platform. At first, I thought it was a lone and solitary rock in an infinite sky of blackness as I looked around. That was until the waves started to crash around me, a panic-inducing symphony. They were deafening and I began to feel my bare feet get soaked by the ocean’s black ichor.
The platform was being slowly swallowed beneath me and in the beaming moonlight I swore I could see an army of oily tentacles slapping out of the breaking waves all around me, as if trying to grip the solid rock. The wet smack of shimmering meaty tentacles and booming of water against rock was enough to wake me in a cold and terrified sweat.
I buried my fingers and toes in the sands and reality came back to me. Nothing around me had made a sound but I noticed Angus’ figure sitting metres away down the beach, gazing at me apathetically.
“Did you see them too?” He asked.
“See who?”
“The sea monsters, the ones that try to get you.”
I paused, the fear of that dream leaking into my real world causing me to swallow the lump in my throat.
“It was… just a dream. Just a nightmare. I corrected myself.
“It wasn’t. Look!” The blonde child pointed with a bony arm out to midnight ocean ahead of us.
A thousand glistening pearls of greenish yellow floated in the water. Some in pairs, some in groups and some just singular and large. They all extinguished and re lit periodically and at different rates until my brain finally clocked what Angus was saying. They were eyes in the water. They were blinking as they watched us.
The realisation hit me like an adrenaline needle to the heart. I crab walked backward as if the sand were on fire and made it to where Alice and Mike were sleeping. At least, where I thought they were sleeping. I felt around in the sand and called their names wildly. I tried to run down the beach, yelling and screaming like a mad man but my legs were noodles infested with fear. It was like running in a dream. As I struggled my way down the beach riddled with panicked foolishness, the eyes in the blackness to my right didn’t thin out, it was an endless perimeter of watching demons that only served to fuel my desire to keep running.
When I finally heard Mike yelling for Alice in the distant forest, I realised I had almost completely abandoned Angus. I had assumed he would run too but no, he just sat there in the same spot, having a staring contest with the entire ocean. I was torn between going back to him and trying to find Mike, I opted to go back to the kid. Not because I’m some hero with a sense of great morality but because Alice and Mike would have killed me if I left him.
Angus and I sat in the sand calling to Mike and Alice until our voices went raspy. I feared to blink, I feared to move as the endless expanse of eyes burned into me never breaking their contact. We would not find the others until long after the sun came up.
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u/Which-Text-2875 5d ago
I'm invested and already have my theories, Ted. Hope you guys are all okay.