“And is that so bad?” the boy asked.
Aaron glanced at his little brother and saw that Gabriel now sat beside the child, tail wagging as Stevie patted his head. “Hello, Gabriel,” Aaron said to the dog.
The dog wagged his tail in response, panting happily. He had been running in the water and was soaking wet, sand sticking to the fur on his legs.
“What’s the matter with you, Aaron?” the child asked. “Everything here is so perfect—so peaceful. Just let yourself accept it.”
The sky was darkening as the clouds drifted closer to the shore.
“I want to,” Aaron replied, a feeling of pure joy beginning to bubble up within him, but he forced it back. “I really, really do—but this feels wrong. Like I lived it before.”
“But you were happy then, right? And you can be that way again. It’s a gift for all you’ve had to endure.” Stevie was suddenly standing in the middle of the hole he had been digging. “Let me take your pain away.” He stretched his sunburned arms toward his older brother, a smile on his face.
It seems simple enough, Aaron thought as he watched the gray clouds billow offshore. They seemed to be changing direction, leaving the sky over his head perfect, unblemished by the storm. All he need do is accept this time, this place, as his reality, and everything would be fine.
But it wouldn’t.
“This is all wrong,” he said aloud with a furious shake of his head. He gestured to the ocean and the world beyond it. “This isn’t right, this moment has passed. It’s a memory from three years ago.”
“Stop it, Aaron,” Stevie demanded. “Don’t spoil what I’ve made for you.”
Aaron stared at the angry child as the clouds again tumbled in from the sea, low and dark, pregnant with storm. A distant, threatening rumble of thunder shook the air. “This is all a dream—a nightmare, really.”
“Aaron!” the boy screamed, stomping his foot.
“What are you?” Aaron asked, a powerful wind suddenly whipping at his clothes. “Stevie never talked like this—he barely talked at all.” Aaron looked at the dog, who continued to wag his tail happily even though the wind was blowing sand into his lolling mouth. “And this isn’t Gabriel. It just looks like him.” Aaron stepped closer to the child. “I’ll ask you again,” he said grimly. “What are you?”
It was suddenly black as night on the beach, and arcs of lightning coursed across the sky as thunderclaps boomed. The ocean had been whipped into a frenzy by the tempest, with waves crashing violently on the shore.
“You can be happy again!” the child shrieked over the storm. “All you need do is—”
“What. Are. You?” Aaron spat. From the corner of his eye he could see the ocean waters, in the distance, begin to froth and boil.
“I have existed since the fifth day of creation,” Stevie said in a chilling voice not his own.
Something moved beneath the roiling waters. Something large.
“I was that spark of uncertainty in the Creator’s thoughts as He forged the world—that brief moment of chaos—before Genesis.”
A monster emerged from the depths of the sea, skin blacker than the darkness that now surrounded them. It seemed to be at least a hundred feet tall, its wormlike body swaying above the storm-ravaged sea. Hundreds of tentacles of varying degrees of thickness and length grew from its body, writhing in the air as if desperate to entwine something in their embrace. Aaron could not pull his eyes away from the nightmarish visage as it undulated across the thrashing sea toward the beach.
“The darkness of the ocean became my dwelling,” said the thing that resembled his brother. “And there I thrived, hidden beneath the waves—until the Lord God sensed my greatness and sent His angelic messengers to snuff out my glorious light.”
The monster was closer now. Large, opaque sacks dangled hideously from its glistening body, swaying like pendulums as it lurched closer to land.
Aaron was unable to take his eyes from the horribly awesome sight, surprised that he could even think, let alone speak. “You’re so wonderful that God decided to take you out?”
The Stevie-thing ignored his question. “The ocean was my domain, and any who dared transverse them were subject to my wrath—and I soon developed a taste for the lives of those the Creator sent to destroy me.”
The enormous sea beast loomed above Aaron. Even from this distance, he could see that its mass was covered in rows of fine scales that glistened with the colors of the rainbow. If it weren’t so outright hideous, he might have found it beautiful. There was a blinding flash of lightning, followed by an explosion of thunder—and the pregnant clouds opened up in a deluge of thick, driving rain.
“That’s what has kept me alive over the millennia, and what will eventually free me from my prison beneath the sea.”
The viscous torrents coated Aaron’s body, forcing him down upon the sand. The ground could not absorb the thick, milky fluids, and they pooled around him, ever rising.
The beast reached the shore, hundreds of tiny muscular appendages propelling the nightmare up onto the beach. “I sense in you a power that both frightens—and excites,” the monster said, its voice now coming from two places—his little brother and the thing upon the shore, a perverse stereo effect echoing through the air. “Never have I encountered one such as you.”
Aaron fought to stand, but he felt the ground beneath him shift, rising up to hold him fast. The foul rain continued to fall, coating his body in a layer of slime. “What is this place?” he frantically asked the doppelgänger of his brother.
“It could have been your individual paradise,” the entity explained, its voice a disgusted rumble. “Like a bee to the flower, I used the promise of personal heaven to lure you to me. A place where you would have been content until your final days.” Stevie shook its head in disappointment. “But you have rejected it.”
“It’s not real,” Aaron spat, attempting to keep the fluid that rained from the sky and flowed down his face from entering his mouth. “It’s a lie.”
The thing that had taken on the guise of Stevie scrambled from its hole and walked casually toward the gigantic behemoth that had emerged from the sea. “Be it lie—or truth,” it said, approaching the front of the beast. The creature responded to the strange child’s approach by opening its cavernous maw.
The rain of slime was falling all the harder now, and Aaron felt himself violently sucked beneath the surface. His arms became trapped in the rising mire that accumulated upon the ground, and he thrashed in a futile attempt to free himself from the hungry earth, but to little avail.
Stevie had entered the mouth of the sea monster; the circular opening was ringed with razor-sharp teeth. It reminded Aaron of the mouth of a piranha fish. The boy stood there, peering out as it slowly began to close. “It all ends the same,” he said from within the monster’s maw. “You within the belly of the beast—food for Leviathan.”
The final words ringing in his ears, over the storm’s rage, the great beast snapped closed its mouth, reared backward—and threw its mass back into the roiling sea.
Aaron struggled; it seemed as though the harder he fought, the faster he was pulled deeper. It all ends the same, he heard the inhuman voice reverberate in his mind, his head beginning to sink below the surface. He tried to scream, to bellow his belief that this was all some twisted mind manipulation, but it was cut short—abruptly silenced as a mixture of the sand, and the slime that fell in torrents from the black sky, flowed into his mouth and down his throat. You within the belly of the beast, the monster had gurgled. Food for Leviathan.