He gave Ralph a crooked smile, and then sighed. “Anyway, this gateway sort of thing opened on the plateau, between your world, I mean, time, and mine. Happens once every ten years.” He looked up. “My girlfriend, Emma Wilson, got away.” He grinned broadly. “But she’s coming back for me. And when that damned gateway, or portal or freaking door, or whatever the hell it is, opens up again, I’ll be there, front and center.”
The shark came up real close, its snout seeming to lift from the water. Ben shook his head. “No, Ralph, I’m sorry, but I can’t take you with me.” He laughed and tossed the shell out into the center of the lagoon. The shark spun away to investigate the splash.
Days came and went like that, and to begin with, Ben regarded their relationship as something akin to that of coaxing a wild wolf into your camp — there was wariness, but also a mutual respect. When Ralph was hunting, Ben stayed out of the water. And in turn, when Ben was in the shallows trying to spear a fish, Ralph usually stayed away, cruising along the deep end of the lagoon.
Once he had cruised in a little too close and got pushed away with the butt of the spear. After a while, the stout shark seemed to get it and remained out in the deeper parts of the enclosed rock pool. In fact, as if in payback for the scraps Ben tossed him, there were times when Ralph seemed to herd the fish toward Ben’s waiting spear.
Some days, Ben spent his time out at the breakwater, on the rocks, leaning on his arms and looking out at the huge sea beasts, or up and down the coastline. Northward, he could see the jutting landmasses that might have been headlands or perhaps islands in the far distance. He knew his home was up there somewhere, and often wondered what it would be like now — perhaps miles of shallow coastal estuaries, foreboding swamps, or vast plains of grasses, and forests of weird trees that looked like 50-foot-high Q-tips.
Ben was about to turn away, when he noticed something else. It was in the far distance and in near to the jutting shoreline. But oddly, it looked square against the horizon.
He frowned; other than geologically, nature didn’t really do squares or geometric shapes. If he had been back in his own time, he wouldn’t have given it a second glance, as he would have immediately known what he thought it was—a sail.
“Insanity, or a solitude-induced hallucination?” He laughed softly as he watched the thing. It seemed to tack away and finally vanished from sight. He continued to stare for many more minutes, but there was nothing bar some humidity mist rising from the ocean’s surface.
“Wasn’t a sail,” he said softly.
But Ben kept looking for the square, while in his stomach he felt the leaden heaviness of longing and homesickness. When he had finished for his day and turned, Ralph was always cruising back and forth behind him. “I thought I saw… nah, nothing.” Ben saluted. “Night, big guy.” And headed for his cave.
Like clockwork every evening, Ben marked off more notches on the cave wall, always carefully keeping track of his calendar. He knew it would take him many weeks, and maybe even months depending on what he faced, to return to his plateau. But he had years to go just yet.
There was time to enjoy his paradise, and over his many years, he had found so few safe havens such as this that he shouldn’t rush to leave it.
There were still dangers here, and from time to time, he spotted two-legged hunters patrolling the tide line. They rarely hung around for long and avoided the water, seeming to know that in those depths things waited that were even more fearsome than they were.
As the sun was going down one evening, Ben felt the change in the air pressure, and noticed the horizon was filled with a wall of clouds, like a dark tsunami bearing down on him.
Storm coming, he thought, and made a mental note to secure his items in the cave, and sleep well back in its depths that night. It meant sucking in more of the pterodon shit, but at least he’d stay dry.
“Hello?” Ben squinted. “What’s that?”
There was something else in the distance. Coming down along the coast and in close to the shoreline, he spotted what looked like a huge fallen tree, just floating. It was hard to make out clearly, and as the sun set, he began to lose sight of it.
“Damn,” he breathed. At first, he thought it might have been the sail again. But, even now, he thought that was his mind playing tricks on a fatigued and lonely mind. He squinted, concentrating. It had to be a tree stump, and he kinda hoped it would float all the way down to him and wash up during the storm — he could certainly work with the wood.
He rubbed his red eyes. “I’d give my left testicle for a good pair of field glasses right now.”
Then it was gone. Ben sighed and moved further back into his cave as the angry clouds swallowed the light.
The storm hit a few hours after dark in an explosion of furious wind and rain. At first, sleep was impossible as the thump of huge waves against the cliffs was like the beat of a titan’s drum. Outside, lightning forked, thunder cracked, and he could only turn his back and pull some of the large leaf fronds he had gathered up over himself to stop the wet wind rushing in at him.
Ben’s body made a small barrier to the storm’s fury and a few of the small pterodons came and nestled in close to him. He almost regretted eating so many of the little guys’ eggs. Almost. And they still stank terribly.
Regardless of the thunderstorm, Ben managed to catch a few hours sleep, and when he woke, it was to the sound of his flying roommates greeting the dawn with their usual squawks and chirrups as they headed out to skim the surface of the ocean with their toothed beaks to catch sprats from the surface, or to go and pick at the lines of debris washed up after the storm.
Ben sat up and rubbed his face, and then pulled his beard flat. He let his hand run down its foot-long length, and then glanced at his knife-tipped spear. He had promised himself he’d scrape the beard away when he set off back to the plateau, and would, even though he didn’t relish the idea of scraping his face with the now chipped and rusting blade of his former hunting knife.
Ben eased forward, keen to see what damage the storm had inflicted on his lagoon, and the first thing he noticed were the tracks on the sand — massive and strange — like someone had beached a boat in the night. The drag marks had to be at least 20 feet wide, and on each side, there were footprints, or rather, claw prints, and each as large as a manhole cover. He’d never seen anything like them.
He crawled further forward until he was at the lip of the cave mouth and rested on his hands and knees following them. They came from the ocean well down the beach, and then whatever it was, was dragged all the way along the sand toward his line of cliffs. The deep gauges finished at his lagoon, where they vanished.
The sun wasn’t fully up, and it was still too dark to make out anything in the water, but he swallowed, feeling a knot begin to form in his stomach.
“Hey, Ralph, did you have any company last night?” Ben asked softly. It looked like some sort of large dinosaur had patrolled the beach in the dark. But as the sand was so churned up, and also many of the tracks obliterated by the downpour, it was hard to determine where the thing eventually went. Or even, if the tracks were leading to or from his lagoon.
Further down along the beach, there was no sign of anything larger than a few pterodons squabbling over something in amongst the weed.
He stared out at the horizon for a few moments, and as the sun rose, he watched the light slowly go from a blush in the distance to creating a golden highway along the vast blue ocean. His lagoon was still in the shadows and remained an inky black. But it looked calm and mostly untroubled by the storm, save for some debris floating within it.