A Lost Sun

A LOST SUN
Dominic E. Lacasse

  God created a male and female Leviathan, then killed the female and salted it for the righteous, for if the Leviathans were to procreate the world could not stand before them.
-Rashi, Commentary on Genesis 1:21

   June eighth, 2007. This was the day we lost the sun.

   I grew up by the ocean. The sea was a huge part of the life of my small Maine town. Everyone worked at the fish plant, or on the boats, or in the marina where all the boats were hauled and launched and painted and scraped. Everyone had something to do with the ocean; that was what it meant to live where I lived.

   However, despite living immediately next to the surging grey waters all my life, I gave little thought to their mysteries. I remember hearing that we know more about outer space than we do our own oceans. After June eighth, I am inclined to believe this to be true. The depths of the sea keep many things hidden, things which perhaps we were not meant to see, things which remain hidden for a reason.

   I once read about an event known as “the Bloop.” This was a sound recorded by an undersea microphone. It was perplexing to scientists because it carried the audio signature of a living creature, but was so immensely loud that if it was living, it must have been several times larger than even a blue whale. No creature of this size is known to exist- or indeed to have ever existed at any point in the world’s history. This sound was recorded once, and once only. It was heard twice. Once by a microphone bobbing in a hard plastic cage hanging from a buoy somewhere in the Pacific, and once by the residents of my town. That was June eighth, the day we lost the sun. Now, nothing makes sense. If a thing like the thing that came among us on that day can exist, then the world is not a place of logic. Every day I wonder if I’ve gone insane.

   On the morning of the eighth I was heading to school, making my way down Lower Water street, just above the breakwater that formed the borders of humanity. It was an unusually calm day, as I recall. The town was just waking up. All around me I heard the sounds of a new day, saw my neighbors bearing the kind of placid happiness that one only feels on a chilly morning by the sea. The sun was rising through a hazy fog over the bay.

   I don’t know if I was the first to see it. I was gazing out to sea, hoping to see a whale, or perhaps an osprey or eagle soaring over the water. What I saw was an immense darkness, a shadow bigger than a house. At first I thought it was some kind of illusion, but it neither faded nor slipped away. Rather, it was moving toward shore with sleek and elegant bursts of motion. Before it rose a crest like I’d only seen ships make, and behind it a wake that was turning the entire bay from still water to a slowly churning bed of blue-gray.

   By now others had seen the shadow. We simply stood and watched it. Nobody said anything to anyone. It was as though we understood our inability to comprehend whatever this was with words. We were silenced by the immensity of what was happening, though we did not as yet understand anything about it. Of course, we still don’t.

   The shadow slowed and stopped about a hundred feet from shore. The silence was deafening, every eye focused on the mysterious darkness that now lay motionless, blackening nearly half the bay with its immensity.

   And then, in one swift motion, the creature lunged from the water. Massive sprays of water seemed to hold glitteringly motionless in the sky as the great beast rose, higher than the houses on the waterfront, higher than the church steeple. Its great shadow covered block after block of our city as the creature finally reached its full height and seemed to settle on the sea floor.

   We were looking at a creature fully two hundred feet tall if it was an inch. The very act of its standing displaced enough water to briefly ground some of the boats on the waterfront. Its head was oar-shaped and massive, the water spilling from its sides back into the bay a roaring thunder. Below the head we could see only two massive limbs, as wide as redwood trees. Strange parasites, creatures the size of men that seemed to be all mouth, clung desperately to the creature’s flanks, so tiny in proportion that they seemed to go unnoticed. On either side of the creature’s immense head were its eyes, immense black orbs, at least twenty feet in diameter, glittering with an obvious intelligence which made the creature even more terrifying.

   We stood dumbfounded, to scared even to scream or flee. For a silent moment the creature regarded us with apparent curiosity. We simply stared back, unable to think. There we stood, human and leviathan, there we stood silent and waiting.

   And then the creature sounded its call. A minor note like the trumpeting of some unreal instrument of war blasted through our town in a cavalry charge of sound. Trees on the waterfront were broken clean from their trunks by the fury of the leviathan’s cry. A crescendo of breaking glass signaled the shattering of every window for half a mile. All who watched were thrown to the ground, the sheer force of the noise knocking us backwards several feet and sending us tumbling. Suddenly a large field of grass above Lower Water street burst violently into a maelstrom of flame. All who stood there were immediately incinerated as a vast tower of fire reached into the heavens. The note and the fire sustained and grew louder for several seconds before both suddenly vanished into the morning air. The monster stared silently.

   At last fear gave way to panic. We still could not think after what we had witnessed. We stampeded like cattle from the behemoth that had cursed us with his presence. I ran too, passing old women with broken bones sobbing in the street, passing a brother and sister clinging to each other and wailing with fear. I saw the men running up from the waterfront. Those who had been close to the monster looked like the retreating survivors of some hideous battle, with blood pouring from their ears down the sides of their faces. All was dust and smoke and glass and gravel and fear.

   As we ran the beast slowly turned and began to stride out to sea, crushing boats and raising great clouds of water until it at last slipped under the waves and was gone, as though it had never been.

   Soon we stopped running. We could no longer go on. The shock of what had happened sapped the energy from us and left us panting in the streets. I could just barely hear the sounds of the people around me, the cadence of running feet, the unnatural scream of car alarms, the too-natural wails of the injured and the frightened and the insane. And then a crack. There was a hollow, wooden cracking noise which seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth itself. And then another. The sound of cracking wood, as though some great giant was breaking a tree over his knee, crescendoed and filled the town. The screaming and wailing matched the rise in volume as we awaited with horrified certainty the next abomination to descend.

   In the field of ash above Lower Water street, a massive tree sprang from the ground. Slowly it rose into the sky, its trunk seeming to spiral larger and larger as it rose higher and higher, higher than the tallest buildings in town, taller even than the monster itself. Its branches spread like the arms of death, like a plague, and on them grew malformed leaves of black. The tree grew and grew, its boughs reaching out to cover the entire town, its leaves growing in dense thickets, bristling and dark. Slowly the leaves took over the sky, turning the grey sky black from one end of town to the other, closing us in, executing the final curse, blotting out the sun. In darkness now, we again fell silent. I listened to my own breathing and stared ahead and saw nothing. That day, we lost the sun.

   We would eventually find that the tree could not be cut by any blade we tried on it. Even when, in our desperation, we took the town’s stock of blasting dynamite and detonated it at the base of the great horror, the tree remained unscathed. We found that the branches bowed down to the ground in a wide perimeter around the city, the boughs hemming in on themselves in an unholy wall stronger than the most secure prison. We did not need to learn these things to know that we were trapped by something that could never be destroyed. We knew that as soon as we first saw the profane thing break from the roots of the earth. We investigated merely out of a sense of propriety. At the end of the day, when our knowledge was confirmed, none were surprised. We simply went home, exhausted, and sat quietly in the darkness.

   June eighth was now four months ago. The darkness has never once abated, nor have we ever managed to contact the world outside. I have my doubts that the world outside even knows. Quite likely for them there is no tree, there is nothing but a ghost town. We have lost the sun and perhaps we are all dead.

   From the ground enriched by ashes,
   Newly raked by water-maidens;
   Spread the oak-tree's many branches,
   Rounds itself a broad corona,
   Raises it above the storm-clouds;
   Far it stretches out its branches,
   Stops the white-clouds in their courses,
   With its branches hides the sunlight,
   With its many leaves, the moonbeams,
   And the starlight dies in heaven.

-The Kalevela