The Crossing. (Chapter Four)

Photo by Sebastiaan Stam from Pexels

That night, after sharing a hearty pot of goatmeat, spinach and sweet potato stew with my old friend Akhona Khumalo and his family, I asked permission to park my rig higher up on the Krans, near the Snakestone cave, where I wanted to set up camp.

AK seemed reluctant to join me, peering long and thoughtfully up at the Krans that stood high above the village.

When we were younger, we had spent many Summer weeks camping and fishing along the coast, and I had never known him to turn down a challenge.

Finally, he stood up from the firepit, stretched and said "You win Mack. Let's go.But we'll have to stay away from the inside of the cave; it's a sacred place."

We wasted no time getting up there and setting up a rough camp of mats and blankets at the lip of the overhanging rock ledge that fringed the deep cave. Below us, we watched the village quietly drift into the night’s warm embrace, as fires and chatter faded and died. Above us, the sky shook out her wide shawl of galactic sentinels, the shining souls of the ancestors watching over their clans and herds.

Over gas-fired mugs of coffee and a few tokes of the powerful local Red Beard, AK and I settled into the comfortable reminiscence of our past shared experiences and the highs and lows of our personal journeys since our last adventures.

AK had struggled to reach his goal that he had outlined to me many years ago, but eventually achieved his Masters in Anthropology at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.

I had moved on to Wits University, through a more privileged path to my degree, although I confessed to AK that study didn't come naturally for me and I had to work harder than most to earn my degree in Archeology.

As a fresh brew started its slow bubbling roil, both of us, as young men detached from political and cultural disparity, began to rediscover each other; we began to unbend, relaxing more into the unfolding years the distance between us had awakened.

Just then, I felt the ground begin to shiver. Not a tremor, not a seismic shock; more like the hair on the back of the earth's neck was rising. The large standing rock at the mouth of the cave, the Snakestone, buried deep into the earth for as many generations as the surrounding hills bore witness, began to resonate with a soft hum. In a breath, the cave behind us was shot through with ripples of sound and light.

For a second, I thought that the local Red Beard had developed some new and frightening psychotropic characteristics, but then all rational thought was shattered and mashed. I felt my bones being shelled and shucked, my skin shaved and pared, the inner core of my consciousness cleaved and fractured. The stars above me crawled down from their beholding and scratched at the dry earth that matted the hills seeped in a dark new light. The moon-burnt clouds sucked in around me, inhaled by the dark cave and impregnating the Snakestone which began to uncoil in the raw dust and thunder of the night’s newly-torn and bloodshot portal.

I looked over at AK; his skin peeling off him, his bones turning to spears thrusting back at me, penetrating the outer layer of my ebbing consciousness. Darkness flooded back into the wide screaming maw of the cave, pouring over the puddles of light the moon had splashed earlier. The pulsing hum of the Snakestone took on a glowing incandescence of its own, then coiled and spat splinters of light into the gullet of the cave. Hunched at the frayed edges of the shifting shadows deep within the cave, a chimera shape emerged from the rock wall which blistered and scabbed behind it. Slowly it rose and loped toward us on long mantis legs, its face an aberrant bedlam of insect and porcine features. As it moved, the Snakestone began to flicker and change colour, its hum shifting pitch as if communicating with the entity. I felt the same shift in frequencies fizzle in my bones, ripening into what I knew was language, without understanding the words.

As the therianthropic nightmare teetered and lurched toward the stone, an image of my best friend, Sebastian Eede, now a leading psychiatrist, bloomed into vision. He was standing at the edge of a high rockface, above a heaving, foaming ocean. Behind him, a small hominid, dirty and terrified, sniffed at the air, like a hungry hyena in the wind.

The Mantis-pig revenant - colossal, brittle, decaying - had reached the Snakestone.

Its giant triangular head rotated on its prothorax as its spindly spiked legs shook under the strain of keeping its pig body upright. It oozed a rasping grunt as it collapsed against the stone, melting into the rock surface in the same way as it had emerged from the cave wall.

I heard my name being called from a great distance. The air around me began to move again, as a cool on-shore breeze was chased out of the forests to the East.

"Yo, Mack!" I turned from the cave mouth to see AK standing behind me, fear etched into his glowing ebony skin, his eyes wide in disbelief. "Yo Mack, what the fuck man?"

I was pouring with sweat and shaking, and was overcome by a heaving nausea. After parking my dinner on the limestone dust at my feet, I began to feel my connection to reality and my balance return.

"What happened?" I asked AK. My voice was raspy, my throat burning, as if I'd been screaming for hours. "You crossed over to the house of dreams," whispered AK. "You triggered the Snakestone and went into a trance."

"How?" I asked, as the images I had seen bared themselves again, and the cold incubus of fear nested in my gut.

"I have no fucking clue man! It's been happening to others in the last few years," said AK. "Which is why I came back here. The people are troubled because this happens very rarely, and only to the most powerful Sangomas when they perform the Ubulawu ritual. Now, it's happening to ordinary people. It happened to my father last month."

As exhausted and shaken as I was, I listened intently as AK began to speak.