THE SINKING SANCTUARY
by William Pauley III
Somewhere on the third floor of the Eighth Block Tower, a pale man stirred inside the darkness. He sat on an unmade bed, frantically flipping through the pages of an oversized book, one that was given to him by a total stranger a few weeks previous, on his birthday, of all days.
It was the only gift he received that day, and although he knew the stranger had no inkling the day was significant in any way, he still thought it was the greatest birthday gift he’d ever received. It was perfect, everything from its ruffled yellowed pages right down to the solid blue leather cover encasing it. The handwritten script hastily scrawled across every page was pure poetry, and not only that, but its aesthetics, the sheer look of it, was an art piece all in itself. He cherished it as if he’d been entrusted with some priceless family heirloom. He accepted the gift, promising the stranger to protect it at all costs. He was told it was no ordinary book, that the words etched inside were important, that they had the power to save him, and the others…all the others...from what he called ‘impending doom.’ He was intrigued, but it wasn’t until later that night, as he read through its many stories, that he truly understood the weight of the task he’d just been assigned.
His fingers ran along the pages, tracing each word as he read, and before long his fingertips had gone numb. There was electricity in the words, actual electricity. He felt it upon his first brush of the page. As he swiped his finger along every sentence, there came a short burst of sparks, flashing bright then immediately fading before his eyes. At once, he felt the urge to share it with others, like a virus hopping from host to host, but there was only the one book, and in order to properly share it, he’d have no choice other than to give it up. That simply wasn’t going to happen. He wouldn’t allow it. It was now his book, and he was its protector.
There was only one solution, as far as he could tell. The book would have to be replicated. But how? He felt the words were too important for paper, for paper was too fragile, too easily destroyed. So fragile, in fact, he wasn’t even sure the book he now held in his hands would last for the entirety of his first read through. The way it flashed and sparked as he read had him believing that even the book itself was hoping to be destroyed, that the fire it produced was meant for its own pages—some strange suicide. With that in mind, he knew the book would have to be replicated soon. There could be no procrastination.
Thankfully, the solution was curled inside a black tin box, resting just under his bed—his tattoo machine. The machine had gotten him through just about every rough patch in his life so far. It provided extra income in the moments where unexpected costs would’ve otherwise left him out on the street. It was always there when he needed it, and there he was, calling upon it once again.
The words of that curious book would soon be embedded in his flesh.
A few weeks later, he was running low on skin.
Every last bit was covered in black ink, except for a couple of exposed patches on his back—the places his tattoo pen couldn’t reach. He’d spent every waking moment carefully etching each letter into his flesh, copying the text word for word, and had no intention of giving up until the entire book was inside him. He was nearly there, at the very end. Only the final story remained.
He was much thinner now than when he started, hewn slim by obsession. He hadn’t eaten anything since his birthday. It didn’t seem to matter. Nothing did, nothing except the book.
As he wiped away excess ink with the bed sheets, he took a moment to examine his work, which proved to be no easy feat, as his entire apartment was nearly wholly swallowed by darkness. His obsession with the book had caused the world to crumble around him, and one of the first casualties came in the form of the electric company shutting off the power to his apartment. He was always a month or so behind on bills, but now with his mind focused elsewhere, too much time had passed between payments. The water had been shut off as well. Probably other conveniences too, but those were the only things he’d noticed.
Thankfully he still had access to both water and electricity when he needed it—electricity from the charged pages of the book and water from the constant rainfall outside his window. He wasn’t sure exactly how long it had been raining, but he was fairly certain it had been coming down throughout the entirety of the tattoo session. The only light in the room came from a solitary candle on his bedside table, and it was nearly burned down to its end. He wasn’t concerned about losing light though, because he had several more stashed inside the table drawer, waiting to be lit. He’d collected them in anticipation of the day he could no longer keep his creditors at bay.
He removed another from the drawer then swiped his fingers along the text, lighting the wick in the flash of sparks produced from the friction. The room instantly became brighter and the man could now see the walls of his bedroom, along with everything contained within those walls. He was surprised to see the floor was covered by about a foot and a half of standing water. He looked up at the ceiling and it too was soaked. Water droplets leaked from it in steady streams throughout the room. The entire time he was sitting on his bed, working, he’d mistakenly thought the sounds of rain were coming from outside the Eighth Block Tower. On any day that had come before his birthday, seeing his flooded apartment would have sent him hurtling into a state of pure panic, but now that he had that book, none of it mattered to him. In a way, the flood even made sense. It was written about inside the pages he was now pushing into his skin. The end was coming soon. He’d have to work faster if he was going to get it all down before water filled the room completely.
He moved the candle closer to the book and skimmed over its pages to find the place he’d left off. The air that filled his nostrils now was thick and warm with the scent of burning wax, and it served as a reminder to not spill the hot wax onto the pages as he read through the text. The light from the candle was almost too bright for reading. He strained to read each passage, squinting his eyes to block out most of the light. He mumbled to himself as he read, his voice becoming a beacon in his dimly lit bedroom, a space wherein the last few weeks he’d heard only three distinct sounds: his own breath, the pattering of the drippings from the ceiling, and the humming of his tattoo pen.
Upon finding his place in the text, he once again took the electric pen into his calloused fingers, then began to look for a spot on his body that was exposed enough to contain the final words of the book. However, before he could get to work, something caught his attention.
There was movement on the other side of the room, a blur at the edge of his peripheral vision. Something had emerged from the water there. He turned his head to get a better look at the thing, and as his eyes focused on it, a shudder of horror, like ice down the back, turned every last arching branch within his nervous system cold.
It was a fish, but not just any fish. It was a large, ancient fish…an angler fish…an ugly fish. It looked older than the world itself. When its gash of a face emerged from the black floodwater, the light radiating from its forehead burst across the room, easily ten times brighter than the light of the candle he now held in his hand. The pale man recognized at once who the creature was. He muttered its name under his breath.
“Old Joe Booth, you scab. Hell’s gift…”
But the thing did not react to his words in any way. Instead, it remained there on the surface of the water, staring coldly, boring holes through the pale man’s ego with its beady, empty eyes, like two gaps in the face—barren, impossibly hollow. The pale man found the longer he stared back at that vacuum of a creature, the weaker he felt, so he wasted no time in breaking free of those nothing eyes to immediately get back to the task at hand. In a loud, booming voice, the pale man read the following passage aloud:
“In the end, the remaining Old Joe Booths…now giants to most, each with glaring white irises burning through otherwise dark eyes and empty faces…”
He stopped reading. Though he was no longer looking at the thing festering in the water at his bedside, he could still feel those empty eyes tracing the lines of his face, feeling very much like hot breath on the back of his neck.
After listening to the sounds of his own fevered breath for several seconds, the man once again looked up at the fish and everything about it was just as hideous and repulsive as before, however there was now movement in the water that wasn’t there initially. It curled around the beast, moving in all the ways water should never move, taking on the form of specific objects and other creatures, as if the water itself was a blob of paint slithering over a black canvas, without a brush, without instruction, just a sentient nightmare blooming hideously in the space between the pale man and Old Joe Booth—both real and unreal, somehow at the same time.
At first, the water just sort of burst before his eyes, like wet fireworks or a web unfurled, however instead of dissipating into the air, as fireworks do, the rolling pockets of liquid remained clung to the air, nebulous, serving only to stir his panicked breath. He threw his hand up into the air, showing the underside of his palm to the creature, as if the gesture alone would somehow make the horrors stop. They did not stop. That’s when he resorted to the only other thing he knew to do, he took the book into his hand and read another passage aloud:
“...broke through the thick sheet of ice that had been molded by the licking waves of the bell black ocean…slowing, but still shifting…along the outer walls of the tower. With thrashing limbs, they pulled themselves from near tombs, up onto the frozen concrete platform…the roof…the well…that too was buried by a thick crust of ice, the frosted waves of violent tides. And the hideous things, five in total, met under black stars and black skies, staggering, drifting, wondering of the frozen earth that surrounded them…”
Though he fought against it the entire time he was reading, the urge to look up from the book to peer into those cold, dead eyes staring back at him eventually became too much to resist. He pulled away, giving into his unsavory urges, and once his eyes left the page, he was surprised to see he was greeted by something else entirely.
There, standing in the middle of his bedroom floor, was an astronaut—fully formed by the floodwater leaking into his apartment. At its feet, bobbing along the surface of the water, was that bloated tumor, Old Joe Booth, just staring its nothing stare, waiting and brooding. The pale man made a conscious effort to keep his eyes off that hideous, gnarled tooth fish, but as much as he tried to resist, he found himself returning to it repeatedly.
