Copyright © 2019 Johann Tienhaara
In bathrobe and slippers, Zius battled physics, bailing water out of the basement window sill.
"It's filling up too fast," he complained.
"You could channel Archimedes."
Zius rolled his eyes, threw his bathrobe in the dryer, resigning his assault on fluid mechanics until the deluge ended on Tuesday evening.
The ground was still frozen, but the ice had melted in the torrential downpour, and the basement window was no longer a feeble levee against the onslaught of flowing water. Zius set up fans in the basement to expedite drying, and pulled a sheet of plywood off the unfinished subfloor to see what damage lay beneath.
Under the subfloor, the water had drained, but the drain hole was continually seeping black liquid up from the cement foundation.
The black liquid trickled down the graded cement floor to a crack in the wall at the back of the basement.
Zius called me down so we could puzzle over this steady stream of black liquid, where it might come from, where it might drain to. Our house was built on slate. There wasn't any petroleum deposit around that we knew of. And this liquid didn't look like oil, no garish purple-green rainbow reflections. This was pure black.
"Come, Ennie, love, let's have an adventure together. Let's find where this strange black river flows!"
Zius wouldn't even change out of his bathrobe first. The glint in his eye was part mischief and all excitement. So I followed him, like I always do.
We found no signs of the black liquid in our own yard, but the yard slopes down into an abandoned schoolground. Dusk was beginning to cast dice at our eyes, so Zius -- reluctantly -- agreed to wait until morning to continue our search for the mysterious black stream.
By dawn, the black flow along our basement floor had doubled in width, and the pitch was hiccupping out of the hole.
Zius had bags under his eyes. I don't think he'd slept. But the half-mad gleam in his eyes was still there.
"Let's go!" he said, tugging me by the pyjama top. I forced him to wait for me to caffeinate and change. He waited impatiently to set out in his robe and fuzzy bear claw slippers.
In the abandoned schoolyard, concealed by a thicket of tall grasses, we found the vomitorium from our basement stream. A hole at least a metre across belched black liquid that ran down the hill, through all the mud and patches of crusty snow and tall grasses, into the wood adjacent the schoolyard.
"Zius, before we go any further, you need to have some breakfast," I pleaded. "And change into something decent." I sighed. "At least check your blood sugar. Please?"
But he would have none of it. "Come, Enheduanna!" he cried, and followed the reflectionless stream into the forest.
The flow split around birch and maple, meandered alongside clusters of spruce. We trudged for an hour, crunching frozen brown leaves and splashing mud as we followed the strange liquid. All was silent, but for our steps and breathing, until a voice from our flanks startled us.
"Welcome."
Zius and I turned.
"I am Ashurbanipal. What business have you with my pool?"
He was squat and blockish, thews rippling beneath leather bands. A hardwood stylus, ridged and sharpened like a corkscrew, longer than him, was strapped to his back. Stone knives were veiled by leather, one on each hip. His bare quadriceps were rolling landscapes of power and speed.
"Pool?" I stammered.
"How do I get to the pool?" asked Zius, eyes shining.
Ashurbanipal snorted. His pupils shrank. Threat bloomed in his irises.
"I want --" before he could finish his thought, I gripped Zius's forearm and pulled him with me as I ran.
The leaves and branches stung. I ran, pulling Zius, as though Pan's flute were filling the silence with dread music.
"I want to swim in the pool," Zius panted. His eyes were orbital.
A robust blow, some metres to our left, and I saw the shaft lodged in the trunk of an oak.
"Faster!"
We ran until our hearts hammered us into submission. Sucking air, I turned. Needled and leafless trees, but the strange, belligerent Ashurbanipal was nowhere in sight. I'd lost a contact lens; Zius had lost both slippers, and mud caked his robe.
We rested against a thick trunk, the ground before us slanting down to the black stream. I was thirsty.
After an hour, we moved on, following the black flow. With or without help from my husband, I was determined to drink.
As we searched without hope for water, a woman, topless, the head of a lion strapped over her crotch, drifted ashore in her little sparkling rowboat.
"I am Inanna," she introduced herself, stepping ashore, and pulling the rowboat a half metre up the bank. She walked to us, arm out, palm down.
Zius bent forward and, palm on the back of his head, she pushed him to kneeling.
"Here is your me." From the mouth of the lion, black liquid squirted onto his forehead.
"Zius!" I cried.
Inanna locked eyes with me briefly, nodded, then returned to her rowboat.
"Zius are you alright?"
Black hieroglyphs covered his face. He was gazing down at the stream and Inanna's departing rowboat. His pupils had changed shape, indented at the bottoms. He looked up, and grinned.
"I love you, Ennie."
A rustling above.
High in the branches, a raven, cocking its head to one side, then the other, soundlessly mouthing corvid words.
Ice flowed down my spine.
"Zius, we must run."
"Avaunt!" came a cry from somewhere, as branches snapped and ferns swished before a trampling force. "Avaunt from my pool!"
We ran again, Zius on his naked blue feet.
Zius disappeared last night. Hungry, thirsty, mad, no longer cloaked in the shreds of his tattered bathrobe, he bent down and drank from the black river. Then he scooped up the liquid in his cupped hands, and began smearing it on the leaves of bushes and small trees.
He howled, "I am cephalogod!" and ran off into the wild.
After my husband went mad and disappeared, I continued following the black river. It's about a kilometre wide here, give or take. It must lead somewhere, there must be food and drink, or at least animals or birds I can learn to hunt, if I continue along its course.
There are trees and reeds and grasses everywhere. But no fruit, no animals, no no insects, and no birds, save a single, unspoken raven, whose re-appearance I apprehend in fear.
There must be some kind of ecosystem. This waterless river and this nurtureless forest, fluttering and shushing in the breeze, make no sense. I need a map.
Four times I have tried veering away from the ominous black river, setting out orthogonal to its course. I've walked for a hundred, two hundred, a thousand metres, before turning. And there is the black river, right beside me. It changes its course as I wander. It follows me. I cannot shake this terrible thing.
I caught a glimpse of what I believe was Zius last night. His body was pale, and covered in whorls of black liquid, esoteric sigils all over his skin. They move. The black liquid tattoos shifted and curled and snaked along his wasted muscles, eddying together and fusing, streaming apart into new symbols.
I have still not found water. I will die here if I do not drink the black liquid. The river is close, I can feel its gurgling. In the distance I hear a roar, some kind of unearthly falls as the river -- which is now so wide I cannot see the other side in the dawn light -- crashes over rocks and branches into some deathly pool of insanity.
I saw Zius last night. I am sure of it, even with my contact lenses long since destroyed, and my vision lying to me now in my depletion. It was him.
His ribs were bare. No flesh. His organs, liver and kidneys and coils of gut, dried out and dangling behind him like a demoniac tail.
And on his bare bones, a swirling graph of black: one single, unbroken line, undulating like a waveform on an oscilloscope, strung around him from head to toe.
He was dancing like a mad puppet, and singing about rosemary.
Before him stood Ashurbanipal, conducting his great wooden spear like an oversized baton.
Now I must drink.