id: 409 name: Cast Adrift, Yet here I sit. author: Livid date: 6th June 2021 text len: 20692 views: 234 Cast adrift, yet here I sit. Within this frozen hellscape I have dwelled since our cutter got cast adrift with that miserable nor' easter. My teeth chatter, my bones ache, my fingertips go numb after more than an hour away from the dwindling supplies providing heat aboard our vessel beached atop this forsaken half-frozen island. Woe betide the man who finds my journal, for they may find the scrawl of a half starved or maddened cannibal left to die alone after that devil storm took the first mate overboard in a swell. Try as I may to keep my wits, the numbing chill saps away at mine and remaining members of the crew's sanity. As does this horrible humming from within the ice cave at the islands rear. Eastman, the radio man has been trying to contact help for the better part of two weeks, yet no sign of sail or dieselboat comes, in fact our signal seems to just get lost in some sort of unnatural interference. I think back to the storm when it happened, we had just left the USCG Station in Jonesport, bearing witness to strange lightning, a crackle on the skin accompanying each ominous lightning strike in the distance, whilst we may have left port with a patrol objective and a normal route, the far away storm with it's strange light came anyway, almost chasing us across the horizon. Our duties cut short, caught adrift, and some men even reporting hallucinations during the storm, I myself having witnessed what seemed like a shimmering doorway torn asunder from the fabric of the heaving waves and air in front of our vessel. Seemingly I felt like we were being pulled through that gaping maw of crackling light and electromagnetic interference by some unseen force. I pray that my mind was merely playing tricks on me during a time of stress, and should we be rescued it's simply something for a Coast guard employed psychologist to question me on during an evaluation following our eventual rescue. Alas, I do not think that to be the case, for here we sit, with no actual evidence of chatter, even with the communications equipment we have onboard. RM Eastman described it as a "silent world" outside of where we lay trapped due to any echo of a signal on the air simply being non-existent, not even a remote buzz. Maybe, just maybe we need to explore once again, try fishing once more. Hopefully we did not scare away the seals with all of our inane, modern panicked chatter. This is a scenario more befitting Shackleton, not 21st century mariners. Unlike poor Ernest, we have solar banks on top of our boat, and the cells seem to be holding charge for the time being and cloud cover permitting we can keep the electric reserve heaters running. Engineering and the machinist mates do not feel so confident as to the integrity of the ships superstructure. In some ways I wish we were lucky enough to have one of the few remaining oaken hulled ships left to the coast guard for training simply due to how their hulls could flex properly with the right reinforcement, much like The Terror's could have in-theory at the very least. Night comes & goes once again, I awake from strange dreams of sitting around a fire in a frozen landscape, evergreens catching howling winds accentuating the growing sense of despair carefully emanating from within my gut and slowly spreading, seemingly pulling my limbs taught. In the dream I heard the sounds of stone knives scraping freshly cleaned bones, low mutterings in some language lost to history from the men wearing rags and tarnished copper sitting around low fires and using shaped clay lamps that had to be burning tallow pulled from sea creature or a great beast of sort. Yet here I sit, my mind seemingly casting itself to the four corners of the subconscious and it's forgotten terrors. The cold, the isolation and the ragged nature of the crew must be gnawing away at my rationality for I had never dreamed like that before, it was an alien sensation to feel both like a witness, a visitor and a participant all at the same time. I can feel it on the air, the black months are likely coming soon, while we may have been conserving our batteries, and upon discovering how stranded we were, I ordered careful rationing of fresh rations. Order does not seem to be breaking down, but accidents have increased as cold hands and ice scraping duties have lead to falls and some men have simply disappeared into the night. In response to this I have had to order more watches as our time in this bleak environment stretches on. We have established foot patrols on the ice and on the island proper, as such the crew have confirmed it's size to not be much larger than what the old NAV log listed as the Square Miles for Borden Island. Sometimes our patrols would find gnawed bones poking out of the rocks, signs of what could have been life, or human habitation maybe going back millennia, petroglyphs on hewn stones maybe dating back to a time when the sea levels were not so high. The disappearances of my crew continue throughout the weeks, gone in an instant, some men claiming to see a shambling humanoid form with a bristling maw and gnarled talons pulling them off the deck, or a voice luring them onto the glacier or the icefields during a patrol. A scream cut short by a hairs-breadth and then brutal silence as the nights grow longer and longer. My dreams continues to get more intense as the days get shorter and nights get longer. I feel myself traveling with this ancient tribe of carnivorous, nomadic warriors. They traveled by sea, in a boat the ancient irish would call a coracle or something similar in fashion to a mix between a dugout-type or hide-bound great canoe. They were of pale skin, a mixture of black, red & tow headed warriors, eyes gleaming in the flickering firelight of the cook fires. always scraping bone, always cleaning & tanning suspiciously less and less hairy hides with each subsequent dream. Yet every instance I awake, I find myself drawn to that foreboding, cursed ice cave, hollowed out from the glacier and into the rock, as if frozen in time, some ancient tragedy matching the broken stone tools, split human femurs and evidence of butchered megafauna dotting the landscape based upon the findings of our foot patrols. Why patrol you may ask? Why bother with such things when surely fishing, ensuring fresh water and desalination equipment being maintained is of higher importance. No, keeping the men busy is the only way to avoid mutiny in this frigid open crypt. RM Eastman has no luck, and it has been three months, the rationing that we started from the very outset continues, but the ship's doctor & the supply officers are concerned about the possibility of scurvy running rampant in a crew of mariners from the 21st century. It's preposterous, yet here we find ourselves trapped by the machinations of past sailors troubles. RM Eastman finally had his rotation come up for a patrol, his lot was to provide security for the men on fishing duty. Were he only so lucky, as the twilight dipped down, something pulled him into the water from their position in what could best be described as the sediment-laden remnants of what may have been an estuary when so much of this landscape wasn't covered by lethally cold saltwater in a forgotten past. Whatever took him did so angrily, letting loose a guttural distortion of what was thought to have been a human cry, a pained, agonized sound as described by the men that accompanied him. We have had so many casualties, yet none have fired a shot. Our stores and the ship's armory do not denote any ammunition expenditures. Something is killing us, and has been from the start, yet we have no idea what it was. Butchered in our beds, have starved or pulled away trying to reap a meager harvest of miserable fish but yielding a pittance of what should be possible. The cave dreams keep coming, they get more intense, I smell the "meat" cooking on the fires, hear the grunting of that lost language. The tools and technology in the hands of this tribe that has been reduced to very probably hunting other men in some forgotten vision of what this landscape could have been does not match their clothing, which is closer to something a siberian tribesman might have worn in the 1100s, yet they have jewelry, knives and tools better seen in an exhibit covering the forgotten bronze age steppe north of the black sea. decorated with animal heads the likes of which I have never seen before, horrific beasts seemingly pulled from the mythology of their ancestors, presumably who lives in better times. I feel drawn, and so do so many of the men. Amongst the motifs found on petroglyphs carved into the rock is a monstrous serpent, with half-man/half-beasts kneeling in front of it as if in worship to a god with a name lost to time. My officers were amongst the first to whittle away on limbs from dead pines from the small valley seemingly left unadulterated by the taint of the sea, or driftwood pulled from the brackish, rocky black sand dotting the shore. They began to whittle totems of that monstrous serpent and it's hideous features, as if compelled by an other worldly force. As such and to such a degree I had to physically pull the officer of the day away from his obsessive task, his fingers had been bleeding onto the totem as he carved it from what I soon realized was one of the scraped clean human femurs that we have found amongst the rocks. I set my revulsion aside and took him down to the sickbay, hopefully an attendant will see to his injuries. I yearn for sleep where the world I see in my mind is not that of some hideous cavern, yet I know somehow that deep down it shall only return to me once I venture into the earth through that most forbidding maw of stone and ice, dotted with human remains. One of the ratings had suggested it was a bear, but most of us due to our home states being from north-eastern new england knew very well he was probably thinking of a horror novel at the time, or a TV show half remembered through stress and hunger. Most of us when free from all of our layers and fleece looked like skin and bones. The crew look thinner & thinner with every week that the nights grow longer, what did we do, we normal, and many amongst my crew also godly men to get trapped in this frigid island equivalent to some neolithic man's purgatory. My turn at rotation for a patrol draws near, and the mean allotted to do so with me agreed, we must investigate that hellish cavern, we must find out what lies below, why it draws us, why the petroglyphs approaching it are seemingly more grotesque, more covered in visible sign of devilry, twisted machinations of man-link things breaking through, almost mocking us through the stone. Yet we press on, we must press on, we must avoid mutiny, those of us left anyway, out of a crew of 100 men, we are down to forty-three through accident and attrition these men are near the breaking point. By dawn we ventured out, the sun no longer rose, yet we had demarcated a path and ventured onward towards that cavernous maw, seemingly mocked by each subsequent set of hand-carved petroglyphs and depictions of monsters and halfmen battling one another, fighting, raping, eating everything, themselves in an almost psychopathic revelry of that great serpent carved upon that massive stone near the ice field. It was depicting something close to a renaissance depiction of hell and the apocalypse. Each subsequent stone or rockface leading up to the cavern, even in the light of my headlamp portrayed true terror, sights best left unseen in their mockery of creation. Yet, we still have no idea where our ship was thrown to, aside from a high longitude we don't know where we area, and GPS stopped working right after the storm that brought us here vanished as soon as we were beached. Sometimes when I close my eyes I still see those horrible, yet damningly beautiful lights in the sky from whatever anomaly brought us here, even when standing at the mouth of the cavern to catch my breath. That brief moment of respite before we began our descent chilled me to the bone, I heard that sound, the sound mentioned by one of the survivors from that ill fated patrol. It seemingly echoed out even through the howling wind cresting the ice, whatever it was sounded like it was in agony, with a malice born from great hunger. I feel the burning hatred in that bellow through my bones. That was sign enough for us to begin the walk or possibly climb down. The walls of the ice-cavern section of this gaping maw of stone had patchy points of rock coming up through the floor, some of it dotted with faded rust brown stains likely dating back to a point in time before those who would become charioteer tribes on the eurasian steppe were learning how to domesticate cattle. I could see it on the haggard & drawn faces of my crew, they too felt "small" as we descended, finding ancient remains, evidence of fighting, skeletal remnants of things that could not be human in origin, yet clearly were hominid enough. It was like walking through a museum dedicated to some forgotten evolutionary epoch, seeing the motifs painted or caves on the stone walls gaining greater and greater complexity with it's depictions of battles, and even great cities now lost forever to time. With each step, we did not feel lone, none of us felt like we weren't being watched. A sense of presence, or as if eyes were boring into the backs of our heads was there with each step down into the darkness we went. I had my climbing pickaxe and sidearm, several men had some of the clean, yet somewhat clapped out surplus M16s and M4s that had been alotted to the ships armory in hand, some had their weapons slung or holstered. Slowly yet surely, things began to glint back at us from the light of our headlamps, the bright LED light seemingly glinting off of tarnished copper and bronze displays. It was as if we had stumbled upon a crypt, or even a gateway to somewhere else. "Stop Captain, don't take a step forward" said one of the security officers to my rate in our small formation of six men. I slowly set my foot back down and back up. The security officer slowly leans down and shines a line on a thin line of what seems to be wire stretching between some of the great copper or bronze clad statues dotted around us. Of which, some depicted humanoid creatures in heroic poses, almost herculean. Some in a clear mockery of man, maybe in commemoration of a defeated enemy before the dawn of written history? Slowly begin to walk over the tripwire and begin to proceed past the great statues, seeing a set of cracked ajar ancient doors dotted by depictions of mankind being broken then cast to the four winds by the servants of that great serpent. The details of how grisly some of the violence being depicted could only best be described as "in line with the old testament". Into these cyclopean depths we did descend, past doors adorned with depictions of malicious sin, left ajar by some ancient invader, almost beckoning us into that forgotten blackness. Down we went, first with trepidation, then with the realization that rescue was never coming, our supplies would eventually disappear. And with that, acceptance of the situation that has truly befallen us, thus we descended further. Seeing hewn limbs now long mummified by time, seemingly untouched by water or salt, uncontaminated by time. Evidence of continued fighting, bronze & copper spearheads, axes or otherwise left dotting the floor, some still stuck in the the remains of a mixture of both men and the corpses of these half-beast dedicants of that hideous serpent-god dotting the rocks and motifs. Clearly, a last stand had occurred here long before recorded history. Yet down we went further, consumed by a desire to explore this stone artery into the earth that had been haunting the dreams of the crew since the first week of being trapped here on this hellish frozen island. Going far enough down, my ears popped, we had been going down for ours by now. Sometimes, when we sat still, you could the scrabble or click-clack of talons around a half mile back up this winding tunnel of cyclopean despair, this open tomb. Amongst a hall of the dead, something was hunting us, that much was apparent. I lost my footing heading down some long forgotten stairwell; thankfully I broke nothing upon the landing, but I dislocated my shoulder due to the jarring impact and the attempt to prevent myself from plummeting face first into an abyss now lit up by glowsticks set up along the perimeter of the stairs in fifty-foot intervals going down. Over the next two hours, it was clear we were down two men, the faint cough/gurgle of a scream cut short by talons, or teeth echoing as a faint din further up the tunnel made itself known. This was our deathmarch to at least either confront what had been haunting us sense being tossed adrift, or at least explore and see the unseen before dying of starvation. More and more this looked like what may have been the entrance to possibly an ancient area of habitation from a forgotten epoch of history, when I close my eyes and focus on the blackness of the tunnels, I hear scraping bone, I feel that drum-taught tension in my core stretch outward as if trying to preserve my sanity. Yet, it finally dawned on me, I had been alone for the better part of these past six hours of exploration. My crewmen vanishing into the black either being distracted by treasures forgotten by time or by the temptations or delusions of freedom hitherto unconsidered in this long buried city. I can smell the stink of desiccated, almost petrified flash, that sing-song rasp of scraping bone in my head, seemingly following me deeper into this network of abandoned tunnels and masterfully hewn structures, almost on par with a biblical description of Dis, albeit with the sulfur. Yet the bronze and copper artwork nears that of classical antiquity, or the fineries of scythia and ancient china, just harshly angular, made by hands and minds shaped by some unknowable sense of cruelty & contempt. And as yet, I still cannot determine if this gigantic place was once made by men or by those "things". I wander for a few hours more, stopping at a temple, or what looks like a cross between a mighty temple or what could have been a resplendent palace in a time before troy had it's walls besieged by scheming achaeans. On that last fateful step, some of the stone flooring beneath my feet crumbles, I plummet into the depths with great speed. I hear something break, like a green branch snapping, it's hideously loud, the agony shoots my right leg, I can feel something jutting out. At best I may be able to rig a tourniquet, or use the one I hope I packed into the LBV I had been issued before we left port on that strange day where the sky seemed wrong and the spooks at the station seemed nervous about some unknown thing that was coming. While I staunched the bleeding to the best of abilities, I know I will die down here from infection or worse. I decide to close my eyes, hopefully drift away from the pain, yet there it is, the rasp of scraping bone. I hear that cry again, that bellow of agony, hunger and hatred, it seems so close. I flicker on my headlamp seeing a set of chiseled stone stairs leading up into the glittering vastness of rock above my head. How I did not die from the impact is clearly between god and the lingering ghosts in this gigantic tomb that may have been called home to a forgotten people. Yet I see it, the glow from those eyes mentioned in a report from one of the patrols. God help my surviving crew if they should make it through the coming months with the iron rations we have left, I won't be there to join them. The creature moves with a loping gate, it's head adorned by a mixture of bronze headpieces, hide and bone, only leaving revealed two gleaming red eyes in the blackness and a set of clacking jaws in hideous hungry anticipation. I look around me finally, seeing that I fell into what must have been a body pit or a feeding ground as this society collapsed around it, leaving behind horrific remnants of split and gnawed bone, man and monster alike. Deciding that at best in these few fleeting seconds before whatever this thing was decides to rip my throat out, I should put up a fight: I tear my Glock19 out of it's holster and let rip at the creature, it seemingly dodges a few of the rounds through some unnatural means seeing as I passed my pistol qualifications pretty soundly. Before I put the muzzle under my chin and pray for forgiveness for the act, I realized that I truly had been cast adrift, yet here I sit.