The Shore of Ararat

The Shore of Ararat

Dagon opened his tired eyes and saw nothing. Only blackness.

Lightning from the continuous storm flashed, alighting briefly the oval shaped interior of the ship’s steerage. Dagon saw the six other members of his species chosen to board the ship, including Enlil and Nabu, with whom he had the closest bond.

He had children with Nabu, but they weren’t chosen to make the voyage. They were now somewhere at the bottom of this new, supernaturally raging sea.

Sea monkeys.

Dagon’s vision adjusted. He could now see shapes, but nothing more. Down in the underbelly of the ship it was never light, and at night it was difficult to see much of anything.

The ship rocked. Enlil vomited, which fell floorward and joined the rest of the putrid, slimy collection of bio-waste.

Lightning again struck. The ship creaked in the wind as if to at any moment split and sink.

They had been at sea for nearly one hundred and fifty days. Noah was becoming more panicked and paranoid by the week. Whenever he came down to the steerage, which was rare, the torch he carried flickered in the darkness and showed the thick bearded face of a man driven to megalomaniacal insanity; his eyes darting from wall to wooden wall; his long fingernails scratching at his throat and creating cuts and scabs. Blood dribbled continuously down his neck; his Adam’s apple looked like an actual apple.

Dagon knew not where Noah got the light for his torch amidst this raging sea. He also knew not where Noah procured the food he hauled down to each of the groups of animals every day. Perhaps from his God he was always talking about. Dagon feared this god—Noah said it was good to be fearful.

Noah hated chimpanzees. He hated all apes other than humans, but he seemed to despise chimps the most. He considered them a living example delivered from God of how humans are not to behave.

He was afraid of them, too. Dagon knew that.

Dagon, hungry, moved toward Noah’s flickering shadow. He grabbed at the bars of his sea-cell.

“Stay back, beast,” said Noah, darting wildly away from Dagon’s cell to the other side of the room, whereafter he again fell away back into the room’s middle after being startled by a sleeping gorilla lying across the hall near the bars of its own cell.

Dagon made a call at Noah, hoping to communicate his desire for some food, and maybe for a cleaner cell. Noah didn’t receive that message; he instead shrieked, pointing his torch forward toward Dagon. Dagon fell backward into his cell; he was afraid of fire.

* * *

The boat rocked for several more weeks before the storm abruptly abated and the skies cleared, better lighting the steerage. Noah made his rounds more regularly, now more alert but somehow also more paranoid. It was a manic sort of paranoia, though—his gaze shifting from one of elation and excitement immediately into one of anxiety and stress. He was always looking up at the ceiling of the room as if something might at any moment drop down upon him in attack. That was impossible, though—all the animals were still in their cages. Many of them weren’t even alive anymore, having long ago died from starvation or disease or both.

The voyage had to end, eventually.

* * *

Nabu woke Dagon, who sat up from his place sleeping in the filth and looked outward from his cell to Noah with his family trailing examine the state of each animal living in this part of the cyclopean boat.

“What will happen to these beasts?” said Noah’s son, Shem.

“After sacrificing several of them to Yahweh, we will, after the waters recede, release the rest back unto the earth.”

“Why does our God allow such creatures to procreate in this new world? Did he not create the flood to eradicate incurably sinful creatures?”

“God’s will be for us neither to understand nor question.”

Shem, angered, lowered his head, teeth grinding.

After examining the rest of the nonhuman primates in this section of the ship, Noah and Shem together with the rest of their family made to leave the shadowy steerage.

“We will soon make landfall atop the summit of what was once Mount Ararat.”

“We are landing atop the mountain?”

“The mountain is now a shore.”

“Who is piloting the ship?”

“God. We have no need to pilot this ship.”

Shem vexed, they left.

Dagon looked at Nabu. She was sullen. So was Enlil, who now sat cowering in the corner of the cell with several others of the group of chimps.

So they were to be sacrificed…

After having miraculously survived the murderous, planet-destroying flood, he and his family—at least some of them—were to be slaughtered and dismembered, their blood spread circularly around this new home atop the summit of Ararat as if a magical barrier.

Dagon had seen it happen before, when he and the members of his former nomadic band had watched from within the forest as humans made sacrifices.

Sacrifice, it seemed, was essential to the human species of ape.

Those humans didn’t follow Yahweh, though—they existed back in Dagon’s homeland, in Africa, before this strange trance had settled over he and his companions, forcing them to walk hypnotized from their home northward to Egypt and thereafter across the Red Sea and then to Noah.

Those humans in Africa were now buried underwater, as were—as Dagon understood—every other human culture outside of Noah and his family.

Dagon wondered what sort of dark power this Yahweh possessed to enact such a horrific event, and what degree of control Noah had over the situation.

* * *

Dagon, Nabu, Enlil, and the rest of the chimps were drug from their dark home in the ship’s steerage out onto the deck and then by way of narrow gangplank downward atop their new rocky home. Dagon wanted to run but he was bound and there was nowhere to go. This island was small. The storm had abated; what was left remnant were only damp, sharp rocks and pools collected within them. Unbelievably lucky ocean dwelling creatures who had managed to ride the storm surge upward to the top of the mountain somehow had made a new home in the puddles and managed to survive. Dagon saw fish darting around the pool, amazed at their perseverance. Would they, too, be sacrificed? Would they—after having survived these insurmountable odds—now be eaten by Noah and his hungry family?

Dagon was sure they would. He wouldn’t mind eating them, himself.

“What should we do with all of these creatures?” said Shem while leading the chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and other primates down from the ark onto the shore, “What if they grow rebellious? This new island is too small. The beasts could overtake us if they choose.”

“The beasts will not overtake us because Yahweh will not allow them to,” responded Noah, standing atop the ship’s deck with a look of profound accomplishment spread across his wrinkly face.

Noah was right, Dagon could not rebel, though he wanted to.

He wanted freedom for what remained of his band. He couldn’t give them true freedom, though—Yahweh’s curse was too strong.

Dagon held the favor of no supernatural, world-destroying entities.

Noah made a fire.

He and his family sat around it as its flames—standing atop this summit at the height of the planet—crackled further skyward into the dark night, the smoke fusing with fog and dancing off, free, away from the campsite.

Dagon envied the smoke and the fog.

He and his band, along with the groups of other African apes, were tied to planks pulled from the boat and driven loosely, carelessly, into the ground. The planks weren’t sturdy, but still none of the apes could escape.

In the coming days, Noah and his family—forgetting their command to make sacrifice to Yahweh—tried to build a mansion atop Mount Ararat from the remnant boards of their boat, but were unsuccessful.

They inhaled greedily the fish from the pool and thereafter still hungry thoughtlessly slaughtered a gazelle.

It stormed after that.

Not enough to overtake the summit of the mountain—only a small storm, drizzling rain and communicative, divine thunder.

“I have disobeyed Yahweh,” cried Noah, sobbing and kneeling at the shore, his full belly jiggling groundward as the waves overtook his knees as if they were the squishy summit of the last mountain.

“He said he would provide for me and I in my stubbornness refused to listen. I have killed this gazelle, one of his chosen children.”

He and his family nonetheless in the days following ate the rest of the gazelle, and after that several other animals, including birds, fish, and mammals.

Noah tried again to build a house. He failed. He then took to drunkenness, drinking to excess the wine stored aboard the ark.

After stumbling around the circumference of the summit, Noah collapsed and thereafter spent several days lying comatose in the sun, only awakening briefly to eat and drink. His family thought he may die, but eventually he awoke for good, his breath hard and pungent as a fermented swamp:

“Yahweh has spoken to me,” he said, “We must make sacrifice.”

As if magnetized, Dagon stood involuntarily from his place tied to the board. Struggling, he somehow managed to undo his bindings and walk forward to Noah. He put his long hand atop Noah’s well-fed though still fragile shoulder.

Dagon could do nothing. Some invisible force prevented him. He instead wept.

“Good beast,” said Noah. “You, being sinful in nature, will represent the baseness of humanity. Yahweh must take you; he must spill your blood. You, as a symbol of those innumerable unworthy who were drowned. A final, symbolic, washing away of sin—as those now dead beneath the waves have been washed of their sin. You will symbolize the cleansing of the world.”

Noah then dragged toward the central firepit. Dagon tried to struggle and free himself, but he couldn’t. He was confused. Dagon was a chimpanzee; he should be much stronger than this old human. But he was helpless. The demon spirit Yahweh had granted Noah far too much unseen power for Dagon to be capable of fighting back.

Noah kept dragging Dagon across the rocky summit. Dagon’s band looked on from their place leashed by the neck to the weakly implanted board. Yahweh prevented them from helping Dagon.

Yahweh, too, prevented the gorillas from helping, and the bonobos, and all the other animals there present.

Near the firepit sat a raised, flat bed of smooth stone. Laid across the stone was a collection of kindling and also larger branches as if collected for a fire. Dagon wondered how a rock so perfectly symmetrical stood atop what used to be the summit of a great mountain. More of Yahweh’s dark magic, he assumed.

Without effort, Noah lifted Dagon from the ground over his shoulder and thereafter atop the stone. He didn’t bother to tie Dagon down. Dagon tried to move but couldn’t—he was totally powerless, as if paralyzed. Nabu wept distantly, hiding her face. Enlil shrieked, enraged.

Enlil and Dagon shared a great bond. Even though Enlil was next in line in the band’s hierarchy—if Dagon died, he would be the new alpha—his love for Dagon prevented him from coveting power.

Family is more important than greed, more important than power.

“I give you to Yahweh, my son,” said Noah, looking down at Dagon gravely, in ritualistic sobriety.

It started raining. Thunder cracked. Lightning struck the wood atop the stone, setting it ablaze. The flame grew undeterred by the rain, growing ever closer to Dagon, who laid entrapped upon its middle.

From within his cloak Noah removed a blade. He raised it skyward. Lightning again struck, this time homing in on the raised metal rod of Noah’s blade. The electricity traversed the blade and thereafter through Noah’s body—shaking him and frying his hair and beard—before dying in its new home withing the dampening earth.

Noah glared at Dagon, wild-eyed and crazy:

“I make this sacrifice for you, Yahweh!” he shrieked, his mouth agape, his teeth splitting from the remnant crackling electricity.

Looking on from the edge of the boat, Shem turned and gave the rest of the family a look of fearful uncertainty. Noah turned to them, as if feeling spiritually their distrust:

“Look upon this beast!” he said, “If you distrust Yahweh—if like those now drowned you decide to put your faith in the pleasures of this world—this will be you! It will be you upon the stone, and I will not stay the divine hand of Yahweh. I could never hope to attempt such a thing!”

With that, Noah turned and looked one final time down at Dagon. Dagon trembled and closed his eyes. Noah grinned.

He then raised the knife and drove it into Dagon’s chest, piercing his frantically beating heart. After that the flames over took them both, though only Dagon was burned.

Noah emerged unharmed from the flames and turned to acknowledge his family before thereafter tossing the blade aside.

The blade landed not at all far from Enlil and Nabu, though they were incapable of moving to take it.

End