The Rockhounds

Russ squatted over a hole in the ground deep in the backwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was the morning of the Fourth of July, the sun was shining, and life was good. Russ had been spending his Independence Days like this his whole life. As a child, his Summers were spent camping outside with his Dad from the first of June to the end of August. In the Fall, it was deer camp with all the men on his Dad’s side of the family. They’d go up to Escanaba and roll out two big army tents, one for the “barracks” and one for the “mess”. Now, as a grown man in his thirties, he had his dream job, which was building mountain bike trails all across the country. His company had him traveling to remote locales all over the U.S., camping out in the rolling hills of some wooded outpost with a crew, a battalion of earth movers, and literally, blazing new trails in the wilderness. He’d grown quite accustomed to hearing the yipping of coyotes at night, the tickling of mosquitoes in his ears, and even shitting in the woods like a damn bear. He finished up his business with the hole and filled it in with the dirt he’d taken out with his trusty shovel.

He stepped out of the woods and onto a remote beach cuddled up next to Lake Superior. The beach itself was not sand, but countless golf ball sized stones washed ashore over millions of years. Russ looked out to the horizon and at the flat line where the sky met the lake. The sun was doing something spectacular to her today, as if billions of diamonds were floating atop her surface. This was Russ’ favorite body of water in the whole world. There was something about the color that was different from every other lake on the planet. It felt like home. Even though he hadn’t grown up in the U.P., there was always just something that called him back here again and again and again.

Russ’ friends, Boone and Gordo, were waiting patiently on the shore for him to return. Boone was idly picking up stones and swatting them into the water with a stubby piece of driftwood. He was long and lanky, a little taller than Russ, but skinny in the arms and legs and soft in the middle. Boone wasn’t used to roughing it. He’d grown up with a single mother who never took him camping because it freaked her out, and she’d passed that fear onto him. The closest he’d been to outdoor living was staying in a cabin at Fort Wilderness Resort in DisneyWorld, but he was out here trying to have a good time in spite of it. God bless him, thought Russ. This whole trip was Russ’ idea, ‘Let’s go get lost in the U.P. for a few days,’ was how he pitched it to Boone, and though Boone balked at first, with a little prodding he gave in and bought himself a tent, a sleeping bag and an air mattress just so he could come along and spend some quality time with his old pal before their two lives diverged for God knows how long.

Gordo, on the other hand, loved camping, if only for an excuse to buy a bunch of wilderness and survival gadgets. He was sucking on a tube connected to a bladder of water in his backpack and happily grinding some weed up in a grinder. A bluetooth speaker hooked to his belt loop filled the beach with the ripping psychedelic rock of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, which happened to be Russ’ favorite band.

“Turn that shit up!” Russ shouted from the treeline and it made Boone and Gordo both jump a little. “No one out here but us! Make it loud.” Gordo obliged and cranked the volume up as high as it could go.

People called him “Gordo” as a joke. He was actually quite small in stature and frame, but he had a particularly big personality to make up for it. Russ sauntered up to Gordo just as he finished packing the bowl, which he held out to Russ. “Happy Independence Day, my dude,” said Gordo. Russ accepted the pipe with pleasure and took a long pull.

“Freeeeeedom,” he exhaled. Then he passed it back to Gordo, who took a puff of his own, and finally, it was to Boone. They did this for a couple rounds, then Gordo pulled out a black clamshell case that contained all his goodies, reloaded the bowl, and passed it around again.

Boone and Gordo got into one of their deep discussions on the nature of God, the Universe, and everything in between, but Russ felt pretty high and antsy to get going, to do something. He had the urge to move, to walk, to get out of this smoke spot and head North down the beach. Specifically North. He didn’t know why, there was just something pulling him in that direction.

“I think God is a math equation, probably,” said Boone out of nowhere. “I think it’s like just a big math equation that holds the Universe together. Like, unalienable laws of math and physics. The golden ratio. Fibonacci, you know, with the spirals?”

Russ started bouncing impatiently, shifting his weight from his toes to his heels, back and forth. He was doing it unconsciously, but also hyper aware of every muscle in his foot contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing.

“Like what do you mean, unalienable laws?” Gordo said.

Boone prattled on, “Like, the laws of the Universe. The laws of physics. These are unavoidable. That’s what’s holding the Universe together. There are certain rules. Gravity. Maybe gravity is God.”

“Yeah, or maybe God is gravity,” posited Gordo.

“Exactly. It’s all just how things work. It’s one big, giant math equation -- pulling, pushing, holding everything together,” Boone mused, “Magnetic forces controlling the entire Universe and life itself.”

Gordo blew out a long tail of smoke from his mouth, “Probably true,” he said.

Russ tuned them out and looked down at his feet, then at the rocks between his feet. They had been polished smooth as silk by the endless lapping of the lake. The rocks themselves were mostly unremarkable, shades of pink and gray and white granite, pretty common stones to find anywhere in Michigan. Maybe if they got lucky they’d find a stray piece of iron ore, or maybe some green oxidized copper.

He saw a spindly black spider skittering through the stones and honed in on it, the way one does after a few too many hits of the strong stuff. The spider went under a rock and seemed to disappear. Russ flipped the rock over with his toe, and saw something black on the other side. He yanked his foot back, fearing the spider would crawl up his leg, but the black thing wasn’t the spider, it was a shard embedded in the pink granite stone, long and sharp and jet black like obsidian, but slightly translucent. Tourmaline, perhaps? He’d never seen Tourmaline in the wild before, and he wasn’t sure it was native to Michigan. When he touched it, he found it was warm, even though it had been on the dark side of the stone. There was an inner heat to it, as if it were a living thing. Tiny flecks of something shiny inside the crystal were catching the light, just like the lake in all her majesty. Russ was getting lost again just looking at them sparkle.

“Whatcha got there?” asked Boone.

Russ shrugged, caught off guard by the question. “Rock,” was all he managed to answer.

“Yeah. I can tell,” said Boone.

“Don’t know what kind. Pretty, though,” mumbled Russ as the other two stood and stretched their muscles back to life after their long bull session. They gathered around Russ’ open palm and looked into the black crystal embedded in the granite. Russ saw the pupils of their eyes turn into empty pits. Gordo reached out his arm to touch it, and Russ reflexively pulled his arm away as if Gordo’s hand was the head of a rattlesnake.

Gordo’s shock quickly melted into anger, “I wasn’t going to take it. I was just going to touch it,” he said. “Why don’t you just chill out?”

Boone, sensing a confrontation brewing, took his leave, pretending he needed to stretch out a bit more as he scurried away to the shoreline.

Russ stepped closer to Gordo and puffed his chest out. “Well, I don’t remember giving you permission to touch it, so how ‘bout you chill?”

Now Gordo stepped forward. The two were nose to nose, or would have been if Gordo was about six inches taller.

“Hey guys!” Boone called out from the edge of the water. “I found another one!”

Immediately, all animosity was forgotten and Russ raced Gordo to the water to see Boone’s discovery.

Boone’s stone was bigger than Russ’ by half. This stirred up a green envy inside Russ that he did his best to quell. “She’s a beaut’,” Russ bleated.

“It’s warm,” marveled Boone, “is yours warm too?”

“Yeah, sorta,” Russ muttered.

“You didn’t mention anything about that,” Boone said, now turning his crystal over in his hands, examining it closely, getting lost in the sparkles as Russ had.

“Now I’m the only one without one!” Gordo cocked his head down and turned around in frantic circles. “Guys, help me find one!”

Boone wasn’t taking his eyes off the rock in his palm and Russ knew that if he found another black crystal he damn sure wasn’t going to give it to Gordo. It would be going directly in his pocket.

He held his crystal shard up to his face once more. It was just as mesmerizing the second time around. He brought it closer to his face until it touched his lips. It was smooth and warm. He closed his eyes, stuck out his tongue and gave the stone a lick, taking great pleasure in feeling its perfect smoothness against the ultrasensitive surface of his tongue. He was getting lost again. The world around him was becoming as dark and warm and silent as the stone in his hand.

“Aha!” Gordo shouted in triumph. Russ’ eyes shot open in annoyance. Gordo was on all fours, cradling a crystal he could call his own and smiling wide.

Russ looked up from his friend and his sudden annoyance abated. Far off, down the beach, was a black speck that seemed to stick out like a sore thumb against the pink and green and blue of the shoreline.

Russ pointed at the speck, “Whaddya say we go on an adventure, boys?” Boone and Gordo looked up from their precious stones and saw what Russ saw. None of them had to even utter a word of agreement, they just picked up and started walking North to the black speck.

-- - -- - -- - -- - ----- - -- - --- - - - -- - -

They walked for hours. For a while, they talked amongst themselves as they hunted rocks, hooting and hollering after each find, but soon, the chatter dwindled, the excitement wore off, and they became more and more transfixed on their task. The beach spread itself out and so did the boys, wanting their space all to themselves.

The black speck had only appeared to be a few miles away when they first spotted it on the horizon, but they had no idea that the beach would undulate back and forth as wildly as it did. Around every bend, they were discovering secluded coves complete with waterfalls, or sweeping, forested capes with towering white pines, but all that beauty went unnoticed. Their eyes never wandered up from the rocks, except to occasionally scan the horizon for their destination, their precious black speck, and then they would cast their eyes back down to the beach.

They’d been successful in their hunting. The black crystals were becoming more common the further they went, so much so that the boys were running out of space to store them all. Russ, in particular, had stashed away over fifty stones into the pockets of his shorts, which were now sagging down his butt. Thank God he remembered his belt. He’d forgotten it the last time he went camping, which had led to a disastrous self-pantsing in front of a gaggle of pretty girls from the next site over. Someone had taken a picture of the exact moment it happened, but Russ had demanded they delete it from their phone before it ever saw the light of social media, or even a group text.

Russ took off his backpack to pull his phone out of the front pouch, and while he was at it, he dumped a handful of rocks in there for safe keeping. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the screen because they’d been so fried by the light reflecting off the beach. The phone read three o’clock, so that meant… He didn’t know what it meant. He’d forgotten what time they started out. It felt like it had been yesterday.

Gordo had stopped as well to get at his backpack. He placed it on the ground and Russ could see he was carrying a few handfuls of rocks in his t-shirt like it was a basket. He frowned when he opened his main pocket to see that he had no room for the excess rocks in his shirt, and so he took out his little black clamshell case and tossed it on the ground like it was nothing, he didn’t even give it a moment of consideration. Then, he dumped out the contents of his t-shirt into the space left behind.

Similarly, Boone was jettisoning items from his pack. He did it as he walked, one eye on his bag and the other on the ground. He began pulling out items at random and letting them fall: power bars, cans of LaCroix, a beach towel, sunscreen. Suddenly, Russ became painfully aware that he’d neglected to put any sunscreen on before their walk, he could feel the heat radiating off his shoulders and neck and nose. They’d all been torched by the sun, so much that their skin was beginning to match the pink hues of the beach.

Russ looked down at his own pack now, trying to decide what he could lose to make more space for the all-important black crystals. There was a long-sleeve flannel shirt wadded up in the bottom of the big pocket. It had a smoky scent forever clinging to it. It was his lucky camping shirt, which he always forgot to unpack after a trip, and never washed, but was always pleasantly surprised to find wadded in the bottom of his bag when nights got chilly around the campfire. Guess the lucky streak is over for this guy. He took the shirt out of the pack and dropped it on the ground, immediately forgetting it ever existed, and then dumped a handful of rocks into the void left behind.

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More hours passed. More walking. More hunting. The beach was changing again, it was narrowing, and the overwhelming monotony of pink granite was now being disrupted by giant black teeth of basalt. Some were boxy little pedestals spackled with bird shit, others rose thirty to forty feet in the air, replete with little trees growing atop their peaks and shoulders. The way the basalt formed, with little jags and crevices running throughout, made it awfully inviting to climb up their faces, and that’s just what Boone decided to do.

Russ and Gordo didn’t even notice what Boone was doing until he was halfway up the face, limbs stretched out over the black surface of the rock twenty-five feet up.

Gordo’s voice was hoarse and cracking, “Oh shit, you good to be climbing that, bro?” he said with genuine worry. It was the first time Russ had heard him speak in a long time. Such a long stretch of silence was rare for Gordo. Then, suddenly, Gordo seemed to forget all about his friend of ten years, and his concern vanished into mist as he went back to hunting crystals. Russ, who had an intense urge to follow his own rock obsession, fought it off and kept his eyes trained on Boone, who inched himself ever higher.

When Boone came to an outcropping near the top of the rock, he hoisted himself up onto its precarious perch. It was just a sliver of space, enough to put his two feet on and that was it. Boone was pleased as punch to be up there, Russ could see it written on his face, then he found out why as Boone began to shovel armfuls of crystals from the outcropping into his bag.

Russ could see that Boone was getting greedy. All the added weight of the rocks in his bag, combined with the lack of hydration and concentration, and well, Russ could see where this was leading before it happened. He’d been on the jobsite with newbies who liked to push themselves too hard and too long the first day to impress the rest of the crew, only to pass out from heat stroke and exhaustion before the end of their shifts, sometimes it landed them in the ER. The thing that scared Russ the most was that some sick part of him was rooting for it to happen, and when it did, that sick part of him fluttered gleefully in his stomach.

Boone’s foot slipped, it was a bad foothold and there was just too much weight in one spot. He cartwheeled off the side of the rock and went into a freefall. For a split-second, the world became silent, and then that silence was punctured by the crash of Boone’s body making impact with the beach. Gravity is God.

There was a long moment of indecision after Boone fell. Russ and Gordo stood frozen in place. Russ was telling himself it was the shock that was causing him to freeze up, but he knew it wasn’t. People in shock aren’t able to rationalize that they’re in shock, are they? Then, suddenly, Boone drew in a heaving breath and cried out in pain, and that broke the spell.

The other two men sprinted over to where Boone lay. He was all crumpled up. He’d tried to stop his fall with his arms, and as a result, both his wrists were broken and were beginning to swell up like water balloons, with his hands dangling off the ends like rubber gloves. His breathing was labored and sounded wet. He coughed and the corners of his mouth foamed with red spittle. Russ knelt down next to him and put a hand on his chest, not knowing what else to do. He felt Boone’s chest rise and fall rapidly.

A memory flashed in Russ’ head of the first deer he shot when he was just a boy in the woods of Escanaba. He’d missed the heart and hit the poor thing in the guts instead. He, his Dad, and his Grampa followed the blood trail all day and into the night. At the end of the trail they found the deer still alive and thrashing in a shallow pool of its own blood, moaning with every breath just like Boone was now. Russ remembered Grampa slipping a pearl-handled knife from the leather holster on his belt and plunging the blade into the throat of the deer, twisting it, then slashing it down the jugular toward the chest. The cries of pain from the animal became retching gurgles as the blood pumped out of its neck faster than Russ could believe.

“Stay still. Stay still.” Russ repeated, not knowing what else to say to his injured friend.

“Everything hurts. Everything hurts,” Boone moaned. “Except my legs. I can’t feel anything in my legs.” He sounded panicked, “are my legs still there?”

Russ laid his hands softly on Boone’s neck. He could feel the blood pulsing through his jugular vein; it felt warm. “Just stay still, okay?” Russ said calmly, “Just stay still. We’re gonna get you help.” Then Russ looked over at Gordo, who knew it was an empty promise. Russ knew too. They had no earthly way of getting Boone any help. They were miles away from their camp, which was miles away from any road that had a name. Who knew where the nearest hospital was? Who knew where the nearest anything was?

Boone yelped with pain, breaking through Russ’ doom spiraling and bringing his attention back to him. Boone was trying, unsuccessfully, to pick up his fallen crystals with his shattered, useless hands.

“Hey, just lay still, man,” said Russ as he swept the stones away from Boone’s trembling fingers. Boone shot Russ a look of pure hatred then, as if he thought Russ was going to rob him of his prizes while he was at his most vulnerable. Maybe it was post-concussion psychosis, maybe it was the effects of the drugs coursing through his system, or maybe Boone really could read Russ’ mind.

The truth was, Russ did want to snatch those crystals out of Gordo’s hands and pocket them, but he managed to suppress it. There was bigger loot left to plunder, he could sense it. He looked up at the horizon. The black speck was no longer just a speck, but a tall rocky point, fifty feet high and twice as long. It stuck out into Superior like a black spike. There was that pull again, that tugging sensation in his chest. He wanted to go to that point now more than he had ever wanted anything.

He remembered the deer in the woods. After the knife had done its job, and the panic, the cries, and the blood subsided, the deer had just laid its head down to go to sleep forever. Peaceful and still. Forever. And that would happen to Boone too. And that was ok.

Russ didn’t have his knife with him anymore, he’d left it lying on the beach somewhere a long time ago. Boone would have to make it to the afterlife on his own, but he wasn’t about to wait around to see it happen. He had more important things to do.

And so, without another word, Russ rose to his feet and left Boone and Gordo to march onward toward the point. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

-- -- --- -- -- - --- ----- ----- ---- - - -- --- - -- -- -- - - -

The big basalt crags grew larger and more numerous as he pushed on to the point, so too did the glimmering black shards strewn along the beach. Rocks he would have considered priceless treasures just an hour ago were now so commonplace that his eyes were editing them out of his field of vision. Got to focus on the big prize. Though, he didn’t have any concept of what sort of prize he was expecting. He just knew he wanted it.

The point was inaccessible from the beach, unless he felt like climbing a sheer rock face to reach the top, but remembering Boone’s fate, he decided a longer, safer route was best. He saw that the base of the rock began somewhere deep in the forest, so he hiked into the trees to find an easy path to walk up to the top.

The trees that grew around the base of the rock were skeletal and brown, like Christmas trees in March. Their normally soft bristles had turned to barbs and hooks that poked and scratched at Russ’ skin as he brushed by, leaving faint lines on his face and arms and legs.

When he came out of the trees, the light had diminished considerably. He didn’t have his phone anymore, so there was no way to check the time. Instead, he held his fist up to the horizon. The sun was a solid orange disk about half a fist length from the water and dropping fast. He guessed it was 10:30pm, as the sun didn’t set until 11pm in the U.P.

He’d seen many a sunset over the Great Lakes growing up, and there was never a more bittersweet feeling. This was the time when all the heat began to bleed away from the air and the sand, and the grim realities of school and work and life came rushing back all at once.

He broke from his sobering thoughts and realized he was already at the tip of the point looking down at the waves crashing into the talus of boulders that had built up around the base of the rock he stood atop. The wind was whipping up now out of the West, pushing up whitecaps on the lake and blowing his shaggy curls into his eyes. It was when he wiped away the hair from his face that he saw the very rock he stood upon was covered in millions of tiny black crystals.

He sat down the way a child sits in a sandbox and raked his hands through the stones. They were still so warm. In them, he saw a million setting suns over a million Lake Superiors, and even after the sun had dipped below the water, there was still a light glinting off of them, like the eyes of a cat in the night. There was no moon that night, just the starlight. The stones then became the stars, each one a swirling galaxy unto itself, spinning in infinity just for Russ. He could see his other lives, the choices he’d not made, the roads not taken. He lived a hundred lifetimes staring at those rocks, bending his mind around them and through them.

So lost in thought was he, that he could not hear the crunch, crunch, crunch of Gordo sneaking up behind him, carrying not only his pack, but Boone’s as well, and even Boone’s cargo shorts, with their pockets full of stones, tied around his shoulders in a knot. In his hands was a rather ugly but rather large chunk of white granite. When he got to Russ, he lifted it high over his head and brought it down with such a tremendous amount of force that he threw himself off balance and missed his target, only managing to land a glancing blow across Russ’ forehead.

Russ clutched his forehead where the rock had struck him. A large gash had opened up and rivulets of blood came out between his fingers and seeped into his eyes and his mouth. Red pain thumped inside of him. He wiped the blood from his eyes just in time to see Gordo, still woefully off-balance, teetering on the edge of the cliff. Russ knew he could save him if he wished. He could reach out and grab him by the shirt and pull him back from the precipice; even with just one arm, he could do it. But there was a tumor of hate in his heart and it had been growing all day. This was his rock.

Russ reached out and put his hand on Gordo’s chest, then with a flick of his wrist, sent him toppling over the side. Gordo’s scream caught in his throat the moment gravity clenched it’s thick fingers around him and pulled him down to the water frothing below. There was a long sickening silence followed by the loud smack of his friend hitting the water.

Russ had been cliff diving many times. The highest he’d ever jumped was sixty, maybe seventy feet into a flooded limestone quarry in Illinois. Gordo’s fifty foot plummet was survivable. It was likely that when Russ peeked over the edge, he would see Gordo’s head bob up above the surface, spitting water and cursing Russ to the high heavens, but it never happened. Instead, Russ saw a dark shape under the water, a shadow of the friend he once knew, flailing his arms and legs like a turtle trapped on its back. The weight of the rocks were holding him down, but Russ knew Gordo would never let them go. He knew because it’s exactly what he would do. These stones were precious, too precious to ever part with, even if it meant drowning just six feet under the waves.

Russ watched until the shadow stopped moving and then sat right back down and swept his hands over the rocks, trying to fall back into the zen state he’d been in only minutes before, but it would not come. He couldn’t help but think about all those crystals in Gordo’s pockets, only a few feet under the water. Sunken treasure. That thought turned into an itch in his brain that he couldn’t help but scratch.

He swung his feet out over the edge of the cliff and looked down, catching a spell of vertigo when he did. The wind and the waves were as fierce as ever, which only added to the danger of climbing down, but the temptation of all those poor, orphaned crystals was too much for Russ to resist.

At least the cliff face here wasn’t as sheer on this side as it was on the beach. There were little clusters of outcroppings and shoulders that stair-stepped down toward the water. Russ had been bouldering before on the Oregon coast, on basalt very similar to this, but never on anything this tall. Climbing is the same at a hundred feet as it is at ten, he told himself, just make good decisions.

He made his first decision and lowered himself down onto a step that looked the most solid, then it was straight down a ways until a little landing pad where he could sit and stretch his fingers for a bit. This was much harder to do in the dark than he had anticipated, but he was too far now to climb back up, so down it was.

He carefully descended for the next two hours, stopping for rest between sections and choosing his holds with care. Finally, he set his feet on the broad talus of boulders at the foot of the cliff. Here, the waves were as tall as Russ, and when they crashed into the boulders, they soaked Russ to the bone with a frigid spray. Now he was wet and shivering, the night air cutting through him like a knife. He shoved his hands in his pockets, burying them in the warm crystal shards. Just touching them was enough to put him in another place. Suddenly, he wasn’t so cold. Suddenly, he wasn’t so alone. Then, another wave splashed up from the lake and brought him back to cold reality.

He stepped lightly to the edge of the talus and searched the water for Gordo’s final resting place. The chop was too intense to see anything, and even if he could see Gordo, an underwater expedition in these conditions was out of the question. Or was it? Russ thought of all those lonely stones trapped in Gordo’s pockets and Boone’s pack and how warm they must be.

“No!” he shouted, snapping himself back. He would have to wait until morning, when the light came back and the water smoothed out. All he had to do now was survive the rest of the night.

He found an alcove in the rock and tucked himself inside. It was just enough of a shelter to guard him from the wind and the waves. This would have made an excellent smoke spot, he observed, if Gordo were here, and not in a watery grave, he would already be sparking up by now.

He leaned against the rock wall, expecting a bitter chill, but was met instead with a pleasant warmth. There was heat coming from the rock. He let his shoulders relax and let his back mold to the contours of the rock, trying to soak in as much of the resonant heat as possible. Russ turned around and rubbed his cheek up against the basalt. It was as rough as sandpaper, but God, it was warm. With his ear pressed to the rock, he could hear a sound coming from inside. It sounded like a flushing toilet, and then a hollow draining away. He noticed that the rhythms of the sounds matched up with the rhythms of the waves. The rock was hollow, he deduced, and what’s more, there was a way to get inside.

Finding his way into the rock was now his number one purpose in life. It wasn’t just the warmth that was beckoning him inside, but something else, it was the same gravity that had been pulling him along all day. Gravity is God.

He moved out from his shelter in search of a cave. He knew better than to look for a big, yawning opening; caves rarely ever looked like that except for in cartoons. He was looking for something small, a keyhole passage, and based on the flushing sounds, it was likely to be near the waterline.

It was too dark to see details, so he felt along with his hands. The heat from the rock kept his wet fingers from seizing up. He slid his hands up and down the wall, checking every crevice for an opening. All the while, freezing spray from the waves pelted him from every direction.

Then he heard a hollow sucking sound coming from his right and he got down on all fours, straining his ears to listen. There it was again. He pinpointed the source of the sound and crawled toward it until, at last, he found the hole. It was about the size of a drainage culvert, just big enough for a guy his size to squeeze through, but it would be tight. Then came the water. A big wave sloshed into the rocks and shot into the hole, filling it completely. When the water drained out of it, the warm air came rushing out; it felt like a propane heater hitting him right in the face, making his nose red and runny. It was ecstasy.

He waited for the cave to fully empty itself, then he wriggled himself in. The cave was pitch black with no end in sight. The walls were slick with algae, making it hard to get enough of a grip to pull himself forward and he made little progress before the next wave blasted into the tube, rocketing him forward through the blackness. His body scraped against the rock walls and cold water infiltrated through his nose and down his throat. He was flushed out the other side of the tube and deposited in a large stone vault.

Russ spent a long minute vomiting up lake water before rising to his feet. The room was long and narrow, but tall enough for him to stand up in, and it was warm, so warm. There was a meek, dark light emanating from a source at the far end of the room that outlined everything in dim shades of gray. The source of the light was the same as the source of the heat, and the center of the gravity that had been pulling Russ toward it all day.

It was a giant black crystal, twenty feet tall and ten feet wide. It had brought him here. It had tested him with many trials, and now it beckoned Russ to come even closer, to take his final steps in the journey. Russ approached with reverence and awe. His boots crunched on what he thought were stones, but were actually bones. The crystal had brought many to this room before, men and women and children who’d felt the same pull for centuries. Like Russ, they carried pockets full of black shards, the fragments of the rock that had splintered off when it first crashed to Earth eons ago. Like Russ, they didn’t realize this room would become their crypt for all eternity. They did just as Russ was doing now, stepping closer and closer to that magnificent heat, that dark light, forgetting everyone and everything that wasn’t the crystal.

Russ shoved away the piles of desiccated bodies leaning against the face of the crystal so that he could have it all to himself. He laid his gashed forehead against the warm black surface and suddenly it didn’t hurt anymore. Nothing hurt. There was only warmth. There was only darkness. Now he was truly lost.

Then he rolled his face so that his nose touched, and then his lips, and finally, closing his eyes, he stuck out his tongue and gave the stone a lick.