Ankh

by Ramsés Dávila-Luna @ The Writer’s Cavern

Deep in the Amazon jungle, Tim Jones and his unlawful mining crew ran into a serious predicament. Their excavators had unearthed a giant obsidian-circled mirror. The thing looked about twenty feet wide and had marbled borders with engravings of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

One of Tim’s childhood friends, David Smite, joined him on the expedition. “There’s a sickness that creeps inside of me the longer I look at it,” David told the group. He furiously struck the mirror with a pickaxe, but it didn’t scratch or break - it absorbed the sounds of each impact. There was a strange stillness to this Vantablack no matter what grotesque technique was used to try and get it to shatter.

David grabbed the sides of his arms and wrists in pain. A sickness had transferred into him with each blow he gave to the mirror. He looked at Tim Jones like a stranger now.

The ground beneath the men suddenly trembled, and the soil sank in above their shoes. Trees and plants close by swayed from side to side as they settled deeper into the soft ground. All the men except Tim Jones ran away from the mirror. The rest dropped their tools behind them as the Earth gently shook and swallowed what they left behind.

Fear wasn’t what held Tim Jones back. Amongst all the commotion, he could hear soft breaths coming out of the mirror. They weren’t the sounds of any normal breath. The breathing was identical to that of Tim’s bedridden child, Jonathan. By this time, the moving dirt underneath Tim had reached his calves, but the breaths coming from the mirror kept reminding him of his sick child and the lung disease that inspired his quest. The men with Tim were there for profit, but he was there to catch a steal that would fund an experimental medical treatment for his only child.

The trembling came to a sudden stop, and the men gathered themselves. They used their hands to claw through the dirt and help Tim’s legs break free. “You hear that breathing sound?” Tim asked. The men all signaled a quiet "no."

The group crept up on what they could make out of the black mirror, which now lay mostly covered by dirt after the tremors. They locked eyes in sheer confusion. With the sun dipping low, they spent their final hours digging their tools from the earth. The machinery would have to wait; night was falling, and that was when the critters came out to play.

Tim Jones collected himself away from the crew. A guilty conscience took hold of him as he looked up at the sky in defeat. “We’ve gotten ourselves out of worse holes. We’ve been mining since we were sixteen. We got this,” David told Tim as he playfully tapped him on the shoulder.

Back at camp, the men retreated into their makeshift tents as the night took over. Insects hummed, and frogs whistled. Other eerie sounds came in and out. From inside his tent, Tim Jones could make out some of the nearby whispers and rumors that David Smite spread about him; David’s words infected the other men and made them lose faith in his gold-mining expertise. But the harsh words didn’t bother Tim, as his mind was somewhere else; his eyes grew heavy as they carried worries about his son’s health back home, and he went into a deep slumber to cope with the exhaustion these feelings brought him.

At sunrise, Tim emerged from his tent and couldn’t find any crew members. He walked back to the construction site and found out the men had propped up the black mirror against a tree. Their eyes became glued to the void. Tim walked up to each of them and tried to move them by force, but they would position themselves back into the same spot they were last standing on to keep looking at the mirror. Tim tried to make out what the men must have been looking at and took a deep gaze into the blackness, but not even his own reflection shot back his way.

One of the men abruptly broke out of their trance and shouted, “You took my gold! You thieves! You slimy bastards! It was all of you!”

One by one, the men shouted obscenities and accusations at each other. Their screams turned to fighting, and they began to attack each other to the death with the tools they held in their hands. Tim stood in disbelief as each man turned into a savage beast that marred and disfigured the other. Heavy blows to the shoulder. Slicing stomachs until their guts spilled out. Gouging their eyes out with hammer strikes. Blood splattered and spilled onto the mirror from the heavy blows of each man. They had branded each other robbers and carried an anger so repulsive and rotten inside of them that they kept striking each other with their tools even as their bodies poured out their last drops of blood.

The breathing sound returned, drawing Tim’s eyes back to the mirror. An image of Tim’s sick son, Jonathan, morphed into the mirror. Jonathan’s lungs slowly rose up and down as he fought for each breath on a hospital bed.

Dead men from Tim’s crew littered the ground. The few who remained crawled on hands and knees, weakly striking at each other as their strength faded away.

“What’s this all about? What do you want from me?” Tim asked the mirror in fright.

A soft breeze swirled around Tim, and the clouds over him began to darken. A black duffel bag slowly funneled itself out of the mirror and dropped onto the ground.

In Jonathan’s voice, the mirror vocalized the following to Tim as he stood frozen: “Take this with you. Your men are mine. Never come back. Put dirt over every part of me and help me go back to sleep. You’re the only person who's ever gazed into me without thinking about yourself, and for that, you live.”

Tim’s legs buckled right from under him, and he crawled his way towards the bag near the mirror. He passed by the lifeless and squirming bodies of his injured men that looked at him as he passed by them.

“Take the bag. Bury me. Leave. Put me back to sleep,” the mirror told Tim one last time.

Tim reached the bag and grabbed it. His legs shot back to life, and he stood up at a snail’s pace. As he positioned himself behind the mirror, David Smite reached his arms out for help on the ground. Tim gave David one last look before pushing the mirror down over him and the rest of the men.

In sheer sadness and pain, Tim used a nearby shovel to cover the mirror in dirt. This time, the breathing didn’t come from the mirror. It came from the men crushed by the mirror that still had life within them.

Droplets of blood lightly rained down from the sky. The ground beneath Tim began to rumble again, and he ran into the forest with the duffel bag in his hand. The storm picked up, and more blood rained out of the sky.

Once he cleared the lower slope, Tim opened the duffel bag to find eight bars of gold resting beneath a note that read, “For your Jonathan.” He zipped it closed, casting a final look at the sprawling jungle behind him. Below, the ground anchoring the mirror imploded completely, allowing a nearby river to rush in and sweep the entire forest away.

Ankh

Ankh

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