The Nameless Crocodile
It was in the hazy twilight hours, when the sun had dipped below the horizon and crickets began their evening chorus, that the Keepers led me to the heavy wooden gates of a rock arch in what seemed like sheer cliffs. Silent, all dressed in layered robes of coral hue, the Keepers do not speak, never speak, nor make a sound at all. Only the sound of my own footfalls dully rose with each step, as though I were alone, as though the robed figures, at once human and yet inhuman, strange and uncanny, I saw before me were mere phantasm, a figment of my own mind leading me toward I did not know what for reasons I could not fathom. I couldn’t say how many of them there were—it was not many, I could be certain of that—but any attempt to count them, or search them for detail, or to perceive them as some complete whole, as more than fleeting impression, and it began to slip from my thoughts, like trying to grasp something that turned to water as soon as you closed your hand around it. The gates creaked as they opened, the sharp sound of their old iron hinges ringing, and the Keepers led me forth and into the space beyond the wall.
Beyond the wall was a cavernous space, vast yet sparse. Here just on the other side of the gates was a landing which stretched out a little distance with a path that led to a wooden walkway. On the far side of the enclosure in the low light one could make out another such landing leading to a wooden fence and gate on the lefthand side, what was beyond who could say, and on the righthand side a stone platform, a dais, which overlooked the waters. The waters. The ink-dark waters of a lake which seemed to dominate the whole of the space, lapping gently at little bits of shore on each end and against the rock walls; the ink-dark waters which seemed to be the reason for the place, if reason could be thought an appropriate word. Whether it all—the basin, the walls, the stone dais, all of it—was built by humanity or some ancient forgotten race, like the wooden walkway and fence, or if it were natural, one couldn’t say—for that too seemed impossible to think upon without it slipping from one’s mind before the question could be fully understood—but the waters were key. By the hands of man or God, the waters were key.
We stood a moment on the landing, the Keepers formed around me in a perfect circle. The Keepers began to move, first clockwise, in an elegant, precise motion, circling around me seven times, before reversing and circling counterclockwise the same number. Seven and seven. It meant something, I was sure of it, but what it meant I could not begin to ascertain. Was it a dance? What reason had they for doing so? Why the Keepers did anything seemed an enigma that would remain forever beyond my comprehension, but their every move seemed somehow significant, weighty; nothing they did was without meaning or merely by habit, I was sure of it, and yet that meaning was always out of reach, always just outside the pale of understanding. Seven times, another seven times, and with the last they broke and formed wings along side me; in unison they gestured onward toward the wooden walkway and on across the water.
There was only the familiar plunk of my steps on the wooden boards as we began to cross the walkway; still the Keepers made no sound, not a footstep, not a word, not the rustle of their coral robes as they walked—glided seemingly, their movements obscure, too smooth—and we made our way down the planks. Only the familiar sound of my steps until something began to stir in the water that surrounded us; a large mass or shape which began to form in the distance breaking at the black water’s surface; something which arose from the depths of the lake; something which began to move, neither quickly nor slowly, but with a clear deliberation, toward the walkway. Toward us.
An enormous crocodilian, larger it seemed than even the largest crocodile should be, swam, its massive tale propelling it through the dark water—still neither quickly nor slowly—toward the walkway, its deep green-black body just at the water’s surface, it’s head breaking the crest of the weak waves. Toward us, toward us it swam, closer and closer. The keepers stopped along the wooden walkway and peered out over the water toward the beast; the keepers stopped, and I stopped; the keepers watched, and I watched. Closer, the creature came, its head jutting out of the water, mouth slightly agape, its body pushing ever forward, that powerful tail back and forth in a serpentine motion pushing it ever forward, cutting through the inky blackness of its lake.
Still we stood, perfectly still, as the massive creature approached. It was Death, if it wished. It was Death, if that was its design. Resistance, flight—no, nothing could be entertained—I could not fight, I could not escape, to think of either seemed almost a moral mistake—one might as well defy God. The god of death before us in the dark of the water. What fear there was strangely mixed with a sort of resignation—not an acceptance of the inevitable, should the beast so choose, not the mere sense of being resigned to die if that were to be my fate, but a passivity in the face of all possibility. It wasn’t that there was nothing I could do, should it come to that dread moment—though that were most assuredly true—but that it all been ordained and I was merely a vessel; I was playing the role set for me, acting upon the stage. Here in the face of the beast I was nothing, resigned to being nothing, but this was only the awareness of the beast; for the beast had been with me always. Momentarily, I had grasped the beast, but I could not behold it for long. A clarity unknown before that moment and yet still there was the creeping bemusement, this spell cast over me, as a glamour which hid reality from my mind’s eye. I saw, but I could not continue to see; I grabbed, but I could not hold; and so it slipped away from me. I was not reluctant to accept the truth, I had accepted but then unknowingly become reluctant. It slipped away from me.
The crocodile, a large crocodile but a crocodile it remained, approached and began to pass beneath the wooden walkway on which the Keepers and I stood, its skin like the rocks of a riverbed glistening and wet, just above the lake’s surface, as it crossed below our feet. A part of me wanted to touch it, it was so close, to bend down, reach out and run my hand along the scales of its pebbled back, a part of me wanted. I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to. It passed beneath us and swam a little distance on the other side, slowly, almost lazily, gliding its way through the water, before turning back and passing beneath us again to return from whence it had come. Further away it swam, and further still; in the gathering gloom it became harder and harder to see, before it slipped back beneath the dark mirror of the face of the lake and was gone.
Evening had begun to fall in earnest, the light grew dimmer and dimmer, the sky blacker, and the twilight passed into night. So we continued on, the Keepers and I, continued down the wooden walkway to the far landing with the stone dais on the other side of the lake. When at last we arrived and stepped on to the firm rocky ground, without words, without conscious knowing, I knew what I was to do and we parted company, the Keepers in their coral-hued robes continuing on as always without a sound down the path to the gate in the wooden fence at the far end and beyond, to what who could say? As for me, I felt some compulsion, an urge born of the sense of necessity, and I set out to our right to climb up onto the stone dais which overlooked the lake.
I stood upon the stone dais and looked out, surveying the whole of the known world in that moment in time; above, the full moon and stars lit the scene as brightly or dimly as they might; beneath only the blackness of the water. There was a bed—made and ready, low to the ground—atop the stone near to where I stood and at very first glance a great desire began to overcome me, beckoning me to lie down. And so, there under the open sky of night upon the stone dais at the far side of the lake beyond the wall, I laid down and went to sleep.
Somewhere in the ink-dark water below, the nameless crocodile swam.