Genesis Lost

GENESIS LOST: Shadow of Time


PROLOGUE: Childhood Remembered


The dead are not near they are here, pondered Daniel Dean of age fourteen. He can recall it now so simply. In a curious way he had sense early that day all the darker things coming soon to pass. Somewhere from the deep crevasses of his consciousness these things existed and they would plot to manifest into physical form. These were malevolent things that would gladly take away his world and install their own.

He recalls that morning being dimly aware that his own subconscious was preparing him for the traumas to come and that his mind had somehow omitted his own memories of the past. Memories that had once vanished were now in preparations to resurface. These were not the thoughts most adolescent males must deal with when awakening, but Dean was not like most. He had awoken from a terrible dream that morning, a dream he could no longer remember. All he had was a feeling, an awful sense of dread and loss.

Though like most his age, the morning thoughts began to fade as the day set in and it became time to play. He readied himself for the day’s journey, anxious to retreat to the solitude of the areas surrounding desert. Rainy days as it was then were the ones Daniel Dean loved the most. At the age of fourteen, the desert can be an exciting and wondrous place. It was a place like this young Deans imagination could run away as fast as his legs could run through the desert. He can reminisce of these days now, not running to or from anything, as he was right where he had wanted to be.

There he was an exotic hunter in Canadian forest or perhaps he was a brave explorer of some elaborate amazon. It was where he was a streetwise archaeologist unearthing dangerous and ghostly creatures to defeat. It was a place where imagination had no boundaries and the proffers of escapism were limited only by the weight of his own truths.

As an only child living in a small desert town in Southern Nevada, this seeming endless field of weeds trees and dirt became his playground. On such a day where the clouds heavy and moist weighing down on the airs promise of rain, young Daniel felt as if he had a heightened awareness of his senses and surroundings. He ran as only the youthful could with seemingly endless endurance. His daydreams blossomed in those unknown spaces between the mind and the eyes.

It was 1944 and his parents had only recently started putting the pieces back together after the economic crash that began to cripple the country in the late 1920’s. By 1929 Daniel had been conceived and what would be dubbed The Great Depression was beginning to truly hit the American people. His parents were no exception.

His parents had very liberal sensibilities and were very open with their child. He was very aware even at a young age of their everyday burdens. Daniels mother, Dorian, had always been able to explain everything so simply that Daniel could always understand her. He quickly learned to accept her truths about life on an almost adult level.

Dorian was an immigrant to America having moved at the age of nineteen from England. She met Johan two years after her move and they were wed shortly thereafter. When Johan met Dorian, he was working two part time jobs and attending college. His goal was to graduate and become a successful physicist, but shortly after meeting Dorian he had found his lover pregnant. A few months later the saw mill he worked at shut down. He married Dorian on a part time wage and on a prayer.

Their prayers would come to be granted as time passed though they had a hard few years to endure first. Daniel would be born into poverty, though he would come to forget all about those years by the time he was eight. What he understood at fourteen was that things had gotten better for his little family. His mother was making money playing in the town Orchestra, though her true musical passion was jazz. His father managed to get a job at a research and development facility for the U.S. Air Force. Things financially leveled out and the presence of comfort and joy entered their lives for the first time.

There was something else making his home life unsettling for him at that time. Something beyond money and security, a problem his adolescent mind could not accept nor understand. His parents loved each other and loved him so he supposed that was enough. Even still their worries had become more elusive and he could sense it. Sensing it was all he could do because these weren’t the types of parents to share their deeper anxieties with their children. The stories of their struggles were known to him, but some things, he reasoned, were private.

His parents had deep fears that he didn’t understand or could he form into anything relevant with his youth’s experience. Those shapeless fears manifested in his subconscious, took root in his imagination. Said fears becoming the imaginary villains in his epic make believe adventures outdoors, unsupervised. The desert was a place where he was free from the burden of his parents and free from the rules of society. He could just play in a timeless wonderland with consequences based only on his own sense of judgment. It was out there that his heroic fictional self could easily defeat his imaginary enemies, villains courtesy of his repressed subconscious. A subconscious trying to heal a young boy far too frail to internalize the truth of the life in which he was really living.

Unaware of any of these physiological concepts, he behaved like any fourteen year old boy would alone at play in the open. Actions that would seem foolish or dangerous by any would be observer save for other young boys. He had constructed a crude machete out of an old pipe he had found. Daniel managed to sharpen its edge enough to break through the branches of trees and whittle objects from the sticks. Building a tiny crass fort out there had been one of his growing ambitions.

Years later Dean would look back on those days fondly, but it was in this desert he learned the true nature of fear. Daniel began to remember the first time he felt real terror out there or anywhere for that matter. He could recall digging a small ditch in which to design his fort. Deep inside the ground digging one day he found himself surrounded by centipedes. It was to him the most traumatic thing imaginable at the time, and he was dimly aware of the damage it had done to him mentally.

The incident with the centipede had been seven years past and on this day he had managed to forget almost everything being lost in his role play world. He was so deep in his own universe he later felt as if he had really gone to some far off fantasy realm. It wasn’t until he noticed how close he was to a construction site that he realized he had completely lost his bearings. He looked around the area which he had discovered and rediscovered hundreds of times. How, he wondered, could he have gotten so lost or never seen the site before? It was possible the site was recently erected but it certainly was nowhere to be found the prior day.

Having none of his surroundings look familiar he had started to feel uneasy. In a hauntingly serendipitous way, he had instantly learned to fear that construction site. In his mind it was scribed that this place was bad. That the deadness he felt in his dream that morning was now in that place before him.

Dean noted that the site was empty of other people, that it was not yet completely gated. The explorer inside him he had been invoking all morning forced his legs to move forward, though his head ached dully and slowly begun to freeze with fear.

He approached the wooden walls the construction men placed to mark the perimeter. There were two sides of the wall and a foot and a half of empty space in between each side. He would have to look between the boards to make sure it was safe, before passing through the gates. In his mind he was crossing the threshold of a strange, forbidden and perhaps magical place.

It was when he looked down into that empty space inside the shifty walls he saw it. An image so degraded and bizarre it burrowed into his brain like a splinter, opening the several mental pathways to his sorted and forgotten memories. What he saw was seven foot tall feline-like creature defiling a weeping man who looked to be dressed as a boy scout. The very same uniform Dean would where to his club meetings and events.

The attacker had a tall and muscular body, with legs and feet that where very much human but his hand were large comically over-sized paws. Its face that of a feline with a long nose and hair atop its head. Hair that was long and knotted like dreadlocks. As the cat-man looked towards Dean, the man being assaulted began to stiffen as if dead. Then the man quickly began to decompose. The beast did not hasten but kept at his victim, smiling at Dean. Its lips that looked of a gross laceration, curled around its mouth bearing its fangs. Dean became utterly paralyzed with terror.

The corpse being defiled began to fall into dusty pieces. The monster stood before Daniel, unclothed completely. To no real surprise to Daniel the feline’s penis looked like a massive veiny centipede. Its legs crudely twitching covered in dripping thick mucus.

This broke Daniels daze instantly, he began to run away as fast as he could move. Dean heard no footsteps but could feel the beast pursuing him. He felt the monster had become the wind itself behind him. Dean wondered if the thing could now float, as if it had become some shapeless nightmare hovering above him, baiting.

The boy had sensed true, the beast had indeed changed forms. He was now being chased by what appeared to be three ghosts. Their bodies looked like thick black smoke pacing through the air, a combination of thick oil and fumes. They each bore floating golden halo’s, though it did not sit atop their heads. The halo’s orbited around their blank faces, where their eyes would be if eyes they had.

They caught up to Daniel quickly, swarming around him and snapping at him. Each time they opened their mouths a mist of blood would burst out revealing dozens of long razor like teeth. Each time it looked as if those razors cut through fresh flesh to break through and create lip slots. Inside their mouths slime and blood slid all the way down into their throats. Dean could smell the stench of decay coming from within them, a scent that somehow reminded him of digesting frost bitten food as a little boy.

Daniel cowered, falling to his knees trembling. He closed his eyes in prayer until bellowing out a massive scream. He laid there for unknown minutes crying, eyes shut, holding himself. When he opened his eyes, surprised he himself hadn’t yet been defiled, he saw that nothing was there. He found he was alone in the desert that was barren a construction site, soaked and covered with sweat and urine.