Noah's journey to the other side was now complete.  He cowered on the dark sand of this unknown shore, spent and drained, vomiting and spitting brackish ocean water, his thirst consuming him now as the lapping sea at his feet taunted.  As he came to his senses he saw that he had actually arrived exactly where he had intended to go and that the sand was dark because it lay almost entirely in the shade-shadow of Purgatory Chasm.  The only light at the moment came from the thin lip of the crescent moon waxing across the mere 40-foot-width of sky between the chasm's two towering cliff faces opposing each other above his head.  Turning he could also see the water wave back out of the giant cut in the rock behind him and disappear into the darkness of a night on the Atlantic.

Only he knew now that it wasn't the Atlantic anymore.  He had set sail from the beach in Rhode Island but the old man's words - the incantation spoken from shore by the enchanted fisherman - had sent up the waves and wind and had blown him here to the place he had, of course, wanted to go--the place he knew his father must be waiting for Noah to come find him.

As he looked around he became aware of a change in his vision.  Only a part of the sky and the sea had been visible because of the walls of the chasm, but glancing around he realized now that he had in fact lost all his peripheral vision entirely--it was as if the walls of the chasm blocked his eyes, left and right, no matter where he looked.  The feeling was disorienting especially there in a strange place, when he didn't know what or who lurked behind the rocks or even under the tide.  But it also had the effect of focusing his sight on one swath of the beach at a time.  And he found, after walking some distance deeper into the chasm, higher up on the sand and along to the geometric center-line of the cut into the cliff, that the moonlight seemed to form a lighted path on the sand as the erosion narrowed.  He walked along it but it appeared to be fading by the second.  He looked up and saw that the moon has crossed the thin slice of sky and was set to disappear behind one of the walls.  He began to run now in the darkness and it became almost a desperate flail because he could no longer see the sand under his feet, only the ever fading line.


He lurched suddenly forward and flew off his feet, briefly through the air and finally head first into the coarse sand.  He spat and scraped the grains, with the backs of his hands, from his eyes.  He cleared his vision long enough to watch the lighted 'shadow' of a silhouetted hand slowly vanish from the sand directly in front of him. 


He was plunged into the darkest darkness he had ever experienced as the moon-sliver disappeared overhead.  A hopelessness overwhelmed him.  He thought of his mother, and his sister.  He thought too of his father lost at sea, long before he had ever really known him, and now lost here somewhere in the darkness.  Before he knew what he was doing he was clawing at the sand in front of him, where he thought in his memory the image of the hand lay, almost projected by the moon, onto the sand.  He was digging, searching.  It was all he could do, all he had left to do.  What was he thinking coming here to this strange land?  Following after his father into the darkness?  His father was a legend.  What was he, a boy, a nothing, a half-man?  If this weird place had conquered his father's will with the help of all the enchanted creatures of the deep what hope did he have? 


His hand fell upon a metal object that was warm under the cold sand.  The object had curves and points and it had heft, made of metal bars pointing in multiple directions.  He dug it out of the sand and lifted it out of the hole.  It began to glow returning light to the cavern around him.  In that moment his vision was restored and he could even see 360-degrees around him at once.  The walls and beach glowed yellow then red and a warm breeze blew up and enveloped him like a blanket.  He began to see visions playing across the walls of the chasm.  Visions he had a hard time organizing at first but then they coalesced into home movies almost, but as clear and as real as if the people and places were brought forward to him. 


He saw his parents young again.  They were dancing on the beach.  His father, dark haired and muscular, his mother a vision, beautiful and exotic.  Then he was with them as a child but from a time before he could remember, and then his sister was there too, and for an instant they were together as a family once more.


Then he saw the events he knew only from local legend--of his father racing to the beach to save a whale caught in the shallows.  He watched as his father ran down the beach and dove into the ocean, swimming out beyond the whale and miraculously coaxing the great beast to follow him out the sea.  He saw his mother walking the shore line scanning for some sign of her lost husband and he saw her dreams where she herself drowned and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.  


Time went fast forward now, he saw himself aging rapidly, growing beyond his father's oldest years, his own hair graying, his beard lenghtening.  He saw his body shrivel and shrink and gasp for breath.  He then yelled involuntarily.


"Noooooooooooo!!!!"


And the light and visions vanished.  He was left with only the metal object in his hand.  He knew now it was a small metal anchor.  The breeze died down and slowly the warmth seeped away.  But he heard a voice, softly whispering in the wisps of sand, that he knew to be his father's, older, injured...in peril.


"May you be safe from every harm."


It was more than a wish.  It felt as if it had the power of a spell.  The darkness fell full and cold once again.  And Noah heard a stirring from all around him.  They were coming for him now.  He had awakened all the beasts of the land and sea, and they were angry.