The Lost City
28 Feb 2022Today’s prompt: “Write a scene set in a different location, using all the details from above.”
The glass and metal dome clangs open with the sound of a metal trash can being bumped into in the night. Gears in some hidden mechanism operating the dome’s hinges yowl like an angry cat. Sentries in towers eye you as you propel yourself through the water into the open dome and through the gate to the hidden city. The sentries hold what look like fantastical sniper rifles, slim and metallic but with ornate nautilus-shell details.
A sound almost like a jackhammer fills your ears. You realize it is the groan of metal cables pulling the sides of the dome back up. The dome closes with a heavy clang, and then there is silence.
Kelp leaves swirl through the Atlantis city streets, like deciduous trees dropping their leaves all at once. A large fish as black as a crow swims through the top leaves of a piece of kelp as large as a tree as though it were perching there. It eyes you warily. Goosebumps raise along your skin.
The silence breaks as you hear laughter echo around you, and suddenly children – some with gills, some with fins growing out of the sides of their heads, each wearing an elaborate white mask encrusted with shells and seaweed – chase each other through the watery streets. They wear slim-fitting dive suits, some with helmets, some without, but in no way could they be confused with your own dive suit. They are slim-fitting, modern-looking, in bright colors. Some of them have cartoon characters of fish on them. They’re reminiscent of Hello Kitty, but aquatic. Hello Fishy?
Out of the corner of your eye, you spy a dogfish shark. You decide to follow the kids.
Most of the buildings you’ve seen until now have been spectacular – glassy towers topped with bulbous domes, twisted spirals of metal mesh, Nautilus-inspired coils that shimmer like mother of pearl. But as you follow the children, they divert into an alley of run-down ancient ruins of brick and stone. You notice what looks like words written onto the walls of some of these ruins in a language you don’t recognize, though it seems like it has some similarities to ancient Sumerian. You pull out your waterproof camera and begin taking pictures, and tell yourself when you catch up to the children – the only people other than the sentries you’ve seen so far – you’ll see if you can communicate with them, and then ask them what the words mean.
The children have gotten far ahead of you at this point. You can no longer hear their laughter. Instead, you hear a sound a little like a woodpecker, a little like an owl hooting, and a little like your old house settling. Is that the dome? The creaks are unearthly. They’d be right at home on a Halloween CD amidst the wolf howls and clanking chains.
You see the dogfish again. It seems to be following you. You hurry to catch up to the children.
Going in the direction you last saw the kids, the structures around you change once more. They’re smaller, but they look lived in, and they’re constructed entirely of amalgamations of coral and shells cemented together. Kelp beds in front of these dwellings appear to be well-groomed. Some of the homes look beautiful, similar shapes and colors of shells working together to create a pleasing, harmonious whole. Others are more of a hodge-podge – random shells thrown together any which-way, looking less structurally sound. It’s in front of one of these hodge-podge houses that you see your first adult in the city proper, cutting down a few overgrown kelp leaves in the yard. Suddenly, this adult Atlantean darts toward you with incredible speed, its large kelp pruners in hand. You can only stand still as the Atlantean barrels toward you and stabs with its pruning shears a mere foot behind you – right into the neck of the dogfish shark, who, despite being much smaller than you, was surging toward you, teeth bared and poisonous spines at the ready. Blood billows out from the dogfish and evaporates into the surrounding water, as if it was washed away with a hose.
“Thank you,” you say into your dive helmet, and then, remembering your surroundings, you sign “Thank you,” hoping that even though ASL was created long after the Atlanteans diverged from the rest of the populace, that the intent will be conveyed. The Atlantean looks perplexed by your signals, but makes a gesture unmistakable in any language: move along.
You follow along your original path, past a home festooned with shells with holes bored into them and attached by string to the rafters. The shells were hung along a rapidly moving current, and they tinkled and clinked against each other sweetly. You move forward for a closer look at the trinkets, when you hear a snap below you. A giant clam the size of a bear trap clamped down on the end of your flipper. Thank goodness it wasn’t around your ankle – it could have broken a bone. You pry the end of your flipper out of the mollusk. You resolve not to swim into anyone else’s front yard. This place is dangerous.
After nearly getting your foot caught, this neighborhood takes on a creepy vibe. What would have been a simple collection of large, pointy shells now looks like the equivalent of a chainsaw collection. Narwhal horns that would have looked ornamental now have you wondering if they could be used as weapons against unwary interlopers. Everything seems sinister.
Get hold of yourself, you think. You’re just jumpy. There’s no cause for alarm.
You keep telling yourself that until you round the corner and see a town square where a diving suit that looks just like your own hangs from a scaffold.
Your heart stops momentarily in your chest. The whole square is filled with silence, but you could swear dozens of eyes are watching you.
And then you hear a giggle, and then a rock launches at your diving helmet, and another, and another. You begin to panic. You envision a rock shattering your face plate like a broken window left by an intruder. Not likely to happen – modern diving helmets don’t use glass. But that doesn’t stop a sharp rock from severing the tubing to your air supply.