Digging for Monsters

Art by Dulcie Power

The professor walked for many days, making slow progress across seemingly limitless fields of sand, wading against the endless currents of the wind. He walked with purpose and without much interruption, the heat of the day and the cold of the night slowing him only for the amount of time required to change clothes.

By the seventh day, the green of the professor’s hat had disappeared, a constant hail of grit and sand stripping it away, leaving the front bare and grey. His trousers, stitched new only two weeks before, were thinned and fraying. His shirts had survived, due only to heavy rotation, but his shoes, great, big black boots of leather, were showing their age. Fine white sand poured in and out of various gashes and tears. The boots appeared as though alive, breathing with each step across the desert, taking everything in, letting everything out.

The professor’s face was aged beyond any reasonable assumption of his years - sun and stress causing deep lines of something other than sorrow to run across his features like the mountain ranges of old. Buried beneath the dust and the sand, any layman would find the ruins of his face to be improbably handsome. The professor had long since forgotten this about himself, had long since shelved all memories of making girls smile in the small concrete courtyard of his school. He revisited these memories very rarely, only ever stopping by to remember how the girls would run and scream as he held towards them the yellow frogs that spawned in the school’s artificial pond. The girls always came back to him after the initial scare, but he had forgotten that part.

Two sips from the sack would keep him hydrated for the sixteen hours he intended be awake, and as the sun rose ahead of him, the professor took his first of the day, noting from the bag’s display that there would be plenty more sips for the journey back home. He’d arrived at his destination. Or at least, the beginning of his destination. He took five steps forward and found himself stood rather precariously at the edge of an incalculably large basin. To the untrained eye, the basin could easily be written off as just another in the many thousands of sand dunes and plains that the professor had crossed. But the professor’s eyes were not untrained. He lowered himself to the ground and gently lifted his body over the lip of the basin, as if easing himself into a pool. The sand transported him down into the basin, further and further on a steady sloping gradient until he was eventually able to right himself, batting the sand from inside the back of his shirt. He swung a small backpack around by the strap and removed from it a collapsible shovel. He had no idea of the shovel’s exact age, but it was painted in a long-defunct camouflage green, with a faded criss-crossing flag of red, white, and blue. This suggested that it was between three hundred to seven hundred years old. He began to dig.

The professor had grown up hearing many tales of monsters. Some of the monsters were people: men and women who refused to do the right thing, who revelled in doing the wrong. Some of the monsters were elemental: great rains, floods, gods crashing down from the heavens, destroying mountains, sending hurricanes and hail and fire and wrath. But some of the monsters were mythic. These monsters lingered in the dreams of children who didn’t want to wake up, who preferred to live in a world where great and frightening beasts still roamed the earth. Adults spoke quietly to children at night, submitting to their demands for repeated stories of lizards that stood eight-men high. Fish that could swallow a building whole. Bears as large as a bedframe, their fur impenetrable to both bullets and cold. Children listened with tensed fists and wide eyes, and they ached to see these monsters they so feared. The professor was no different from the other children. Indeed, while those other children had eventually grown up, their minds shifting towards attempting to understand the human monsters instead of the mythic, the professor’s ache for the mythical had never left him. On the contrary, it was this ache that drove him. So now here he was, digging for monsters.

Some centuries ago, a long time before the professor was born, the basin had been a lake. He had heard about it from an uncle who spoke with an accent that the professor had struggled to understand as a child. The uncle was large, much larger than any man around these days, and hairy like an animal. His hair fell out of his clothes like hay shoved into a scarecrow, and that hair was bright orange. The professor had been terrified of him as a child but the uncle knew what all uncles know: a scared child loves a scary story. So, every other night, the professor and his siblings would sit around on small stools made of wood and brick and listen as their scary uncle told them stories of a time before the sand. The professor’s favourite story had been that of the dragon. This particular dragon was one of the largest to ever live, as long as fourteen men, and for many years it had ruled the skies, eating, pillaging, and dominating the other dragons. Eventually, the other dragons got tired of the big dragon, and they came together and hatched a plan to kill it, once and for all. So, one day they attacked, surprising the big dragon, ambushing him amongst the clouds. But he was much stronger than the smaller beasts. He fought them off for hours and hours, killing many. But eventually, as all things do, the big dragon grew tired, and its reactions got slower, and the smaller dragons overwhelmed it. The smaller dragons climbed all over it, biting and gnawing and ripping out its dark blue scales. After some time, those smaller dragons managed to completely tear off the big dragon’s wings, sending it plummeting down from above the clouds. The small dragons celebrated, thinking it dead. But the big dragon was not dead. As chance would have it, the dragons had been fighting above one of the largest lakes in the world, and the deep water of this lake is where the big dragon landed, allowing it to survive. Without its wings, the dragon could not again take to the skies to challenge its attackers and reclaim its throne on the horizon, so instead it stayed in the lake, eating fish, and crabs, and whatever else was careless enough to swim out into the dark water. The dragon remained there for thousands of years, rumoured but rarely seen, long after the rest of the dragons became extinct.

In the basin, sweat poured down the professor’s back in a way he hadn’t ever really experienced. It came out hot then cooled quickly in the night air, leaving him damp and shivering as he dug further into the sand. His progress was slow, and he’d turned off his brain so as not to become despondent. The sand was light, and no sooner had it been removed did it yearn to seep back into place. The professor had moved his dig site seven times, each time searching for a flatter part of the basin, somewhere more promising. In the dark, the sand could have been mud, and each hole a grave. After twelve hours of digging, the professor’s body gave up. He threw down the shovel and flopped to the ground, his hands gripping sand behind him, shakily supporting his body, as heavy as it had ever felt. He looked up at the stars, and faintly recalled stories of men visiting them. He laughed at the naivety of his childhood self for believing that possible. As he absent-mindedly ran his hand through the soft sand behind him, his fingers bumped against something solid. His heart fell through his chest and his body was set alight. The stars above appeared to spin, and suddenly everything was possible.

In the dark, the object was difficult to identify. It was about the size of his palm, flat, with several sharp, pointed corners around the edge. One side of the object was smooth and slightly concave, whilst the other was rough to the touch, somewhat weathered. He sat in the shadow of the basin and looked at the shape in his hand, his heart beating in his ears. He held it up to the sky, surveyed the more defined silhouette.
It wasn’t man-made. It couldn’t be.
Looking back to the edge of the bowl into which he’d climbed, he had an idea. It would be lighter beyond the lake. He wouldn’t need to wait until morning to make out the colour.
He set off running towards the edge of the basin, before doubling back and slamming his shovel into the dirt where he had been sat, marking the site for further excavation. Shoving the object into his trouser pocket, he set off again, a smile on his face. Numb with adrenaline, he didn’t feel the blistering cold.

Climbing out of the basin was much more difficult than sliding in. The sand in his boots slowed him considerably, and a tired body couldn’t keep up with a vigorous mind. He stumbled and slipped and dragged himself up the hill. Every time he made five feet of ground, said ground gave way, sending him back three feet. But he persisted. After thirty minutes of struggle, and two tumbles to the bottom, he finally reached the summit of the rise, dragging himself out and onto flat earth, his thin arms using up every last drop of energy. Out on the plain, the light of the stars shone brighter, and above the horizon a full moon dangled helpfully. The professor’s hands were numb as he hurriedly fished through his pocket and retrieved the object. It felt wet from his sweat, so he rubbed it against the leg of his trousers before holding it up, catching the light of the moon across the rougher side. It was dark still, and the professor’s vision was blurry from exertion, but the object shone unmistakably blue in the fragile light of the evening. The object could be a thousand things. It could be the shell of a crab, a home left unoccupied for hundreds of years. It could be a stone, rarely seen amongst the sand, smoothed and blued by time. But it also could be the scale of a dragon. Of the professor’s dragon. And not only did the professor want that to be the truth – he needed it to be the truth.  And so it was.

His blurry eyes became blurrier as tears formed. He stood still, frozen by both the cold of the night and the electricity that ran through his heart and his mind. He stood there and remained still for longer than he had ever remained still before in his life, staring into the blue. He ran through the same stories over and over again in his head, his cheeks wet, before eventually looking up, seeking any clouds that might happen to be lazily trailing above him, not knowing their significance, never understanding their place. The sun was creeping over the sand dunes on the horizon and the sky was glowing brighter than it ever had before. The professor felt dizzy, and as the first rays of the sun began to warm his head, he fell to his knees. Looking down, he saw not blue, but red.

The trousers he’d received two weeks before were worn, frayed, and covered in blood. The professor’s legs were entirely numb from the cold, but as the sun slowly rose, he feared the pain that would arrive when they thawed. Loosening his belt, he pulled down the waistband and found his wound – a deep gash in his inner left thigh. He thought back through the night and recalled falling hard down the slope a number of times as he had attempted to climb it. He traced his fingers over the sharp edges of the dragon scale he held in his hand, remembered how it had been wet when he’d retrieved it from his pocket. He laughed. There was nothing else to do. He felt himself growing fainter by the moment, and a cursory glance towards empty dunes in every direction did nothing but make him laugh harder. There was no escaping this. Instead, the professor chose to spend his last moments admiring the object he held in his hand. The vivid blue of life was undeniable. To him, this wasn’t a rock, or a meteor, or a weapon crafted by some savage of the past. It was a piece of something incredible. Something incredible that had lived, and breathed, and died, here on this earth, here in this basin. He felt more connected to that beast than he did to any human he’d ever met. The dragon would never know about him, of course, but he knew about it, and that knowing alone was strong enough to make this all worth it. He took one last look at the dragon scale before throwing it back over his shoulder into the lake, knowing that the winds and the natural movements of the sand would certainly bury it – this time forever, their interaction its last.

The professor laid back on the sand, feeling the sun on his face, and he made a point to relish the feeling, enjoying the knowledge that his last moments were those of pleasure, something very few were able to achieve. And then, with one final thought locked away in his mind, he passed:

The last man to die to a dragon.