The Community Beneath

[undergrain1]

The grainy, sticky, dark quicksand glimmered in the moonlight, alive, but only with an instinctive awareness. It knew it had needs, but it didn’t know what its purpose was. It did not even know what a purpose was. It only knew it had needs.

Doug was strolling through the woods on a very hot day, and at a distance, he saw a pond, surrounded by a clearing. It was very inviting to plunge in, rinse off the sweat and cool himself off. Doug impulsively headed toward the pond, stripping off his clothes before he even cleared the trees, and running across the open ground.

To Doug’s surprise, his feet bogged down, dragging him to a stop, and then he simply began to descend into the soft, black, sticky soil. In a minute, the mud had reached his waist and continued to rise. He had been in marsh mud before, and was surprised at the warmth of this mud, in contrast to the chill of a typical bog.

At least, he reflected, the last time he’d been in a mud bog, as part of his hobby of sinking into mud, quicksand and the like, the deepest he sank was armpit depth. He would be sure to remember this site, adding it to his normal yearly rounds of sinking adventures.

The mud climbed up his abdomen and then his chest, and covered his breasts and touched his armpits as he held his arms straight out from him.

He wondered why the mud wasn’t cold. A hot spring underground? Small enough or deep enough for the heat to be mostly dissipated, but enough to make the mud almost warm enough to be pleasant. In this site, he could remain for minutes, even hours, without hypothermia.

To Doug’s further surprise, however, the mud did not stop swallowing him at armpit level. It continued to admit his body into its hidden, mysterious depths, and tongues began to cross his shoulders, then closed over to totally cover them as it coated his neck. Doug began to try arm strokes to propel him through the mud, but it clung to him and he only ended up coating his arms with the sticky mud as it rose up his chin.

As far as he knew, he was isolated, with nobody for a couple of miles, but he had to try, and he had little time to do so. He opened his mouth and hollered for help. As the echoes died, he opened his mouth to holler again, but just then the mud rose over his lower lip and poured into his mouth. Doug realized he was a goner. His best-ever discovery of a sinking site, what with its isolation and relative warmth, and he would only get to use it...

...once.

He took a deep breath, constricted by the mud. The ooze covered his nostrils, cutting him off from any more air, then it covered his ears and all he could hear was his fast-beating heart. Then, rising up the bridge of his nose, it covered his eyes, and within seconds, closed up over his head, leaving only his arms and hands which he had stretched upward.

And in seconds, those were covered as well, the surface receding from his reach as he descended into the mysterious depths of the quicksand, fated to become his burial site. He wondered how long it would be before authorities realized he was a missing person. How long before his heirs could enjoy his property, like his three-year-old land rover that he’d bought on his twenty fourth birthday.

The quicksand wasn’t getting any warmer as he sank into its depths. What was the source of its warmth, he wondered, curious inquiry obsessing his mind even as he sank toward certain oblivion.

He gasped out his breath, unable to hold it any longer, hearing it hiss and gurgle upward beyond his reach, and unable to resist the impulse, inhaled, drawing the muck into his nostrils and into his lungs, even as it displaced the air in his ear canals and filled them.

Doug lost consciousness and settled in the quicksand’s depths.

And then the quicksand grains fed.

They were not mere grains of soil. They were organic in nature, acting like soil, but not soil. They were alive, like individual single-celled organisms, like amoebas, living in a community for mutual benefit. An individual one or even a few hundred would die as their warmth ebbed away. But so many of them, more and more with each passing century as they converted the matter of soil into new organisms, retained warmth for years. When another life form, usually a warm-blooded mammal, got caught among them, its warmth helped, the conversion of its mass, turned directly into energy through a very efficient process, would sustain with months’ worth of more energy for warmth.

And further, the unique nucleotide sequences, the processes of an animal’s living tissues reproducing, dividing and transferring oxygen, nourished as well. The carbon dioxide content now trapped in Doug’s blood was happily freed from his blood by the organisms that made up the “quicksand”. Burrowing to reach his veins in his neck and arms, it began to feed off that carbon dioxide, moving into his circulatory system to quickly access that vital gas.

And finally, it harvested the neuronic energy in Doug’s brain. Most mammals that fell into the quicksand had very little, but Doug’s powerful human brain had plenty. The quicksand organisms drew upon it, and as Doug’s body finally ceased to have life signs, the quicksand was revitalized.

And purely on an instinctive level, it reached out to call for more. The call for more people to come and experience the strange draw of a sinking experience...

[PM2K]

Very cool! I like your take on quicksand being a living thing. Nice job!