The Mountain Mocks

Noah had been trudging his way over these damn sludgy hills for days now, searching through small town after small town with little reward. He felt his stomach twist and his throat dry up as he made his way to the next spot marked on the map. From atop the side of the great mountain on which he stood, he could see the great hills and peaks roll on for miles and miles more. If not for his awe of such a view, he’d lose motivation in feeling the distance ahead. There was a buzzing energy in the mountain forest air building rapidly. Shortly after he had observed this, a great flash could be seen and rumble heard in the distance. Whatever storm was brewing, it seemed it had been following him through the last town up into the woods through which he now dragged himself. Soon it would begin to rain and Noah, already exhausted, filthy, and further fatigued by the altitude, would need to be under a roof soon or he’d catch a nasty cold again.

Fortunately, coming down an old trail on a relatively nearby hill, Noah had made his way into a small village, round and flat-tiered levels going up and down and centered by a road only large enough to have inhabited one or two cars at a time. At the top of the hill where the road ended and the trail branched off, there was a medium-sized cabin with a steep roof that stretched from the summit of the house all the way to the ground. Making his way to the cabin, a soft hush filled the forest before the first drops of rain fell upon his head.

Under the porch he stood a moment, inspecting the gray skies before him and the bullet-sized droplets falling from them. A gloomy sight, he thought. But yet there’s always been something soothing about a thunderstorm. Maybe it was the raw power of the storm that fascinated him, maybe it was the soft sounds the rain made that contrasted to the great crackling of thunder that seemed so contradictory but complementary to one another.

He turned the sticky knob on the door and shoved until it nearly broke off its rusted hinges. As he appeared in the house, the beams and floor above him settled lightly for a few moments. The turning of the structure above followed by falling trails of dust made Noah apprehensive to enter for a moment, though he doubted anywhere else in the vicinity would be much better. To his left was a short wall with a rectangular shaped collection of papers hanging by a small nail. The small squares labeled in numerical order were crossed off with large X’s up to the square labeled with the number twenty-one. In large block letters, Noah could read “December, 2047”. On either side of the print were portrayals of small children with scarves, hats, and gloves, rolling a large sphere of a white material lying on the ground below them and stacking them on one even larger sphere.

Taking a few steps forward, Noah dropped his pack upon the counter top of the small, rectangular kitchen. On the walls surrounding the kitchen were empty racks and half-open cupboards, and on the floor lay two small rugs, both nearly half-flipped, worn, and out of line. Just about every other foot of the bottom of the wall there was a mouse hole or cavity of some kind. Next in sight was a small circular table with a cloth over it, covered side to side in small cards with odd shapes and numbers on them. Some were in a small row before the side’s respective chairs, some looked to have been tossed aside into uneven piles. Against the wall were a short stack of boxes with tacky bubble letters printed on them, one with a picture of a man in a strange hat with a big mustache, and one with images of candies and treats and strange characters.

Noah plopped right down on the sofa of the cold, deadly silent living room. He stretched out his back and arms and laid on his side toward an ancient television and and an incredibly small fireplace. Unfortunately, all wood that once lay next to that fireplace was all but too rotten to light and warm the room once again. After taking a few minutes to relax his legs, he erected himself once more and decided to examine the cabin further.

Up the creaky stairs he made his way, and at the top he faced one large and two small beds. In the corner by a large, ravaged dresser lay a large pile of clothing. He looked through the rest of the dresser, though there was nothing but more socks and children’s garments.He turned to find a large wooden door with a dusty brass handle, still left slightly ajar. Noah opened it to reveal a walk-in closet with clothes strewn about with books and magazines scattered across the left side. There wasn’t much light but with the door open and the curtain aside, he could make most things out. On one side lay what would seem to be adult clothing, some far too large for Noah’s frame and others far too small. On the other side were small bright-colored shirts with prints of creatures and trucks on them. But what stood out to his eye wasn’t the clothes, but in a slightly less cluttered corner of the closet was a leather-bound.

Noah seized the book from the closet. Whatever this book was, it had almost stared back at him with invisible eyes. Lightning stuck on a distant mountain, flashing chilled light through the cracked bedroom window. Soon, the small zipper keeping the book closed was unfastened by hasty hands, and it took only a moment for Noah to recognize that this wasn’t a book, but instead an collection of photos. A small leather album of photos left behind by whatever family had previously inhabited it, forgotten in a time of panic. The thunder of the previous bolt had now traveled to the home, causing a small creak of settling in the floor below him and roof above him. His heart contorted and stomach flew into his chest and back down into his gut. The small, fragile paper held a photo shielded by a small layer of plastic of a larger-framed man and a much smaller woman with a young boy in her arms and a younger girl climbing upon his shoulders. A heartwarming photo, yet there was a bitter sweetness to Noah holding it. This family left in such a hurry to escape something, and in such chaos, they forgot something so dear. And now, it lay in the hands of Noah, a young man of more than fifteen years and less than twenty, god knows how many years after they existed. What became of them?

Once, when Noah was little, his grandfather would tell him of such wonderful and impossible things. Food was grown from the ground and stores would constantly restock each shelf. Children would go out when it was below freezing temperatures, laughing and screaming, and playing games with the great cold that fell from the sky. There were machines that would keep your home at the precise temperature you desired, be it hot or cold. Things were much different once. But one day, he said, the time came to an end that the people of the world could maintain such a utopia. The flaws of man had much too quickly been revealed to those left to realize them. Much closer this time, a bolt of lightning struck an adjacent mountain, leaving Noah’s mind blank before he heard the anticipated boom, at which point his mind exploded back into thought. His grandfather would speak for long hours about what the world once was. Then, he’d stop for what seemed to be a few minutes, shaking his head slowly only to move it mere inches per second. Old, blinded eyes would stare into a horizon that Noah couldn’t see. The deafening silence would force Noah to snap and get his grandfather’s attention once more.

How long, Noah had asked himself, had they lasted once they left? His grandfather told him that his family had been one of the few to survive the Awakening, and that it was his duty to one day find the others. This family panicked, though. This family grabbed arbitrary items from their homes, took armfuls of clothes, and left. He wondered what ended them first.

“Was it famine? Sickness? Maybe they were overpowered by another desperate family? Perhaps somewhere out there, one of their own lives past them.”.

Turning the page, something else took his attention to one of the photos of the third page. It was the same family, but all in odd outfits and standing in a lake. Behind the family was an enormous, unending pool of blue, liquid crystal-like water reflecting yet another odd image: a great line of trees covered in a deep green fuzzy growth at every angle and side. He turned to his right to see all around the cabin: a sea of trees going for miles, but not one with such a thing growing upon them. He remembered his grandfather telling him of how a walk in the woods was once a wonder for the mind, and how now it was a wonder one didn’t go mad surrounded by the dull, cancerous spines of the Earth. It truly was a wonder. Seeing not one color but grey and light brown for miles while looking down empty rows of wooden pikes that create frustrating illusions.

Eventually, a deep-reaching burn had begun to rush up and down Noah’s very core. It was a strange emotion taking him from the inside, though he couldn’t simply identify what it was he was feeling. Was it fury, sadness? Perhaps it was a feeling of longing for something that never was. Rain pounded the roof above him relentlessly now. The water crept in through the crack in the window and trickled down to the sill.

All that lay outside his window in the great big world now before him were trees that would one day fall in the wind, rain that burns the esophagus, and a perpetual gray fog over the land that wouldn’t dissipate for long after Noah was no longer walking the Earth.

The album flew from Noah’s hand into the wall of the closet from whence it came with great force. He stepped down from the room and back into the living room where he noticed, by the staircase and in a corner he had not yet discovered: a bookshelf. Noah learned how to read when he was a boy, but never had he the chance to read more than signs on the roads he walked or the odd flyers at markets he searched. He once read much of the bible as instructed by his father and grandfather when he was maybe only seven or eight and a small book of poetry he read nearly every night as a boy. No matter where he was Noah kept that book in his inner breast pocket on the left side. That was long ago, before he buried the book with his father.

From the grand shelf before him, he pulled a book to which his hand gravitated. The settled dust had concealed the title on the spine. It was revealed to be a book titled “Paradise Lost” by John Milton. On the cover was an image of a pale, clothless woman with long hair picking from a tree aside a narrow, legless, armless creature gazing upon her. There were several small light-yellow tabs sticking out from the top of the book. Flipping through the old, wrinkled and smudged pages, Noah carried the book outside to a deck. Half of the deck was covered by a wooden structure and a thick plastic tarp tied overhead. From here he could see the vast, lifeless forest on the side of the hill he stood on. Between the mounds of dust before him was the town from which he traveled last. The sun beamed upon the back of his head, lightly illuminating the evening veil of rain. In a way, at least in this rain, the image had an underlying beauty to it. Where exactly that beauty lied, he could not determine.

At last there was a page that was only minimally smudged and well preserved enough to read it without squinting and filling in any blanks. On this page, left alone by time, was a small passage that read:

‘They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms: Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide; They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way’

A heavy wooden chair lay on the deck, under the cover of the astoundingly resilient tarp. Heaving it up from the deck, Noah half dragged and lifted the chair to take a seat where a family would probably cook and enjoy their dinners and breakfasts. Many laughs and smiles were most certainly shared on this very deck long ago. For a long while Noah sat, his mind simultaneously pondering the nature of his own people and keeping itself at a cold repose, when suddenly a feeling that he hadn’t known for a long time resurfaced within: lonesomeness.

Noah was told that humankind were once a group of social animals, that they’d lose their minds by simply being away from other souls for too long. He’d met three people in his entire life: his father, his grandfather, and a man who put them at gunpoint who his father had to relieve of his life. Despite having ever seen three other real human beings before him, and all of them perishing long ago, never had he thought that he was “alone”. Chilling silence was no longer chilling, just quiet time to himself.

But then all questions and thirsts for answers were once again overcome by his new wonder of what it might be like to meet another person. Hopefully not all were like those that caused the Awakening: greedy and ignorant. He now obsessed at the thought of never meeting anyone like him. He’d now be forced to breathe, eat, and drink, but to not live, for a human must have someone to share the beautiful and now “exclusive” gift of life before them in order to truly be alive, mustn't they? Faster and faster, Noah’s head raced about meeting a girl, or a boy like him, or an elder to teach him more of the times before, perhaps even a young one to pass his own knowledge to.

The wind blew directly into Noah’s face, bringing small droplets of rain with it into his eyes. The burning of the rain brought forth the tears of his frustration faster than they were already coming. His frustration with what godforsaken life was given to him by his humanoid predecessors made him feel like his head was full of water and like his chest was full of fire. Less than seconds before Noah’s urge to stand and cry out into the heavens came to action, the wind stopped dead, and the rain straightened once again to make a soft hush instead of a hard clacking of the water on the roof.

“Is anybody out there?”, he cried, “Anyone at all?”

His hands lowered from his mouth as he awaited a response. All he received was an echo of his own words.

“''Is anybody out there? Anyone at all?''”, mocked the mountains.

Noah laughed to himself softly with a bitter, harsh smile as he looked down and to his feet. Once more he glanced upon the passage of the book he set on the chair.

In his hand he held one of the few things given to him by his father just in case. His crooked smile ceased as he wondered, would there be one to meet where he now goes? Were his readings correct about where one goes after? Noah’s father never specified the “just in case” part, and it was assumed that it was for if he were to happen upon another person that hadn’t cared for the peaceful approach. But now it was clear that maybe, just maybe, it was for when he realized that there was no more hope for a diseased earth to heal. It’s possible his father didn’t quite have it in himself to press that truth onto Noah.

Noah closed his eyes as he found the taste of metal in his mouth. Lightning once more struck among the trees in front of the deck he stood. There were two flashes at that moment, but three sounds. One burst, one boom, and a moment later, one great thump.

It was with the final bolt of lightning and last drops of rain that the clouds soon cleared themselves away from over the mountains to reveal a dull, dusty blue sky and one great setting sun. Then suddenly, one more noise could be heard from the distance.

“I’m here”, a voice was shouting, “Who’s there?”

Once more, the mountain mocked, “I’m here...Who’s there?”.