The Mud King

	Nothing but heat, salt, and the intense whine of some kind of small, nigh-invisible insect. That was all I'd had to complement the dismal personality of Captain Rodriguez for the past sixteen hours on this small boat. His assistant, a man of few words who's name I did not know, was sitting across the open cockpit from me. He was eating refried beans straight from the can. I was smoking a joint. Captain Rodriguez was at the wheel, sipping wine from a highball glass. From the cabin below, the engine drummed ceaselessly, as it had from the moment we had departed. Captain Rodriguez held his glass of wine up to the fading light, and spared a few words on pleasantries for the first time since I'd met him.

	"Out here is the only place I drink it."

	His english was broken, but he had a pleasant accent.

	"On land, tequila only. It's like medicine for me then, to kill the dreams. There is no pleasure."

	We continued in silence for a while. He took another sip, and spoke again.

	"Out here there aren't any dreams. It's weird like that. But the whole thing is strange."

	I finally had something to reply to.

	"I hope so. I paid a lot of money for it."

	"The money is a small part of the cost."

	Once again I had something to say.

	"The spider?" I asked.

	Before the Captain had agreed to bring me to wherever we were going, he had given me an address and a name. A man at the address there had given me a large hairy spider, and told me to carry it all the way back to the Captain. He assured me that it would not kill me, and said that I had to hold it in my hands the whole way back, cupping it like a flame against the wind. Then, and only then, would I be able to experience the trip of a lifetime. Nothing would compare, the man had told me. Not LSD, not psylocibin, not even DMT. On this trip, I was told, I would see things that could not possibly exist. Motion without movement. Sense without sight. The area between life and death.

	But the Captain shook his head.

	"The spider was only for proof. I do not need the spider. There are enough fucking spiders."

	He smirked, and so did I.

	"Proof for what?" I asked.

	"Proof of your mind. Like I said, the cost is high. You need to have a brave mind to understand it. It can burn your mind. It makes the dreams happen. But sometimes they can happen without seeing it, too. Like wth the author, Lovecraft. It's hard to make sense unless you actually see it. To dream it otherwise makes it difficult to explain"

	A drug that can make you trip without even touching it. Good one. It was probably just ayahuasca or peyote or something along those lines, cooked up by some recessive tribe out on some backwater island and billed as the Great Trip, the essential secret that every caucasian backpacker has been looking for, so he can tell his buddies that he'd seen the REAL shit. The realest of unreal.

	Captain Rodrgiuez spoke again, jerking his thumb at the exhausted man in the corner of the cockpit, with the thousand-yard stare and shaking hands.

	"My friend over there, he didn't have a brave mind. It had a bad affect on him, and now he can think of nothing else. That's why I brought him here, plus you need an extra person or a dog or something to make it work. It makes you curious in a bad way, and you want to go back because it feels like going home. I don't like to bring people there, in that way, but for him there is no other option. If I could speak English better I could make sense of it. But I think you'll be fine. Just no more of that after I tell you."

	By no more of "that," he clearly meant the joint. I nodded attrition.

	"No problems man. This is the last of it anyway."

	He nodded, and that seemed to end the conversation. An hor later the sun had fully sunk, and Captain Rodriguez went below and fetched an ice chest. Inside were some beers, mercifully cold against the steaming night. He handed me one, and we kept cruising until long after the sun had sank below the horizon, leaving us shrouded in an island of light and shadow created by the buzzing gas lantern. Beyond the mosquito netting was nothing but the endless, dull sweep of black sea on a moonless night.

	I don't remember when I fell asleep, but I remember waking at least an hour before the sun rose. I don't know if the Captain slept, but he was definitely awake before I was, standing at the helm in his threadbare white uniform. When he saw me stretch and stand, he turned and spoke.

	"Another hour or two. Not long, definitely."

	I asked if he had any coffee, and he answered no with a quick shake of his head.

	And then sun rose, bursting above the horizon with a renewed intensity. A half-hour later we were drenched with sweat. I tried stepping beyond the mosquito netting, and was met with swarm of microscopic flies. I stepped back inside, spitting them from my mouth.

	"It means we are close. There is a toilet in the cabin if you need it. But watch our friend here."

	I turned and looked at the silent man in the corner. He had his face pressed to the netting. When he heard himself being spoke of, he turned and looked at us, his face caked in bug bites. I forced a smile, and he turned back to the net.

	"The bugs are part of it. You can't catch them, because they turn to sand when you touch them. But they bite, badly. It will poison your skin if it happens too much. Our friend here will not survive without medical attention. The skin will fall off and the wound will infect."

	I was too tired and hot to question it. The Captain kept talking.

	"The water is not good either. It doesn't move enough."

	I looked out at the ocean. Sometime over night, the rich blue of the sea had been replaced by the dull reddish-brown of a backwater creek. I watched it for a while. I don't know how long. It could have been hours for all the dozing I did. But at some point, Rodriguez slowed the boat to trolling speed. I turned to look at him, and he was pointing out ahead.

	"There it is" he announced without emotion.

	I looked to where he was pointing, and saw nothing.

	"Where is it?"

	"Right in front. About a hundred yards. You can't see the island itself. It's too flat. But there's a shimmer in the air, like a circle of heat waves."

	And then the engine stopped. I was still looking ahead, scanning the horizon, when I heard a dull splash, and the air was filled with the scent of raw feces. I turned around, and the silent man was overboard. Captain Rodriguez saw my confusion, and pointed ahead again. Soon enough the man reappeared off the bow of the boat, swimming forward through the buzzing gnats and preternaturally thick, brown water. I watched him for some time, and then he stopped.

	That is not to say that he stopped swimming. More like he froze in mid-stroke.

	"Now do you see? The shimmer?"

	I looked ahead again. Set against the body of the man, there was in fact something there. Not a shimmer, more like an oblong bulb of distorted air that the man had just barely penetrated.

	"Blink your eyes now! Quickly!"

	I obeyed the Captain, blinking as rapidly as I could, and suddenly the man vanished. It only took seconds for me to relocate him, now wading ashore in waist deep water. My eyes grew tired, and as I rested them, the man would pause again, and then he would jerk forward when I resumed blinking. If this was an optical illusion, it was a good one.

	"When you look, everything there pauses." the Captain offered by way of explanation. He then produced a pair of binoculars with a large mechanism attached to the top, and a wind-up key on top of that. He quickly wound the key a few times, and then held it still.

	"These will blink for you, but only for a half minute."

	The Captain handed me the binoculars. I released the mechanism and pressed the binoculars to my eye. The scene before me was like a flickering film reel.

	The man was wading still, apparently gaining only inches of elevation as he slogged through the thick mud. Captain Rodriguez told me to wind the mechanism again. I did as I was told.

	"The mouth! Watch the monster's mouth!" he commanded.

	When I pressed the binoculars to my eyes again I was greeted by the sight of the man, now upon some sort of mudflat island. He was stationary, a melancholy look in his eyes as he watched us. And then it happened. The ground behind him began to swell, until it ruptured, and the Mud King emerged. I will try to tell you what I remember.

	The Mud King stood twice the man's height, with a body composed of pure obsidian, the joints of the arms held together by some kind of raw pink sinew. His feet were submerged in the mud, but his arms terminated in jagged claw-like pincers, constantly click-clacking as he advanced crabwise upon the man. He had no head, only a lump of the same obsidian material as his body, and at the top of this lump sat his crown: three irregularly shaped spikes of black molded to and from the material of his torso. There were no eyes, there was no nose. There was only the mouth.

	You have most likely seen some likeness of the Mud King before, based upon the dreams that Lovecraft had, and attempted in his own way to relate to the world. But never have you seen an accurate understanding of the Mud King's mouth. It was perhaps two feet in diameter, large enough for the man to slide into unimpeded when the Mud King snatched him up with an one bone-cracking sweep of those awful pincers and deposited him inside the blackness of this unholy orifice. But dear god, the tentacles. The writhing mass of tentacles, lining the wall of the mouth, like an endless tunnel lined with the rotting tongues of a thousand lepers. Wriggling, like a handful of eels plucked from a bucket, as if each slimy appendage had a mind and soul of it's own. For ten whole seconds I watched the man hang halfway from the mouth, and then I remembered to blink, and they were gone.

	And then we were gone, the boat back to trolling speed, only in reverse this time. I was gone. I had seen the movement without motion once the stranger had crossed the event horizon. I had seen the sense without sight when the Mud King sped towards him without the slightest bit of hesitation, despite the lack of eyes, and the body made of unfeeling stone. But to this day, one question gnaws at my mind, begging for answer that I can not give it. The Mud King was twice the man's height. No way his gut of unyeilding obsidian could have held a meal that large, and there was nothing left on the beach after he returned to his subterrean lair. Wherever that man went when he was put inside that orifice, it was not to his death.