Ark

Entry 1

This entire business began when I was taken.

Actually, no. I must go further back. Some friends and I had been planning a road trip South, to celebrate the end of our final exams. The release of tension when I walked out of the exam room door for the final time this year, and into the sun, was like unbinding my arms and finally running free. All right, it was probably nothing at all so dramatic, but that was what it had felt like that the time. So much of life had been taken up with the chore of study, and finally — for the first time in a semester — I felt that I was free.

The camping holiday itself was uneventful. We had planned a journey westward at first, where we would stop at Queenstown for the night, bungy jump off the Kawarau Bridge, and then loop around via Te Anau, down to Colac Bay, and then follow the East coast back up to Otago again. All of this was to happen in just under five days, before Tina had to return to Canada and David was set to catch a plane back up to Auckland. That all changed just after we reached the northward leg of our journey.

I was sure that we were lost. The sun had set, which meant that there was no light but that of our headlights to mark the road. The first hint of something strange was when the G.P.S. started to flicker, and finally lost its signal entirely. David tapped it with his finger, as if by this action, he could magically repair the whole system, and I remember chiding him that he didn't have superpowers. In the back seats, Kat and Tina were telling him not to bother with it, that we had reached the highway already, and how many wrong turns could there be. I was starting to get a little annoyed with David myself, and was in the middle of telling him to forget about the blessed G.P.S. — those things have always been more trouble than they were worth, in my view. But the next time that he tapped it with his finger, the whole car stalled. Someone screamed in my ear — I think it was Tina — and I remember fighting to steer as the wheels lost their traction for a moment, and the car itself veered off to the right and into a nearby ditch. Then the headlights failed.

Apparently, as the oldest among us and as the driver of the car, I had been selected by consensus as the one who should find out why the engine wouldn't start, and what had happened to the lights. I still have little confidence that I would have been of any help to them. I'm a Linguistics major; I was never much of a mechanic. But none of our phones worked either, and Kat was first to suggest that we must have been passing through one of those places where the reception was dead, and that it wouldn't make a whit of difference how many times David slapped his smart phone at the side of its casing. So, as designated driver, it was up to me to fix the car. It was as dark outside as it was within. I could barely see more than two steps in front of me. The headlights seemed fine to me. There was no sign of a crack or any other damage, and I had little idea of what else I was supposed to be looking for. All I really knew, in retrospect, was that nothing was working, and I guess I'll never know what we might have done that night to fix them. But it was at that moment that the whole scene was suddenly lit by a light so intense that it hurt the back of my eyes, and cast everything — the car, its occupants, the road, the trees at both sides — in a frozen array of white and black, with almost no hint of grey or colours in between.

I turned around, and lifted my arm to shield my eyes, and I believe this was the moment at which the source of this light finally captured me. I was dazed for some time by the intensity of it, but also dimly aware that I was floating. I am sure that the beam itself must have done something to my head, because I was also finding it incredibly difficult to stop the muscles in my arms, legs, and hands from twitching uncontrollably as I became increasingly disconnected from the ground below me. It was almost like being caught up in a tight electric bubble. Pulses of static rose and fell in intensity as they passed in irregular intervals through my brain. The only way that I can think to describe it is as though these were a sort of tide, and all the while the same intense light continued to flood into my eyes.

I could not say at what point I found myself in the dark again, but it was not on the ground beside State Highway 1, and I had seen the last of my friends. Instead, I found that I was surrounded by hard, artificial surfaces, black against a dull grey light that infused but never entirely illuminated the scene. I found that I could not move at all. The only movement nearby was that of distant shapes, something like the beating of a fan, and an overhead procession of large egg-shaped objects that at the time, I could not quite make out. It was then that I saw what has so far been my only glimpse of my captors. This was barely a hint of something much larger than I was, two pale faces as large and silver-white as cumulus clouds in moonlight, and with eyes like black glass marbles, except for a silver reflection passing across them each time they caught even a meagre hint of light. Almost immediately, I felt the first touch of a sticky fluid, rising inside the concave structure where I was nestled like a toy in a box. I tried to cry out, but there was no power in my voice and my mouth was every bit as paralysed as my arms and legs. The viscous substance rose over my head, and a cover advanced from left to right until it covered the only opening of the claustrophobic enclosure. The darkness within was as complete as it could possibly have been. For the brief moment of conscious thought left to me, I am sure that I believed it would take me only minutes to drown.