They should have known better.
It is a well-known superstition, after all – most religions have some kind of ritual involving salt and use it to repel evil one way or another. There are countless horror movies where the protagonists cower inside hastily-made circles while demons tear angrily at invisible barriers, unable to cross the fragile white line. Hell, the Catholics still use it to make holy water, dousing themselves with it every time they enter a church.
So. They really should have known better.
The company that started it had been in and out of the press for years, selling various alternative treatments that they claimed could heal anything from eczema to cancer. This was just their newest cash-grab, or so everyone thought – salt pumped straight from the Dead Sea, supposed to make your skin smoother and your wrinkles disappear. Their advertisements featured beautiful women floating in still blue water, emerging with bright smiles and glowing skin, pearly white teeth flashing.
Why did it turn into such a success? Did it actually work?
Well, maybe. Maybe they were just good at advertising. Or maybe people just wanted something new, a piece of some far-away place in their boring middle-class living rooms, a proof of travels they had never been on. It doesn’t really matter why they bought it. What matters is that they did, and that they kept on doing it.
Before long, there were month-long wait times to get even the smallest bag of it. The company, naturally, was thrilled, buying up huge stretches of land in Jordan and Israel along the coast to keep mining the gold they had discovered. They flew in all sorts of scientists and engineers to maximize their efficiency, enjoyed some extra publicity from an unsuccessful lawsuit claiming they were scamming people, and even featured on quite a few talk shows.
It was all very short-lived, of course.
It started with some freak accidents. One employee got his arm shredded by a machine, another drowned even though he was posted in an administrative building well away from the coast, some scaffolding collapsed and left a group of potential investors either dead or permanently paralyzed. They were very good at explaining all that away – employee negligence, lax licensing standards for local contractors they’d hired, all sorts of legal nonsense.
They kept on shipping, blind with greed. It took a gas leak that killed a dozen people for the authorities to step in, putting a halt on production until an official investigation could be conducted. The CEO flew down himself, giving an interview the evening before in which he assured the reporter that everything would swiftly be straightened out.
Well. Rich and successful people are wrong just as often as the rest of us.
I don’t think I have to recount again what happened next. The survivors’ testimonies were all over the news for weeks – how the CEO had gone insane, how he had torn people apart with his bare hands, his expression cold and unflinching, how only a whole magazine emptied into his chest by the security guard had stopped him. One of them, a petite Israeli official, went on a talk show a week after it had happened.
“It was like he was not even human.” she said, voice trembling. “Like there was something evil inside him.”
Naturally, the production was shut down after that. But by then it was too late. Violence was spreading from the Dead Sea like poison from an injection site, first to the small villages but then to the larger cities like Amman, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Husbands murdered their wives, mothers drowned their children, neighbors beat each other to death in the streets.
The police was no help; they, too, were shooting people at random, turning on each other when moments before they had been laughing and joking. There were multiple terrorist attacks; a branch of the military went rogue and a day later war was declared on every country within reach.
You have heard about all this, I’m sure; what people tend to forget about are the suicides. It was mostly religious communities – entire congregations drinking poison, rabbis hanging themselves from synagogue beams, nuns filling their pockets with stones and diving into vats of holy water. Some have envied them their deaths; they were more peaceful than most. Maybe that was what small mercy their God could offer them, or maybe they simply saw what was happening around them and chose the only escape left to them; I cannot say one way or the other. In the end, they became just more names on the endless roster of dead.
We felt very safe, sheltered by our superiority complex on the other side of the Atlantic. Yes, the middle east was in shambles, but surely that would not happen to us, us with our stable government and civilized laws, us with our little bags of overpriced salt that we pretended were not the cause of this whole mess. We watched the rest of the world descend into chaos like we would a television show – with a detached feeling of pity, but mostly with relief that this was happening to someone else.
Who threw the first bomb? They’ve said it was Russia, or China, or Pakistan; the French said it was England, the English said it was France. Maybe it was us, trying to seize power or contain the problem, or both. I don’t think it really matters all that much who started it; this isn’t kindergarten. Before long we were all throwing bombs, as if we’d just been waiting for a reason to blow up the world.
Some say the president was already mad then, and maybe he was; he was certainly enjoying bombing the shit out of Europe and Asia a little too much for comfort. But it took some months until he carried an automatic rifle into congress and started mowing down senators left and right. It was the first time a president was killed by his own military, and it was also the last time; we have not had a new president since then.
That was when we at last stopped pretending we were fine. States declared autonomy, closed their borders, and imploded or exploded one after the other like stars. You could not trust anyone – your friendly old neighbor might shoot you in the street, your wife might decide to beat you to death with a fire poker. People were barricading, stocking up on food and water, as if this was some crisis they could just wait out.
The pattern was obvious for anyone who looked. Anyone could go insane at any moment – except those who had bought the sea salt. They might get killed, sure, the salt didn’t protect from that, but they never turned into monstrous versions of themselves, into killing machines with evil in their eyes.
Why did I pour myself into research? Why did I not tell people?
It is a scientist’s curse, I suppose, the urge to always know more, know everything, amass facts and knowledge and truth, whatever that is, even when it will not help anybody. I read for hours while people died, turned pages fragile with age with my little bag of sea salt next to me. The world was burning, and I read myths.
First I found one story, then two, then ten. They varied in the details, reflective of the cultures they had come from, but they all essentially boiled down to the same sequence of events – events that were chillingly alike to what had been happening for months.
The stories described it more poetically, of course – a shadow settling over the world, a great evil swooping down and poisoning minds, making people turn against each other. But stories have something that reality does not, and that is a conclusion, an ending. In the stories the shadow lifted, the evil was vanquished, the terror ended, and it always happened in the same way.
Salt, of course, was the key. The demon, monster, shadow, whatever it was called, was trapped, hidden away, bound by the universal antidote against evil, buried under gallons of water sanctified with tiny white crystals. All that work by our ancestors, all those tears, all those sacrifices – and what did we do?
We closed our eyes and opened the cage.
I will say it again: they should have known better.
It is called the Dead Sea, after all. It wasn’t that much of a stretch to believe that Death was waiting inside.