Rictus

Anger…Gwendylyn, stood up and cast a new eye across his surroundings. If this was death, then he wished to know exactly which part of it he was in. What he saw wasn't entirely unexpected. He was in a small rowboat, big enough only for one person. The boat drifted on its own accord towards an unseen point in the odd halflight. The water upon which he floated was entirely overlaid with an odd, chunky mist. There was no break in the fog, thus he could discern no water, but knew it must be there. He noticed odd, curved shapes in the darkness, like small islands, or rocks. Then he realized that the curious mounds were moving, like him, towards that same point in the darkness.

They're all rowboats

He realized,

They are all, like you, dead. We share a common destination.

Something was bothering him, though. Of all the rowboats, of all the people that must lie within them, he was the only one standing. One rowboat passed close by him, enough that he was able to glimpse inside. He saw a young man, with scruffy brown hair, eyes closed, as if dead. In fact, he was dead. There was a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead, like a third eye from which the Devil peered out of, an eyehole in his toy puppet. Other boats passed by, and each carried an immobile corpse, in the same state as they had been at the moment of death. Some of the dead were old and elderly, and were dressed in fine clothes, faces set, eyes closed, unmarred. They had obviously died of old age, or of unseen disease. Others were clad in ragged, torn clothes, or no clothes at all, in cases of extreme poverty or rape. Eyes were open, eyes were closed, eyes were torn out. Blood and gore stained their skin, wounds of all shapes and sizes, of all varieties, were carved into their flesh.

Here, a child, eyes glassy and wide open, like a dolls', neck at an odd angle. Strangled, no doubt. There, a haggard, middle-aged man, face drawn and pale. Perhaps he had overdosed on drugs? Here, a fair-haired woman with a myriad of knife wounds, hair matted and clotted by blood. There, a soldier, rifle in hand, blood leaking from his mouth and from his gut, which had been eviscerated by shrapnel. Here, a small, bloody, humanoid bundle, with a strange string-like appendage. With a rush of an odd, unfamiliar emotion, Gwendylyn realized it was a stillbirth…

…So all these people were in a sort of hibernative state for the journey. All of them trapped in the stasis of their own deaths, appearing as they had at the exact moment of death. This was apparent and obvious. Some of them were still bleeding, so fresh were their wounds. Gwendylyn wondered why their spirits would show such wounds that the body had sustained? Perhaps the two were more bonded then he had previously thought.

Of course they are: one creates the other, is that not the way?

He also noticed that all of them were alone. One person to one boat, with no exception to the rule. He supposed that even if people died together, the journey itself must be made alone. They would meet again on the next shore, perhaps.

…But why was he awake? Why was he not marked as the others? He looked down at himself. His skin was intact, his chest unopened, his intestines were not spilling out. He was completely uninjured. In confusion, he looked up at the sky. Unfortunately, this only made him more confused.

He had remembered waves of light dancing over him. Looking now, with unclouded eyes, he realized that the light was caused by reflections of water. His first thought was that he was in a cave, and the light was reflected up from the water that he was floating on.

…But how had the light penetrated the unnatural mist? And where had it come from? And besides, looking up, he realized the 'ceiling' was extremely far away, and was not made of rock at all. It looked exactly as if he was looking down at the surface of a lake during sunrise…except he was looking up at the sky. Looking down, more closely now, wary of such oddities, he caught something about the mist. The shapes, the colour, the distribution…they were exactly like clouds. And he realized now that the light he saw was coming up from the clouds below and illuminating the water above.

He sighed and sat back down, looking up. So, that was it. He wasn't on water, gazing at the sky. Sky and sea had inverted, leaving him floating upon the clouds, looking up (down?) at the oceans above (below?).

A wooden creak suddenly resounded off to starboard, but he didn't look. Why would he? He was on a boat, and there were boats all around: of course they would creak.

…But wait, none of the boats have creaked this entire time…why start now?

With this realization, he looked towards the source of the creaking. Another rowboat, exactly like the others. So why would this one creak while the others didn't? Gwendylyn looked inside, curious to see how this one had died.

He saw a skeleton. A yellowed, imperfect skeleton, with bits of earth still clinging to it. It took him a while to realize the significance.

All of these people were shown exactly as they were at the precise moment of their deaths. This was obvious.

How, then, was this skeleton here? If it had been a new skeleton, or perhaps a mound of dust, he would think that perhaps the person had died by a bomb, the flesh vaporizing off, leaving this skeleton…

…But the skeleton showed obvious signs of decomposition and time. Even an amateur could see that, from the dirt and mud clinging to its frame.

…So the only logical explanation wasn't logical at all: this person had been buried alive and had remained alive all the time, even as the body was decomposing, the person lived on.

Impossible.

No one could live with their body rotting around them, buried in the earth with no oxygen.

…Could they?...

Couldn't I?

The thought was alien, it felt odd: as if someone had used a vector and injected it into his mind. The thought was certainly not his own…was it?

He glanced at the skeleton, only to blanch and leap back.

The skeleton rose up from the boat, slowly, leisurely. It turned its head and gazed with hollow sockets straight at Gwendylyn. The hollowness burned his eyes. The skeleton's perpetual grin seemed almost to widen. The sockets alighted with recognition. The skeleton opened its mouth and gave a great cracking laugh, the sound ripping straight through the silence and filling the air. The skull raised a hand and gave a cheery wave.

Gwendylyn could not take his eyes off the spectacle. He screamed out loud, feeling fear for the first time in his living (or dead now, I suppose) memory. The skeleton and its boat slowly passed on, inch by agonizing inch, second by agonizing second. The skeleton gave one last wave, then raised both hands in a double thumbs-up.

Gwendylyn sat for a long time in a fixed position, staring down at his trembling hands. Why had the skeleton scared him so? It was like an effect in a bad horror movie. A talking, living skeleton? So clichéd. Yet perhaps the most frightening part was the skeleton's reaction? How it had greeted him like an old friend?

Gwendylyn shook his head. That was ridiculous. He didn't get chummy with skeletons. When he killed, he liked better to deal with the flesh itself. The torturing of skeletons gave no pleasure. In fact, he had always found the structures somewhat whimsical. Why, then, had this one affected him so strongly?

He searched his mind for an answer. The answer leaped out with surprising readiness. He hadn't felt fear, exactly. Or rather, the fear had passed quickly, giving birth to another emotion. A similar one, a sort of spiking, freezing emotion that blotted out all others. In that moment, he had felt an emotion that he usually only felt after a particularly difficult kill.

Triumph