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Part II; Falling forever
1.
The nightmare about that mountain and the girl. The one that Pete, carried away by his juvenile enthusiasm, so daftly tried to make me remember, was the one that visited me that very last night that I spent with my friends, right before everything went to hell.
I had that dream before. In fact, I think it occurred to me at least once or twice in a week that I was trashing awake, sweating and screaming to that girl whose name I could never remember, till Pete, shaking my shoulders or slapping me across the face, would save me from it. That particular nightmare was like a boogieman that lurked around after the lights were out, jumping up from underneath the bed from time to time to give a good scare, then disappearing back into the shadows. By the time it popped its ugly head around again a couple of nights later, I had already forgotten most of it to get me to realise that it was merely a dream, and so the bloody thing was able to keep haunting me for months.
It always started in the same way. In that dream, I would find myself stranded at a strange shore, with a black sea from which the horizon parted into an alien sky, its dark waves whispering behind me. There were no stars, no clouds drifting above my head, no sun or moon that could tell me the difference between night and day. The sky looked dead, and had an eerie red glow as if something large and jealous had just murdered it with a sharp knife. The sand between my feet was black like the strange sea, like it had been scorched. The beach itself was littered with large slates of stone, the crooked landmarks reminding me of neglected, jagged headstones at a cemetery. Land-inward, a cliff followed the short beach-line, rising up behind a wood of withered branches, dead shrubs and hollow, crooked trees. There were steps carved into the rock face, winding around like a big snake as it went up. I would raise my head and look at it, seeing nothing but this massive mount of stone and dirt. The notion would occur to me then, that it was not a cliff, but a mountain. So broad was its base that I could not see the borders of land touch the sea at both sides, and so high was its peak that it just disappeared into the blood-red sky without becoming much narrower in perimeter. I was stranded at the foot of a monstrous mountain. My hands and legs would start to shake; then a feeling like something heavy was dragging on to them, followed by the sound of rattling metal. If I looked (and I always did, I always looked), I would see that I was fettered by chains. Voices could then be heard, all around me; a chorus of moans and wails rising up from the waves. The beach was swarmed by men and women, washed ashore like frail sacks of suffering flesh, crawling out of the water and onto the black-scorched land, their frighteningly skinny chests heaving madly.
They would crawl first. Then, after struggling up and trying a couple of swaying steps, they would start to walk, their rusty chains clattering between their legs. They all looked horrible, like bodies that have been smashed on the wheel. They had scarred skin, dark bruises, burn marks, blisters and slashes everywhere. Most of them were bald, with plucks of hair falling over their scalps in wet cobwebs. All of them had whip-marks running across their backs, so severely had they been beaten that the flogging had cut through on some spots of the skin like it was butter. I saw a man whose stooped back was one grotesque gaping wound filled with puss, and the pink dented frame of his spine just stuck right through the tissue like a row of teeth through bleeding gums. I saw another man, whose face was completely burnt away, leaving only a grinning skull covered with bits of shredded red skin, his eyes dangling out of the sockets like large boiled eggs tied to pieces of bungee wire. I looked away, absolutely horrified, and my lucky eyes came across a woman. Her belly was slashed open to up to her chest, and she dragged a green and brown mass of intestines behind her. When she came closer, I saw that something moved between the stinking coils of her entrails; a bloody foetus, dangling from his mum's umbilical cord like a caterpillar from a rotten leaf; it's tiny, not yet fully done body wriggling inside a thin membrane sack.
I screamed, spun around, tried to run away. My legs became entangled with the chains and I fell, face down into the ash coloured earth. Darkness loomed over me, and a spilt hoof came down, followed by a black horse leg that sunk deep into the sand. My heart pounded madly as I looked up, and saw, who was studying me with a red glow in his bulging eyes. The horseman mounted on the skeleton frame of the black steed was nothing more but a stack of bones himself, held together by yellow threads of tendons and dried shreds of muscles, like those funny wax jobs they made out of hanged criminals in order to teach the med students human anatomy. The horseman grinned his lipless grin, the large brown monk's habit he wore covered most of him and the cowl drawn low over his skull cast a dark shadow that made the white of his rounded eyeballs appear even more frightening. The only skin he still had was on his boots and was made out of wrinkled, flesh coloured leather. His bony fingers encased the handle of a rawhide bullwhip, and he tapped with it on his spurs, making them give a cheery tinkle with each tap.
I crawled from underneath the mouth-foaming horse, my eyes so wide of fear that I imagined them popping out of my sockets like the ones on that poor bloke I've just seen. The horseman raised his bullwhip and struck it down with a WHUSH. And then, for a spilt second, my mind went entirely blank, and all I could think of was that hot burning gash that cut through me like a butcher's knife. Wriggling with my belly over the sand, I tried to crawl away from him. A second blow exploded on my backside, and the pain caused my spine to arch into a spastic crook.
I felt like I was splitting in half.
The horseman dug his spurs deep into the flanks of his nightmare horse. It screamed in rage and reared, its front hooves rose so high that it blotted out the red glow in the sky. I thought it was about to crush my head. I wanted to scream, but my throat was like a narrow tube, wheezing air, and all I could say was Oh no, oh no, and I felt a warm trickle of fluid running down my spine, right where the whip had hit me. Oh no, I muttered, Not here, please, not here, and just as I turned myself around, the horse hooves came down, not on my skull to make it burst like an overripe pumpkin, but next to my head on the scorched ground, making it shudder and causing the surface to crack.
I started blubbing. Rambling. Took my breaths with animal-like pants. The horseman looked down at me with this devilish glow still smouldering inside his dead eye-sockets.
"Please, not here, not here." I muttered, my mind was quickly backing away, leaving me mad with fear. I didn't want it to end here; I didn't want to die in this horrible horrible place, alone and surrounded by these terrifying phantoms.
"Not here. Please, help me, God help me."
The horseman turned his head to the mountain, raised his skeleton hand and pointed toward the group of wretched beings, struggling up the stone staircase. Like a mindless zombie, I crawled back at my feet, and started walking toward the foot of the mountain. I was quickly swept up by the stream of bodies, a cramped mass of tortured souls and terrifying sounds. They pushed me forward, stepped on my feet, poked me from the side, pressing their shrivelled wounds and festering ulcers against my bare skin. The air was hot and thick with the smell of decay, of rotting flesh squirming with belching maggots. The group halted at the end of the shoreline. They dropped on their knees like sinners in a church, and started digging frantically, removing vast amount of black earth, sweeping it up like dogs busy burying bones, and they dug out large chunks of stone; as they were black, with tiny glittering particles melted into it, they looked like shattered parts of the night's sky to me.
"Must repair it." I heard an old man mumble. His eyes were white-rimmed and sticky saliva trickling down the corners of his lax mouth. He was talking to nobody else but to himself, as if he was totally alone among all the others. "Must fix it." He rambled on. "It's the only way out. The only way."
I searched around and also dug out a piece of glitter-stone. My body and my mind worked autonomic, fully detached from what was left of my old self. Then I followed the others, and carried my precious cargo up the rocky stairs, scrambling on my hands and knees because the steps were too narrow and I was afraid that I would fall. People did fall over the edge, those who were too weak or too injured to actually move or just had the bad luck to be pushed too near to the side. They plummeted down the cliff into the graveyard beneath, their heavy bodies snapping the twigs and branches right off the trees while the trunks snapped their spines and necks like used matches. As we went up higher and higher, the falls became more frightening. A man with one leg amputated to the knee, let out a savage scream as he tumbled over the edge. In a desperate attempt to save himself, he dragged a young boy with him, and we heard a sickly cracking noise as they hit the sharp rocks below. They rolled down like bags filled with broken things and disappeared into the darkness. We all watched, but we saw nothing, felt nothing but fear and the fierce wanting not to become like them. I cast my eyes on the steps, keeping them there. I fought for every small space between the coiling, wriggling mass. I stepped on others, kicked them back, pushed them aaway. Always keeping myself close to the stone surface of the cliff, my right hand tracking it with a barmy fanatism. The air became hotter as we climbed up higher, till every panting breath I took was burning inside my lungs and left my throat parched like a desert. The sky was a blazing furnace; a frightening glow of purple and orange, trembling like a soddin moorage. The stone that I carried in my hands had increased in weight with every step I took. It became heavier and heavier, till it was like dragging a bloody anvil up the hill. I forced myself to keep moving, drenched as I was in sweat and so exhausted that I was hardly able to stand up any longer. A woman pushed me away, and my hand lost contact with the stone wall. A man stepped on my leg and kicked me in the chest. I fell, and slid down several steps, scratching my stomach open over the rough stone surface. My glitter-stone rolled out of my hands. The others moved on, unyielding, like a marching row of insects, ignoring my cries as they trampled me under their feet. A rain of boots and blows, and I was thrust aside till the ground suddenly disappeared beneath my body. I screamed and grabbed hold to an arm, any protruding object, my fingers frenetically clutching onto it while above me I heard the shrill shriek of a hysterical woman.
"Don't drop me! Don't drop me!" I spewed out the words like a lunatic, my heart hammering so loud that I was convinced that it was tearing my entire rib-case apart. The woman's eyes grew maniacal. Her mouth was a gaping, screaming hole. Lightening threw shattered light over her hollow-cheeked face. It was followed by roaring of thunder, making the mountain shudder. She clawed at my hand, slashing her nails into it like an angry cat.
"NO!!" I shouted. "PLEASE! DON'T LET ME FALL! DON'T LET ME FALL!"
I tried to hold on to her, but my fingers started to bleed and became all slippery. My hand glided down the woman's arm, who tried to pull away and kept screeching and crying. Then I just held on to her hand. Then, only her fingers.
I fell back into the abyss, horror wrenching a scream from my throat. The darkness swallowed me up like a hungry maul.
I woke up close to the shore. The sea surged in my ears. The bleeding sky stretched wide before my eyes. A wave pulled over me, and filled my mouth and nose with salty water till I choked and wretched. I tried to move, a hellish pain shot through my body; a hot, blazing agony that left me coiled up in the drowned sand. My limps were completely bloodened; large black bruises bloomed like malignant mushrooms over my thighs, spreading down to my kneecaps and up to my groin. A splintered piece of bone shimmered in the red glow, sticking out of my elbow like a dead tree in a field. Whimpering, I tossed over my injured body that now seemed to consist only of torn flesh and fractured bones, and started to crawl toward dry land. I was not alone. All around me came the cries of misery and suffering, and then they emerged out of the hurling waters like some gruesome swarm of deformed fish, pulling themselves forward, their arms and legs twisted and bend in frightening angles, some of them merely left with fraying stomps, the colour of cooked liver. Others, their eyes empty and drained of any other feelings but despair, had opened their mouths to produce one long, endless howl. I moved with them. I had become one of them now. Finally, we reached the dark line of wet sand on the beach. My useless body slithered onto the muddy surface, and collapsed there.
A split hoof sunk into the sand next to me.
"Ah, poor Spike. I feel sorry for you."
Sobbing and fearing the worst, I stared up at the figure mounted on the horse. A girl, dressed completely in white, from her leather boots and jodhpurs to her long sleeved shirt. Her hair was golden; rays of a happy morning sunshine. Her doll-like, greenish blue eyed, pout-lipped face upset me; it stirred my memory like a bolt of electricity frying a frog's leg.
The horse reared and she reined savagely to get his legs back on the ground. She slapped on the animal's flanks with her riding whip, drawing beads of blood on the dark fur.
"You look really awful." She said, wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something nasty. "All wet and boneless. Like some icky flaccid squid-thing."
She poked with her whip in my swollen leg, making me cry out in pain. My helpless twisting and cringing seemed to be really amusing, and she chuckled manically.
"She left, didn't she?" She asked, smiling sweetly at me. "That bitch! But, hate to say I told you so! You shouldn't have trusted her, Spike. You should have fought at my side. I would have treated you well. At least I wouldn't have left you to die in that cave."
The whip's thin end moved up, caressing the inner parts of my thighs, drawing supple circles near my groin. Shivering, not of cold or fear but of something else, I sucked in tiny breaths in a futile effort to remain calm.
"You're not afraid of me now, are you?" She purred, her voice coated in honey as her riding whip brushed my limp cock that was nudged against my thigh like a cold wounded dog. She jumped off the saddle, her breath quickening, her round breasts played peek-a-boo inside the crease of her low-buttoned shirt. The corners of her pink lips curled into a grin as she hunkered down beside me.
"No." I croaked. "Please, no." Fearing her, absolutely disgusted by her, but strangely wanting her too.
She cupped my genitals with her small hand. Her touch was soft and warm, and an unwilling moan escaped from my perched lips.
"There." She whispered, bending down and breathing over the moist curly hairs covering my groin.
"There. If you're so afraid of me."
Her hand brushed over the head, teased it with her fingertips. Swallowing, I felt an alluring heat pulse from her body, and as she leaned over my chest, her long cascade of blond hair grazed over my skin like the soft tickle of feathers. Who was this strange girl? What did she want from me? And how on earth could my Neanderthal brain keep thinking about things like what she could do to me with her warm mouth and hot hands while I was lying there, sprawled out like a deformed, legless chicken?
"Why don't you try to get away?" She breathed.
I moved slightly, mindlessly, as if she had just spoken out a command that I had to follow. Immediately, agony exploded up my spine.
"Can't." I said, hoarsely, and then, since I was only left with half a brain of wit, added. "I think - my - my legs, maybe they are broken."
"Ah, my poor boy, poor Spike." She cooed like a mum to her baby, and I wondering why she kept calling me Sticks or Spike or what ever it was. Maybe she had a dog named like that. "I bet it is all misery and pain, isn't? It must be unbearable for you to know what is done to you, not once, but only God knows how many times! Just, over and over again."
She closed her eyes, her lips curling into a content smile as if the words could trigger images in her head that gave her some perverse sort of satisfaction.
"And then to be completely helpless, being too weak to stop all this. This merciless destruction of body, heart and spirit."
Her eyes flew open, and I stared not in the sea colored rings of her pupils but into the empty orange glow of two white-less and irises-less eyes. The orange shifted and flickered, like flames behind the isinglass portholes of a hot stove. Watching her like this made my heart stumble and skip a beat. Her sweet-girly smile seemed hideously out of place together with those two devilish eyes.
"They are grinding you up, Spikey-boy! They are putting everything that is you into a giant blender and push on the mash-button till it's all mincemeat. Right until every part of you is no longer something of use, but just an endless source of pain."
Her lip lifted up from her teeth as she spit out the word as if she was experiencing some of my suffering herself, and was caught in a grimace. When she looked at me again, the flames had been put out, leaving her eyes completely black like the coaled insides of incinerators.
"Fate can be so cruel. Don't you think?"
She raised my chin with a finger, forcing me to look at her, the black and ugly emptiness that was her soul reflected in her gaze.
"Tell me, Spike. Don't you want this to end? Don't you want to get away, escape from all this?"
I whimpered. My will and fear were strong enough to make me jump right up and run away like the bloody wind from this scary little bitch, but the rest of me was too broken and in too great an agony to actually do it. I was like a helpless bugger of an insect, trapped inside her spidery wed, bundled in a cocoon of lethal injuries and ready for bloody slaughter.
" Don't be afraid." She said in a way that provided bogus comfort. "I'm here to help. I can do for you exactly that, what that self-centered bitch slayer can't or simply won't. I can make this stop. I can grand you peace. All you have to do is ask."
"I - I - Don't - Please." I babbled, not sure what I was trying to say here, but watching her with the wide-eyed expression of a deer inspecting the rows of sharp pointy teeth inside a wolf's maul.
"Look at those sad losers." She nodding toward the group of skeleton humans as they moved across the beach like a flock of deformed crabs. "Completely blind they are, and stubborn. Still hanging on to that last shred of hope that they have left. Carrying their sins like a bunch of Australian tourists hauling oversized backpacks. Up the hill they go, higher and higher, crawling on bleeding knees, to beg The Old Goat Almighty for forgiveness." She purged her lips, making a comic tsk-tsk sound. "And so, down and down they all fall, like a dumb herd of suicidal lemmings tripping on celestial sadomasochism. Every time they fail, the pain becomes greater, and their misery keeps on growing like a cancer till hope is no more than a mad whisper and they finally become loopy in the head. You don't want to end up like them, Spike. Believe me, you really deserve better than this."
She stood up, grab hold of the leather reins of her horse, a normal pretty looking girl again. Her eyes had returned to their innocent green-blue color.
Reaching out to me, she said; "Take my hand Spike. I'll bring you to a place where they'll no longer make you run inside this big giant pet wheel. You'll be free. There won't be any hope to deceive you, no dawny sky promising a new day that just will never come. Instead, there will be just - darkness." And she smiled affectionately at the thought of that. "Eternal darkness, sweet and comforting. You'll finally find your peace. It's where you belong. It's what you deserve."
Her offered hand looked impossibly red in the cooked lobster colored light. Sharp contrasting shadows made her fingers seem to stretch out hideously long. They looked like claws with talons.
"Trust me Spike. Take a ride with me."
I sucked in a deep breath, and the smell of sulfur filling my up nostrils. God, I thought, she smelled like burned matches, she smelled like the bloody Devil.
"Not going anywhere with you. Leave me alone." I whispered in a voice so small that it was not even picked up by my own ears, but she caught the message all right. Frowning and pouting like a spoiled little girl, she gazed down, astounded, as if she had just offered me heaven and had it rejected only for the puny reason that I was bloody daft like a pig's smelly rear end.
"You want to go on with this? You seriously believe that you even have the slightest bit of chance at getting out of here, by your own?" She snorted sarcastically. "Spike, You're an idiot." She gave an angry tug on the reigns, making the horse's head bob. The animal neighed crossly at her in response.
"No-one ever gets out! At least, not into the direction they prefer." She added with a sardonic smile.
"No. Oh no." I shook my head, getting aware that I could possibly be telling Mrs Satan here herself that she was wrong. People never much liked that and I could only imagine that it was the same with these supernatural emissaries of evil with the capital E. "You're lying. There has to be another way to fix things. There must be." I licked my lips nervously, tasting ashes. "I rather keep the bit of hope I've left than to go for the complete bugger you have to offer."
That last bit wiped the smile right off her face.
"You fool!" She said, scowling at me, screeching like a witch. "You are going to fall, Spike! Again and again! You are going to be the rat in the maze of a sick kid's twisted science project!"
"Luv," I said, feeling light in the head, fear quickly turning into insanity. "I rather stick to misery a thousand times worse than this than to go anywhere with you. So why don't you just gallop along on your jade and go to hell."
The change of expression on her face made me wish I could have bitten off my daft tongue. Fires lit up inside her eyes, burning the blue into deep indigo and bright yellow as the flames shoot up, then turning into a restless tawny-crimson.
"Well." She said, deceivingly calm. "That was rude."
The corners of her mouth crooked. There wasn't even a ghost of badly acted goodwill left on her features.
"Still, if this is what you want."
She rose upright in the stirrups, turned her head and gazed at the east. A hot wind swelled up from the sea, swirling and raging like a soddin tornado, sweeping up the dark sands from the shore. It burned the sand, literally incinerated it, turning it in clouds of amber and tossed them back on the ground as hot beads of glass. The burning corkscrew wind moved toward the girl on her black steed, and consumed her completely. Her skin started to blacken, bits of it was flaking off like a hideous sort of dandruff. Her white outfit curled up like paper above a hot fire. Flesh shredded from her bones, cut to bloody pieces by the blasting hot sand and burned down to crumbly bits of coal.
"Goodbye Spike." She said, it looked like she was grinning mockingly at me with her bubblegum lips scorched back from her teeth, and I could see the red cables of tendons and muscles that moved her exposed jawbone. "You've just lost your last chance to save yourself. Now you're left on your own."
She turned her horse around and then yelled;
"You'll be falling forever!"
She spurred her skeleton horse and the creature reared and started galloping to the west. Both animal and rider seemed to be on fire, a trail of flames torched in their wake like a red cape as they went, the nightmare girl shrieking that curse to me above the sound of horse-hoofs pounding into the sand.
I backed away when a large shadow fell over my face. When I looked up, the horseman was there again with his bare jaw grinning, while the red hellish glow throbbed inside his dead eyes. He raised his hand and pointed with his bony finger toward the mountain, toward the endless stream of suffering human carcasses moving toward it. Human leftovers, Pete would say. Not even the mutts in the ditch would care much about them, not enough meat on the bones. They climb up the steps carved in the rocks that didn't lead to salvation or forgiveness or anything good, but only to destruction, to more pain and more misery and more suffering, and I'll be suffering endlessly now. I'm doomed to carry myself up that mountain over and over again, till the flesh rots off my bones and till my bones are reduced to ash to fill up the sand on the black beach.
I think I must be in hell.
Somewhere, from behind the mountain, I heard that the girl was still shrieking at me. Or maybe it was only her voice trapped inside my head.
"You'll be falling Spike - falling forever!"
A mad grin spread over my lips, and as I tried to laugh, my broken ribs stung into my lungs like a million wasps-stings, making me gag up blood. I watched, sullen and mad, how the horseman raised his bullwhip, and let it come down on my stomach. I kept laughing, right till the welts on my belly broke open and a hideous wound the size of a bloody caesarian section spilled out my guts like a stinking brown fountain rising from the broken sewage.
NEXT PART
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Part II; Falling forever
1.
The nightmare about that mountain and the girl. The one that Pete, carried away by his juvenile enthusiasm, so daftly tried to make me remember, was the one that visited me that very last night that I spent with my friends, right before everything went to hell.
I had that dream before. In fact, I think it occurred to me at least once or twice in a week that I was trashing awake, sweating and screaming to that girl whose name I could never remember, till Pete, shaking my shoulders or slapping me across the face, would save me from it. That particular nightmare was like a boogieman that lurked around after the lights were out, jumping up from underneath the bed from time to time to give a good scare, then disappearing back into the shadows. By the time it popped its ugly head around again a couple of nights later, I had already forgotten most of it to get me to realise that it was merely a dream, and so the bloody thing was able to keep haunting me for months.
It always started in the same way. In that dream, I would find myself stranded at a strange shore, with a black sea from which the horizon parted into an alien sky, its dark waves whispering behind me. There were no stars, no clouds drifting above my head, no sun or moon that could tell me the difference between night and day. The sky looked dead, and had an eerie red glow as if something large and jealous had just murdered it with a sharp knife. The sand between my feet was black like the strange sea, like it had been scorched. The beach itself was littered with large slates of stone, the crooked landmarks reminding me of neglected, jagged headstones at a cemetery. Land-inward, a cliff followed the short beach-line, rising up behind a wood of withered branches, dead shrubs and hollow, crooked trees. There were steps carved into the rock face, winding around like a big snake as it went up. I would raise my head and look at it, seeing nothing but this massive mount of stone and dirt. The notion would occur to me then, that it was not a cliff, but a mountain. So broad was its base that I could not see the borders of land touch the sea at both sides, and so high was its peak that it just disappeared into the blood-red sky without becoming much narrower in perimeter. I was stranded at the foot of a monstrous mountain. My hands and legs would start to shake; then a feeling like something heavy was dragging on to them, followed by the sound of rattling metal. If I looked (and I always did, I always looked), I would see that I was fettered by chains. Voices could then be heard, all around me; a chorus of moans and wails rising up from the waves. The beach was swarmed by men and women, washed ashore like frail sacks of suffering flesh, crawling out of the water and onto the black-scorched land, their frighteningly skinny chests heaving madly.
They would crawl first. Then, after struggling up and trying a couple of swaying steps, they would start to walk, their rusty chains clattering between their legs. They all looked horrible, like bodies that have been smashed on the wheel. They had scarred skin, dark bruises, burn marks, blisters and slashes everywhere. Most of them were bald, with plucks of hair falling over their scalps in wet cobwebs. All of them had whip-marks running across their backs, so severely had they been beaten that the flogging had cut through on some spots of the skin like it was butter. I saw a man whose stooped back was one grotesque gaping wound filled with puss, and the pink dented frame of his spine just stuck right through the tissue like a row of teeth through bleeding gums. I saw another man, whose face was completely burnt away, leaving only a grinning skull covered with bits of shredded red skin, his eyes dangling out of the sockets like large boiled eggs tied to pieces of bungee wire. I looked away, absolutely horrified, and my lucky eyes came across a woman. Her belly was slashed open to up to her chest, and she dragged a green and brown mass of intestines behind her. When she came closer, I saw that something moved between the stinking coils of her entrails; a bloody foetus, dangling from his mum's umbilical cord like a caterpillar from a rotten leaf; it's tiny, not yet fully done body wriggling inside a thin membrane sack.
I screamed, spun around, tried to run away. My legs became entangled with the chains and I fell, face down into the ash coloured earth. Darkness loomed over me, and a spilt hoof came down, followed by a black horse leg that sunk deep into the sand. My heart pounded madly as I looked up, and saw, who was studying me with a red glow in his bulging eyes. The horseman mounted on the skeleton frame of the black steed was nothing more but a stack of bones himself, held together by yellow threads of tendons and dried shreds of muscles, like those funny wax jobs they made out of hanged criminals in order to teach the med students human anatomy. The horseman grinned his lipless grin, the large brown monk's habit he wore covered most of him and the cowl drawn low over his skull cast a dark shadow that made the white of his rounded eyeballs appear even more frightening. The only skin he still had was on his boots and was made out of wrinkled, flesh coloured leather. His bony fingers encased the handle of a rawhide bullwhip, and he tapped with it on his spurs, making them give a cheery tinkle with each tap.
I crawled from underneath the mouth-foaming horse, my eyes so wide of fear that I imagined them popping out of my sockets like the ones on that poor bloke I've just seen. The horseman raised his bullwhip and struck it down with a WHUSH. And then, for a spilt second, my mind went entirely blank, and all I could think of was that hot burning gash that cut through me like a butcher's knife. Wriggling with my belly over the sand, I tried to crawl away from him. A second blow exploded on my backside, and the pain caused my spine to arch into a spastic crook.
I felt like I was splitting in half.
The horseman dug his spurs deep into the flanks of his nightmare horse. It screamed in rage and reared, its front hooves rose so high that it blotted out the red glow in the sky. I thought it was about to crush my head. I wanted to scream, but my throat was like a narrow tube, wheezing air, and all I could say was Oh no, oh no, and I felt a warm trickle of fluid running down my spine, right where the whip had hit me. Oh no, I muttered, Not here, please, not here, and just as I turned myself around, the horse hooves came down, not on my skull to make it burst like an overripe pumpkin, but next to my head on the scorched ground, making it shudder and causing the surface to crack.
I started blubbing. Rambling. Took my breaths with animal-like pants. The horseman looked down at me with this devilish glow still smouldering inside his dead eye-sockets.
"Please, not here, not here." I muttered, my mind was quickly backing away, leaving me mad with fear. I didn't want it to end here; I didn't want to die in this horrible horrible place, alone and surrounded by these terrifying phantoms.
"Not here. Please, help me, God help me."
The horseman turned his head to the mountain, raised his skeleton hand and pointed toward the group of wretched beings, struggling up the stone staircase. Like a mindless zombie, I crawled back at my feet, and started walking toward the foot of the mountain. I was quickly swept up by the stream of bodies, a cramped mass of tortured souls and terrifying sounds. They pushed me forward, stepped on my feet, poked me from the side, pressing their shrivelled wounds and festering ulcers against my bare skin. The air was hot and thick with the smell of decay, of rotting flesh squirming with belching maggots. The group halted at the end of the shoreline. They dropped on their knees like sinners in a church, and started digging frantically, removing vast amount of black earth, sweeping it up like dogs busy burying bones, and they dug out large chunks of stone; as they were black, with tiny glittering particles melted into it, they looked like shattered parts of the night's sky to me.
"Must repair it." I heard an old man mumble. His eyes were white-rimmed and sticky saliva trickling down the corners of his lax mouth. He was talking to nobody else but to himself, as if he was totally alone among all the others. "Must fix it." He rambled on. "It's the only way out. The only way."
I searched around and also dug out a piece of glitter-stone. My body and my mind worked autonomic, fully detached from what was left of my old self. Then I followed the others, and carried my precious cargo up the rocky stairs, scrambling on my hands and knees because the steps were too narrow and I was afraid that I would fall. People did fall over the edge, those who were too weak or too injured to actually move or just had the bad luck to be pushed too near to the side. They plummeted down the cliff into the graveyard beneath, their heavy bodies snapping the twigs and branches right off the trees while the trunks snapped their spines and necks like used matches. As we went up higher and higher, the falls became more frightening. A man with one leg amputated to the knee, let out a savage scream as he tumbled over the edge. In a desperate attempt to save himself, he dragged a young boy with him, and we heard a sickly cracking noise as they hit the sharp rocks below. They rolled down like bags filled with broken things and disappeared into the darkness. We all watched, but we saw nothing, felt nothing but fear and the fierce wanting not to become like them. I cast my eyes on the steps, keeping them there. I fought for every small space between the coiling, wriggling mass. I stepped on others, kicked them back, pushed them aaway. Always keeping myself close to the stone surface of the cliff, my right hand tracking it with a barmy fanatism. The air became hotter as we climbed up higher, till every panting breath I took was burning inside my lungs and left my throat parched like a desert. The sky was a blazing furnace; a frightening glow of purple and orange, trembling like a soddin moorage. The stone that I carried in my hands had increased in weight with every step I took. It became heavier and heavier, till it was like dragging a bloody anvil up the hill. I forced myself to keep moving, drenched as I was in sweat and so exhausted that I was hardly able to stand up any longer. A woman pushed me away, and my hand lost contact with the stone wall. A man stepped on my leg and kicked me in the chest. I fell, and slid down several steps, scratching my stomach open over the rough stone surface. My glitter-stone rolled out of my hands. The others moved on, unyielding, like a marching row of insects, ignoring my cries as they trampled me under their feet. A rain of boots and blows, and I was thrust aside till the ground suddenly disappeared beneath my body. I screamed and grabbed hold to an arm, any protruding object, my fingers frenetically clutching onto it while above me I heard the shrill shriek of a hysterical woman.
"Don't drop me! Don't drop me!" I spewed out the words like a lunatic, my heart hammering so loud that I was convinced that it was tearing my entire rib-case apart. The woman's eyes grew maniacal. Her mouth was a gaping, screaming hole. Lightening threw shattered light over her hollow-cheeked face. It was followed by roaring of thunder, making the mountain shudder. She clawed at my hand, slashing her nails into it like an angry cat.
"NO!!" I shouted. "PLEASE! DON'T LET ME FALL! DON'T LET ME FALL!"
I tried to hold on to her, but my fingers started to bleed and became all slippery. My hand glided down the woman's arm, who tried to pull away and kept screeching and crying. Then I just held on to her hand. Then, only her fingers.
I fell back into the abyss, horror wrenching a scream from my throat. The darkness swallowed me up like a hungry maul.
I woke up close to the shore. The sea surged in my ears. The bleeding sky stretched wide before my eyes. A wave pulled over me, and filled my mouth and nose with salty water till I choked and wretched. I tried to move, a hellish pain shot through my body; a hot, blazing agony that left me coiled up in the drowned sand. My limps were completely bloodened; large black bruises bloomed like malignant mushrooms over my thighs, spreading down to my kneecaps and up to my groin. A splintered piece of bone shimmered in the red glow, sticking out of my elbow like a dead tree in a field. Whimpering, I tossed over my injured body that now seemed to consist only of torn flesh and fractured bones, and started to crawl toward dry land. I was not alone. All around me came the cries of misery and suffering, and then they emerged out of the hurling waters like some gruesome swarm of deformed fish, pulling themselves forward, their arms and legs twisted and bend in frightening angles, some of them merely left with fraying stomps, the colour of cooked liver. Others, their eyes empty and drained of any other feelings but despair, had opened their mouths to produce one long, endless howl. I moved with them. I had become one of them now. Finally, we reached the dark line of wet sand on the beach. My useless body slithered onto the muddy surface, and collapsed there.
A split hoof sunk into the sand next to me.
"Ah, poor Spike. I feel sorry for you."
Sobbing and fearing the worst, I stared up at the figure mounted on the horse. A girl, dressed completely in white, from her leather boots and jodhpurs to her long sleeved shirt. Her hair was golden; rays of a happy morning sunshine. Her doll-like, greenish blue eyed, pout-lipped face upset me; it stirred my memory like a bolt of electricity frying a frog's leg.
The horse reared and she reined savagely to get his legs back on the ground. She slapped on the animal's flanks with her riding whip, drawing beads of blood on the dark fur.
"You look really awful." She said, wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something nasty. "All wet and boneless. Like some icky flaccid squid-thing."
She poked with her whip in my swollen leg, making me cry out in pain. My helpless twisting and cringing seemed to be really amusing, and she chuckled manically.
"She left, didn't she?" She asked, smiling sweetly at me. "That bitch! But, hate to say I told you so! You shouldn't have trusted her, Spike. You should have fought at my side. I would have treated you well. At least I wouldn't have left you to die in that cave."
The whip's thin end moved up, caressing the inner parts of my thighs, drawing supple circles near my groin. Shivering, not of cold or fear but of something else, I sucked in tiny breaths in a futile effort to remain calm.
"You're not afraid of me now, are you?" She purred, her voice coated in honey as her riding whip brushed my limp cock that was nudged against my thigh like a cold wounded dog. She jumped off the saddle, her breath quickening, her round breasts played peek-a-boo inside the crease of her low-buttoned shirt. The corners of her pink lips curled into a grin as she hunkered down beside me.
"No." I croaked. "Please, no." Fearing her, absolutely disgusted by her, but strangely wanting her too.
She cupped my genitals with her small hand. Her touch was soft and warm, and an unwilling moan escaped from my perched lips.
"There." She whispered, bending down and breathing over the moist curly hairs covering my groin.
"There. If you're so afraid of me."
Her hand brushed over the head, teased it with her fingertips. Swallowing, I felt an alluring heat pulse from her body, and as she leaned over my chest, her long cascade of blond hair grazed over my skin like the soft tickle of feathers. Who was this strange girl? What did she want from me? And how on earth could my Neanderthal brain keep thinking about things like what she could do to me with her warm mouth and hot hands while I was lying there, sprawled out like a deformed, legless chicken?
"Why don't you try to get away?" She breathed.
I moved slightly, mindlessly, as if she had just spoken out a command that I had to follow. Immediately, agony exploded up my spine.
"Can't." I said, hoarsely, and then, since I was only left with half a brain of wit, added. "I think - my - my legs, maybe they are broken."
"Ah, my poor boy, poor Spike." She cooed like a mum to her baby, and I wondering why she kept calling me Sticks or Spike or what ever it was. Maybe she had a dog named like that. "I bet it is all misery and pain, isn't? It must be unbearable for you to know what is done to you, not once, but only God knows how many times! Just, over and over again."
She closed her eyes, her lips curling into a content smile as if the words could trigger images in her head that gave her some perverse sort of satisfaction.
"And then to be completely helpless, being too weak to stop all this. This merciless destruction of body, heart and spirit."
Her eyes flew open, and I stared not in the sea colored rings of her pupils but into the empty orange glow of two white-less and irises-less eyes. The orange shifted and flickered, like flames behind the isinglass portholes of a hot stove. Watching her like this made my heart stumble and skip a beat. Her sweet-girly smile seemed hideously out of place together with those two devilish eyes.
"They are grinding you up, Spikey-boy! They are putting everything that is you into a giant blender and push on the mash-button till it's all mincemeat. Right until every part of you is no longer something of use, but just an endless source of pain."
Her lip lifted up from her teeth as she spit out the word as if she was experiencing some of my suffering herself, and was caught in a grimace. When she looked at me again, the flames had been put out, leaving her eyes completely black like the coaled insides of incinerators.
"Fate can be so cruel. Don't you think?"
She raised my chin with a finger, forcing me to look at her, the black and ugly emptiness that was her soul reflected in her gaze.
"Tell me, Spike. Don't you want this to end? Don't you want to get away, escape from all this?"
I whimpered. My will and fear were strong enough to make me jump right up and run away like the bloody wind from this scary little bitch, but the rest of me was too broken and in too great an agony to actually do it. I was like a helpless bugger of an insect, trapped inside her spidery wed, bundled in a cocoon of lethal injuries and ready for bloody slaughter.
" Don't be afraid." She said in a way that provided bogus comfort. "I'm here to help. I can do for you exactly that, what that self-centered bitch slayer can't or simply won't. I can make this stop. I can grand you peace. All you have to do is ask."
"I - I - Don't - Please." I babbled, not sure what I was trying to say here, but watching her with the wide-eyed expression of a deer inspecting the rows of sharp pointy teeth inside a wolf's maul.
"Look at those sad losers." She nodding toward the group of skeleton humans as they moved across the beach like a flock of deformed crabs. "Completely blind they are, and stubborn. Still hanging on to that last shred of hope that they have left. Carrying their sins like a bunch of Australian tourists hauling oversized backpacks. Up the hill they go, higher and higher, crawling on bleeding knees, to beg The Old Goat Almighty for forgiveness." She purged her lips, making a comic tsk-tsk sound. "And so, down and down they all fall, like a dumb herd of suicidal lemmings tripping on celestial sadomasochism. Every time they fail, the pain becomes greater, and their misery keeps on growing like a cancer till hope is no more than a mad whisper and they finally become loopy in the head. You don't want to end up like them, Spike. Believe me, you really deserve better than this."
She stood up, grab hold of the leather reins of her horse, a normal pretty looking girl again. Her eyes had returned to their innocent green-blue color.
Reaching out to me, she said; "Take my hand Spike. I'll bring you to a place where they'll no longer make you run inside this big giant pet wheel. You'll be free. There won't be any hope to deceive you, no dawny sky promising a new day that just will never come. Instead, there will be just - darkness." And she smiled affectionately at the thought of that. "Eternal darkness, sweet and comforting. You'll finally find your peace. It's where you belong. It's what you deserve."
Her offered hand looked impossibly red in the cooked lobster colored light. Sharp contrasting shadows made her fingers seem to stretch out hideously long. They looked like claws with talons.
"Trust me Spike. Take a ride with me."
I sucked in a deep breath, and the smell of sulfur filling my up nostrils. God, I thought, she smelled like burned matches, she smelled like the bloody Devil.
"Not going anywhere with you. Leave me alone." I whispered in a voice so small that it was not even picked up by my own ears, but she caught the message all right. Frowning and pouting like a spoiled little girl, she gazed down, astounded, as if she had just offered me heaven and had it rejected only for the puny reason that I was bloody daft like a pig's smelly rear end.
"You want to go on with this? You seriously believe that you even have the slightest bit of chance at getting out of here, by your own?" She snorted sarcastically. "Spike, You're an idiot." She gave an angry tug on the reigns, making the horse's head bob. The animal neighed crossly at her in response.
"No-one ever gets out! At least, not into the direction they prefer." She added with a sardonic smile.
"No. Oh no." I shook my head, getting aware that I could possibly be telling Mrs Satan here herself that she was wrong. People never much liked that and I could only imagine that it was the same with these supernatural emissaries of evil with the capital E. "You're lying. There has to be another way to fix things. There must be." I licked my lips nervously, tasting ashes. "I rather keep the bit of hope I've left than to go for the complete bugger you have to offer."
That last bit wiped the smile right off her face.
"You fool!" She said, scowling at me, screeching like a witch. "You are going to fall, Spike! Again and again! You are going to be the rat in the maze of a sick kid's twisted science project!"
"Luv," I said, feeling light in the head, fear quickly turning into insanity. "I rather stick to misery a thousand times worse than this than to go anywhere with you. So why don't you just gallop along on your jade and go to hell."
The change of expression on her face made me wish I could have bitten off my daft tongue. Fires lit up inside her eyes, burning the blue into deep indigo and bright yellow as the flames shoot up, then turning into a restless tawny-crimson.
"Well." She said, deceivingly calm. "That was rude."
The corners of her mouth crooked. There wasn't even a ghost of badly acted goodwill left on her features.
"Still, if this is what you want."
She rose upright in the stirrups, turned her head and gazed at the east. A hot wind swelled up from the sea, swirling and raging like a soddin tornado, sweeping up the dark sands from the shore. It burned the sand, literally incinerated it, turning it in clouds of amber and tossed them back on the ground as hot beads of glass. The burning corkscrew wind moved toward the girl on her black steed, and consumed her completely. Her skin started to blacken, bits of it was flaking off like a hideous sort of dandruff. Her white outfit curled up like paper above a hot fire. Flesh shredded from her bones, cut to bloody pieces by the blasting hot sand and burned down to crumbly bits of coal.
"Goodbye Spike." She said, it looked like she was grinning mockingly at me with her bubblegum lips scorched back from her teeth, and I could see the red cables of tendons and muscles that moved her exposed jawbone. "You've just lost your last chance to save yourself. Now you're left on your own."
She turned her horse around and then yelled;
"You'll be falling forever!"
She spurred her skeleton horse and the creature reared and started galloping to the west. Both animal and rider seemed to be on fire, a trail of flames torched in their wake like a red cape as they went, the nightmare girl shrieking that curse to me above the sound of horse-hoofs pounding into the sand.
I backed away when a large shadow fell over my face. When I looked up, the horseman was there again with his bare jaw grinning, while the red hellish glow throbbed inside his dead eyes. He raised his hand and pointed with his bony finger toward the mountain, toward the endless stream of suffering human carcasses moving toward it. Human leftovers, Pete would say. Not even the mutts in the ditch would care much about them, not enough meat on the bones. They climb up the steps carved in the rocks that didn't lead to salvation or forgiveness or anything good, but only to destruction, to more pain and more misery and more suffering, and I'll be suffering endlessly now. I'm doomed to carry myself up that mountain over and over again, till the flesh rots off my bones and till my bones are reduced to ash to fill up the sand on the black beach.
I think I must be in hell.
Somewhere, from behind the mountain, I heard that the girl was still shrieking at me. Or maybe it was only her voice trapped inside my head.
"You'll be falling Spike - falling forever!"
A mad grin spread over my lips, and as I tried to laugh, my broken ribs stung into my lungs like a million wasps-stings, making me gag up blood. I watched, sullen and mad, how the horseman raised his bullwhip, and let it come down on my stomach. I kept laughing, right till the welts on my belly broke open and a hideous wound the size of a bloody caesarian section spilled out my guts like a stinking brown fountain rising from the broken sewage.
NEXT PART
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