Down
Original artwork by Kyle Newbridge
Samantha,
The journey to Hell is not an easy one. It is not paved with good intentions, nor glamour. There is no road, but a long, long rope.
The way was clear: I secured my anchor and fashioned a harness. I packed away few letters and books, select notes from the caves, water, food, a knife.
The day came, pallid and gray. The sun and stars lay, visibly dulled, like spots of rust on a tarnished, old spoon. By noon, the sky ceased being beautiful.
It was a hateful descent. The air was a crowd of dark hands, all grasping for my neck. The clouds were a sooty clay worked deep into my eyes. The world was set alight, and the smoke grew, grew faster than the fire, and everything–Florent, and the trees, and the bats, and the sand people, and the forest people, and the caves, and the shifters, even myself, yourself–everything was blotted out.
And then there was something else there too, blotted out more deliberately. A question snuffed from the corner of my eye. The shifters–a movement unseen, the glint of teeth behind the lips’ thin facade, a fog roiling where it hadn’t before.
The beast roared again, and then the shifters screamed too. I don’t know whether from its bellow wading through every fiber of every being–for those were my reasons, my screams–or whether they were going for the kill. I saw a bigger movement, the glint of a tarry wing; I felt the pull of the beast stepping on my anchor, beating Florent savagely, mercilessly, thirstily. And I cut the rope.
I fell, Samantha. I fell and fell, and I don’t know how long anymore. At some point, the wait ceases to exist. At some point, the body has its heart attack, and you grow angry, and then it all stops. The bellowing, the anger, the fleeing, the pieces of Florent falling after me like a thousand mirrors broken over stone.
At some point, the reflections, the mirrors, they become a blur too, become one with the dust. Everything becomes dust.
I think there’s a stream nearby. Water will help.
I’ll send this when I can.
Tomas Cohen
