Hide

Original artwork by Kyle Newbridge

Samantha,

White. It is all white now. White and brown. The snow has come, and I have no food, and the ground shakes every single day and every single night. I cannot sleep.

I can see and hear it now. It wails and whines, as it used to back in Room 101. The monster is enormous, the size of an entire city block. Its neck is thick, and it pulses with the beast’s feverish heartbeats. They create small tremors when the monster is uncontained. I can hear them. Each one. I hear the beats when I rise, and when I eat, and when I tend my home. They are slow—maybe two for as many minutes, then two of silence, then two more—but always present and just slow enough to deny precise prediction. Do you know how maddening it is to hear a heartbeat, non-stop, as you try to relieve yourself among the fallen trees?

I looked down last night. The darkness clung to the air, but the clouds, as corpses, did not stir. I stayed there awhile, waiting. The beast was quiet for a moment, but there continued rumblings from below, like a distant waterfall, but thicker. I fear that the notes, the drawings of the cave, were most likely historical accounts, scientific notations of what lies beyond the end. I pray that their depictions are so fantastical as to either be extinct now or entirely fictitious. I have no place else to escape. It is getting close, and the forest people have already fled.

I must get away. I have no choice, Samantha.

Here, I have chosen to rest on the edge of the world. Where I hope my messages—literally thrown off into the abyss—somehow have a better chance of reaching you. Do they? If I go down, will I find you? Are you waiting for me? Are you down there, far below?

Have you been able to learn alone? Or have you been found out by shifters or some beast like the one chasing me. Nothing has found you, has it? I hope nothing finds me.

The largest quakes come in waves of day and night. By day, the horizon is quiet. The rumblings are from below. By night, the wails, the rumblings from the monster. It will be here in a matter of days.

Please, don’t be found. Never be found. Hide and stay hidden. Lock your doors and dig as far into the ground as you can. Bury yourself, lest it deny you burial.

It will arrive at Florent by the end of the week. I have crafted a long, long rope to take me all the way down, past the dark clouds and to another place. I yearn for quiet. Please, meet me when it is quiet.

Be safe,

Tomas Cohen