He fell from darkness into darkness, tumbling weightless, surrounded by a cloud of his own fear and expecting at every instant to dash his fragile substance against indifferent earth.
At least I’ll die quickly, he thought.
He was mistaken. Time stretched away beneath him, agonizing seconds uncoiling like the rope of an anchor thrown in deep water, his body given up for dead, his mind clawing at emptiness, dread increasing with every beat of his racing heart.
He felt certain he must be screaming because the circumstances so obviously called for it, but could hear nothing. His was equally sure his arms and legs were flailing wildly – those being the only affirmative responses available to falling persons – but he could neither see nor feel his limbs. He felt lighter than sunlight, heavier than granite, at once plunging and soaring, accelerating into the expanding void.
As often happens when the doomed are cursed with a moment to reflect before crossing the threshold between vales of existence, he sought comfort in memory, sifting accumulated trinkets for something bright and pretty to cheer him into his grave. He was not happy, but not surprised, to find his earthly trove composed of poor stuff, dull and shabby, unhappy souvenirs of days spent in toil and discontent. Facing the bitter end of life, he merely confirmed that his life had been bitter all along.
Finding no consolation in his mortal scroll, he thought it advisable to beseech heaven, ask that the gods grant him a swift death, a merciful reception, and peace and ease in the immortal realm, which new effort failed as miserably as the first. He’d had little use for gods in life, asking from them nothing, expecting nothing, and, as far he was concerned, receiving nothing. In the final extremity, he discovered himself incapable of constructing even the simplest of prayers and without the faintest idea where such appeals are best directed. At the moment when even a nodding acquaintance with the divine could best serve him, his habitual apathy toward all things religious ensured he would enter the next world friendless and unescorted.
The two most immediate lines of deliberation thus unsatisfactorily exhausted, his thoughts turned to precipitating events. He sensed the hot echoes of fierce emotion within his panicked brain; surprise, and shock, and a towering anger.
Was I pushed? Am I murdered? Falling to one’s death should rightly leave a strong impression on one’s mind, he reasoned, and being helped into it by nefarious agencies, known or otherwise, even more so. But he could summon no memory of how he had come to the brink of ruin. Likewise, he could conceive of no cliff so tall, nor shaft so deep, that it could afford a falling man more life than that required to comprehend the finality of his situation, yet he’d already enjoyed more thoughtful insights in the course of his protracted descent than would normally occur to him in a year’s time. Yet within those very contradictions he perceived the faintest glimmer of hope. If his manner of falling was clearly impossible, then he was clearly not falling.
This is a dream. A bad dream. Perhaps I am stricken with fever. Or maybe I am under some powerful and malevolent spell, and this is simply an infernal delusion. I must in due course awaken, alive and whole. It is only sense.
He was in a mood to be persuaded, and just as the faintest spark of uncharacteristic optimism began to loosen the freezing band of terror around his hammering chest, his fugitive senses exploded back to business with a stupefying crash and he fell, screaming and flailing, into an icy river of fire.
He sank like a stone into a new contradiction – water so brightly red that it seared his eyes through tightly closed lids, so cold that he felt as if his flesh were being flayed from his bones. His choking fear of falling transitioned seamlessly into a choking fear of drowning, and after reassembling some part of his scattered wits he commanded his newly compliant limbs to action. He flailed to good purpose, now, although in the blinding tumult of the river he couldn’t be certain if he was fighting for the surface or making straight for the bottom. It struck him as patently unjust that he might survive an improbable fall only to drown in an implausible river.
But he didn’t drown, emerging head up and sputtering just in time to swallow a single, grateful breath before smashing painfully into a jagged boulder sitting low in the water. The river was littered with rocks, stealthy ranks strewn across the torrent like an undisciplined army, their sharp shoulders and broad shields tearing the flood into fanciful crimson fountains and broad scarlet fans. The secret to survival, he saw, was in keeping head above the angry flood while maintaining his body in a downstream attitude whereby he might stand a chance of avoiding onrushing obstacles before they battered him shards and splinters. Paralyzing cold and numbing fear notwithstanding, he managed to maneuver past the next few boulders without serious hurt and, in the process, get better acquainted with his surroundings. He observed that the river holding him captive was itself a captive. Irregular stone walls curved up on either side, forming a great echoing throat that amplified the rush and roar into a thunderous howl. Massive stone teeth knifed down from an unseen roof, their menacing points tinged blood-red, like a fearsome seine eternally combing the channel for morsels to satisfy an insatiable hunger.
I’m in a cave, he thought. That can’t be good.
Neither was he pleased to learn that he wasn’t alone. Lifted high on the crest of a wave, he glimpsed a grotesque figure leaning out from the bank, scanning the surface with a hundred staring eyes, a forest of drooling fangs bristling in its gaping mouth, a huge ax in its powerful grasp, raised and ready to strike. The current swept him past the monster almost before he had time to fear it, and he presently came to a massive gate leading to a chamber in which burned a vast fire. The figure of a beautiful woman stood before the gate in flickering silhouette, her sweet voice lifted high in a plaintive psalm that struck him as vaguely familiar. She beckoned to him with arms that were snakes, and her breath carried to him a ghastly stench of infection and decay. He slammed hard against another rock, and by the time he recovered he had drifted within reach of a giant, as tall as a giraffe and with the head of a great hyena, who stood upon a narrow shelf of stone by the river’s edge and repeatedly stabbed at the frantic swimmer with an enormous barbed spear.
If I survive this spell, I’ll kill whoever cast it.
Dense billows of darkness vomited from the mouth of another passage, and the red river shrieked aloud as the black effluent fouled its bright waters. He prudently began kicking for the opposite shore, nearly swimming straight into the grinning jaws of three enormous crocodiles lounging on the bank, spouts of crimson water reflecting like tongues of flame in their glassy black eyes. Reversing course again, he managed to regain what he took for the middle of the stream. But he was approaching the end of his strength. Blinding terror, brutal cold and frenzied exertion had taken their toll, and he knew that he must make for dry ground or perish. As he twisted awkwardly, sluggishly about, scanning the banks for any place not guarded by sharp stones or infested with dubious characters, he detected a change in the river’s mighty voice; a low growl, as much felt as heard, was rising within the prevailing howl. It was a sound he knew only too well: the boom and crash of falling water. In the span of perhaps only a few minutes he’d survived things that should rightly have killed him at least twice over, but it was the approaching cataract that finally defeated his will.
I give up.
He stopped thrashing and lay back in the boiling stream, filled with an unexpected quietude. Desperate efforts on behalf of life seemed suddenly pointless, even foolish.
I’ve always done my level best to look after my mortal property, he silently lamented, and to present myself in marketable condition. Spell or no spell, I’ve had it.
A soft and fatal peace enveloped him, and he was only distantly aware that a new sound had risen within the commotion, a faint and light and musical sound he absently recognized as the jangling cadence of a sistrum approaching from behind. Motivated by nothing more imperative than careless curiosity, he swung around to see who dared create a joyful noise within that terrible place. A stately barge bore down upon him; clean planks neatly joined, rails gilded sun-bright, great falcon’s eyes regarding him from either side of its sharp prow. A small forest of oars dangled from its sleek hull, apparently unmanned and carving wild arcs through the air as the ship careened through the maelstrom. It may have been a trick of the light, or perhaps a phantom of his overwrought imagination, but he conceived a fleeting impression of passengers aboard the vessel, robed in white, seated erect and still as death, expressionless faces staring straight ahead as the river carried them toward their fate. The menace was at last perfected, his doom inescapable, the terror exquisite. Just as a surplus of fulfillment can dull the mouth’s appetite for food, so does overindulgence eventually mute the mind’s capacity to fear. As the final course in such a lavish banquet of horrors, the spectral barge seemed rather bland fare, more absurd than menacing. He would have laughed out loud, but could no longer summon the energy.
If I survive this spell, I’ll have to congratulate whoever cast it.
Raised high by the surging water, the barge’s golden keel crashed down upon him even as the flaming river fell away beneath his idle feet, and he found himself again falling through darkness, this time surrounded by a rain of blood-red stars and the rapidly diminishing roar of the cataract.
At least it’s over, he thought.
He was wrong again.
