again, and when I refused her she asked if I’d kiss her. I was starting to hate her. It wasn’t her fault, but still. Something had happened back there to cause her to be this way. I had felt some of it too, but it had passed. I hoped it would pass with her before I throttled her to… well you can’t die twice. That made me wonder. If I killed her where would she go? What a dark thought. I chastened myself for entertaining the thought. She was a pleasant girl when she was sober.
We were getting close and I was getting excited. I accepted that it wouldn’t be paradise on the other side; no oasis and old friends toasting champagne and yucking it up. I’d settle for any view other than what was behind me. Perhaps just one other person. Someone else because I was beginning to feel lonely even with Julie in my company.
She had been silent for a while, and I judged that her high was waning. Hoped it was waning.
“How you doing?” I asked her.
“Getting tired.”
And she was, I heard it in her voice. Not sleepy but exhausted.
“We’re almost there,” I said.
“What do you think is on the other side?”
“No clue.”
“I think there will be people. A lot of them. Maybe far off, but we’ll see signs of them.”
“I guess it will be almost exactly like what’s behind us. No people.”
The top of the ridge was too steep to climb. We had to walk laterally along it until we found a rock with wide enough grooves to make steps of. She wasn’t thrilled with letting me go first, but I wanted to help her up so she wouldn’t fall. She made me promise I wouldn’t look without her.
True to my word I made it to the top and avoided looking down the other side. I laid on my stomach and reached down to her hand, and pulled as she climbed. Finally we had made it.
At the top we walked toward the opposing side of the ridge. With each step the valley on the other side presented itself greater. We stopped at the precipice, which was steeper on this side, more treacherous.
More fucking nothing. Dirt, rock, vast open hell. A more empty feeling there was none.
I looked over at her. Her eyes were sober and glassy, a solemn expression borne on her angelic face. Her gaze swept the valley, which was larger than our previous. A tear rolled down her cheek.
“I’m sorry, Julie. I wanted to find others, too.”
“Why do you suppose your leg wouldn’t bleed?” She said distantly. “Because the dead don’t bleed. Just as the dead don’t die.”
When her eyes gazed down the steep cliff, I knew what she was preparing to do, and only had time to call her name before she leapt over the edge.
She tumbled head over foot, again and again: I turned away from it.
I backed away from the precipice, dropped to my knees and wept. If there was any justice in this universe, her passing from here would bring her to where she belonged: heaven. Her being here was a mistake.
Alone again. I missed Emmy. I wondered how she was getting along having just endured the death of her uncle. She had witnessed me die. Poor thing. I suspect I died of a massive coronary. A heart attack caused from seeing that hellish thing. It’s easy to blame that thing, but how was my health really? High blood pressure and high cholesterol: yes and yes. A diet of processed foods and scotch. I had quit smoking, at least, but several years of that probably didn’t unclog my arteries like so much Drano. It was also possible that I had died of an allergic reaction to that tonic Ernest fed me. God I hoped that wasn’t the case. Emmy would feel responsible for my death if it was. Poor thing. As I wept there, alone in my misery, I pined to tell Emmy I loved her, that this wasn’t her fault, and that I was sorry for putting her through this.
I laid down on the rock and cried myself to sleep. A deep sleep. When I’d wake up nothing would be the same.
When I awoke I hadn’t the slightest notion where I was. I sat bolt upright and looked around. I was in hell, that much I remembered, but my environment had changed drastically. I was in the same spot ( I think) on the damned sharp rock, but my visibility was hindered by mist. Thick gray mist with a water-weight attached to it. As if the dark clouds had dropped and enveloped me. Coupled with the intense heat, it was like being in a steam room. It didn’t seem to be any later in the day. I checked my watch and couldn’t read the time. My automatic response was to push the little button on the top left and damn if it didn’t illuminate the screen. This was the watch from my childhood, though I still couldn’t recall it. I remembered its functions oddly enough. It was 8:20 AM. I had slept for five hours.
Fortunately my thirst was abated, still. Somehow. Had it not, I’d be working on harvesting some of the moisture in the air, perhaps with my shirt, and sucking it out. That was one problem I no longer faced. Nor was keeping company. I had wished that annoying bitch would shut up, and now she would never make a sound again. Jeffrey Jay Jacobs the Self Centered, I believe we met earlier.
It was going to be rough getting a move on with no visibility, but I needed to be actively engaged in some mission, to maintain my sanity. The subsequent ridge recalled from recent memory (and now obscured by clouds) was a great deal away. Many hours of traveling it would take. I’d make my way there and take a look over that ridge. And then the next. And then the next, until something changed. Or until I found another partner, and next time I’d see to it that our friendship stuck. How shitty must my friendship be that my companionship drives people to throw themselves off cliffs?
It was deafly quiet. I wished Julie was here if for no other reason than to have another pair of ears to listen to my rantings. I wasn’t fond of remembering my past, how I fucked my life up, and dwelling on it would just bring more despair. So I’d sing. My voice wasn’t all that bad, and I’d be the only one who heard it anyway.
It was going to be real tricky descending this ridge, with or without proper visibility. I had all the time in the world so I’d spend copious amounts of it gingerly climbing down this rock, taking breaks often.
The problem with singing is most of the songs I knew the lyrics to were love songs, and they would just make me more miserable. So I sang Oh My Darlin’ Clementine. Emmy used to sing it when she was a kid, and she was cute as a hamster’s nose as she did so. Facing the steep rock I slowly backed my way down the hill.
It had been twenty minutes, I judged, and little progress was made. Maybe, I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t fucking see. But suddenly I saw something, just as my foot brushed up against it: Julie’s white dress. She wasn’t inside it. When I picked it up it fell apart like a thousand-year-old piece of delicate fabric. I hunkered down and scanned the area for signs of her body. I knew I wouldn’t find it, but it was an impulsive action. Could what have happened been what I had hoped for, that she was delivered to her rightful place? Heaven?
“Please be the case. God if you exist, please accept Julie into your kingdom.”
I continued down the hillside. The lower I got, the darker it became. The more layers of cloud that separated me from light. It got to be that I could scarcely see my own shoes.
I had reached the bottom. The tricky thing was going to be keeping a straight trajectory. There would be no way to achieve that. I sensed I should be hungry. Famished, even. I possessed no physical wants. I settled into a healthy pace along the dirt hard-pack. I wouldn’t be surprised if I walked smack into a rock formation eventually, if the cloud cover didn’t relent. It was of little concern as I made my way.
There was the distant yowl of an animal, or demon, unlike the simian shriek. It bristled every fine hair on my body. It came from my left. Another entity answered the previous, and to my dismay it originated at my right. I increased my pace.
“Though in life I used to love her, now in death I’ll draw the line. Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my da-aarlin’ Clementine.”
There was a snort. A low deep guttural chuff. A beastly ejaculation that painted the most horrific image in my imagination. The damned thing was I couldn’t pinpoint its location. It was a
s though sound got all twisted and tangled up in this pervading mist and I couldn’t make heads or tails of its proximity or direction, like I had with the previous occurrence.
“Ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine. But alas I was no swimmer so I lost my Clementine. Oh my darlin’ Oh my—”
Another chuff, this one behind me and very near. I ran. There was a bat-like screech overhead. It wasn’t near, but its subsequent screech was. I was at a full sprint when I tripped over a rock and fell flat on my face. I stood up and waited before continuing. Listened. There was a plentitude of sounds, most low and distant, but not all of them. New sounds were originating, alien sounds. When I felt something tap my left calf I cried out and ran again. Ran like holy hell.
There was laughter from an omnipresent voice, like God in so many movies and shows, its origin all around me. A maniacal laughter that instilled the most fatal dread I’ve ever known. As if it sensed my dread, its laughter grew more maniacal, and louder, more foreboding.
As I ran I perceived arcs of black like moving shadows through the mist. They were all in my head, I consoled myself. Maybe the mist wasn’t so bad: I didn’t want to discern what I perceived. At my right flank appeared the simian thing, pacing itself alongside me as if for sport. So close was it that I could distinguish its particulars even through this weather. Sickly green with a ghastly demonic face, fanged teeth and large protuberant lidless eyes. Reflexively I backhanded it, striking it in the face. It shrieked and stopped, then cackled in a register redolent of humor.
If ever was an occasion suitable for a heart attack it was now. My heart was beating like a myriad of drums, exploding in my chest, pushed to the limit. The encounter with the simian thing ratcheted up my pace to impossible speeds. I began faltering, damn near tripping over myself as I sprinted.
What stopped me were two piercing red dots straight ahead. I skidded to a stop and began treading backward even before my forward progression had ended. They were canine in nature, like red wolf eyes. What or who they were attached to was lost in the haze, but their nature was evident. They were rapacious, evil eyes.
“What do you want,” I said in no more than a breath. It was all I could produce.
The eyes bobbed up and down almost imperceptibly as it stepped toward me. I turned and took but one step when I encountered something I can only describe as an imp. A spritely little demon with a wide toothy grin and yellow reptilian eyes. Then another. And another. They were diminutive in stature, and thus I plowed between the lot of them and took to a sprint. Something hooked my ankle mid-stride, sending me to my face once again. I heard the footfalls of he who possessed the red eyes, and it was then that I surrendered to the moment. What could I do against them? The many scores of them, in all their corrupted breeds and perversions.
The thought I then clung to was I am already in hell, what could they possibly do to me? I was already dead, they couldn’t kill me again. I rolled over on my back and sat up, anticipated the worst. And the worst came. The beasts and demons and ghouls and imps environing me lunged and pounced and pummeled me; bit and clawed and trampled me. Devoured me as I screamed at the top of my lungs. Into the black I went.
The alarm went off at seven AM and I rolled out of bed. I could smell the hickory aroma of bacon coming from downstairs. I loved it when I smelled bacon, and not because I loved eating it so much: it meant Mom was also cooking pancakes, and I loved pancakes. I looked out my bedroom window and it was dark. Low hanging rain-clouds suffused the sky. I took a quick shower, dressed, snatched the backpack from my desk and jaunted down the stairs, went inside the