There was no frame of reference –
like being in the void of space, only he felt gravity pulling him
towards something.
His shoulder slams with too great a
force into what feels like a cliff. His body bounces and spirals.
The inertia makes him feel as though he is going to vomit, and he
does, but there is no means for him to slow the spin now that his
shoulder is dislocated, at best, and completely shattered if worse.
He feels his foot catch on something,
but whatever that something is breaks and allows his fall to
continue. His foot dangles without control, but at least he has
stopped spinning.
A moment passes, just long enough of
one for him to realize the excruciating pain he is in. He lets out a
yell, a blood curdling scream from the bowels of his most miserable
point of existence. The only comfort he received was hearing the
echo of his own screams.
“This is a nightmare, it has to be,”
he says aloud, but he knows that he feels it all. He knows, deep
inside, that this is really happening.
He tries to recall the events that led
to this tumultuous fall, which he realizes he is still in the midst
of, but cannot remember anything before this point. It is as though
his entire existence has never come to fruition and he is just living
the journey into Hell.
A deep, boisterous howl of a voice
comes from nowhere. “Now. Now is your time.”
As the voice finishes it's long bellow
his body stops abruptly. His body slams into the most solid piece of
anything that he has ever felt, and his whole body is destroyed. The
pain is so intense that he can't even so much as whimper. The only
point of relief is that he has stopped falling, but of course he
can't even form enough of a thought to come to that realization.
Lying there, still absolute darkness
and still in absolute pain, he can feel his heart beat start to slow
– too slow, he thinks, but he is ready for death. He would be
begging for it if he could form sounds.
A flicker of light forms in the
distance, down a long hall that is now beginning to look like stone.
“Welcome,” the boisterous voice
from before says from all around him.
A swarm of small creatures, half the
size of a human – roughly the size of a child barely able to walk –
pour into the room as the torch finally illuminates the room. He is
surrounded by hundreds of the little things. Unable to turn his
head, the one holding the torch walks to him.
The small creature, whose head is now
looking down at him, is as black as the fall with what appears to be
a gray ash covering his body sporadically. The creature looks back
at the rest of the swarm, back at the man, back at the swarm, and
then starts making a noise unlike anything the man has heard before.
Before he knows it, every one of the swarm is on top of him, pulling
the skin from his body and feasting.
The pain from before feels as though it
had happened decades ago and this new pain sets in. The creatures'
claws are all like dull, rusty knives cutting his skin away. His
flesh rips away like cheap wrapping paper being cut by even cheaper
scissors.
As the last piece of flesh had been
devoured, the creatures scatter. As the light creeps down the hall,
the man moves his eyes as much as he can to see nothing but exposed
muscles – not a single piece of skin is left anywhere that he can
see.
The booming voice enters his head once
more, “Are you having fun, yet?”
The man just wants to cry, but nothing
comes out. He wants to yell, but it all falls into silence.
The sound of rabid dogs strikes off in
the distance. The howls are rushing towards the man. It sounds as
though there are thousands of them, and they are very near.
There is no means for him to see what
is happening as light never entered into the cavern, but a sudden
slam of one of the dogs lands on his body followed swiftly by what
feels like hundreds of teeth dig into his exposed muscle.
The first dog jumps down but
immediately a second leaps atop him and takes it's chomp of muscle.
He jumps down and the next. This agony continues for what feels like
an eternity as the man still cannot make a single noise. He still
cannot cry, and he cannot beg. The pain is, again, so intense that
all his previous pain forces itself deep into the past.
As the final dog finishes his bite, it
pauses and shifts its body. It then let's out a siren like howl
before jumping down and leaving the man with nothing but the sound of
hooves stampeding into the distance, but the man is entirely unable
to hear anything any longer.
“How do you feel?” The voice booms
into the man's mind again, but he is still unable to utter anything.
The room illuminates with the most
intense light that anyone could imagine, but all that is left of the
man are his organs and bones encasing them. His eyes dart around the
room, but the light is blinding and nothing can be seen.
As his eyes adapt and he can finally
see, dark, nearly see through, floating creatures flow towards him.
He thinks about how it all must end at some point, it is his last
form of hope.
The ghastly things hover over the
remaining parts of his body, pulling each individual organ from the
his skeleton. One of them positions his head so that he is forced to
watch everything. His bones are shattered all around him, and what
is still attached by the cartilage is cracked all over. Blood covers
the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the table in which he fell
atop.
The ghosts each tilt what appears to be
their heads towards the large hole in which the man fell from. As
they do this, every organ – other than the brain – start turning
black and shrivel into near nothing. There is no pain, but the man
feels absolute disgust at the sight.
The ghosts vanish just as quickly as
the light arrived, and his skull falls to the ground. The brain
remains. He attempts to contemplate all that has happened to him,
but nothing makes sense.
“I will give you the ability to speak
to me now. What would you ask me?”
“Why are you killing me?”
“Oh, my dear son. This isn't death.
This is life.”
-Dustin S. Stover
If you enjoy my writing then please purchase my collection of short stories, Happiness in a Void of Darkness.
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