Styx

I walk through a blank landscape. Nothing surrounds me. Everything is silent, muted, and grey, with the plain, achromatic landscape sporadically overtaken by blotches of empty, brown dirt. The bleakness is interrupted only by a patch of grass. In it is the corpse of a giant owl.

I arrive at the vegetation. I lie on my stomach. I crawl on my belly and eat dust. My legs hang pathetically behind me. Arriving at the edge of the swamp reveals a mass of tiny, flesh colored creatures.

Each of the pink worms have faces like those of people. I notice a set of dollish eyes on every creature, with red pupils in the center of their black eyes. Passing me, each locks its gaze with my own.

I find myself moving with the worms. I have no control of my muscles anymore. I belong to the ground. I belong to the horde of flesh devouring the corpse of the owl. I bite. The flesh is nauseating. I swallow. I repeat.

All around me, thousands more of the wormlike creatures emerge from the ground and fill their mouths with the rotting flesh of the dead owl, which only stares hopelessly at the grey sky and empty landscape beyond the small swamp.

The owl is stripped of its flesh. Only random ligaments and muscles dangle from its yellow-white skeleton. I stare into the musculature that was once a face. Darkness looks back at me.

The ground hushedly shakes as the worms burrow back into the ground all at once. The flesh in our bellies begins the first leg of its journey to Hell. I plunge my face into the dirt and begin to burrow. The ground is soft and easy to move. I go deeper into the ground, thrashing my body violently to push dirt away, biting and swallowing the pieces of earth. The sun no longer reaches the depths I am in. Our bodies push downwards in unison. We are one superorganism.

Suddenly, we burst through a barrier. The ground gives way. I fall. Looking around, I see my fleshy compatriots raining down on soft, brown earth that has been firmly patted down into a floor. There are walls made of dirt. Across the rudimentary room, a fire casts dark shadows on the wall. A set of yellow eyes stares at me from the darkness.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

I sputter flesh and dirt out of my mouth.

“Would you like something to drink?”

I hear water pouring into a cup. A hand reaches out of the shadows to hand me a simple, metallic cup, steam billowing over the rim. Before I can get up to walk towards the hand, an arm extends to me out of the shadows. It stretches on and on, twelve feet give or take, until it reaches me on the end of the room where I am sitting.

“Take it.”

I wince as I take hold of the cup. It is hot. I smell the steam coming up from over the rim.

“Drink.”

Unable to restrain myself from quenching my dirt soaked, reeking throat, I obey the figure in the shadows. It pulls back the arm into the darkness, leaving behind only the yellow eyes. Thin, rectangular pupils study the way I drink the hot liquid.

“Where am I?”

“Your Christ referred to this place as Gehenna. But this place, it isn’t anywhere. It does not exist, not in the sense you are accustomed to, and neither do you or do I.”

The being smiles open mouthed, revealing a wide mouth nearly the size of an adult torso full of uncountable rows of human teeth. It laughs. The flame burns steadily.

“Some of your kind call this room Mana,” the figure continues. “Do you enjoy your drink?”

“Yes, actually, I do.”

“Good. It is my gift,” a smile crawls across the face of the hideous being, the rows of teeth glowing yellow in the light of the fire, “now what do you give me in return?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you do not understand, but this is the Law of Gehenna: ‘all things must be repaid.’ Now, if you have no gift to offer me, then I must take something to level the balance of your account.”

Two hands strike the earth floor. Long spindles of arms pull a mass from the shadows. Sinews and muscles bulge under acrid skin. A thousand years of death fill my nostrils. I fight back the urge to vomit. The being reveals itself. Its face is like mine, only its mouth extends beyond the cheeks, the lower jaw hanging open and distended. Rows of teeth bare as the being screams unintelligible incantations. I recoil.

“Wait!” a voice cries from above me. “I have payment!”

Through the hole, as if carried by beams of light, a blood soaked heart falls to the dirt floor. I hear the cardiectomized mass throbbing. The beast turns and devours the heart in two bites. Blood and tissue splatter across this hell.

I move towards the hole above me. A hand is waiting. I am blinded as I am rescued to the surface. Howls of agony and starvation follow behind me as I am rescued from the clutches of the beast.

No one is there when my sight recovers. I look ahead. Beyond the owl, a titian sunset colors the horizon shades of apricot, casting a shadow from me. It dances. With a will of its own, the shadow moves, stretching itself to play in the horizon and menacingly shrinking to dance at my feet.

The flat dimension of the shadow prowls floods with depth. I stagger back. The shadow becomes solid and stands in front of me. My shadow contorts itself, folding its arms into its legs, flickering into perverse and occult forms that I can not understand. Like a gymnast, its limbs extend and wrap around each other. My shadow grows. I turn to run as the swamp, the owl, the entire horizon are all rapidly consumed by darkness. I can not run. I, too, am devoured. I pass on into the shadows.