Hello Darkness

I wrote this a few weeks ago but don’t know how to end it.

My opinion, this was Hell. I looked down the hill, watching the shadows of the sparse fir trees reaching up to me, climbing the grassy knoll. The warm glow of the sun infected the ethos, as if decrying my conjecture. I held firm; this was an old trick of Hell. So pleasant and sweet it would be, entreating my pleasure, but I did not forget what the setting sun meant, what darkness entailed.

Before Hell, I had some notion that pain would end at death. Funny thing, to cure death without curing pain. I looked to the immortal evergreens. Season through season their green needles grow, never tasting the wantonness inflicting their brethren.

Placing my hand on the rough bark of the closest tree, I press my soft palm into its unremitting skin. How many rings, I wondered, did it have? How many years were there to count? Were someone to count my rings, for men have rings—we have signs of our ages, faces wrinkled and smooth, backs tall and bent—what would my ring age be? Eighteen? Twenty?

And yet the years I’ve lost count of. Seventy? Eighty? It has been so long. I sigh as the hours fly by, as the warm glow gives way to a cold chill. The twilight world of long stretched shadows covers the land like a black blanket, a web-work of darkness. Hell is at the door now.

Halfway up the tree I decide is high enough, more than enough. It’s curiosity really, that makes me ascend even to this height, and curiosity driving me go on higher still. Unsatisfied, I keep climbing, feeling the thinning branches bow under my weight. Little matter, I have fallen into pits deeper than this tree was tall.

You can’t give up. No, you’re not listening. I wasn’t trying to motivate you, telling you don’t give up, I mean that you can’t give up. I did fall into a pit, I was there a hundred days before my legs healed. I ran out of food in a week, but starving never starved. Even after the shattered bones of my legs stitched themselves back together, I couldn’t climb those moss covered walls that formed my prison. But every day I got a little higher and a little higher. I’m an excellent climber now.

Balancing myself on the wavering treetop, I put my binoculars to my eyes. Any moment now, now that the sun has set, you’ll see why I say this is Hell. I suppose there has been some sort of leniency in my case, for my torment, though eternal, is spared the fullness of depravity. But I still witness the ultimate degradation of Hell’s denizens.

There’s one now, look you. Look upon the rotting corpse that never dies. It starves, it decays, but it has fallen into a pit with no bottom. Madness grips them in the end. I know not if the disease affects their brains, or if the ever growing torment simply demolishes their minds. Whatever means Hell has, it utilizes.

The shambler sways from side to side, drawing ever closer to my tree. The tattered dress suggests it was once a she, though there was always the other possibility. I used to put them out of their misery, called it my purpose, but then I learned the truth.

In my pit I had a companion, one of them. We were both pretty bad after falling in, broken. But I crawled over, and taking a rock, bashed the snarling monster’s brains in. Once its body stilled, as so many had before, I sat back and waited to heal. Then one morning it woke up. The caved in skull, still dented by my hand, was bleeding a sickly dark ooze. I heard its rejuvenated groaning.

They were as immortal as I. Every week I would take my rock and destroy its head, but still it returned. Named him, only one I ever named, Sid. “Hello Sid,” I’d say when he’d renew his moaning tones. “Now back to bed,” I’d joke. “Back to bed,” I’d say with every swing of the stone. I left Sid in that pit, left him there alone with no one to put him to sleep. What terrifies me is that I miss him; that I dream of him; that I find myself talking to him even now. His rotting broken face is ever before my vision, his snarls ever in my ears.

Below she adds her voice to Sid’s.