The Ferryman

A dark tale about the final journey in the afterlife across the river Styx as a man tries to barter for a terrible prize.

Endless.  Bottomless.  Such a term.  It tries to sculpt a state, an abyss, a horror, that is going to continue for all time and, in that, there must somehow be infinite suffering.  That is not this void, not the darkness of the Pit.  Not its true pain.  There are boundaries, clear and immovable.  There are margins.  For, in that, is its great weapon of inflicting unspeakable suffering.  That the souls condemned here know there is nothing for them now but this space.  This finite hole.  Beyond the fractured black walls of stone the sky is shining and the great world is spinning still.  Moving on without them.  Here holds no chance of flights of imagination or wretched hopes of falling forever.  You are put in your place and you will never know anything different.  Then, broken by the unassailable confines, your mind will breach open and in that inescapable place you will fall forever into despair, as the unmoving ramparts close in and crush your hope of ‘more’.  Truly bottomless places have edges.

The great Pit is a cavern deeper than any man could imagine and is a hundred miles high before the dim illumination fades off. There is no light, not true light, just enough of a hollow glow revealing the sliding gaps between shadows.  Allowing titanic rocks to plague the mind with gruesome faces that pass, between blinks, into the darkness.  The Cave.  Vast as a nightmare and small enough to echo every whispered regret.  On the grey shore the great arching ceiling can be seen and the orb of blackness descends into impenetrable edges.  There the water begins to weave forward.  Catching on a light without a source, the tips of the waves spike like white knives but the inky sea seems always deathly calm. No storm could ripple its unearthly rhythms.

On cracked and worn stones, trembling bare feet near the dark waters edge.  In the perpetual gloom the scraping of pebbles linger and a wind is beginning to whisper itself into frenzy, trying to lacerate the air with what feel like faint temptations and tainted threats.  The feet step once more, with a yearning that, in this place, the waves will lap coolly over the toes.  But there is a heat emanating from the waters.  

Out there, the light has started to approach.

Out there, in the dark heart of the water, where the strange light will soon hit, the heat is seething up from the undercurrent of pleading men; monsters and mothers, and screams are gagged from lungs filled with black seawater and bile-filled hearts.  The cold heat of hate and desperation.  The molten undercurrent to icy tides that would freeze the stars. Under the roots of mountains every death of hope and syllable of suffering is trapped here.  Every broken heart is returned a thousand times over.  Every whisper of regret and scream of pain is caught in the great walls, never to escape, and becomes like transparent slime.  All the shattered cries drip from the Cave, back onto their tortured makers.  When the spray of the waters slices high enough it falls as rain laced with the miserable pleas of the damned.  Nothing, not hope nor guilt, escapes this place.

The feet shuffle and the Man steps back.  Now watching that light.  Giving no warmth from its tiny pale glow.  Unmoving.  Only bobbing.  A thousand miles or one, it could be an ocean liner or a firefly.  It sits out there.  The only thing of substance in a suffocating Cave of herculean proportions, laced with loathsome shadows and a spring tide that recedes like blood.  Those shadows that move and stir across the towering rocky fortifications yet have no source.  No creature lives here, no animal or tree could survive in the stilted air of this ashen hall of granite.  Yet on the periphery, of the eye and of the mind, they still dare to move.  Instantaneously fading shapes of long forgotten beasts, impossibly monstrous animals that crawled on the world long before men could walk in the sun.  Those half-true movements of hybrid grotesqueties playing on the sanity.

It is getting larger now, the cruelly distant light.  The sound begins its callous cadence.  A distant clinking.  The Man is naked, though a piece of clothing rests behind him discarded.  In his hand he holds tightly a small object.  He glides a finger over it expectantly.  Inside he knows he will soon be cold, like a pain that has yet to be categorized, his body simply continues until the truth is accepted.  Cold.  And then burning.  There was always the talk of burning but here, in the darkness, fire would only bring light.  Only bring change.  That great gift.  Here, without it, the reason the gods would deny it becomes clear.  Shadows are cold. There is no light.  No warmth.  No change.  No progress.  Fire has no place in Hell.

The light has risen above the horizon line, above the water line.  On the charcoal waves the strangely disturbing glow has faded. It was an illusion, hopes the Man, brought on by straining eyes drawn to a final chance at light.  The light sways now.  It is a lamp, hanging from the stern of a small boat.  It’s ornate glass wrapped in intricate sigils on carved steel.  Dark, but once it may have promised a mild gleam.  The large pole is fixed at the back of the wooden boat and the arm extends out and over, holding the lamp high and above the one and only rider. It clinks louder and louder on it’s singular advance.  The outline framed clearly by the putrid grey on all sides.  It sticks on the waters edge and, on one edge of the Cave, it rises for miles as a great ethereal mountain.  The fog was always hanging on the water but now it is intensifying and the Man can see how it’s foul movements hide a fetid and malformed danger.  It hangs and shifts like natural whisps of smoke, then crashes into rocks as if made of solid substance.  And on its shifting roof the smoky arms squirm and distort as if the spirits of freakish primal monsters are being pulled and tortured within. Clefts of rock slice the fog at times and grey ravens of smoke swirl and flock up into the recesses of the Cave.  All along the deadly haze there seems a nauseating menagerie of beasts unseen and pulsating, who’s extremities are glimpsed by wavering, unfocused eyes.

The Ferryman has come.  He slides the great oar into the water and lets it drift back, the boat creeps forward and the oar makes a long arch before another stroke is applied.  No light, no fire, no sun.  In truth, the Man may have been waiting for days for this arrival, or minutes.  Now, with the shapes becoming clear, eyes straining to adjust and the sounds finally being carried to his ear, over the sadistic whispering shadows, the Man retreats a little bit more.  No longer curious as to the new world he inhabits.  Now he wants to flee.  His face is a flurry of emotion, and, in this place, the stark truth is that, somehow, he belongs.  When that natural reaction of all creatures is removed his true essence seeps from his naked frame like a sickly revelation.  He has no feelings behind his eyes not born of malice or tyranny.  In this vicious sphere of the underworld this new denizen seems to have be waiting to return to this accursed home all his life.

The Ferryman takes an age between strokes and, though without sails, the once teasing wind has become a gale and it moves like a bird of prey up into the grand hall of stone, up into the blackest corners and then screeches aloud.  Calls, from an epoch of hate, layer over gusts.  Calling into the cave for madness and regret to bleed from the rocks.  And the towering walls of stone answer with murky faces that change from laughing killers and hungry abysses.  Obsidian fissures suck in demonic gales and spit them out with sinister echoes.  Mile long stalactites creak and hang, then, with unerring timing, snap and screech as they fall in terrifying explosions.  Pummeling into the vast waters below with unearthly roars thrown into the air from their wake.  Indeed, the darkness is filled with these shrieks of crumbling death.  These deafening mountains have been falling all along, hidden by the madness that besets all visitors upon arrival as they clamor to make sense of the deranged world.  The cracking bedrock continues to gash and gnaw at itself.  Massive ruptures thunder across the cave, as if the entire structure would collapse in a heartbeat.

There is not a word the Man could say that would convey the grasp of fear in his mind as the Ferryman arrives.  Even his sick and grisly mind.  Not a language of men that could build the image of pain and torment his heart sends slicing through his body with every beat.  Screams of terror would echo and bounce and that breath of life, that rush of air, can show the world your fear.  Could show you understand what you feel, if only for a primal rush of pain and terror.  But in the center of petrifying night there is no escape, or understanding an eternity of pain, made in an ever-changing hole that holds you in contempt.  Where the very air that scratches down your throat licks you with spiteful tongues, and wants to sit in your chest, and feel you die in fear of every gasp you take.  Here, where you cannot bear the thought of taking more air in and would give anything to get it back out; where there is no word or sound or help to you or anyone else in anything you say.  Screams are worthless in the underworld.

The boat is looming and its horrid light sways ever more in the glide forward. A light filled with a flame that, at first, seems hidden behind glass but, now clear, is the most terrifying of all that swirls between reality and the madness at the edge of his skull. The flame is completely black. The silhouette of the Ferryman casts a long shadow over the water. His face obscured, his features hidden, only the long flow of his robes can be made out. Worn and battered they flutter and slap the boat. Larger than a simple one-man fishing vessel it is oversized and could easily hold two dozen grown men. Yet it’s shape still allows the giant Ferryman to operate it. Only one passenger will it carry at a time.

The shadow of the inhuman sailor snakes along the current and makes it’s way to the gravel of the shore.  The wind is high and piercing in the top of the cave, but its fury contained for now.  The Cave has grown darker.  The light of the black flame paralyzes the Man.  He would run straight at it, be burned into a black hole of human misery, if only he had any thoughts of his own left.  He can’t escape from it. Cannot approach it.  It will follow him now in his nightmares for the rest of eternity now he has laid mortal eyes on it. It sees him.  Despises him.  Degrades him.  Loves him, in the most awful way possible.  Now a thousand voices, all his own, scream every horrible thought he has ever had back to him.  The feeling is of a lifetime piled into a moment, with nothing but itself for sustenance.  So it feeds on it’s own pain and the soul is squeezed and shaken and exposed like naked flesh to whips made of ice and every mistake and fear he has ever had.  This is what Hell is; the black flame.

Waves crash for an instance.

The shadow touches the shore and the boat will momentarily reach the dock.  That short wooden outcrop.  The sound of the Ferryman is repeated in the echoes of the Cave.  Reverentially the wind and the shadowed walls call out between their cries of primal emotion.  Whatever time there was is now a creaking, quivering mess.  Sound bends around the shadows and the soil crawls like repulsed flesh beneath the naked little human being.  If there really was ever any light inside the great Cave it would have crawled away.  The Man stands.  Defiantly wrapped in his arrogance and desire for power.  Like all men, but his eyes betray a lifetime of satisfaction in his quest.  Eyes that once led a life without fear.  Even here they hold a purity of cause.  A black selfish crusade.  It is a look of murderers and madmen before they are executed, and it is a permanent fixture on his handsome, disgusting, face.

The Ferryman stands under his black flame and guides his boat to the dock.  No rope is cast but it rests motionless against the wooden edge.  The waves splash and maintain a dull roar as if to refrain from disturbing their only rider.  He stands straighter, somehow growing three times the actual movement, the giant sickly frame gilded on one side by the light above.  The spray of black waters creates a wet sheen across his features and cloak. Bearded and old, of some indiscernible age, with a bald head, this could have been his face for a day or all his life.  How many people see the Ferryman twice?  How many tell the story?  This is how he wants to look now and that is all The Man knows.  A hand, almost half-skeletal, carves its way from the layers and layers of the grand cloak and extends in expectation.  The palm is laid out flat.

The Man steps onto the dock and steadies himself.  The wind bites at him for a moment on a quick raid from above.  It slides a putrid touch into the back of his eyes before whipping a icy streak against his lower back.  But now he is ‘on’ and the game he has wanted to play all his life must begin.  Windows of the soul are the eyes.  His are black.  Black pupils and nothing else.

“I have no coin for you Ferryman’, he speaks with confidence and insouciance as if this was a meeting he had called with a subordinate.

The Ferryman does nothing.  Fiery black shadows cascade up the walls for a brief instance.  From that extra step up onto the level of the dock the water now carries a glass look.  The black flame.  He cannot look at it.  Cannot think of it.  There are sounds now however to draw his attention and give some distraction. Coming over the water.  Coming from the water.

The hand remains out.

“I have no coin for you Ferryman’, now with a arrogant grin to carry his words over.

The wood of the boat creaks for a moment and the waves lap the shore with added bite. The ancient one constricts his spiny fingers and points out in the water.  The man must wade out and be lost in it forever.

The man takes another step forward, now halfway to the archaic boat.  The Ferryman has gripped his oar with one hand and will soon cast off.

‘There is no one else coming’, his march of words now gives way to his cocky tone of voice.  

The boards under his feet groan like dying dogs and the waves snarl at him to come and drown for all time.  Come here you insolent b*****d and let us drown you in hate. The cries on the water are rising. Hell beckons.

‘I am not going to swim Ferryman’.

One last time the hand is cupped.

‘I have no coin for you Ferryman’.

Enough has transpired. The Ferryman knows the ocean will rise and pull the stupid little creature into its burning depths once he departs.

‘But I have an offer Ferryman.  Now that there are no more fares’, he presses home his slight advantage with a lifetimes worth of perverse desires. ‘You can be free’.

For the first time in an age, the Ferryman actually looks at someone.  A man without divine or demonic companionship, without a touch from the gods or claim to immortality, has garnered attention.  He looks at this creature as an actual thing, and, in a sliver of time, acknowledges his existence.

‘I am the last of my kind Ferryman.  Your final few trips have been years and years apart. Long have you sat waiting for passage when once these shores would be overflowing with the mobs of repulsive no-bodies.  You know this to be true’.

The Ferryman places his oar on the bottom of the boat.  Stands.  The winds abate onto the ocean’s horizon.  The screams continue but the waves endeavor to wash them into nothing.  The Cave is listening to a human voice, without it being filled with fear or grief or pain from a thousand emotions that language captures no better than a candle catches snowflakes.

‘I have led a life that they would have despised.  I have brought nations to their knees and I have created the greatest slaughter of any species.  I am the last human being to walk the earth Ferryman.  You know this to be true’.

The Ferryman steps off his boat.

‘When you take me across the shores to the underworld you will have no more purpose.  Your task complete.  I have done you a service.  I can grant you freedom. Here, now, you can walk the dock until the coin crosses your palm and you must depart with me’.

Without words a disdain emanates from the specter.

‘I mean, I would help if allowed.  On that shore sit all the worst of us.  And I shall be the king among them.  I have won Ferryman.  I am the last of my kind.  I have poisoned, bombed and hunted them all my kind.  I held them under water and pushed them into fire.  Buried them under the bones of their families.  Now.  Now we are one and it is I.  I am the lord.  I am the master”.

His rage and vitriol spill up towards the face of the dark keeper of safe passage. His warped heart pumps the venom of his own hatred through his body and a lifetime of psychotic control finally seeps out his dripping lips as he sneers at every mention of humanity.

‘I won.  I won it all Ferryman’.

In the Cave moans of the ocean murmur in the dark.  The heartbeat of the newly dead man quickens as decades of reserved cruelty and malice are paraded from him.  His voice rises in glee and fury.

“Listen. Listen to them Ferryman!” he bellows out over the hissing ocean, bubbling with screams of a million souls tortured in the deep.

“How many have I put there?  Or on that black foreign shore?  How many cursed me Ferryman? You know my name”.

He rides beside the keeper of the waterway and sneers in twisted pleasure.

“You know my name.  How many have I put here?  I can’t remember them.  I could never count” he leers in twisted joy.

Waves slap the docks and the wind whips the great clothing of the Ferryman into a billowed shadowy swirl.  He stands resolute as the blood fever of a lifetime’s massacres and planning wash over this malevolent visitor to the underworld.

“How many?!” he screeches. He laughs and bawls into the sky with ecstasy.  Thrilled at all he had wrought in his life.

“There’s no one left. Do you understand? I won Ferryman. And, oh, how I made them suffer. I sent so many to you.  The things I did, the games I made them play and the choices I forced them to make.  Parents choosing children and children choosing parents.  All screaming into the night.  I won.  Those great factories of death.  The fields of human suffering.  Those maggots. Where once I ended them I soon made them sinners. Damning them to pain far beyond their empty lives above”, he screams in the face of the underworld’s gatekeeper.

“I filled that boat with souls for you.  And now.  Now you owe me.  I am the last, Ferryman, and I have no coin for you.  I have a proposition”

The wind and shadows beg to be set upon this impudent man, covetous and conceited.  The walls boom and boulders crash into great swirling whirlpools miles out to sea.

“Is Hades out there?  Will he be pleased to see his greatest servant?  His equal.  Finally here to claim a place as a lord of the condemned?  That’s what I want”.

The clanking of the light fills the stormy bay as the boat is rocked against the dock and the lashing winds have churned a sea mist into a downpour of blackened rain.  The deadly fog has glided across the eastern waters and hangs low beneath the dock, scraping the shore, leaving a sticky grey demise hanging over the smooth stone and oozing between crevices.

The head twitches on the Man’s wretched frame, and the light that catches him reflects off his flesh a sickly sheen in the foggy light, as if he whole being was, for the first time in his life, being exposed.  His body and hands are in tiny motions, his vile excitement coursing throughout his being.  Yet there is silence between them.

The Ferryman spies him, the words carrying in the air long after being spoken.  He c***s his head and listens over the great river.  The screams have come now.  The word has spread and the crowds of Hell have come to call.  All the hoards that were cast here, tricked here, forced here and coerced here.  They have lined the eerie beaches and they are braying with wrath, regret and turmoil.  They roar out and the mayhem is rising.  The tempest of the sea matched by the upheaval from the great tormentor.  The tides batter and rise as if now become an ocean wave and the fog hangs hard, clawing on the fridges of the dock. Now a relic.  Hell is angry.

The glowing under the glacial currents surges in tandem and all the lost souls reeling in black tides are gurgling their sniveling laments up and into the Cave.  And it answers.  The shores are filling apace as the Ferryman listens and the river souls recklessly trash and bellow from the depths.  The clamor and hurt rising with each new voice, bouncing, smashing, and splintering off the deathly clefts in the great hole under the world. Pitiful echoes casting new echoes and the screams calling out onto the malicious winds and slicing waves of the great damning river that holds them in eternal night. It is a choir of demons singing the last great song of the damned.

‘How many did he put here?’ crosses the Ferryman’s mind.

They stand amid the cacophony of pain and the Man revels in the deafening hate rebounding in the obscene cavern. That black hole of violent death.

The Ferryman’s head pivots back, arching around in a slowed pace of time, as if every muscle moves in careful consideration.  Every motion performed like the passing of an era and the creep of a mountain.  His brow lifts slightly and a voice that welcomed gods, fallen heroes and a million forgotten sinners carves its way across the Man’s consciousness.  He is without remorse, without pity and fueled with a hatred that would make the hardiest servant from heaven recoil, yet the taste of fire and smoke and the sound of a thousand betrayed secrets that comes when the Ferryman speaks chills his bones more than any touch of the waves ever could.

“What. Do. You. Propose?”

The breath is gasped back into his body, and shivers along his nervous system tell him he’s still awake and whole.  The blackening at the verges of his mind fading slightly as the Ferryman knifes the oar into water as he waits, the arms of the fog fingering it as it is plucked back out.  The din of the crying souls has become a white-noise, but the wind carries a story over the others occasionally.  A chilly gasp that encaptures a grand tale of a lifetime.  When these tales are carried past his ear the Man smiles and the Ferryman notes that the more tragic and brutal the atrocity the more the smirk sticks to the face, the more his teeth are pressed with the flesh of his lips as if they long to bite and savour the pain of those left here by this manic beast.

“I am the last one Ferryman.  Everything in that world up there is mine by right.  I own it and I have claimed it.  But now, now I am to be cast aside with all these fallen fools and cowards?  I am to walk alongside disappointments like Achilles and Napoleon?  I am to be seen as a lowly failure.  No Ferryman.  I am the last.  You are without a purpose anymore”.

At this supercilious rant the Ferryman steps back onto his boat.  It sways a moment under his weight but with practice beyond instinct he balances and sits on the small perch back beside the pole.  The shadows swim over his lined face.  In the silence he knows he is being examined, that his mind is working and being assessed.  He knows this because it is what he has done, and seen and known.  With every new traveller who must be told what has occurred.  Every mortal that tried to bargain, brag or beg.   Every victim who came unknown and every fool who arrived without coin, to end up in the black depths.

“On that shore lie poets and dreamers and conquerors.  I am more than them all and, oh, how many would like to see me dragged down to the level of those shortsighted cretins.  I am not like any of the masses huddled on that distant rock.  I am more.  And with that I will be”.

He strikes a finger toward the boat. And, with needled agony, forces his hand to point at the black flame for a moment before his eyes rest on the oar.  The primordial boat and the undying oar.  Carriers, harriers and persecutors of all mankind.  Those simple pieces of wood, but in their salted and black-smooth features holding a unique place in all the world and beyond.  The only things in existence that can touch the Stygian waters and survive.  That great tree felled and forged into the dock and the vessel.  Not even the gods could tempt the waters without fear.

“I arrive with that as my keep and I will be a lord.  I will be welcomed to Ambrosia feasts and taken to temples of the Fates.  I will be more than any man dared dreamed and will watch as the great legends can only stare on at my walk through hell unimpeded”.

The Ferryman resented everything the man had said.  His arrogance and insolence.  His scorn for all that was here in the Cave and his great contemptible strength at overcoming all the fear and terror in his frail little flesh.  He resented him, most highly of all, for being right.

Before he could even begin to hesitate or question, the charming veneer, of a fearless façade of a man, was at work and his proposal put forward.

‘You have no more charges to carry.  No more coins to collect.  I have filled your boat time and time again.  Now you must move back into the world.  Your cause is undone’.

The Ferryman rose up and looked out over the foggy shore that he had collected so many passengers from.  Eyed the dock in a way he had never before truly needed to.  As not needing him to return to the end.  That he could walk ashore and never feel the motion of the waves beneath him ever again.  He could walk off into the darkness.  It was at this the world was changed, for nothing had happened in his mind except the most devious concept of all.  Imagination had returned to his life.

‘You. Cannot. Step. On. This. Shore. Ever. Again’.

‘That is the shore on which I will be king Ferryman’, he tried hard to utter.

Attempting to curb his disdain for the figure, his practiced disgust at all others who dared to speak to him, their superior.  Now, with the ancient seafarer reeling in his newfound temptations, he was assured and arrogant as with any of the men who had begged at his feet, or the animals that had eyed his cruelty through confused, glassy eyes. The time held firm again. And the Ferryman swayed in the boat for weeks upon days. The sun and moon and stars could have spun and burned and danced but in the Cave it was a moment, or a lifetime. The pallid prison cell where time was as fluid as a nightmare. The Ferryman dropped his oar and the wooden clash reverberated into the starless sky of black above. With that the man said nothing, his creeping grin held at bay lest he lose his composure now at the moment of victory. The Ferryman stepped ashore. Stepped ashore for the last time in his, or anyone else’s, life. The man mirrored his feet exactly. One foot in. Then two. And now the boat had a new captain.

The fog clinged to the dock’s edge and the wind descended to touch the face of the bartering figures, intrigued and suspicious, in the foul shadows formed under the light of the swaying black flame.

On the boat the oar was heaved from the floor and the man’s eyes gleamed with vile intentions and horrible enjoyment.  From his hand he spun the coin he had held all along.  He flicked the shining sovereign across to the Ferryman.  It spun in its golden arch and was caught by fingers that moved at their own pace yet quick enough to always be where needed. The Ferryman cocked his head and inspected his final fare as the impatient Man pushed himself off the dock.

“Say hello to the world for me Ferryman. It is yours to do with as you please. Come see me…”

He had already been lost into the fog as the Ferryman eyed his silhouette one last time.  The words scrambled through the dense grey tentacles.

“Come see the new lord of Hell”.

The Ferryman, and the dock, had dissolved and now he began to force the oar into the water.  It was demanding at first, the tempo and rhythm beaten and broken by the uncompromising and malignant wind, and the erratic waves that followed no pattern of nature.  In the writhing blackness below, the shapes and glows of souls stretched thin and desperate, choked on their own words of remorse and spat out curses to anything and everything under the sun and under the earth.  The dark above malingered and moaned as great roars of breaking rock heaved into the ceaseless night.  Always the rocks and waters and wind would roar and yet nothing ever seemed to change.  No matter how many great shattering rocks crashed from the sky, no matter how many cracks were beaten into the walls by the vicious swell of waves, the cave was always present, always closing in and showing no borders all at once.

There was no shore to be seen in either direction.  No water to know.  Days became months.  The months were a blink and between each one the water became a river or a stream, an ocean or a tidal wave.  The storms would erupt for days and ravage the tiny vessel.  And then the calm and deathly blackness would come.  The fog recede and the wind leave and not even a scream would be heard from below.  When the Man cried out in frustration his raging words went no further than his own lips.  His very fear stifled in his body, unable to move.  Yet move he did.  The ferry continued on and the tempests below began to find new support.  Out there, weeks and years and moments away, all at once, was a shore.  It had the ghastly stirring of souls.  Tearful, begging, decayed souls and he would find them.  And they would fear him and loathe him.  Their new master and lord.

“I won”, he whispered into the spaces between Heaven and Hell.

After a storm of a thousand years in feeling, and a blink that lasted a hundred nights, the waves and fog and indecipherable shadows began to reform into some semblance of sane reality.  The waters were real and carrying him forward, the oar meeting its surface, breaking and pushing him on.  The ever-changing world became concrete, and he no longer had to challenge every perception he experienced.  The fetid fog hung now on the horizon and the horizon itself, a black wall on a black canvas, could at least be guessed to be out there.

Fathoms deep the tears of black souls were emptied into the water as the litanies of sins and pleas for redemption began to hang on the thin air.  High in the cavern the wind waited and watched it’s new custody.  It was getting cold, like a new air was coming off a high mountain. Off land.

The Man redoubled his efforts and the shore began to seep from his wishful mind into this dilated pupils.  His sinewy, lizardy, muscles pressed hard to keep up the pace and he split the whitecaps as a shape began to take form ahead.  A million miles past the shadows he thought.  It was there though.  The voices made it clear.  They were weeping.  It was the most delicious sound he had ever heard.  The pain of all humanity finally joined in their loneliness. They shared this Hell where everyone is still alone.  How many voices were there because of him?  How much had he contributed to this hellish song?  The composer of damnation’s hymn.

Cold snap seized his lungs and he struggled to stop shaking but now the land was real and it warmed him in his depravity.  It was without colour or form but some hills were beginning to take shape.  And then movement.  Outlines.  People.  Apparitions.  They were there and they wanted him.  Grey misery hung on the horizon.  Chill wind beginning to spit from above.  The waters were spraying high in the west.  Huge waves that slammed up into the Cave, washing against the walls fifty miles high in the great dome cavern.  Rainfall began on one side of the dark world.  The wind careened through the furrows of stalactites and the water was held at bay with the force.  But the cold slid off the shore, across the bay forming ahead, and the man found it stung his heart with magnificent pain.  It was a cold that they all had to suffer.  A cold he could keep at arms length with his new possession.  He had not dared look at it once.  Not once.  But the black flame was there and though it offered a pain and fear unknown to any other creature or torment down here, it was still freedom, and freedom with pain is better than captivity with hope.

Now the decrepit masses had shifted out.  The new arrival caused attention but this time it was new and different.  This time is was the last time.  The last man, the one who had trampled all others to earn a title no one could call him.  Some felt him coming and they went to find their old master and emperor.  The human monster that scarred their minds more than anything they faced here in the world of living shadows and hateful time.

He approached the shore and they screamed at him.  He did not flinch.  He did not do anything.  And they saw him.  They saw his black eyes.  From the rolling shadows the population of Hades came forth to greet this most infamous of guests.  The man who had overcome all others, who owned all the things a man could own, and who had climbed over every last one of his fellow men to reach the heights of power.  He was coming to the shore. Faces that had spent all their moments in the darkest recesses of the underworld picturing his damned visage pressed to the fore.  They packed the beach and suffered the winds and fog.  The women who could never hold their children and the wraiths who had sacrificed entire portions of their soul weaved forward.  The specters of a thousand crying lovers moved forward and the boat kicked up speed on its approach.  The man’s smile dimmed slightly when he saw the numbers of them.  Stretching further and further as the darkness was peeled back with each stroke forward.  The lands were filled over and over again and somehow more kept appearing.  More and more and the waves lapped them and some fell into the waters, not to sink, but were held aloft as the shallows were now choking with the swimming undead.  All Hell was coming forward to greet the last man.

He stopped forcing the oar into the thick waters and the speed of the boat carried him headlong toward the thronged shoreline.  The great undulating masses of sinners.  But every thrust through the breaking waves caused his heart to sink a moment. 

‘How were there so many?’.  So, so, many.  Worse than this question was the terror of the next; ‘how can they keep coming?’

Now the current of the shallows carried the wooden floating casket and he gripped tight at the pole, the burning cold of the flame no longer mattering.  It was there but, for now, there was the bitter gaze across a wall of human ghouls and shades of lives past.  There was not a single space between the people now.  Not a hair could pass between the edges of the world and the faces of the dead.  The boat skipped over the shoals a moment and brushed into the rim of sand left between the feet of an elderly woman.  She looked.  They all looked.  

And it was silence.

The winds had no more threats or laughter.  The crashing ocean had boiled itself into black glass.  The boat creaked a moment and the echo boomed into the cave and over the great plains of infinite bodies and sin.  The Man could feel physical pain as his heart battered and cannoned in his chest and he heaved as if to vomit but nothing would pass his lips.  He could not even cry a tear as realization sliced into his flesh and seared his eyes open.  Wide and full he peered into the darkness beyond, and along the bulwark of faces before him.  A hundred thousand deep of silent grey eyes stared at him.  From the shadows beyond he knew they were looking too.  The hills squirmed and moved, alive, with the phantoms of a million more.

With a cue the fog licked the starboard side of this ship and a wave kicked the port. Following a breeze, gentle as a lovers kiss, the boat clicked backward.  It had gone cold and his breath was freezing in the air.  The sea spray that had been kicked onto the rocks above was now falling in serpentine cascades, and in the freezing air began to frost over. Black water icing over and the boat was cast off the shore, moving imperceptibly away in the tiniest, slowest moments.  The black snow began to fall.  Without movement or word the Man dropped the oar from his hands and stood, shivering, naked, and alone in his hushed boat.  He could not step foot back onto the dock.  He could not take a spot on the shore of the spirits.  Two thoughts drove him mad in his silence.  That the pain and punishment to come had never been known by any man, that he could not possibly understand the levels of anguish he would now endure.  The second thought, the one that caused him to die inside all over again, was that he would most definitely soon understand. The shadows and seas would make him understand. 

The last Man drifted.  In falling black snow the seas opened and watched the most solitary figure in existence.  The shore had diminished and he had never stopped staring at it.  Even the perpetual fog was gone.  The wind had fallen away and the rocks and shadows were creeping inward. Somewhere high above the roof of the Cave held the last din of sound, and it pierced his heart to imagine a faint tone carried in the shadows; to the maddening Man he could hear the Ferryman laughing. Under the black flame the greatest of all humanity, the final measure of it, stood in his creaking flesh alone in endless insanity, in walls of shadows.

There was no more room in Hell.

 

 

Author's Note

This is my first short story...so be rough. I'm not going to get any better at any speed if people are nice and tame. Please feel free to get really picky and suggest as much as you feel. One caveat; a lot of my spelling will be all over the place as I'm originally European so I'm mixed between North American English and real English.