Hell Mountains

Heyo, something I wrote recently (measured in months, instead of years). Inspired by the photograph next to #10 in this list.

Through the craggy paths of Hell you trudge; the dead, dry bones crunching under your feet, the wind sighing, and the dust of a thousand desiccated dreams swirling in agitated circles. And you think, “Just beyond that next ridge, just through this valley of shadow and despair, just a step into that looming black, and I will meet another traveling, human soul. It will no longer be only the long lost dead to keep me company, no longer only the mournful cries of the adrift and afraid, no longer this barren moonscape, haunted by lingering ghostly hopes whose the bodies have been gone for countless ages. Somewhere in that beyond, I will meet a real companion, instead of the hallucinations and the hauntings.”

You’ve lost track of how long the journey has been through these deserted Hell mountains. Monsters lurk in the creviced shadows, snarling at you as you pass by. Some are real, some are not, and you cannot decide which is worse: the Fury that bites and claws and gnashes, tearing the hair from your head, plucking out your eyelashes, stabbing at your arms and snapping on your ears until they bleed; or the softly whispering, nearly immaterial sylph who calls you ever onward towards a goal you cannot name and will never find, leaving you distraught when the next crag brings no end, just more mountains and more shadows.

This is no Dantean inferno; you have yet to run across another soul, tormented or otherwise. Occasionally a screaming, gnawing beast rages out of the caves or a slithering, crawlie beast oozes over the trail, but even they are few and far between. There are only remnants in Hell, only tatters of departed lives and hollow echoes of regrets. The air is thin and cracked, like a skull baked in the sun: worn and empty. Sometimes the mountains of bone slide away under your feet, and you are left staring up, enclosed by the silent dead.

The silence of the dead, with you for eternity. You, who wished for silence the way most people long for love – as a savior, an absolution, a bliss; who longed to be left alone, no longer bombarded by never-ending noise and needs – solitary stillness was your wish. Here on the peaks of Hell, you are finally alone.

And you weep.


Loosely influenced by Stephen Peck’s novella, Short Stay in Hell

xo,
Devo