I belong to the marshes now

Empty voids of immense nothingness fled my mind as quickly as they had appeared. I have awoken and groggily I rise like a zombie clawing its way up tooth and nail from the cold hard soil. Bewildered I recoil and turn in awe and fear of what surrounds me, I find myself trapped in what I can only assume is the dampest and most isolated sorry pit of the Earth. Surrounding me is drowned marshes, trees draped in moss and suffocated by the inevitable unstoppable force of rot, always creeping forwards, pushed solely by time on its way to claim another victim. Bodies of water lay dormant around me, an even deeper shade of green then that on the trees clings tightly to the surface like a deadly parasite bleeding it’s prey of any life. It creates a film of waste. It hides all that is beneath it, leaving only darkness and harsh secrets below.

Searing pain shoots through me from head to toe and back from boot to skull, thick oozing blood drips down my cranium with strong desire to plant itself back into the roots of the Earth around me. At the same time, ice cold water engulfs my feet, taking them as passive prisoners to the forbidden depths below the green. Gone, gone, gone from my vision leaving only the harsh reality of agonising pain as a reminder that they are still attached, as the pungent liquid drags itself higher up my calves. Desperation, yet also a faint idea of calming inevitability casts itself directly into the back of my skull. I am now a mere puppet of destiny, how can I be scared or even petrified if nothing I can do can control my fate?

This wasteland of hopelessness and crushing silence owns me now, I belong to it and in knowing that I find peace. Not with God nor hope of a plentiful promised land but with wonder and eerie intrigue into the sheer complexity of what comes next for me, will the deep dark nothing once again capture me and enslave me for eternity or perhaps something else, something that I will never comprehend with my puny human knowledge. Pointless, pointless to ponder such sweet, surreal mysteries that I can never share with you, for now silence, only silence comforts me tonight under this constant black fog of night.

Chalk on a blackboard! Fingernails sharply, slowly, scratching at stone until they gush, these are the only comparisons I can fathom in this moment, a piercing screech bellows around me taunting my ears, and with that, the only sense I’ve been clinging onto has been snatched from me as if the murky water waves have brutally stolen it in one fell strike. The horrific noise circles around me, like vultures darting around their prey for a final bloody meal. This alone is enough to drive weaker men than me insane with fear, but next comes a whisper, no, many whispers, an army of whispers in unison stabbing at my eardrums with swift sweeps. Impossible! They speak a language I so wish to know but alas I do not, the tone is unlike anything on Earth, yet still deep down in my guts I know they are taunts and teases, confirming my fate and that the expiration of my life is nearer than I thought or would care to think. These noises, they scatter, they are impossible, from nowhere they attack, yet from everywhere. I once again find myself in utter confusion , like an infant plucked from home and thrown down into a new world, a horrifying inescapable world. I digress, I feel the desire now to say that these murderous, ruthless noises draw ever closer from no real dimensional direction that I can see. If this is the end then I can only pray it will be over soon, swiftly and finally.

Ice and fire fills me, biting at my neck and waging a vicious war through my veins, every nerve of mine fires in unison and I freeze even tighter and more still than I thought humanly possible. Sickness and nausea flows around me choking every cell with fiery wrath, perhaps this is what precedes death and the reaper himself is waiting to strike me down. It’s watching me, I have finally seen the pitch-black eyes glazed over watching me this entire time. From the depths of the foul unforgiving pool before me, a small hunched over shape of a creature, not so far withdrawn from being that of a man watches on, I sense it tasting the fear irradiating out of me and landing into it’s vast nebulous of a mouth. A disgusting grin carves into the rotten grey warbling skin. Paving its way past what looks to be maggots and flies scurrying under the flesh. As the sinister smirk reaches its final resting place, I fear so do I.

A long and yellow hook like claw protrudes from where fingers should be, suddenly it lunges towards me like a bullet and bites into my Achilles tendon. I feel skin, muscle and ligaments tear away as tissue paper leaving me vulnerable and helpless. I am a split bag of sand crumbling down and into the water I find myself, smashing my head against a jagged rock I feel a familiar searing pain coursing through it. Here, I find myself able to see what horrendous untold secrets had been hidden from me all along, layers and layers of skulls, possibly ripped freshly and untimely from men like me, their sockets stare perceptively and almost empathetically into my soul.

The revolting offensive creature gives me one final darting glare to let me know I am done for; its rotting barbed wire teeth fly like darts into my soft and tender neck. I belong to the marshes now.

Empty voids of immense nothingness fled my mind as quickly as they had appeared …