Black Depth

The darkness echoed in hymn. The sadness in its song, the longing. It reached out into the abyss hoping to be found, to be noticed. It had looked a sorry sight when I found it, a most peculiar finding. I felt an overwhelming ache in my ribcage, that crawled between my bones and pressed softly against my chest. But I couldn’t take my eyes away, not even for a second. It was there, on the ground. Some decaying leaves had covered the corners with their skeleton veins and it had a tear down the side, as if it had been thrown so violently away that I could almost feel its sorrow pulse through the veins in my wrists. Rejected by its owner. I knelt down in the dust, the ash. The fire had stopped burning yesterday and the only thing that could be found through the greying haze of a once beautiful blaze was this. This small black book that looked like coal and ruin. Its pages were held together protectively by a single elastic strap.

“What happened here?” I thought to myself. My fingers reached out, they had started to shake. My hand hovered over the notebook, and my skin against it looked even more pale. As pale as to say you could even see the binding of the blackness through the palm of my hand. Like melting snow in new spring heat. Again. I could not blink. I could not look away. I could hear the sirens behind me, screaming their blue and red. Red and blue. Screaming that they were coming. Like banshee calls in the darkness of the night, that wail for lost souls dying in the depths of hades comfort.

I panicked. I wanted so desperately to reach out and touch it, as if in some twisted way it was whispering to me. Its whisperings of sweet honey, of sweet nothings. Like it had been waiting for me this entire time. It was destined to be within my grasp. Snap. Crunch. Mumblings. “Run, Leena. Run!” They were coming, and they weren't allowed to find it. My shaken hands grabbed the book from the rubble of a phoenix’s attempt to rise and I pushed it between my coat and shirt.

I ran. I ran as far as my legs would take me even though my knees shook like glass, and my ankles were clumsy and feet small. I could feel a vibrating warmth from the book, and suddenly everything around me turned into a clouded hue of black ink. I felt like I was falling, falling endlessly into a hole where everything and time itself passed me in colors I could not even begin to describe. And then I woke up. The sweat dripped furiously down the side of my face and I could feel my nails digging tightly into the outer layers of the book I had found not days before. This dream wouldn’t leave me alone, no matter how hard I tried to shake it from my mind. It curled and lapped, like waves about to break at the banks of shore. As if a serpent now laid there to rest tormenting me. even while I laid in slumber to escape from the reality that I had stolen the book that held the key to Eden.

I remember when I was small, I couldn’t pronounce my mothers name properly, but I could remember her tales of Eden. A place of illusions, and magic. A place where you could find riches far more vast than anything you could dream of. She always laughed at the end. A laugh that tried to tell me that it was just that, a tale. A tale passed down through generations and years of folklore. Years of hope that somewhere lost in the smog of our bland lives we would find something that could pull us into an array of pure colour. Yet, when I let my fingertips touch the pages within, there was nothing but blank. The pages stared back at me, white and hot with a fury that I could not figure out. It whispered to me, in its smooth curling voice. “Follow me. Follow me while the moon is high, and your eyes cannot see it.” I thought about that all day, the hours blurred together and all I could think about while my eyelids fluttered heavy like stone was that the moon must be such a beautiful sight while I laid motionless in my bed sheets.

There he was again. The velvet in his cloak danced against the air, my fingers could almost brush against its crushed material. I could almost feel it brush against my skin in the softest of motions. I could never quite reach it, no matter how much I tried. All I could remember was running, running towards him in a frenzy of need. My hands constantly reached out in a desperate attempt to tug at the end of it, but to no avail. My hands would fall in frustration, then grab back out in front of me to try again. I could never see his face, everything around us was as black as the cover that bound around the pages of the black book I still clutched tightly to my chest.

I fell. I kept falling and he disappeared. My hands pushed out in front of me in a flustering try to break my fall but I kept going. Into darkness. Into a black depth that never ended. The ground shattered around me, like a glass mirror that fractured into fragments of reflecting splinters. Except they fell entirely upwards. The pages from the notebook broke loose from its binding as they fluttered around me, I kept plummeting. Descending down uncontrollably. Like butterflies the corners of the pages fluttered against the air, I could finally see their endless cursive paragraphs written in golden ink. Once hidden, now suffocating me entirely. The words danced on the pages like fireflies guiding a way home in the pitch darkness that continued to envelope around me. They were getting away. They were flying away up and up into the fragments of dancing glass that never once pierced my skin. I tried to scream but a deafening silence pushed against my throat. It was stuck there, choking my words and erasing my power to cry for help. Still, I kept falling. Up, down, I couldn’t tell which way anymore.

Then it thundered. It roared and crashed. A high pitched clattering all at once. The butterflies fired down like bullets in sharp crescendo. Thousands of them. Gold coins that glimmered and shone. Falling past me faster than the speed at which I was falling. There must have been thousands of dollars, at the very least around $20,000 had just blinded me in a golden metal that hit coldly against my skin. I shivered and suddenly everything sped up, as if I had been falling in slow motion the entire time and then I stopped. My hair was not entangled around my face, it did not whip around my chin, and the ringing in my ears from the whispering air around me quietened. I opened my eyes, I sat encased in a glass box, my hands pressed against it but there was no way out. Darkness again engulfed everything around me. The coins shattered against my skin, the box filling up with a golden treasure I couldn’t even collect. He stood there, in front of me. His cloak now rippled against the ground, his face still in shadow. But I could feel his grin, it made my skin crawl, but I was fixated on him. I banged against the prison of see-through hell I was tricked in. Surrounded by riches I had greedily hoped for. The sound of thunder again echoed around me and I looked up to see my body falling, my thundering palms had sent the butterflies in a manic flight around me. The pages of the black book closed above me, the darkness loomed again, and all I could do was weep in a hymn that echoed out into the darkness, to anybody that could hear it.