Welcome To Hellville - Part 10 By Rich Mills

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Full ashtray, dry mouth and thoughts connected with his inordinate hunger were momentarily sidetracked by a juggling jester, the sight of which threw him off the long-winded path he'd set out on. He picked himself up, dusted himself off and looked back from whence he came. Blocking his way, being directly in front of him, as usual stood the lighthouse. Circling high above, crows swooped and chased through the brisk breeze being whipped up off the eternal oceans that crashed against the ever eroding coastline, somewhere off in the distance.

Skirting the circumference of the tower, the ravenous birds sought out a fresh exquisite corpse. Of no significance to the scavengers, the long dead white tower was merely a resting point for them. Disused and cut-off, it laid silently at a tangent to the horizon, blocking all views of the path that lay just beyond its thick crumbling walls.

Scorching rays from the sharply silhouetted sun accelerated the ageing of the dried, cracked whitewash walls. A tarnished brass bell swung majestically from a rotten drift wood bracket next to the iron-clad and heavily studded door. Threatening to drop from its dutiful place at any moment, it tolled a generic knell for all his woes. The reflected glare of the sharp sunlight dazzled deep into the back of his eyes, blinding him for a moment. He fought through it with a persistence of vision he'd not been able to muster before.

The high-noon sun's radiation beat down on him hard, leaving him deaf, dumb and blind in a desert of silent running sand. He didn't give an inch, not a fucking micron, his senses hadn't totally abandoned him yet. With now eyes screwed tight shut and all musculature in tension around his slight frame, he drew breath and... SCREAMED...! And... SCREAMED...! While at the same time opening his eyes and his body to the external forces that surrounded him on all sides. He expelled whatever had been bottled up inside that dark place for so long.

Now for the first time ever he did not face a purely blank battlement. Staring into the immovable impermeable expanse before him, as the sunlight reduced to only a squinting gritty uncomfortable pain, focus fell onto what appeared to be a delicate scarlet thread which appeared to have caught itself on the wall's rough surface. Reaching out and taking hold of the soft silk thread it started to unravel and grow, coiling about his hand, creeping its way up his arm, endeavouring to wrap itself around his thorn whipped heart, eating away at his un-leaven flesh.

Pulling away from the anchorage point of this epiphyte which had entwined all around the bastion wall, in what was now the somewhat subdued death throes of this briefly epic epiphany. The red thread snapped. There it lay motionless in his hand. In truth it was nothing more than a broken thread disintegrating before him. Reduced to a line of fine power, a dying wind glanced against the surface of his palm taking the remnants of the thread with it. The fine red mist finally settled on the air around him, dancing about in front of his eyes before dissipation spread it too thinly to see with naked eyes any longer. White light, white noise, white out. Soft voice, soft whisper.

Continued ....next page,

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